- Apr 17, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 24, 2024
A lot of my urban fantasy series have kernels of inspiration from fairy tales. (Hall of Blood and Mercy is my PG take on Donkey Skin, I used a lot of fae lore from the Ballad of Tam Lin for Court of Midnight and Deception, and Gate of Myth and Power is my version of Hades and Persephone.) The Magic on Main Street series doesn't have any direct fairy tale source, instead it came from an idea I've been pondering since back in the "Ye Olden" days of my career when I wrote my Timeless Fairy Tale series. Specifically, my retelling of Sleeping Beauty. It all started with this image...
This meme/image has been making the rounds of Facebook, Instagram, and social media for over a decade, and I stumbled upon it when I was doing research for my aforementioned Sleeping Beauty story. This image, combined with the original story which explained that the Sleeping Beauty's parents only had 12 sets of gold dishware for fairy visitors when there were 13 fairies and so they decided to leave the one fairy out of the guest list which resulted in Sleeping Beauty's curse, made me ponder the intricacies of fae lore. Across the board, fairy tales usually imply that fairies/fairy queens/fairy godmothers all know one another, and see each other frequently. In some stories, it's implied that they even have meetings that they all show up for, or perhaps even live near each other, and that they have their own society with complex rules and factions. Not all fairies got along, and there were often sides--like Maleficent and the three fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather in the Disney movie. For more inspiration fodder, around the time I was writing Sleeping Beauty, superheroes were dominating the movie industry. In 2016 Batman V Superman and Captain America: Civil War both came out, showcasing superhero versus superhero movies. All of this got me thinking...what if a "bad" fae and a "good" fae fell in love--wouldn't that be similar to if a supervillain fell in love with a superhero? I'm sure all Batman fans are mentally screaming at me about Catwoman right now, but I specifically wanted to know what would happen if the genders were reversed and the male love interest was the villain while the woman was the hero. The idea was full of possible tension. If I looked at it from the fairy perspective it would be an interesting idea as they'd be able to understand each other, their history, their abilities, even though they disagreed about things. If I went at it from a superhero angle, it would be both interesting and entertaining to have the supervillain and superhero injuring each other at night, and then being dismayed that their daytime bestie had gotten hurt, never knowing it was their doing. However, I didn't want to write an actual superhero book--even though I am a fan, that isn't my writing vibe--and I couldn't find a way to work it into my Timeless Fairy Tale world because my lore was already set and I wouldn't be able to fully capture the good fae/bad fae vibe with what I had planned for the spinoff series Fairy Tale Enchantress. So I kept the thought in the back of my mind and let it ferment. And then came Magiford. As urban fantasy, Magiford walks that line between fairy tales and superheroes, borrowing abundantly from both genres. It was the perfect setting that would let me capture the best of both worlds and spin them into one story. Thus, Considine and Jade strutted their way into existence. (Well, Considine strutted. Jade marched in and then smartly saluted.) Jade being a slayer and Considine hiding from Killian and the Dracos kiddos meant I was able to implement the superhero secret identity aspect of the story, and Jade's job is basically to be a magic cop, which made it easy to draw moral lines to show how different the pair was. In the same way, their backgrounds meant Jade naturally understood Considine, and that the relationship between their night identities was a lot more personal than the typical superhero story and much more in line with how personally fairy tale fae knew each other. Considine's brand of morally gray-ness was directly inspired from the original Sleeping Beauty story (called "Little Briar Rose") as the original never actually calls the fairy that curses Briar Rose evil, it just states she was angry she wasn't invited, so she stormed in and cursed the princess out of spite. Similarly, Considine is perhaps one of my least dark/antihero urban fantasy heroes--particularly considering Noctus' and Rigel's history, and Killian's political machinations--but instead his long life has worn him down and made him cynical and tired to the point that he mostly lives to cause chaos and acts out much the way the uninvited fairy did. And that's the story about how fairy godmothers and superheroes inspired a vampire and slayer romance! The more you look the more you'll see similarities from my inspiration reflected in Magic on Main Street, so share other examples you think of in the comments down below. I hope you enjoyed that peek into how I craft stories, and until next time, Champions, thanks for reading!
