Love Is Never Ugly

Inspiration First Half

Love Is Never Ugly is one of my most successful fics written so far and now it'll soon be getting it's own comic adaptation. But some readers have some questions about my work and some are wondering where the inspiration came from. So this chapter will explain how everything came into place.

Part 1 - How it started.

It all started with fanart. I had seen a lot of pictures of Charlie and Alastor dressed as Belle and the Beast from the Disney movie and I thought, you know this would make a good fanfic. I wonder if anyone has written one, because I've always loved Beauty and the Beast and Charlie x Alastor could work with that dynamic. After all it is a story of redemption as well as a story of love. Someone had written a fic but to my disappointment it was just the Disney script with names changed and I thought that's not really what I had in mind. I wanted to read a fic that told the famous story but in a way that it would go if this was Charlie and Alastor as the two main characters.

Then I thought, well I've already written a Cinderella fic with them so maybe I could try to do a Beauty and the Beast one. Can't hurt to try right? But again, I didn't want this to just be a re-written Disney script. I wanted this to match up with the characters and the show I was using. Hazbin Hotel is musical and whimsical but it's also dark. So I needed to add dark elements.

So I began doing research. Looking at all variations and adaptions of Beauty and the Beast. So I re-watched the 1991 Disney adaptation, I watched the Broadway show online, I watched Jean Cocteau's version, I re-read the original story in my fairy tale book, I re-read the modern version novel called Beastly, I read other tales told in different cultures online, and they were all great but lacking the dark element I was looking for. Then I found a Czech, fantasy-horror adaption of the tale from the 1970's called Panna A Netvor. In this version the beast was cannibalistic and terrifying but also mentally tortured by his curse and was torn between knowing the peaceful ignorance of being an animal or acknowledging his human side and facing the painful truth of his actions. And that's when I realized that this was what I needed to draw inspiration from on the dark aspect.

But reading and watching all those adaptions, I realized that each one had elements that I really liked and decided to add them in my story as well. So I set to work creating my own story and how I would make it all fit.

Part 2 - The Beauty

When I was writing Charlotte I didn't want her to just be another Belle. I wanted her to be how Charlie would be if she was human and in a fairy tale world which wasn't too hard considering the creators themselves have described her as "If a Disney Princess was in Hell."

Like Disney's Belle I gave her a love of books but I also gave her a love of music because Charlie is a music lover. Like Beauty from the original story, she's actually very content to live a simple life in country but just like with Charlie, she's not really happy at home. I needed to give her a reason for why that is. A reason for why she would be happier with the beast than at home with her family. In the original fairy tale, Beauty had evil sisters and a rather morally-grey father, so I thought, let's work with that. So she's unhappy because she has a sister who's cruel to her and a father who loves her but doesn't really pay attention to what she wants.

Speaking of wants, like all protagonists in fairy tales, I had to give Charlotte a want. A wish, a desire, a dream. But I wanted to do something different. We're always hearing stories about heroines having these huge, incredible, and massive goals and dreams, but what about a heroine who has a much more simple wish? In my story, Charlotte's greatest dream isn't to have adventures or save the world or marry a prince or fight in battle. Her dream is just to find a good friend. She's very lonely and she feels like she can't really talk about how she feels or what she wants to anyone in her life. She's just looking for one person willing to listen to her and be there for her. It's a simple want but for Charlotte it's hard to achieve because of her family life.

Charlotte is oblivious to her loneliness and unhappiness though. She doesn't recognize that her family is between controlling and just cruel. This is because she has nothing to compare her family to. She has never known what healthy relationships are like and what it means to really care about another person. When she meets Alastor and his staff, they are the first people to ever actually listen to what she has to say, to really talk to her, to really try to figure out who she is and what she likes and what her interests are. They don't automatically assume what she wants or she needs, they take the time to pay attention and learn those things from her.

Charlotte's greatest strength is her compassion and empathy. She isn't strong because she struts around, declaring "I don't need a man." Or acting like she can do everything on her own. She's strong because she knows what it's like to feel alone and to feel like you're not good enough, and she doesn't want anyone else to feel that way, no matter who they are. Like any normal human in her situation, she is terrified of Alastor at first, scared of his appearance and revolted by his actions. But once she realizes that he can't help the way he looks, that his actions stem from a misguided tactic of survival rather than malice, and that he's just as lost and alone as she is, she decides to do for him what she would want anyone to do for her. She decides to be his friend.

Part 3 - The Beast

This part was very tricky because I needed the beast character to be extremely dark to fit Alastor's character, but I also had to make him someone who Charlie could fall in love with. Which raises the question, how do you fall in love with a killer and cannibal without coming off as insane? Especially in this story because in this one Charlie is human and living on earth so she's not used to psychos running around. So I went back and re-read and re-watched all variations and adaptions of Beauty and the Beast and I realized that every version had one thing in common about the beast.

He was born human and then cursed. So he knew what it was like to live as a man among people. He knew how to behave as a human did. But what if he didn't have that chance? What if the beast character was actually born looking the way he did and didn't grow up in human society? What if he was technically human but didn't know how to be one because he spent his whole life with no human influence on his upbringing? Like say in the wild, among animals. That way if he killed people and ate them, it wouldn't be out of malice or evil, it would just be for survival and ignorance to human behavior.

Alastor's human father died before he was born and because of his appearance he had to be kept in the forest where only animals (who aren't so easily influenced by appearances) interacted with him. Also he doesn't look like a human and his mother wasn't human either, so in the beginning it's very hard for him to empathize with humans. Especially since growing up, a lot of them were very cruel to him and later killed his mother. Charlotte is pretty much the first human he ever really knows and because she's much kinder and because they bond, he is finally able to recognize his own humanity and understand the sins of his actions. Then of course there's Katie putting voices in his head to manipulate him and fill him with self-hatred which drives him to hunt and perform acts of self harm. Commenters have compared his behavior to addiction but in actuality it's more like a disorder. Specifically something similar to schizophrenia, depression, and binge eating.

Yet despite his beastly appearance and morbid way of living, Alastor has a moral code and will not kill for pleasure or sport. Nor will he ever harm a child or a kind lady because he can empathize with both due to losing his loving mother and having a tragic childhood. He also has an adoration for meaningful beauty like the kind found in flowers, birds, the sun, music, art, and books. This beauty fascinates him because he knows it'll last as opposed to the vain kind found in people. However with Charlotte is different, her beauty comes from her kind and gentle heart, and that's what draws Alastor to her in the first place. The first thing Charlotte is doing is selflessly offering her life in place of her father's and he doesn't realize it at first but it's what makes her beauty so fascinating and alluring to him. That such a beautiful young woman could have an equally beautiful heart. And having be brought up by a mother who has devoted her life to him, he has a particular soft spot for women who are tender and caring.

In the end, all Alastor wants is for someone to help him become a better person and to make him feel better about himself. For his own kind to accept him instead of rejecting him. To recognize that he wants to love and be loved but he's so damaged that he doesn't know how to go about it. In other words, just like Charlotte, his greatest wish is to have a good friend who can understand him.