#you can blame that on the ghostwriters at least andrews will always have the OG....

[5eraphim]

so what was up with that swan bed?/ the chateau lore drabble

soooo one thing about me, is i love a literary reference, and i love writing characters as odes to others in stories

the swan bed- isn't really something subtle, as (well as far as i know anyway) there's really only one story with a swan bed in it, that story being flowers in the attic (in corrine foxworth's bedroom) which I used as inspiration/set dressing for this piece.

in the chateau the bed is beautiful and lush, but is where reader is forced to suffer the excruciating pain of feeding the vampires. in flowers in the attic, corrine's bed is seen as where the "sin"/main conflict of the book comes from. i don't want to spoil anything about the book, but if you know literally anything about FITA, you probably know what i mean. (and is obvi mirrored late on in the book via the dusty, abandoned mattress in the attic later in the book)

but i also kinda used corrine as an inspiration for Spy, as someone who was once humane and caring- only to metamorphize into someone selfish and cruel by the end of the story. (not to say Spy was ever self-less, but he was at least human before he was vampire, and i wanted to have the implication he's only so vicious bc he's been living as a vampire for so long- and can't see his reader as a person anymore. reader is a recourse and a captive- but not human, not anything like Spy himself, like how corrine doesn't even see her own children as family by the end of the book, they're nothing but a liability.

corrine has always been one of my favorite villains in fiction, and really is one of the best utilizations of fairy-tale tropes subverted by FITA. at the start of the book she's like a fair, beautiful and kind-hearted princess, faithful to her husband and loves her family more than anything in the world. But during the events of the story she becomes the villain after returning to living with her mother (who is meant to be like a wicked witch/evil step-mother character, someone who is ugly inside and out contrasts corrine who is beautiful on the outside and REPULSIVE on the inside.)

corrine and spy aren't really all that similar characters all things considered, but i wanted to write them motivated by their shared vices here (selfishness/greed/possessiveness/callousness) and have some fun writing Spy at his worst, and trying to examine how he would be if he were to go all in on the materialistic vanity so common in vampires. corrine motivated by these vices would go on to betray her family (no spoilers but JESUS this lady is evil) and Spy would trick/coerce Engie into "overdoing it" while feeding- knowing he's too new to feeding from humans to have the self-control to stop himself.