#oc: rosebelle fortier

[rose-bookblood]

The Witch and the Beast | WIP Intro

Genre: fantasy retelling, romance, post-apocalyptic steampunk

Target: NA

Setting: our world, France; centuries in the future

POV: multi (mainly 2), 3rd person limited, past tense

Themes: family, guilt & forgiveness, trauma, oppression, power

Logline: In an attempt to save her father's life, 21-year-old Rosebelle offers herself as prisoner to the king of a forgotten realm, cursed to remain a half-human, half-wolf beast.

Literal logline: Disaster bisexual falls in love with sad wet dog (literally) while juggling his nosy siblings and practicing witchcraft.

Featuring: one-sided enemies to friends to lovers | Arabic bisexual FMC | mixed black-white family | siblings dynamics | vampires, werewolves & witches | Italian pirates | side f/f & m/m pairings

Inspiration: various iterations of Beauty and the Beast and other fairytales

CW: violence, gore, death, descriptions of corpses, blood drinking, trauma & depression, sexual harassment, self-hate & implied self-harm (no physical injuries)

Hi, folks! After ages, I'm finally introducing this project I've been mentioning for months! It really shouldn't have taken me this long to post this, but I'm a busy perfectionist.

The best way I can describe TWATB is if Once Upon a Time and The Vampire Diaries had a child. Hopefully a better written one. It's mainly a Beauty and the Beast retelling, but in book 1 you can see hints of other fairytale characters and, in book 2, all new characters come from different stories. Yes, it is a series, it seems I'm physically unable to write standalones.

Plot

After a nuclear war set technology back and filled Earth's atmosphere with gas clouds that black out the sun, vampires came out of the shadows and subjugated the humans.

Rosebelle Fortier wishes to escape the small French village where she lives, unable to pursue her thirst for knowledge and tormented by a vampire who wants to make her his. Ro's wish comes true with a catch when she offers herself as prisoner to a half-human, half-wolf Beast and his siblings to save her father's life.

Before he angered the wrong witch, Adam ruled the Kingdom of Alsace. Now, he's a monster trapped in his own castle and by a curse that will only break if he learns to love and be loved back. Time is ticking by and, even when a girl stumbles on his path, Adam knows there's no hope: no one will ever love a beast.

As a hidden threat forms, Ro and Adam must come into their own power and fall in love, all before time runs out.

Characters

(* means a character appears in book 2)

Rosebelle Fortier

she/her

the Beauty

bookworm with a thirst for knowledge

curiosity killed the cat etc. etc.

may or may not become a witch

disaster bisexual

Adam d'Alsace

he/him

the Beast

a literal sad wet dog

(he's a werewolf)

(he's also depressed)

currently stuck in a hybrid form

François Guérin

he/him

the Avenant/Gaston

nasty musty crusty dusty

old as fuck vampire

spends his days harassing Ro

Delphine d'Alsace

she/her

eldest sister syndrome

forever plagued by guilt

Ro & Adam's matchmaker

this || close to losing it at all times

Julien d'Alsace

he/him

wishes his family did something to fix the situation

be gay do crime

grumpy but there's no sunshine (yet)

perpetually on the verge of spilling all the tea to Ro

Véronique d'Alsace

she/her

moody teenager

trans & aromantic

wants to be left alone with her garden and books

she and Adam connect on a depression level

Charlotte d'Alsace

she/her

definitely undiagnosed ADHDer

aromantic

a ball of sunshine

loves running around the castle gardens in wolf form

Bianca Chen Hildebrandt*

she/her

the Snow White

princess of the Kingdom of Germany

lesbian

her stepmother turned her into a vampire against her will

is now leading a rebellion

Astrid Morgenstern*

she/her

the Sleeping Beauty

Bianca's loyal knight (in a totally heterosexual way)

pansexual

is currently. you guessed it. asleep

Sebastiano Falconieri*

he/him

the Captain Hook

unsurprisingly, a pirate

bisexual

Italian pride let's gooo

stuck on a magical prison island

Setting

Like I mentioned in the plot, TWATB is set in an unspecified future, after a nuclear war. As a consequence, the planet is cocooned by a thick cover of gas clouds that block all sunlight. Vampires, who had previously been considered a myth, came out of hiding and started ruling over the humans. Besides that unfortunate implication, lack of sunlight also means the climate is colder and living conditions are dire. The story is set in France, but now it looks like Siberia.

The war also set technology back a couple centuries, before the discovery of electricity. There's gas lamps, railroads (not many, because, y'know, lots of ice and snow), zeppelins. And, of course, I couldn't resist the steampunk/Victorian aesthetic.

But that's not all! Even though I'm not sure how much will come across in book 1, since it's set at the castle for 90% of the time, there's more to the setting than "steampunk but cold". I've built a vampire-centric society with its own rules and spent a bunch of time researching what effects the absence of direct sunlight would have, to make everything as realistic as possible.

This is all for now. Hope this "new" project piqued your interest!

— Rose

Taglist: (lmk to be added)

@ink-fireplace-coffee

[rose-bookblood]

trick or treat rose!! how are you??

have a good day/night!

@ink-fireplace-coffee

Carmen!! You get a treat 🍬

I'm very focused on my fairytale retelling right now (placeholder title The Witch and the Beast), so here's some lore about the protagonist, Rosebelle, also known as Ro.

Ro is a 21-year-old who lives in a village in France, that's now run by vampires. Ro hates the vampires, who keep the population in check with fear, a hatred that's reinforced by the fact François, the village's overseer, constantly harasses her specifically. But, of course, she can't rebel, or her father would pay the consequences.

Like a good Belle, Ro loves reading and dreams of leaving the village. She craves knowledge, and she'll get it, even though she didn't imagine it would happen while she's being held captive in a castle by a beast and his four siblings. Oh, and that desire for knowledge will bite her in the ass at some point.

Fun fact: one of my first thoughts when I named Ro was "I can't name her Rose, that's my name and it would be too self-referential!"

Rose isn't even my actual name???

[rose-bookblood]

⭐

@italiangothicwriteblr

Send me an ask for a director's commentary on one of my WIPs.

Hi, Joy! Since you seemed interested in TWATB, you get a commentary on the first scene I came up with for it.

Quite embarassingly, I sketched out the general plot for book 2 before that for book 1. Yeah, I know, booo, it's a retelling, you already had the skeleton there and couldn't develop the damn novel? Anyway, that means the first actual scene my mind conjured for TWATB is from book 2.

I had a general idea for the end of book 1, which I'm not going to spoil, but it entails Ro and Adam leaving the castle in a dire situation. Through some shenanigans, they're brought to Bianca (aka Snow White)'s presence, and the scene is the moment they meet.

Quick refresher: Bianca is the princess of Germany, who has been turned into a vampire against her will by her stepmother and is now leading an underground rebellion. Ro and Adam are both vaguely aware of Bianca's existence — especially Adam, considering he's a royal as well —, but have no idea what she looks like, nor do they know what happened to her.

So, when they're brought to her, Ro and Adam only know that this is some kind of human rebel group hiding in the Alps. These guys introduce them to their leader and, as soon as she sees Bianca, Ro is absolutely mesmerised, because she's a disaster bisexual and Bianca is gorgeous. Then Ro goes like "wait a minute. This bitch a vampire" and instantly gets hostile.

In this world, most non-vampires dislike vampires, but Ro feels a particularly visceral repugnance towards them, thanks to having been harassed by François for years. So, throughout this scene, while Bianca and Adam are trying to broker a deal because they need each other's help, Ro is rowing in the opposite direction.

It's a peculiar scene, because although Ro is impulsive and tends to act from emotion rather than logic, she has a strong sense of self-preservation. In the past, she's never confronted François or even Adam, not before she was certain he wasn't dangerous to her. Right at this moment, Bianca is offering them their best chance, and Ro won't take it because of her aversion towards vampires.

Adam is the first to be stunned by it, and that leads to him realising just how afraid Ro is, or at least used to be, of vampires. At this point, Ro has fought vampires and won, but Adam hasn't seen her for most of her life, when she was defenseless against them and could only count on her wits and luck. Now Ro is being a little stubborn and deriving satisfaction from being equally matched with vampires — she's since learned witchcraft —, but a big part of it comes from her unease around them.

It's also a compelling situation because this is, let's call it that, the first test of Ro and Adam's relationship. Before, they lived in an enclosed space with people (Adam's siblings) who were actively pushing them together. In book 2 they have to navigate how they work as a couple in the real world, where there's no curse freezing them into a stasis, and where they have to face and build themselves a future.

And I also just love Bianca as a character, if I dare say so myself. I mean, she's a lesbian vampire princess/rebel leader!

This turned out very long, so I hope it was at least interesting to read. Thanks for the ask, Joy!

@italiangothicwriteblr