Four-Color Fairy Tales: Seven Sleeping Beauties.

 

This may be a question you've never asked yourself before but: What if there were too many Sleeping Beauties?

Yes, I'm back to talk about some fairy tale related comics. I thought since I managed to get out a post a while back, I'd try for another one. Today we're looking at the manga 7-nin no Nemuri Hime or Seven Sleeping Beauties by Fiok Lee. Now, keep in mind, this manga doesn't currently have an official U.S. Release, so I can't really let you know where to find it.

Promo image of Seven Sleeping Beauties.

The story goes that young Prince Alec, the middle son of the King and Queen of Ludovechia, hears the story of the Sleeping Princess of the Kingdom of Amarylis. According to legend, there is a faraway kingdom where a castle covered by vines and guarded by a dragon houses a princess who has been cursed to sleep for (so far) the past thirty years. Upon hearing the story, the serious young prince swears that he will one day rescue that princess. Time passes and the now grown Alec finds out that his father the king has planned to invade and annex the kingdom. So, taking a set of curse-lifting instructions, he sets off to seemingly conquer the kingdom for his father but secretly to save it. Things don't go quite as he planned, though. For he finds that there is not one sleeping princess but seven of them (a misunderstanding that makes more sense when you remember this was originally written in Japanese, a language that does not pluralize but instead relies on context clues to communicate amount). And he also finds that waking all seven of them does not succeed in waking the rest of the palace. So, now he has to get into the good graces of the seven princesses (in no particular order: Claire, Charlotte, Chiara, Mia, Elisa, Flora and Euchar) and help them investigate the particulars of the curse and figure out how to wake everyone else.

So, let's be honest about what this is first and foremost: it's a harem comedy. Sometimes also called a harem romance.

A harem comedy in anime and manga is basically a series built on a love triangle on steroids. Anywhere from three to twelve possible love interests. Oftentimes with each character type having a genre-specific name (tsundere, kuudere, yandere, dandere, deredere, etc. I'm not going to explain them. You can look them up if you want to). Supposedly, the first ever harem comedy was Ranma½ by Rumiko Takehashi. She wrote that series to poke fun at love triangles and to communicate that she thought they were stupid. It then backfired spectacularly and harem comedies became one of the most common variations of romance manga for the boys' demographic. Recent examples include TheQuintessential Quintuplets and The Cafe Terrace and its Goddesses, among others going back decades. I imagine it was helped by the fact that being wanted by multiple women is a very common (though, still kind of stupid) heterosexual male fantasy.

It's also a genre that is considered by most American manga and anime fans to be, well, trash. Though, in anime fan parlance, that doesn't mean bad so much as it means a guilty pleasure that you shouldn't take too seriously.

Truth be told, seeing one of the core “princess stories” of the Western fairy tale canon rendered into such a male-oriented genre, especially one generally considered trashy and indulgent, can be a bit odd. With so much about the fairy tale landscape being oriented around girls and women, from who generally told the stories originally to who the mass-market versions are marketed to today, seeing a sleeping beauty harem comedy kind of makes you think “Okay, is this even legal?”.

Though, I have to say, given with the caveat that I am a grown, heterosexual man myself, I'm rather enjoying it. A lot of that is predicated on the fact that they complicated the story in just the right ways that it feels like there's more to invest in than “Which princess will Alec end up with?”. And it's a good thing because Alec could stand to face some more complications. Remember that he's a “Prince Charming” type and those guys don't actually do much. They just show up as a story's ending and everything just resolves itself. It's actually in challenging Alec that the manga shows that it's aware of the issues many have with the original story. One of the very first hurdles that Alec faces is gaining the princesses' trust after they discover that he had to kiss all of them in order to wake them up. I like this, but what I really like is that (at least in the translation I read) they included this modern reading without making it seem too modern. No offense to most modernized retellings, but if it's set in a pre-Industrial fantasy setting, I'd like it to still feel a bit antique. And that can be done with dialogue. There's a very big difference in vibe between “OMG! You didn't have her consent! That's totally sexual assault!” and “You brute! Forcing yourself upon a sleeping princess! Normally, you'd hang from the gallows for that!” And, to Alec's credit, when he reads that the way to wake up the sleeping princess is with a kiss, he finds it strange. And he's right. It is strange. The occurrence of the “curse-cancelling kiss”, despite its cinematic and cultural prominence, occurs very rarely in actual fairy tales that have been written down. Mostly just the Grimm version of Sleeping Beauty (“Little Briar-Rose”) and none of the prominent variants I've read of it. And it certainly doesn't appear in many variants of “Snow White” or “The Frog Prince”, which it's also associated with.

And while I've talked at length about Alec, I should also emphasize that all seven princesses have distinct (if not entirely fleshed out) personalities. From oldest to youngest, there is: Flora, who's slow and laid back and likes to fish. Chiara, who likes to tease Alec and who has a passion for plants and herbal medicines. Claire, who is very interested in romance and novels about such. Mia, who's a bit of a childish scaredy-cat who's trying her best to grow up. Charlotte, who's short-tempered and hates shifty people (which is how she regards Alec). Euchar, who is curious and analytical, as well as usually holed-up in the library. And Elisa, who's energetic and loves food.

And I think the whole story is starting to heat up at the part I got to, because they've just started to find information about The Witch of the Ivy who cursed them.

Cover image from Seven Sleeping Beauties

Though, there is also a fly in the ointment that may turn people away from this comic. Continue on for potential SPOILERS:

In recent years, there has been an uptick in fantasy harem romances derived from the world of webnovels. These are online novels created by users of the web novel site. So, basically, written by regular folks. And somewhere along the way, they realized that if those stories take place in a fantasy realm, there's no reason that the protagonist can't marry ALL the potential love interests. Personally, I once again blame heterosexual male fantasy, only this time supplemented by the history of polygamous rulers in feudal Asian countries. Anyway, that trope has spilled over into manga.

And sure enough, it looks like the solution to Alec and the princesses' problem may be some degree of matrimony as a way of further lifting the curse. And we once again run into that pluralization issue. So far, the characters seem to think Alec needs to marry one of the princesses. But I'm still waiting to see if that other shoe drops and Alec ends up with a wife for every day of the week. (Note: this definitely differs from most European fairy tales.  In "The Twelve Dancing Princesses", the soldier just picks the oldest princess.  In Jack tales, if Jack rescues multiple princesses, some go off and marry his brothers.  Though, Alec doesn't have enough brothers to go around).

Some might be okay with this eventuality. Some might very well not be. Heck, some people even engage in multi-partner relationships in the real world (Personally, I do understand it from a fantasy perspective, but am really not sure how they manage that in a practical sense. But it's not my life). I know this may seem like a lot of warning for something that a number of people might just see as an alternative lifestyle. But, some people are more thrown by it than others, and some people see misogyny in it. So, I thought people should be forewarned that it is a possibility.

Anyway, I'm enjoying it. I'm going to read it going forward. But I totally get why a “Sleeping Beauty” harem comedy might not be for everyone. But hey, now you know it's out there.

Fairy Tale Fandom Book Report: Indexing

 

I bet you didn't expect to see me again.

Yeah, I haven't been posting on here much lately. I got to a point where I kind of hit the wall in terms of fairy tale stuff. It had taken up about 99% of my reading and entertainment. I got burnt out and had to take a break.

But, just recently, as I've been trying to use the resources at hand, I decided to dip into my Kindle library in between public library books and just happened to find the absolute nerdiest fairy tale fantasy book ever.

It's titled Indexing by Seanan McGuire, and it was released back in 2014 as part of the Kindle Serials program.

Cover of Indexing

Indexing follows the ATI Management Bureau, an organization whose agents intercede when fairy tales events crop up again in real life and regular people start to be pulled into “the narrative”. The cast includes a number of agents, most of whom are part of some story or have narrowly averted being part of one. There's Henrietta “Henry” Marchen, a woman born from a “Sleeping Beauty” and who's at risk of becoming a “Snow White”. There's also a confrontational goth would-be “Wicked Stepsister” named Sloane Winters. And there's also their archivist Jeffrey (whose last name I've forgotten) who's one of the Shoemaker's elves (he's not actually an elf, just super capable and efficient). And those are just a few of the characters appearing.

Now, you may be wondering what the ATI in ATI Management Bureau is. Well, remember how I said this was one of the nerdiest pieces of fairy tale fiction I've read? Well, the ATI is the Aarne-Thompson Index, sometimes called the Aarne-Thomspon-Uther Index. It's an index that folklorists and scholars use here in the real world in order to identify the type of folk tale they're dealing with. It was originally written in Germany by Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne, then expanded by American folklorist Stith Thompson, then expanded again by German folklorist Hans-Jorg Uther.

And Seanan McGuire wrote a work of fiction based around the concept.

The Aarne-Thompson Index

I'm guessing that McGuire just thought it would be funny to have agents calling out index numbers like cops call out codes for crimes. Like, if they ran across a Pied Piper situation, they'd be like “We have a 280 in progress!”

In all honesty, I've never read a book that was quite so aware of the complicated reality of fairy tales all while creating their own story about fairy tales coming to life. It acknowledges variants. It acknowledges how animated movies have impacted the perception of fairy tales. It acknowledges how the broad, poetic language sometimes employed by fairy tale retellers would turn into something very scary when taken literally (apparently having “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as black as ebony” just ends up making Snow Whites look spooky). It acknowledges that some stories that get lumped in with fairy tales (Peter Pan, The Little Mermaid, etc) aren't folk tales and thus aren't in the Index. Heck, you would not believe how happy I was to read one character say the phrase “Fairy tales are weird”. So few people acknowledge that! Sure, a million people will talk about how the “original” fairy tales (which aren't the originals at all) are more violent, but very few people acknowledge that they're also weird as hell and seem to follow their own strange rules!

That isn't the only reason I appreciate this book. The plots are well put together and the characters are well-developed. It's also one of the more modern-minded pieces of fairy tale fiction I've encountered. At least in terms of lifestyles and identities. There are gay characters in the book. There's a trans character in the book. One of the main characters even struggles with her mental health. And it brings up those specific issues and then stops short of any that may date the book too much (for example, no mention of whoever was president during the time this was published. I think it would have been Obama).

If there were one thing I could complain about, is that despite drawing from fairy tales, it's got a very negative attitude toward them. But that's kind of understandable given the circumstances. Most stories that you'd want to read would be absolute hell to live through. I mean, I wouldn't want to live through a fairy tale anymore than I'd want to live through a horror story, space opera or western. Heck, even a romantic comedy would be annoying to live through if not fatal.

It is a very unique little book. Though, I haven't read the sequel Indexing: Reflections to know if McGuire kept it up.

The sequel to Indexing.

It was even good enough to rekindle my interest in fairy tales . . . sort of.

Yeah, even though it brought me back on here, I'm still not keen on letting myself get burnt out again. And I'm still figuring out how to keep my interests varied and balanced. So, you might see me again, but no promises as to when that might be.

Until next time (whenever that is).