A Day Late & A Dollar Short: Beastly things...

(Welcome to the first installment of "A Day Late & A Dollar Short," my intermittent series of random meeblings hastily flung-together several days past my weekly deadline.)

I'm in the middle of reading this recent blog post at The Hathor Legacy, when this paragraph caught my attention:

The Beast’s repellent form, initially a metaphor for old age as it related to arranged marriages between the audience (young women) and the rich men their parents chose for them, has been imposed on him, though not by time, but rather, as a way to gain wisdom. His only salvation will be the love of a woman who can see beyond his physical limitations– but he’s on a supernatural deadline, imposed by an enchanted flower that represents his own mortality and will take him with it if it dies. The Beast takes a man prisoner, because he is cruel, and when the man’s daughter comes and volunteers herself in his place, the Beast takes his chance to both free himself from his own beastliness, the ugliness of his fur and claws standing in for Gothel’s graying hair and wrinkles, and to save himself from what he considers an untimely death– and though, at the end of the movie, his castle and its inhabitants are restored to their former condition, one wonders how long the Beast had actually lived. After all, his servants had begun to refer to themselves as the names of the furniture and tools whose shape they occupied, his home had fallen into disrepair, and no one within the distance of one night’s horseback ride seemed to even be aware of any castle or prince in the area, even Belle, who one would assume would have read at least a few history books.

The rest of the article is very good (it's actually about step-mothers and how Disney borked them), but my brain wandered off in a different direction.

I've long had an unhealthy obsession interest in stories like The Phantom of the Opera and "Beauty and the Beast," any story that revolves around a physically different person falling in love with someone aesthetically acceptable. Basically, the bad boy falling for the girl is more to my tastes than the girl falling for the bad boy--probably because that's not normally how it works in real life.

There are "Beauty and the Beast" type stories in cultures all over the world, but one of the earliest, that I know of, is the story of Eros and Psyche, found in Greek mythology. C.S. Lewis wrote an amazing adaptation of the myth in his criminally-underrated novel, Til We Have Faces, which is actually written from the POV of Psyche's ugly half-sister. Lewis was revisionist before Maguire made it cool, yo.

I'm in danger of rambling forever, so I'll get to my point: I would like a story where the Beast-character actually is the villain--not just a misunderstood person with an ugly face, not just a spoiled brat, but an actual has-done-horrible-things villain. And who is, not necessarily redeemed, but who becomes a better person because of the Beauty-character being thrown into the mix. Not out of Beauty's love for the Beast, but out of Beast's love for Beauty, and... his own self-respect, maybe? I'm not saying this well. Argh, words, how do they work?

The best villains work because they are still human on some level; they have emotionally attachments and ethics of a kind and morals of a kind--you don't sympathize with them, but you don't hate them unequivocally.

So, if the Beast was a complete dick, and Beauty finally said, "Screw you and your talking furniture. I'm going back to my father until you become human ALL BY YOURSELF, because I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE!" and then the Beast actually wised up and DID all that, and Beauty said, "I'm impressed and I'll give you another chance, but you're still on probation" and Beast said, "I respect that..."

Yeah, that's pretty much the story I'm looking for.