Introduction

Matthew Bright

 

 

ONCE UPON A TIME, WE told stories, and these stories shaped us. Stories always have. There are volumes written about how folklore both reflects, as well as creates, how we see the world. What else is myth and folklore but the power of pure narrative, passed down through the ages, and transformed? Once upon a time, and still to this day.

If I were to mention ‘fairy tales’ in this day and age, most likely the first images that would spring to mind would be Disney’s. But much of Disney’s output is a sanitised, saccharine iteration of such stories with much darker routes, and paths into darkened woods littered with breadcrumbs. This corporation’s spun-sugar narrative has undoubtedly left its mouse-shaped imprint on our ideas of romance and love for generation upon generation. Prince Charming, and his happily ever-after. This impact is also covered in volume upon volume. But the debate of whether these ideas are warped or aspirational, I leave to others, in other introductions, and in other books about fairy tales. Instead, I’m here to ask: if fairy stories reflect the world back to us and also shape our world, how about we try those stories with a different shape? Particularly, a round shape. A rotund shape. A hirsute shape.

But when discussing fairy tales, let us bravely attempt to be realistic. The cast of Prince Charmings across the last half decade of pop culture is so white and difficult to tell apart that it might as well have been decided by Ryan Murphy, the mind behind modern T.V.-fairy-tale fare served up in huge helpings including Glee, American Horror Story and Scream Queens. Modern female leads in fairy tales are little more diverse. And let us be further realistic; the gay community is not exactly unfamiliar with, but rather intimate with, placing the ideals of the young, thin and pretty on a pedestal, despite the astonishing diversity of those who comprise our community somewhere over the rainbow.

In recent years there has been a notable rise in ‘recasting’ the familiar white-washed faces of some fairy tales, particularly where such fables intersect with queer culture. Think cartoons of the Prince’s Grindr profiles. Gender-swapped princesses. Cosplays that switch up race and gender. But for all this ironic subversion, it is still common to see the same iconography at play: the hopes and dreams of the thin and beautiful. In the world of fairy tales, it’s a culturally ingrained idea that the fat body belongs only to the realm of the inconsequential, arguably the farcical, but certainly the villainous. And these characters do decidedly do not get to live happily ever after.

Here at Lethe, under the Unzipped imprint, we have often championed erotica and romance collections that put the more traditionally overlooked body type front and centre. It’s easy to get heavy (pun unintended) when talking about representation. It can so easily become fraught, laborious, worthy. But if some of our earliest ideas of love and romance can start in the uncomplicated roots of fairy tales, then we think everyone deserves the chance to be a part of that ever-after, that magic, maybe that darkness, too. We want to create stories full of joy and froth, silliness and escapism, lightness and sexiness, whimsy and hirsuteness. Inconsequential stories are consequential.

This time, we are taking on fairy tales as our theme. Sure, some of us fledgling queers might have grown up identifying more with the princesses in these stories, but if, in your later years, you have found yourself built more like LeFou than Prince Eric, then that happily ever-after might not appear as a foregone conclusion at all. Balls to that! Consider us your fairy godmother. If you’ve been wondering if someday your prince will come, well... here he comes, and he’s put on a few pounds.

Run away with us to the woods, where the cubs and bears are not going to eat you (not without informed, enthusiastic, consent, anyways), where no one will judge you if you take up residence in a house with seven bearded men and only one bed, and where, if you fall in love with a large, hairy man with a forbidding castle and well-stocked library, he will still be that way after you kiss him. 

Come get your happily ever after.

 

—MATTHEW BRIGHT

Manchester, England