The Evil Princess: A Fractured Fairy Tale Satire
Like so many people, the author of The End of the Magical Kingdom, wanted to see a Disney movie with a lesbian princess. Of course, Disney is taking forever with that next installment of Frozen because they’re afraid of offending people and getting banned in countries around the world.
While the first lesbian and gay Disney fairy tale might someday hit theaters, one animated romance you will probably never see on a Disney screen is the relationship between Salem the Witch and Mary Melancholy. Even if Disney ever produced such a gay cartoon, it wouldn’t really deal with the issues that we as a society face today. They would probably make it a little bit like <em>Frozen</em>; something a bit patronizing.
Then we started to think of our “fantasy motion picture.” An animated musical that went beyond the G-rated world of Disney. What about a social satire that combined pathos, danger, and tragedy happening in a comedy and almost childlike world?
The story began to explore the deeper questions of humanity, such as what causes bigotry and where hate and suspicion come from.
A Gay Disney Fairy Tale You Will Never See
One could say that the “princess mythos” carried an altogether different connotation in the days of the Brothers Grimm than in the overproduced modern age of Walt Disney-whitewashed love stories. To some, a princess is merely a debutante, a young woman entering into the world and struggling to fit in and failing to be a good role model.
To our jaded thinkers, a princess represents entitlement. The viewpoint that a monarchy will last forever because of the royal family’s good intentions. To jaded audiences of today, the very idea of an oligarchic society peacefully ruling over the poor is not only trite but insulting. The word princess understandably takes a more ominous implication.
The character of Mary Melancholy, a Disney-archetypal princess is raised in royalty but is oblivious to the political chicanery happening around her – including an uprising of protesters against the “Golden Elite”, the rich billionaire monarchy.
The story concludes with the touch of the macabre, as the singing and dancing stops cold and the story descends into a fairy tale straight out of Hell, as the Brothers Grimm might have imagined it, with death, darkness and dirges by (not) Alan Menken.
Through original artwork, song lyrics, a quirky narrator and a little bit of magic, we get the definitive fairy tale musical experience, but this time reflecting our own real world and the issues that matter in the 21st century.
The End of the Magical Kingdom</em> series goes beyond just gay. This is a series that will boldly challenge the status quo of young adult and middle-grade fiction. Future books will introduce Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning characters into the cartoon epic, as the struggle for freedom and happiness continues throughout the land of Cadabra.
How the Story’s Beginning Sets the Tone for a Tragic Parody
This is the story of three princesses: Mary Melancholy, Sweet Blossom and Wendy. Once upon a time, they were childhood friends. Each one was destined to inherit a kingdom. Wishing to remain friends forever, the girls decided to create a “Ten Year Cadabra’s Box”, a box of random stuff they would store and seal for ten years. A decade passes and now they’re all grown up. They’ve each inherited a kingdom and learned the ways of their respective peoples. And it’s time for a reunion!
The Evil Princess, Book 1, opens with a haunting image: a fairy tale princess emerging from the darkness who just so happens to be DEAD. She was once beautiful, a belle, and now limps along looking like a zombie princess from Hell. This warns the reader of tragedy, violence and much suffering to come.
A Fairy Tale Parody and Fairy Tale Social Satire
As the story begins, it recalls the spirit of The Brothers Grimm books – social criticism piece meets horror, all the while happening in a fairy tale world for young minds to better comprehend. The Fairy Tale Parody Genre allows the author to teach with comedy. Parody has historically been associated with writers who wrote scathing criticism of their society. The humor or satire of such a book is often biting, slanderous and obscene, just enough to provoke a world of readers into rebellion or protest.
Miguel de Cervantes, Marquis de Sade and William Shakespeare all made use of the parody genre. It was written similarly to comedy, but wasn’t so “light”. Parody usually allows for more exaggerated violence or plot twists, that border on disturbing and upsetting—a definite turn off in light-hearted or juvenile comedy. These lampoons are supposed to be stories that criticize some aspect of society that the author believes to be unjust.
No one wants to read a depressing story about social injustice. So the first thought was to make it funny. Creating a fairy tale satire is a great way to discuss social issues in a safe context. It’s also a genre that plays to younger audiences or adults who don’t want topical issues of the day taken so seriously. Under the guise of fairy tales, writers and artists can use satirical humor to comment on today’s most important social issues.
Gay marriage, religious intolerance, misogyny and political injustice…these are the issues people care about. But readers are tired of being bashed over the head with dogma about how we ought to feel about this or that. One of the goals of fiction is to tell a story objectively, leading the author to form his or her own opinions about the moral of the story.
The story is a parody of Disney fairy tales but with the darkness and psychological horror of the original Brothers Grimm fairy tales. The story was also intended to be a comedy series in the style of Susan Harris’ Soap TV series and other shows that mixed absurdist comedy with tragic elements.
The Pitch: “Imagine Disney musicals if they actually stuck to the original Brothers Grimm storyline. Or Game of Thrones happening in a Looney Tunes universe. Or an LGBTQ version of Star Wars directed by Stanley Kubrick.”
Just because characters are funny and situations are farcical doesn’t mean there is an absence of tragedy. Tragedy is all around us and especially in comedy, because our pain brings out our deepest survival instincts. Laughter will always be a great way to cope with despair.</p>
This is a book that not all parents will appreciate, given the depiction of LGBTQ themes as well as themes of sex, drugs, and violence. However, this is a caricatured world that reflects our own. This series is for teenagers over the age of 13. The book comes with a warning label because of extremely violent scenes and harsh emotional intensity. However, because there is no pornographic depiction of sex the book is technically not for Adults Only. Many in the literary industry have been asking for an official “ratings” system for literature, but nothing has happened as of yet.
The Evil Princess is a book that aspires to mash up the most extreme elements of across-the-board fiction, from surrealism and comedy to the bleakest of drama and social criticism. The book series is not just a parody but also a caricature of humanity’s frail existence, offering readers a roller coaster ride of laughter, tears, and rage. Just your typical coming-of-age experience, but with more princess dresses and bloodshed.
The Story So Far…
- The Kingdom of Blood & The Kingdom of Gold
- Finally negotiated a peace treaty after decades of bloody conflict
- Many concede that King Amram of the Kingdom of Gold “won” with his financial war on King Satyre
- Satyre couldn’t compete against the richer Kingdom of Gold and so surrendered
- Satyre and Amram agreed to a “peace treat marriage” between the two kings’ children and heir-apparents
- Mary Melancholy is now engaged to Prince Aaron
- The two kings still hate each other but still agree on some things
- Such as, God is real and living…
- And witches are evil and banned from civilization
- Prince Aaron is a really nice guy and not an obnoxious dick like his father
- Everything is going so well…
- So why in the world would Mary fall in love with a witch?
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The Saint of Science: A Fairy Tale Parody
God help the outcasts?
No, the outcasts are all here.
God help you.
Socially awkward books are not commercial or mainstream by any means. Yet, this is the voice of the new generation. Historically speaking, great writers always created literature and eloquent characters who spoke just as wittily as the narrative itself. But in The Saint of Science, Book 2 of The End of the Magical Kingdom, we hear the voice of the outlier.
It’s an unwritten rule in publishing that lead characters should be super-intelligent, ultra-witty and always with the perfectly sarcastic comeback. That makes the character ‘likable’ to editors. In Book 2, the creative team decided to have some fun breaking literary conventions and created a bunch of unlikable characters who exhibit different aspects of socially awkward conversation. Some characters even cross a line and exhibit major personality disorders, that in any other book, might be the focal point of the melodrama. But not in this universe, where madness and genius are closely intertwined.
Whereas in the first book, Princess Mary Melancholy was characterized by her anxious conversation and nervous reactions to other people, in Book 2 we see characters like Princess Blossom, who sometimes shows histrionic tendencies, even when trying her best to help others. Even Salem the Witch, the bad ass heroine / villain of the first book returns for another round, this time bringing even more conflict to her character pathos.
Blossom and her “gang of misfits” are opinionated for sure, and they often rub people the wrong way. Just because characters speak the same language doesn’t necessarily mean communication is always clear and friendly, between such differing cultures. There is a certain honesty in telling these socially awkward characters’ stories and not trying to popularize them into role models, just to fit into the “young adult” genre.
Many of us have never felt like we fit in with any crowd, any group or any club, in school or out of school. Sometimes when a socially awkward person speaks, they make others feel nervous or defensive. Their comments might be so outside the box, that friends or acquaintances don’t quite know what to make of them.
A lot of us today can relate to that and so that was reflected in the writing of the series. The story wasn’t dumbed down, nor did the author want to pretend as if every character was so perfect.
One of the main points of the book series is that just because you are not going to get along with a lot of people in life, you CAN actually find a really good friendship among your fellow outliers. There is a great spirit of tolerance among our culture, which transcends just age or social class. We are rebels,
revolutionaries, and oddballs and yet we take pride in what we are.
The Queen Darwin Dynasty
Of course, to someone like Sweet Blossom, her social awkwardness is an unrealized trait for much of the book as she has bigger issues to content with, namely growing up in a House of Evil Queens.
The pitch seems easy enough…imagine if everyone’s favorite (bisexual) Disney Princess had to fight Nazis…including her own mother, the Evil Old Queen / Führer, Queen Darwin IV. Princess Sweet Blossom must contend with a sexual and cultural revolution, all the while introducing progressive politics to a bigoted Evil Queen administration. But Cadabra alpha males courting her attention, upholding the values of Science won’t come easy.
Idealism and close-mindedness are dangerous, as Blossom soon discovers that all of her friends and enemies hold racist, homophobic, and bigoted attitudes that are not easy to change. Not only must Blossom learn painful life lessons about life and the moral flaws of others, but she also grows to realize that her own personality and social awkwardness can run people the wrong way. But is that the price of leadership?
The End of the Magical Kingdom series is, in the late author’s own words, “Young, Angry Books for Millennials, Gen X, Zillennials, and Boomers who are forever young at heart.”
The distinctive style that characterizes these novels, is “plots, language, and structure that is iconoclastic by nature, but with a coherent and emotional narrative that holds the audience captive.”
The book series had three goals in mind:
1. To write anti-heroes; characters and behavior you’ve never really seen in books before. </p>
2. To use a modern and simple language that jumped off the page, resembling TV and movie dialog.
3. To embody the anti-establishment personality of “every young generation”, and the spirit of revolution that never dies.
4. To write a book about all the major personality disorders and present them honestly.
These books for young-at-heart readers feature a distinctive brand of “Tragic Parody” (comedy, horror and literary drama in one) as well as some gonzo writing techniques that you rarely see in modern teen novels today.
The “parody homage”, ”the poetic distraction”, and what we can only call a “WTF troll scene”, a scene meant for shock value that pushes the limits of reading and writing. The adult themes, graphic language, and over-the-top violence are also author trademarks that may alienate some readers. However, the creative team is confident that to outliers, it will be simply dramatic literary fiction.
This is the way a lot of young authors write fanfiction. It’s very politically incorrect, blasphemous of copyright law, and surreal in that it combines bizarre comedy with the most inappropriate of erotic entanglement…and yet it produces intense drama in the end.
A Novel for People Who Don’t Like to Read
To make the novel Young Adult friendly, the book is written in “Tragic Parody” style. A book for people who don’t like to read, and would rather imagine the story as a movie or screenplay.”
That’s why there’s mostly action in the narrative, more dialog, more humor and shock value. Not as much boring introspection, internal writer speak, and long verbose descriptions that keep a lot of teens/millennials away from thick novels.
The book uses more gonzo writing techniques that you rarely see in modern teen and YA novels today. Some people who read it classify it as mishmash because it’s too funny to be serious, too dramatic to be a comedy. I think the secret to writing good comedy is to realize the characters never understand they’re existing in a comedy world. They think of their lives every bit as painful as we would our own.”
The worst thing a book can be is boring. So if you laugh, get pissed off, or something scares the shit out of you, then mission accomplished!
Our audience is not just LGBTQ, but outliers, anti-socials and people that don’t quite fit into modern society.
It’s cool now to say on Facebook that you’re a ‘freak’ or ‘weird’ or ‘nerdy’, but the truth is most popular people don’t know what it’s like to be rejected by society, or be mocked by their peers, and to lose all self-confidence because of other people’s judgments.
This is a book about not feeling connected to anyone you know, even the people who are nice to you. All of the protagonists and antagonists in the coming series have trouble relating to other people. How they get along with others, and what they do about their obstacles, is at the heart of the story.
The Saint of Science begs the point that sometimes those who think outside the box, like the outliers and misfits of today, are the ones who rule the world tomorrow.
To anyone who’s ever felt exiled and has been told “They are not one of us!” shortly before being booted from the lion pride, perhaps they can relate to the story’s Anti-Disney novel sensibilities. We’re not all Scar, we’re not all Zira, or Kovu, or Simba. Sometimes we’re just one forgotten wildebeest who got lost in the stampede.
The Story So Far…
- The Commonwealth of the Pink Sky (Pinkian Gynocracy)
- The Queen Darwin Dynasty is the ruling family of the Palace of Saints
- This is an atheist, science-based kingdom…God and Religion are banned
- Queen Darwin IV is not in good health.
- Princess Regent “Dusk” is first in line to be queen when the Queen croaks
- Countess Huxley and her daughter Lady Bramwell are also considered heirs to the throne
Blossom is the “Princess of Candy” and she should be happy with that title, nothing more, or at least that’s what the Queen said - The Commonwealth’s Military has its own sense of decorum and their own opinions apart from the Queen
The Committee of Science is a panel of renowned scientists whose job is to advise the Queen - The word “Pinkian” is mostly a derogatory term…
- To them, Atheism is the “truth”, not a belief
- However, they are very fond of the color pink, hence the colloquialism
- There are strange, creepy things going on up north, where the icy observatories are located
- The Queen is evil…everyone knows this.
- Science ought to kill the old bat already!
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The Watchmaker’s Child: A Fairy Tale War Allegory
Who knew “mind-fuck” was an actual novel genre? The less crude definition one that seriously fucks with your sense of reality and perceptions of truth.
For a mild mind fuck, mainstream readers follow the horror applications of Stephen King, while the more sophisticated ones delve into the shuddering unrealities creeping into realities of H.P. Lovecraft. Everyone likes a good mind fuck now and then, especially when our minds start bouncing off walls of everyday repetitions of the same old thoughts, same old activities.
Not all novels that seriously mess with your head are horror stories, however, nor are they an introduction to fantastic creatures and maiden voyages into the unknown. Herman Hesse, largely regarded as a spiritualist writer attempting to combine Eastern religion with Western philosophy, took a maiden journey into the psychosis of the mind when he created Steppenwolf.
His main character, Harry Haller, a very ordinary, middle-aged man steps into a magic theater that pulls him in and makes him a part of it through the engaging actress, Hermine. Hermine makes him question the morality of war and explore the passions of jealousy while teaching him to indulge himself in song and dance. As the plot thickens, there is a hint that he murders Hermine, although the conjecture is that the murder wasn’t the sin, but that he thought of it at all.
Some authors consistently mind-fuck. Kurt Vonnegut liked nothing more than to twist his readers’ minds. A prison survivor of World War II, he fictionalized his experiences as a prisoner of war in the novel, Slaughter House – Five through an unreliable narrator who tells the story of Billy Pilgrim who believes himself to be in an alien zoo and who is traveling in and out of time. But his most chilling mind fuck fiction is Cat’s Cradle. The outspoken anti-war activist fictionalizes the creator of the nuclear bomb with a narrator who seeks to find his human side.
But not all mind fuck novels are a psychedelic ride into the mystic realms where reality collide with imagination. Modern mind-fuck novels may incorporate non-linear narration, stream of consciousness, space travel, and fantastic or horrifying creatures as protagonists. Modern mind-fucking novels give you intellectual vertigo.
If the author succeeds, you lose all sense of dimension. Mind fucking stories challenge your perceptions. They go above and beyond the duty of presenting the frailties of the human condition by challenging you to go inside the protagonist’s mind and follow the ramblings, delusions and psychosis of the narrator, who trembles on the edge of harsh reality and paranoia.
The best mind fuck stories are an assault on your sensibilities, and it’s difficult to describe <em>The End of the Magical Kingdom Book 3: The Watchmaker’s Child as a fairy tale/sci-fi mishmash when anyone can see that behind all the talking animal jokes and Walt Disney/Looney Tunes parodies, the origin and fate of CEO Wendy is a mindfuck orgy of existential dread.
This is by far the most experimental work of the series so far. Breakaway characters draw in the reader intensely, providing a new pathos, while the final chapters shift the tone almost into pure sci-fi. It’s a postmodern, almost dadaistic, coming-of-age book that questions the social norms and perceptions of reality. While it’s easy to see why a reader might call the book misanthropic, or even anti-human (the metaphor of the juxtaposed robotic society wasn’t lost), the story formula is much the same as the previous books – a story of growing up, forgetting the “magic” of childhood, and reluctantly stepping into an adult world or moral ambiguities.
The long cast of characters, many of which are princesses, robots, and other strange cartoon-like shapeshifters, spend much of the novel assaulting each other with unremitting brutality – both physically and emotionally.
The epidemic proportions of their destructive natures reflect the modern-day violence of superhero movies or maybe political war crimes. But in the “magical kingdoms”, there are no superheroes or heroes. There are only the strong who prey on the weak. It’s a ferocious psychological grip that leaves the reader feeling like a captive soldier trapped in a world where only the strong survive, squinting into the horizon, looking for a glimmer of hope in the most unlikely of places.
What if you could hear the unflattering thoughts of the God who abandoned you? What if you found out more insider information than you could handle? These are the questions that both Wendy and The Reader contend with, as The Watchmaker’s Child goes down the rabbit hole of frail human existence.
The plot follows CEO Wendy, the second-in-command of the Diamond Empire, who must play God every day to keep her people afloat. Meanwhile, journalists, horrorists witches, political enemies, and an unruly mob of impoverished people are constantly attacking her empire. Wendy is also protecting a secret about her father Wardiz…a doozy, since revealing this secret could cost her everything. Telling the truth is not as convenient as minimizing violence. But even Wendy has a breaking point and the consequences could be world-changing. More than anything else, the novel seems intent in placing the passive reader in a role of godlike moral conundrums, asking in essence, what would we as individuals do so differently from what we’ve done historically?
An Anti-War Novel and Political Allegory
The war satire is a somewhat retired genre, because of political correctness and WWIII paranoia. But Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was definitely an inspiration for a book with few heroes, lots of absurd comedy, and even darker cadences of nuclear war, suicide, and the worst of human behavior.
The message seems to be “We can still laugh at dark things. Laughter is sometimes the only way to process pain.” Whether madly idealistic, or downright obsessive-compulsive, we get the very worst of Gallow’s Humor in this mindfuck book that unravels the very notion of patriotism.
The series is partly a biblical epic and a war novel or an anti-war novel, since it reflects our values as a generation of pacifists, third-party independent voters, and anti-imperialism. War is ugly, War is Hell. War is rape and tyranny no matter who wins and if it was justified. Perhaps our generation of young idealists needs to be reminded of this, in this modern age of biased news reporting, fake news, and paranoid conspiracy theories.
In order to be honest to the nature of the story, we have to empathize with the consummate politician, which is symbolized by CEO Wendy, the daughter of King Wardiz, who’s been missingin action for quite a while.
Why must they lie? Why must they kill and why do they think they are doing a greater good? Because they are essentially playing God. And in telling their story, we can hear their soul, in agony, and living with such a moral burden.
One of the goals of mindfuck fiction is to tell a semi-linear story objectively, leading the author to form his or her own opinions about the morals and deeper meaning. In the third book, The Watchmaker’s Child, we clearly see a mishmash of genres, from fairy tales to biblical style allegory, to fanfiction smut and even a political Orwellian nightmare, like the cover of Book 2 implied, with the Stalin-esque cover, a veiled criticism of leftist politics.
The primary motif of The Watchmaker’s Child is, of course, the computer-based society of the Diamond Empire, which emphasizes delayed corporate response and cheap robotic labor. But the final revelation in the Third Act of the story involves not merely technology, but the isolated and lonely internet culture we are creating in the 21st century – a quickly evolving species that no longer feel connected to anything but the “self”, the “you do you” philosophy that consumerism has marketed so well.
The final mindfuck of Wendy’s comeuppance turns the mirror on us, as a complicit audience, one who rages and demands social justice, but with no real strategy on how to avoid recreating the same history we condemn with every new generation. The story could be superficially called horror, sci-fi, and satire, but more aptly fits the misery-lit genre, if the protagonist were Humankind itself, struggling to overcome the addiction to playing God.
The Story So Far…
- The Diamond Empire (Diamond-Brand Capitalism at its Best!)
- King Wardiz calls it capitalism and free-market trade, though quite a few people have suggested the Diamond Empire is just short of Hell on Earth
- Half the population is robotic, half human, and all the humans are weird-looking in that 3D, 4K face kind of way.
- Speaking of King Wardiz, he’s been missing from the public eye for years
- He outsources most of his projects to his teenage daughter Wendy
- Some conspiracy theorists believe a secret elite society controls the Diamond Empire
- Wendy is reviled in the press, and blamed for much of the suffering of a poverty-stricken people
- Wendy must contend with a jaded population called the “Revolution”, stationed in the Ghettos of the otherwise wealthy Diamond Headquarters
- It doesn’t help matters that Wendy is glib, unemotional, robotic in personality, and practically a hermit
- Suicides are at an all-time high and Wardiz’s empire can’t keep up with the numbers
- And hardly anyone likes Wendy’s lavish self-serving music videos, which doesn’t exactly endear her to the people
- But what she hates most of all are boys who snoop around and get too dangerously close to the truth!
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Book 4: The Broken Divine
Coming Soon!
