I need to fall in love with this book again, but first I should explain why I'm not updating much.

So before I publish the next chapter, I wanna add to a few things.

If you've been here from a while back, you know that I'm revising this story. Instead of that old time-travel plot, the book will be based in an alternate reality entirely, just to even out the playing field for the power dynamics here. It's just too easy to follow the time travel plot archetype for me, and I wanna make history here.

Some people have reached out to me on the matter of my characterization of the characters and the BatB plot template. Truth be told, throughout the years I've been planning and writing this book I've always stuck to this one perspective of the story that's so popular, but I've come to a stage in life now where I just don't like this story as I used to, the way it is at least. The Beauty being this nerdy bubbly kid 'getting with' the Beast who's some rich introvert whining about having no friends while being an asshole to everyone around him.

So if you remember the older version of this book, Mavis was just a tomboyish carpenter, Vlad being the wattpad template of a 16th century ruler who hated the Turks, and the antagonist was just too much of a basic bitch.

I wanted my Mavis to be 'such a funny girl that Belle' in a contemporary aspect so there would be a contrast to the Beast. In most movie adaptations of this, Belle always sticks out of the crowd by being the only one in the movie to have brown hair and brown eyes and has this practical demeanor that's just an aesthetic atp. In our case, who better than a muscular Desi girl (with Turkish roots) who's into a male-dominated industry like engineering and construction?

Some feel that Mavis is "too masculine" to be a Belle archetype, and it's earned me a few homophobic slurs. Let me clarify a few things: I don't believe in gender stereotypes, and especially not those set by the West. No offense to those adhering to traditional European gender philosophy, I've just noticed it's been so forced and shoehorned in mainstream media that anything else is seen as 'unattractive' or 'wrong'. I mean, take beauty and the beast itself, Belle was seen as strange for knowing how to read as a girl, despite when the story was written it was seen as some 'rare' idealistic trait in a woman. Instead of making that a mindless cultural icon, why not we actually reflect on what Belle's uniqueness represents?

As for this whole trope of 'good girl fixes bad boy', why not expand on these two archetypes and for once actually flesh them out as human beings rather than caricatures? What makes Vlad a beast is his unhealed trauma and emotions getting the best of him over his constant strive to do better for the people around him instead of being some emo hothead, and Mavis being a beauty due to her moral code despite what others think of her and her goal to achieve independence rather being this pretty girl who can do something 'the other girls can't'.

And Vlad, holy hell did he need some serious reconstruction. Let's first look at the beast, a rich loner who isolates himself because of his own insecurities. Well, how about a vampire therapist struggling to deal with his own shit and at least TRYING not to project onto others? I want to create a modernized, more contemporary archetype of a beast, the abstract frame of someone capable of evil shit yet ends up not being the villain, or someone you can find in real life as well. So only a while after publishing those chapters I realized the whole resemblance between Hannibal Lecter and thought: why the hell not? I mean, who could ever love a beast?

God, my sense of humor is deteriorating.

Cheers!