Origins-Disney Version

Beauty and The Beast

Beauty and the Beast comes from a French novel by Madame de Villeneuve. In her tale, the kingdom is populated by fairies. One such fairy is called the Madam of Time, and she doesn’t get the idea of consent. When the prince refuses to marry her, she punishes him by turning him into a beast. He isn’t cruel like in the Disney version, he has great manners. Well… for the most part.

Belle is the daughter of a merchant (and secretly a fairy princess!). Her father gets lost in the woods and decides that the Prince’s empty-looking castle is a great place to rest and eat. That’s fine, the beast’s totally cool with it. That is, until the merchant decides to pick a rose from the garden for Belle, at which point he goes psychotic and threatens to kill the man. After some begging, the beast agrees to spare him if one of his daughters willingly comes to live with him forever. Like a good father, the merchant goes home and sends Belle his way.

Belle’s time at the castle is pretty peaceful; she doesn’t even see the beast that much. He just shows up every evening to talk to her. And to ask to sleep with her. Luckily for her, he knows what consent is. But not harassment, because he asks again every day, just in case her “no” becomes a “yes.”

So she doesn’t have to sleep with the beast, but she does have to sleep with some pretty creepy dreams. In them, there is a handsome prince, and a super preachy woman who tells her to be grateful to the beast for all his kindness. This continues until she gets homesick and asks the beast to allow her to visit her family. He grants her request, but warns her if she doesn’t return quickly, he’ll die. Not because there any sort of time limit to his cure, or fatal repercussions for exceeding it, just because his feelings for her have grown into a fixation that should be treated at the nearest mental hospital.

Naturally Belle is delayed in returning, and the beast plays his part by dramatically dying to attract the attention of his love interest. But she revives him! After watching his near-fatal display of affection, she realizes how much she cares for him, and decides to say “yes” the next time he asks to sleep with her.

Instead of sexy times, he just lays in her bed and falls asleep. Belle sleeps next to him, and when she wakes up he has transformed into the prince from her dreams. But it isn’t happily ever after yet, because his royal mother objects to his plan to marry a merchant’s daughter. Luckily for the couple, the preachy fairy godmother from Belle’s dreams comes by and explains that she’s actually a fairy princess who was switched at birth. A fairy because her mother was a fairy, a princess because she’s the daughter of the beast’s uncle. In other words, his cousin. They marry anyway, because incest is a royal tradition.