A wild academic ride through monster romance! Sponsored by Ground News| Compare news coverage. Spot media bias. Avoid algorithms. Try Ground News today and get 40% off your subscription by going to https://ground.news/princessweekes
From folk tales to the latest best-sellers and films, we’re diving deep into the complex allure of otherworldly lovers.
Table of Contents
00:00 Start!
01:35 Eros & Psyche — Animal Bridegrooms
11:29 Loathy Ladies & Shapeshifting Maidens
22:17 The Sheik and the Other
32:50 Shape of Water
45:38 Ground News Ad
47:48 Credits
Works Cited & Reading List:
– Aguirre, A. (n.d.). “Tentacles & Triathlons.”
– Bugge, J. (2004). “Fertility Myth and Female Sovereignty in ‘The Weddynge of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle’.” The Chaucer Review.
– Díaz de Arce, L. (n.d.). “Rhapsody in Blue Bodies: Primitive Desire in Ruby Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarians.” Interstellar Flight Magazine and Medium.
– Feinstein, S. (n.d.). “Longevity and the Loathly Ladies in Three Medieval Romances.” Literator.
– Hull, E.M. (1919). “The Sheik.”
– Jenkins, H. (n.d.). “It’s not a fairy tale anymore: Gender, Genre, Beauty and the Beast.” JSTOR.
– Lee, L. J. (n.d.). “Guilty Pleasures: Reading Romance Novels as Reworked Fairy Tales.” JSTOR.
– The Oriental Beast, The Sheik and Fairy Tales. (n.d.). Journal of Popular Romance Studies.
– The Sheik. (n.d.). Wikipedia.
– “Desirable Futures: Romance.” (2019). Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction.
Videos Reference:
(Part 2/2) || The Shape of Ableism: How We Restrict Disabled and Disfigured Stories The Princess and the Scrivener | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK1KLVPipmY
The Shape of Water: Falling In Love With Monsters (Feat. Lindsay Ellis) | READUS 101| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERrVNKEQJA8&pp=ygUXc2hhcGUgb2Ygd2F0ZXIgbGluZHNheSA=
My Monster Boyfriend| Lindsay Ellis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YesMWAxqJ60&t=1336s&pp=ygUXc2hhcGUgb2Ygd2F0ZXIgbGluZHNheSA=
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Hearing that excerpt from "The Sheik" honestly made me want to hurl. Like seriously… people complain Disney Beauty and the Beast was Stockholm's syndrome, but this is a clear actual case of it.
excellent work!💙
OCTOPUS
I got called OUT by "Ice… Planet… Barbarians"!
… I am *shamed*.
I know I'm late but if y'all are looking for some wlw monster romance I recommend the dreamers and demons series by Darva Green
I have never heard the interpretation that Hera despises Zeus because he took over her queenly title. She despises her husband because he is a sleazy, cheating son of a bitch, and one of the things she’s the goddess of is THE SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE. And she CAN’T leave him because that would break HER marriage vows. So while he’s out here sleeping around with everything that does and doesn’t move, she is bound by her promise of loyalty and fidelity. She doesn’t hate him because ‘he gets to break his promise and she doesn’t’ but because he breaks his vows to her in the first place.
“If I’m under competition with a frog and I lose, there will be violence ♈️ “ is one of the best, most Aries thing I’ve ever heard
Sadly it's gone now, but Lovestruck had a very nice lesbian werewolf romance
Unfortunately, the werewolf was a cop, but ehh… nobody's perfect
"CIVILIZED VAGEINA" I'M 💀💀💀💀
OK, first, the way I HOLLERED at the princess throwing the frog! 💀😂😂😂😂
Secondly, have you heard of the fairy tale "Bearskin"? Basically, this guy makes a deal with the devil in which he can't bathe, cut his nails or hair, or pray for seven years. In the process, he meets this merchant who offers the hand of one of his daughters as his wives (the bearskin he is forced to wear will pull whatever money he needs out of it) but only one will agree. Even though he isn't a monster per se, this falls in the same vein. She is forced to see something more in him to get with the handsome and rich dude at the end.
There's the story from Scandinavia called King Lindworm (also Prince Lindworm). He is a half-human, half-snake creature. There are different versions, but the most common one is that a queen was desperate to have a child, and a crone told her to eat one of two roses, but not both. She eats both anyway and gives birth to a human boy and a snake.
When they're of age, the snake asks for a bride but ends up eating his new wives during the wedding night because they show disgust towards him.
Since no other princess is willing to marry the snake, the king grows desperate and tells a shepherd to offer his daughter. The shepherd is like "No, the fuck?", but the kings insists so much, he finally gives in. Obviously, the poor girl is distraught, but she meets the same crone who told the queen to eat the roses, and instructs her to wear multiple shifts (Some versions say 7 other versions say 10), and to tell the snake to shed his skin for every shift.
So she wears every single shift she owns (in other versions, these shifts are given to her by the servants), and during the wedding night, she tells him that she will take off a shift only if he sheds his skin.
There are two versions of how this goes: the first one is that after he sheds his last skin, he's revealed to have a human body under there.
The second version is that after he sheds his skin and is vulnerable (if you know snakes, they're very sensitive when they're freshly peeled), she hits him with a whip dipped in lye. Then, after he's laying there sobbing from the pain, she bathes him in milk, then holds him in her arms until he transforms into a handsome human prince.
I dont get why when it comes to beastmen its always the men drawn as predator animals and the women are often prey animals, like were are my hot bear and lion and heyna ladies and the colorfull pretty bird men? Like bears especialy are always made into male beast characters when you dont hear the term "papa bear" used nearly as much as mama bear, same with lions and heyenas which are female dominated / the females do most of the work, meanwhile beast women are left being portrayed as rabbits or soft less intimnating animals, stop being a wuss and give us more beefy strong predator animal beast women, without making them racist sterotypes mind you, I have plenty of oc's ( characters I create ) who try to challenge these norms which is more for personal prefrence but also because I find it just so much more appealing when I create a character for story or for anything but a collage of traits I just find atractive, I got pretty men, I got strong women some still very much femine, Brook is a deer lady who weilds a very heavy wepon and therefore she is a lot more built but shes also femine, She has long colofull curly hair and oranges and purples and yellows to complment her dark skin, she is indpendent but like any human from time to time needs resurance and love, at first I made her to be a supporting character in a story I want to maybe on day publish but she grew to be more as I fell in love with her character so much more. I do wanna say I also give animal traits like ears and tails to like all characters not just the non white ones as a result of mostly drawing furries or animals growing up. Once you create characters less out of what you find atractive or desireble and make them more distinct you might end up loving them more ( not that I dont find those traits atractive btw I just mean resorting to the defult of societys beauty standard, I have a pretty wide range of what I find atractive and those dont fit into societys standards at all, I love feminine women, I love masucline women, really all women, same with men exsculding more masculine men personaly, which if I never stoped drawing and refrencing the defult ( basic pretty white women and men ) I would have never found out when I did )
I snorted and nearly choked to death on my own spit at "civilized vagina"
I love your hair!
Here's one for my weebos:
The first time I recognized someone was making love to a non human and animalistic creature was in "Seasonal Feathers" a classic Vocaloid song featuring the beloved Kagamine Twins acting as lovers: the pair is happy till one season Len gets sick and his lover Rin has to save him by making beautiful silk garments and selling them to buy medicine. So at the end it is revealed that Rin is a crane? And she like was rescued by Len when she got stuck, as a crane, in a fishing trap or something… and she is like, but would you love me even if I wasn't human? Because if she uses all of her feathers to make the silk garments she looses the ability to be human again, and Len goes "I'll totally still love you because as a crane, I thought you were pretty hot."
And then I went "what?"
And then I thought "can I find animals sexy too?"
I was 13, and confused. Also the song is based on a folklore story in Japan!
Dang this was really cool. I don't mind that it didn't go/stay horny as I found it a really interesting deep dive into, well, alot of stuff. I agree tho, we need more butch lesbian werewolf romances
First of all, I want to thank you for making all of us freaks who saw Beauty and the Beast at the tender age of six and went "If monster, why sexy?" feel like we have a safe space here….😂😂😂
This is going to sound like a stretch but I have a theory and I swear, I have seen it play out in real life since I got old enough to watch my friends and family choose partners. My theory goes that you can tell what a person's type will be when they get older based on whom their favorite Disney couple is. For instance, the Little Mermaid girlies will grow up to be the sort of people who will change everything about themselves just to have a partner. Us Beauty and the Beast girlies are the "I can fix 'em!" crew. Even though we are intelligent, strong willed, and all that, we see a wounded "beast" and we are determined to (fix) tame them. Most of us maybe might need therapy…..😂
And I am also very Pro-Hera. Zeus deserves for Hera, Athena (whose mother he murdered to try to stop Athena's birth only to absorb Athena and bring her into the world anyway and then he wanted credit for being a single dad… like that bastard didn't cause the situation! I literally can't stand him! Lol), and Hecate (whom I assume will eventually get sick of Zeus acting like he let her live…. Doubtful. Very doubtful) to get together and take back Olympus. I would love to see Hades assist them. I feel like the Hades slander that continues to this day (I don't believe he took Persephone against her will at all) was all the work of Zeus. I really think he might have been the one who taught the Romans how to do propaganda, for real. 😂😂😂
Man, I read that book The Sheik when I was like ten. My great aunt used to give me the books her friend was finished with because as a kid, I was that book worm that would read whatever I got my hands on. I had read romance novels and I thought it would be that. It wasn't really detailed or anything but…damn…I wasn't ready. Lmao
Shout out to male selkies that comfort unhappy (usually married) human women.
Maybe I watch too many shows and memes about lesbians, but I can't help thinking of the classic saying.
"Straight women will fuck any minotaur, fish-man, demon, or abusive psychopath before they even think about kissing another woman."
If any of you guys are really into studying mythology of goddesses, and other female deities throughout time, I recommend researching Eos. She’s the Ancient Greek Titan Goddess of the Dawn known for her beauty, rosiness, and popularity with the guys, who eventually goes on a stint where she basically kidnaps, sleeps with (sometimes producing children), and then discards men of her choosing. She also eventually has a beef with Aphrodite who curses her to have an insatiable lust for men, for sleeping with her husband Ares , leading her to then be married to mortal men several times, having to eventually witness all their deaths. She’s genuinely one of my favorite goddesses. SHES INNOCENT IDC IDC🥱🤣✨🌅🪽
I wrote a story (fanfic for an anime I like) with a classic Beauty And The Beast Setup. The main heroine is kidnapped as a slave and sold to the palace as a hired girl, then gets roped into being a personal attendant to the first prince, whose mother was a demonic fire lion, making him a demonic monster from birth. He was removed from the line of succession and locked up in a sanctum on the palace grounds and no one wants to get near him (hence why the heroine has to do it). However, the "Red Beast" turns out to be a handsome, intelligent, compassionate cat boy who barely looks beastly at all. The reason for all the false rumors of him being savage, ugly, uncontrollable, etc, was because his jerkwad uncle personally found him monstrous (and also wanted his kid to be on the throne instead) – and he never "turns pretty" because he already WAS pretty.
This Tokusatsu has some beauty and the beast elements in it, like Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue (Not to be confused with the unrelated movie that is a retelling of the original series titled Shin Kamen Rider) lightly focuses on the fact that our protagonist has become a monster but his girlfriend wished to be with him. The romance was probably the weakest element of the movie though, and went in a very strange direction.
And then there's Garo, which takes a really messed up form of the monster romance with this guy and his pet gold fish named Haru, who is possessed by an evil spirit known as a horror and makes the man feed her the bodies of women that he murdered so she could adopt a more humanoid form; the hero puts a stop to that twisted love story though and brutally murdered the monster in front of her human lover.
It was a one-sided romance anyways. More of a horror story about a monster taking advantage of someone's loneliness, like with Let the Right One In.
Also, on the anime side of things, I think you could have brought up the complicated relationship in Ancient Magus Bride between our 2 leads.
Okay, so my knowledge on human customs is very dated but I remember hearing the best way to start a comment chain is a song, so:
🎶He'll buy me a thorn, before he'll buy me a rose. Be covered in dirt, before I'm covered in gold🎶
I think the reason women like abduction/forced romance is not having to walk on eggshells for their mans ego as they are forced to in real life. So many women have to perform in bed, praise men for doing the bare minimum and be careful to always let him take the lead even when he’s clueless that being in a forced romance where you can yell ‘I hate you’ and he still comes back and wants you is like a breath of fresh air.
I’m not even five minutes in, but thank you for reminding me that teenage me had such a freaking hard-core crush on Karl Urban’s Cupid from Xena, that I made a special point to visit the Cupid and Psyche sculpture at the Louvre when my high school French club went to France.
now when people ask me what i spend my time thinking about i can send them this.