Forum - View topicREVIEW: Apparently it's My Fault That My Husband Has The Head of a Beast Novels 1-2
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SleepyDave
Posts: 28 |
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Okay, so it was good to not finish this novel xD I stopped reading after the halfway mark of volume one, because the protagonists were so unlikeable, it made me puke.
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11339 |
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Is it really necessary to call him an "alphole"? oO Not only is it an awkward portmanteau, it reminds me of incels complaining about "femoids." :/
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 2606 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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^It's a pretty commonly used term in romance novel discussions, but I can stop if you hate it that much. (Honest statement, not being sarcastic!)
And yeah, SleepyDave, they don't get quite enough development to be all that much better. |
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JacobC
ANN Contributor
 Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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Sorry about that. It's now been replaced with something more straightforward. |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4366 Location: New York |
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I’m pretty sure at this point you can play “Light novel title or SNL sketch?” and have enough weird names to fool most casual readers.
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meruru
Posts: 471 |
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Sounds to me like the reviewer's problem with it is that it's the Beauty and the Beast trope - - goes without saying that story trope comes with the guy being problematic in some fashion - - either he holds her hostage /forces her into a relationship, or acts like a jerk, or both. Though from the review, I doubt I'd much like it either.
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 2606 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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Except that it's not "Beauty and the Beast" - that tale type is dependent upon the Beast being nice to Beauty. He's actually a much less problematic character in the tale type, which is often accepted as being about making girls feel better about their arranged marriages to older husbands; it's more Beauty's dad who's the issue for agreeing to sell her in the first place.
But yeah, my problem is largely that he's a jerk. 
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meruru
Posts: 471 |
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I'd argue that while the classic tale has the element that Beast has to be nice to Beauty, that other stories following the trope don't. Example: The Ancient Magus's Bride. Elias is nice to Chise, but there's absolutely no reason in the story he has to be. And pretty much all of them have some amount of unhealthiness to the relationship - - non consent, extreme power imbalance, or he's a jerk. As a result, it often makes stories falling into this trope difficult to like, unless you happen to have a bit of a kink for that kind of thing. I mean, if you think about the fact that Chise is a slave too hard, you might spoil The Ancient Magus's Bride for yourself even though most people usually mostly ignore that part so they can enjoy it. |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 2606 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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You're right, and I realized at about 1 am (when the dog woke me up having The Running Dream; thanks, Barry) that you weren't necessarily talking just about Disney or Mme le Prince de Beaumont's well-known version.
I do think this series in particular has more in common with ATU 441, In Enchanted Skin, rather than ATU 425C, Beauty and the Beast. Strapparola's Italian variant, "The Pig King," fits Claudio pretty well in the way he treats Rosemarie, because he's much more of a twit than Beast tends to be - and much worse than Elias in AMB, who I agree fits the standard mold pretty well. Strapparola's story is much more sexual than a lot of others in the tale type, which absolutely doesn't work for this series, but his unarguably terrible treatment of his bride is Claudio to a T, where a protagonist like Elias is easier to like if you don't think about the circumstances too hard. As usual my problem is probably knowing too much on the whole fairy tale subject. It definitely gets me into trouble. 
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meruru
Posts: 471 |
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Haha, yeah you definitely seem to know alot about fairy tales. =) What's ATU 441 and ATU 425C?
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 2606 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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I teach a class on them. 
ATU stands for "Aarne-Thompson-Uther," the three scholars who sorted most fairy tales (or at least, started sorting) into "tale types," or specific categories by theme/plot. The types are based on the idea that the same stories exist all over the world, often with no or minimal cross-cultural context, which is pretty cool. So the story most of us know as "Beauty and the Beast" is ATU 425C, or tale type number 425 sub-category C, and it's different from ATU 441, "In Enchanted Skin," where the romantic lead is born as a pig, hedgehog, etc. "Hans my Hedgehog" is the version the Grimms collected.) The website Folktexts is a really good one for seeing a bunch of them and how damn many Cinderella stories there are. |
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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When you wrote "In Enchanted Skin" I was thinking the ones where the woman turns back into a sea creature at the end, like Selkies. I assume that's a different type?
Would The Frog Prince (the fairytale, not the Disney movie) be an example of In Enchanted Skin? |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 2606 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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The Selkie stories are actually classified as ATU 400, "Swan Maidens." It's a subset of the Animal Bride tales, and the Celestial Maiden story that Yu Watase used for Ayashi no Ceres is also a part of it. Folklore usually differentiates tales by the gender of the transformed (although not if there's no transforming; Ash Lad tales are still classified as Cinderella), but what's more interesting (I think) is that Animal Brides usually end their stories by being freed and leaving their husbands, while Animal Grooms end with the typical happily-ever-after with their wives.
The Frog Prince is his own tale type - ATU 440, "Frog Kings." The princesses in these stories are usually much less charming (and less passive) than in other Animal Groom tale types. Plus Freudian scholars think the frog represents a penis. 
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9835 Location: Virginia |
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The Celestial Maiden story was also the basis of Faerie's Landing from TokyoPop. However, it was based on the Korean version of the story. Unfortunately this is one of the many titles left undone by TP.
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