Sherlock AU: John goes missing, held captive by Sebastian Moran. When he is released, Sherlock receives a call that tells him his best friend has been hospitalised.
I'm so tired of people saying that the Prince from Snow White is a creep for kissing Snow White when he thought she was dead.
People act as if he put his tongue down her throat while she looks like a regular corpse.
Maybe I'm just more comfortable with death because of my upbringing.
There's a European tradition that you would kiss dead people goodbye. You would also wait with a dying person because dying alone was one of the most horrible ways to die.
In Poland, you would spend three days with the dead body of your relative in the house so family and friends have time to say goodbyes. We even have pictures of family members in coffins, so we could remember them.
Yeah, it’s a very post-modern, historically, culturally-small-minded way to look at it.
Specifically in this movie (which is a fairy tale’s fairy tale) people just…totally ignore the scene where The Prince is introduced.
Seriously and truthfully, BECAUSE the Prince only takes action in three scenes of the movie, you HAVE to take all three of them very very seriously. Because thats all there is to know about him. That’s how fairy tales work: lots of information hiding under very brief, simple snippets of information. It’s called nuance.
Anyway.
The Prince kisses Snow White as a culmination of their promised love for each other.
First scene he’s in, he falls in love with her because of her obvious purity and he overhears her longing for someone to love her. Then she runs away because she’s not sure of him, and doesn’t know him. But he sings his part of the song, which is all about how he has just one heart to give, one devotion to spend, and he’s choosing to give it and spend it on her if she’ll have him.
And she will have him. How do we know? She sends a kiss to him on the dove. That’s how the exchange ends; that’s how she responds, and that’s why he leaves satisfied. It’s their engagement scene. They’re promising their hearts to each other.
Fast-forward, the Queen messes up what might have been the natural follow-through of that engagement which is marriage by trying to kill Snow White, she’s living in the woods, but she won’t forget the Prince and wholeheartedly believes he’ll come find her.
And the very next thing we hear about him is that he keeps his promise. He’s got one heart, one love, one devotion, and it’s promised to Snow White, and he will not stop searching for her. When he finds her, he’s returning her kiss from their engagement scene. He thinks she’s dead, but he has to finish his quest anyway. This is him, trying to keep his promise even if she’s dead; he’s trying to fulfill the exchange they had when they saw each other last.
It’s ridiculous to assume that she needed to be awake and alive to give permission for him to kiss her; it’s ignorant of the whole relationship, symbolic and literal, between these two fairy tale characters. She already sent him her kiss and her heart; he already promised to claim it; he’s fulfilling the promise in that scene.
Crazy postmodern people, don’t know how to take in a story. Not everything gets to have your socio-cultural lens imposed upon it.
Thank you for your patience as I completed this chapter. Chapter 30 is nearly complete as well (it was one longer chapter that I discovered needed to be two chapters). Because it’s been a while, you may find it useful to revisit the last chapter (Chapter 28 of Blackbird, Fly) before reading.
I can’t wait to dive in! I’m going to back read a few chapters first to refresh my memory, but ack!! So excited!!
These last two months have been an exercise in absurdity. I don’t think my life has ever been busier or more embroiled in uncertainty. For a host of reasons, I’m leaving my job for a better one, and that comes with the chaos of moving but also drama in the job I am leaving.
In February, I was pretty confident I would have the next chapter of Blackbird, Fly completed in a matter of a week or two. Now, we’re nearing the end of April. In my imagination, I have a thousand or words left to write (and then edit), but finding time to work is laughably difficult. This weekend, for instance, I’m hosting my mum, and so writing is a pure impossibility. Every weekend has felt like this. So I fall asleep at night, telling myself the story of what is going to happen next, and I’m desperate to write it, and I simply can’t. Writing this Tumblr post has to be done in haste because in two minutes she’ll be out of the loo, and my ‘me time’ will disappear again.
But rest assured, it’s almost done. I so dearly want to post it for you all to read. I’m so close to the end…
And there she is. I’m off!
@engazed I wish you CALM…. I for one am happy to wait for whenever the moment is right for you. Real life challenges can and should take priority. We (the readers) will be ready when you are.
