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I wanted a fairytale; one about consent, personhood, bodily autonomy, and the violation of those trusts; about being the right sort of girl and the wrong kind of woman, princess and witch all the way down.
I wanted a fairytale about a girl desperate to become a woman, a thing desired even when unloved. She becomes a woman, but not actually (yes, actually); a woman, but only conditionally; a woman not fully, not respectfully, not correctly. Not yet.
And so I have a bibliography. (With those above warnings.)
"The Little Mermaid" by Hans Christian Andersen, translated by Mrs. H. B. Paull (1888)
At last she reached her fifteenth year. "Well, now, you are grown up," said the old dowager, her grandmother; "so you must let me adorn you like your other sisters;" and she placed a wreath of white lilies in her hair, and every flower leaf was half a pearl. Then the old lady ordered eight great oysters to attach themselves to the tail of the princess to show her high rank.
"But they hurt me so," said the little mermaid.
"The Trash Heap Has Spoken" by Carmen Maria Machado (2017)
My grandmother was a mountain. When I was a girl, I’d stand next to her vanity and watch as she strung herself with what I thought of as her “jewels”—jangling, glittering bangles and jade-green Lucite earrings and roped gold necklaces and Swarovski crystal brooches shaped like elephants and tigers. She wore leopard-print nightgowns and smelled like White Diamonds and overflowed from the bones of her chair.
Her body was a marvel to me, a form unbound and soothing as a Buddha. Sometimes, I would sit in her lap and peek down her shirt, to see her mysteries. She was the biggest woman I knew.
"The Fisher Queen" by Alyssa Wong (2014)
My mother was a fish. That’s why I can swim so well, according to my father, who is a plain fisherman with a fisherman’s plain logic, but uncanny flair for the dramatic. And while it’s true that I can cut through the water like a minnow, or a hand dipped over the edge of a speedboat, I personally think it’s because no one can grow up along the Mekong without learning two things: how to swim, and how to avoid the mermaids.
Mermaids, like my father’s favorite storytale version of my mother, are fish. They aren’t people. They are stupid like fish, they eat your garbage like fish, they sell on the open market like fish. Keep your kids out of the water, keep your trash locked up, and if they come close to land, scream a lot and bang pots together until they startle away. They’re pretty basic.
"Mermaids at the End of the Universe" by Kendra Fortmeyer (2015)
The first thing to understand is that we are very beautiful.
Deploy your imagery of choice. Reach for gemstones, for edibles: crystal skin, laughing emerald eyes, hair like gently burnished gold. Peaches and cream. The blush of sunrise staining fresh water. You may mix metaphors. You will be forgiven.
The second thing to understand is that it means nothing.
The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror by Daniel M. Lavery (2018), “The Frog’s Princess”
"Beauty does not belong exclusively to you," the man told his daughters. "Beauty is a public good and you are responsible for it."
"What does that mean, exactly?" the youngest daughter asked. The sun burned hot on his forehead.
"It means—in a sense—that according to a certain understanding you belong to everyone," the man said. (The man himself was not beautiful, but he was often covered in beautiful objects, which he considered to amount, more or less, to the same thing.)
"By that reasoning," his daughter said, "I belong at least partly to myself. Certainly at least as much as I belong to anyone else."
"Don't be clever," his father said. "Go and play outside, where people can see you."
"The Selkie Wives" by Kendra Fortmeyer (2017)
In the beginning, the story goes like this: a fisherman brings home a selkie wife. He spies the maidens bathing in the salt-cove by the sea, their great, glistening seal skins heaped on a stone. When the sun begins to slip from the sky, the sisters slide into their coats, transforming from lovely women into sleek, dark seals who dive into the water and away: all, of course, except the youngest and loveliest, who runs from one place to another, naked and distressed, unable to return to her skin and the sea.
The fisherman emerges from the shadows with her pelt bundled shining in his arms. “Now you will be my wife,” he says. And so it is.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), episode 108
Kyubey: "On this planet, you call females who have yet to become adults 'girls'. It makes sense then that since you'll eventually become witches, you should be called 'magical girls'."