The Maiden - Inspirations and Influences

When I was a little girl, my Grandmother gave me a book of Scottish fairytales. Despite how our relationship has changed over the years, that book still sits on a shelf beside my bed. When I sat down to write The Maiden, the very first book I opened for my research was that one.

With the benefit of hindsight, I probably should've used more famous fairytales, such as Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella. However, the Maiden, as a skin, was based heavily off a character archetype I first encountered within those Scottish fairytales. In addition, several of the stories I mentioned above are actually later versions (or at the very least heavily inspired) by the fairytales I took inspiration from. Both Sleeping Beauty and Snow White draw inspiration from Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree, which features a princess falling into a death-like sleep due to the influences of an evil Stepmother. Snow White also has elements of 'The Son of The King of Ireland', where the titular son searches for a woman with 'hair as black as the raven's feathers, and cheeks as red as the raven's blood'. Cinderella has elements of Rashen Coatie, with an evil stepmother, a jealous step-sister who force her into servitude and a prince who only remembers her show size. 

On top of that, I preferred using these fairytales as inspiration for the Maiden as the guides, and most of the other characters, tend to take a bit more of an active role, which is far more fitting for Monsterhearts. Most people, much like the main characters in Monsterhearts, will not just stand around and do nothing. In 'The Black Horse', for example, the titular black horse is the one who braves a lake of fire to get the ring the princess requested. While the princess is revealed to have been asking for such items to stall for time, and when she can stall no longer, she pushes her fiance into a well. This fits the MC's goal of 'keeping the story feral' far better than many later fairytales, where there are usually only one or two characters taking an active role. However, this does not mean that the protagonists of those fairytales  always take an active role in the story. The Black Horse is also an excellent example of this, as the protagonist and supposed hero of the story, the unnamed rider, is dragged around and cajoled into doing this by the black horse.

This is partially why I wanted to write a skin about the 'guide' character in fairytales, as the role they play in the story fascinates me. They are primarily the ones to drive the story forward, doing what needs to be done to ensure the protagonist gets their happy ending. Yet despite this, they are frequently forgotten by the end of the story. 'The Black Bull of Norway' helps the protagonist through most of her journey, but is completely forgotten once she is happily married. Did she ever see him again? Was he rewarded for his help? In similar fairytales, where the guide is an animal, the guide will usually ask one thing of the protagonist in the end: chop off their head, no questions asked. Once someone does so, it is usually revealed that the guide was secretly a prince and/or the protagonist's new brother-in-law, which, while a little weird, at least explains why he was so eager to help the protagonist, as he was essentially helping his own sister. Even though it does raise the question of why he wanted someone so inept to marry her in the first place. The final version of this archetype is the lover of the protagonist, usually a princess of some kind who wants to escape her father/the demon that kidnapped her. Of course, it could be argued that being married to someone you've just met isn' t much better, but that's another discussion. 

This version of the archetype heavily inspired the Maiden, someone who cannot help themselves, but is very good at helping others and uses that ability to serve themselves. The other two versions more influenced the theme of the Maiden very rarely receiving help, or any sort of acclaim back instead being relegated to being forgotten about, or in the case of the Black Horse, stuck in a field until you can convince your brother-in-law to cut your head off and free you from this curse.