Anonymous 2013/10/26(Sat)20:50 No. 77166 ID: d2b9fe
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So this is where my head went almost immediately.

Not the exact same situation here, but my sympathy still ain't with the witch. What's worse: not buying into monogamy and cruelly crushing the feelings of someone foolish enough to confess love on the spot, or condemning someone to a lifetime of body horror and desperate fear?

>>77166
Fiarytale logic isn't known for its appreciation of proportionate response. There probably wouldn't even be a kingdom left if fruit or vegetables had been involved.

>>77166
That image is wrong.
The curse enacted fairy-tale rules of "bait-and-switch", meaning that thje castle and all the inhabitants' original forms were replaced with new forms, and this act preserved their original forms in a timeless virtual space.

These forms re-replaced the forms bestowed by the curse, which means everyone and everything returned to their last saved-state dictated by the curse.

>>77170
What, so it's perfectly fine to make people suffer for years so long as their bodies don't age for the duration? (And the beast aged, at least. That was the whole point of the cutoff).

The point remains that it's an abuse of power for the petty purpose of exacting massively disproportionate retaliation with no apparent regard for collateral damage.

>>77172
>And the beast aged, at least.
The Beast aged, allowing the prince to mature in spirit, but the prince's original form remained in timeless storage.

>The point remains that it's an abuse of power for the petty purpose of exacting massively disproportionate retaliation with no apparent regard for collateral damage.
>collateral damage.
In the eyes of the sorceress, there was no collateral damage: no-one died and no possessions were destroyed, only made unrecoverable until the curse was broken.
If the curse never got broken, then the sorceress would reason that they never deserved what they had, and would let it all die with the prince's damnation.

>>77173
And that presumed line of reasoning again only supports the spellcaster as a terrible person.

This sort of story is clearly meant to be some kind of parable about correcting people who abuse their power, but it rings hollow, since the 'lesson' can only be delivered by an even more amoral person willing to abuse their power in a manner that laughably dwarfs the original offense.

>no collateral damage
In the case of the quest, there most certainly was (drove the prince to marriage-madness and mass assimilation of other countries with who knows what consequences). In the case of the film, there certainly was, even if the primary victims had their bodies preserved (years of psychological torment, at least one of the transformed going insane and being killed, the rest being completely cut off from whatever friends or family they might have had outside who aged past them and never heard from them again, the socio-political problems of functional removing an entire estate and it's lord overnight, etc, etc).

If I were a fairy tale wizard, you can bet I wouldn't be so gauche as to claim the people I claimed DESERVED it, I'd just call myself an EVIL wizard.

>>77166
...The point, is maturity, essentially.
The boy showed a refusal to help others when it was within his power to do so.
Gaston only saw the Beast as an obstacle to his love, Belle, and was unsympathetic to the idea that he was something more, that he was only a man burdened with a curse, but a monster, beyond any sort of redemption.
As far as the sorcerer...Yes, her actions would cause massive amounts of damage, moreso the longer it took for the prince to repent. But regrets are like that. The longer you take to get to the point where you regret your former course of action, the bigger and more dire they become.

As far as the actual quest goes...The trouble is, the last StoryTeller handed the prince a solution to his problems, but he didn't fully understand or accept he had a problem to begin with, and rejected the lesson once he thought he was 'in the clear' so to speak. As a result...He was turned back into a frog once more.

>>77179
I believe the point everyone else is trying to make is that BECAUSE of this magical person's spur-of-the-moment decision to permanently curse the prince for indulging in a vice common to royalty BASED ON THE FACT THAT HE REJECTED HER, an entire continent is now controlled by an increasingly unhinged, extremely desperate man with unimaginable political control who will do whatever it takes to uncurse himself, devastating a continent.

It's like if I permanently blinded a man for peeking at me, and made him go blind again if he saw naked people, and he was the Yellow Emperor who promptly made nudity punishable by death.

>>77179
You're expecting an eleven-year-old to welcome some crazy hobo who looks ready to shank and/or kidnap him into his own home?

He reacted pretty damn well, all things considered.

>>77185
Okay, I'm not defending the sorceress here - her own conduct in this scenario was pretty questionable for reasons already discussed - but the kid lived in a flippin' castle. He had all kinds of guards. It would have been easy to give her a room or whatever without there being any actual danger to his person or property.

Hospitality was a big deal back in the day. The theme of a powerful entity disguising themselves as an old beggar and asking for a place to stay, and then punishing/rewarding the prospective host depending on their choice is fairly common.

It only works because there was a social convention towards acting as a generous host when asked. And the stories were intended to encourage people to help those less fortunate than themselves. Assigning moral values to the agent of the reward or punishment is difficult because they're more plot device than person.

TDC 2013/10/30(Wed)00:05 No. 77254 ID: 53c44b
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So, I've been debating a bit on what to do with these "Storybook" sequences, such as the one you just saw in the latest update when The Boy was asked to reminisce about his past. I plan to do these for most, if not all, of the major characters, but as you can see they're quite long.

In the future would you guys prefer these stories be put in the main thread, or here in /questdis/? I worry a bit about keeping them here where some people may not see them, since the information in them can be pretty important. But at the same time, as previously mentioned, they're also LONG, so I'm also a bit worried about it disrupting pacing or simply being too long and distracting for some readers.

I would include them in the main story. They fit in neatly, and aren't long enough or off topic enough to merit banishing to the dis thread.

And suddenly waxing on about the backstory of a thing of person or place when it is introduced, cutting away from the action, fells like a very storytale kind of thing to do.

Storyteller 2013/10/30(Wed)13:16 No. 77269 ID: 53c44b
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Storyteller’s Notes - The Frog Prince

I know what the old Storyteller’s intentions were when he penned this story, but I personally think he had his priorities all wrong. I understand wanting to teach a pleasure-seeking young prince a lesson in modesty, and I can understand wanting to teach a conceited young princess a lesson in seeing beyond one’s appearance, but honestly? If there’s someone in this story who actually needed a lesson and clearly didn’t get one, it was that sorceress that the Storyteller brought into the picture.

The womanizing prince ends up a frog, but being so petty that you curse someone with horrible form altering magics over a public rejection doesn’t qualify you for any sort of moral comeuppance? Surely there was a way for these morals to be imparted upon Prince Thaddeus and Princess Carmella without all of that.

I mean, look at the mess all this caused in the long run! I know that this was one of the old Storyteller’s first tales, but maybe he should have gotten a proofreader before he went toying with people’s lives.

Storyteller 2013/10/30(Wed)13:35 No. 77276 ID: 53c44b
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The Storyteller’s Notes - The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was

When the old Storyteller worked his magic it was usually because he wanted to teach someone some sort of grand life lesson. However, If there was a particular lesson he had in mind when he wrote this boy’s story, I’m not completely sure what it was. The boy started his adventure foolish and reckless, and he ended his story foolish and reckless in equal measure. Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate for the boy to learn some caution from his experiences? Caution was clearly a virtue the Storyteller advocated in many other tales, but in this case it was the lack of caution that won the boy royalty and wealth in the end.

My theory is that the old Storyteller wasn’t really TRYING to teach the boy anything in this case - I think he just saw a boy who, try as me might, couldn’t make himself of use to his father, and decided to write him a happier ending. Maybe he looked at the boy’s refusal to ever let the world keep him down, and figured that was a lesson in and of itself that deserved some reward.

Maybe The Storyteller had learned something since writing The Frog prince, and figured this boy was so dense that any attempt to ACTUALLY teach him discretion would backfire anyway.

Whatever the case, it’s a charming little story. I can’t help but appreciate the boy’s spirit.

Anonymous 2013/10/30(Wed)18:04 No. 77288 ID: 3dd384
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>>77269
>>77276
What an interesting character this "old storyteller" was.

Given that he left the picture some time ago, and that it's taken until now for our gracious host to tie up his loose ends, I wonder about the rarity of the tale-spinning magic. I can probably count the practitioners I've heard of on one hand, and many of them are... less concerned with lessons on virtue, let's say.

>>77288

Candidly spoken. Nevertheless, it is a time honored tradition to save the best place by the fire for... the Storyteller.

Oh my, that was a lot bigger than I thought it would be. I'll find a sized down version later... Makes a great desktop, though!