I would like to write a story that combines The Princess and the Pea with Jack and the Beanstalk. Now, I've done takes on both of those tales before (here and here) but I was sitting around today, failing to make any progress on my nebulous plans for Donkeyskin/Allerleirauh, and so I did what I usually do when I run into difficulties with one story, and turned my thoughts to another.
Specifically I turned my thoughts to The Little Mermaid, because I have an old story seed for that, as well (definitely hinting at more of a continuation than a retelling), which in turn led me down the rabbit hole of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, which in turn led me back around to The Princess and the Pea, and different twists I could put on it, which made me think, "But what if the pea was magic, and that's what she was sensing?" and of course magic peas made me think magic beans, and I thought to myself, "Surely there's something in that combination," especially since I'd just been bitching to Nathan about the lack of representation in American media of intimate, non-sexual friendships among (hetero) men and women.
So now I'm rolling it around in my head to see if anything can, in fact, be found in "that". I do like the idea of the prince needing a "true princess" in the sense that he needs someone truly attuned to the earth, an earth witch, if you will. And what if her sleeping above the pea, unconsciously pouring her earth-witch magic into it, caused it to grow up and up and up... say, perhaps, that normally young earth witches, until they are trained to control their magics, never sleep near growing things, to avoid just such predicaments. Maybe Jack was an earth witch, too...
Anyway, that's how these things grow in my brain. I'll leave it there for a while, in the compost, and see if anything sprouts from it.
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