Author's Notes: Little Snow-White

"Snow-White, Rose-Red, will you beat your lover dead?"

"But Little Snow-White is still a thousand times fairer than you."

Two women white as either snow or roses, two sisters that loved and stood together rather than attack each other, and a princess whose "dead body" was nearly sold and then given to a strange prince. These stories begged to be put together in a way that offered the romantic love of a fairytale as well as the familial love that is so often missing from them.


Where to begin? This tale has some rather serious updates: gone is the evil dwarf, now is the evil wizard, who just so happens to be the Evil Queen's father. The darker versions of these stories could get very dark, and while Snow White and Rose Red is more fun and fluffy (save for the Bear and the dwarf's physical fights and the Bear murdering the... what was I saying?), but Little Snow-White? It is dark. I adore the original 1812 idea of the biological queen/mother even though most modern tales remove it - which is fair as it is the easier story to tell and one of the changes the Grimm's Brothers themselves even made, especial considering the queen wants to canabalise her fourteen or so year old daughter. The Prince in the 1812 edition then tries to buy the princess's corpse. Even by the second edition, the story is sanitised some, and, for modern readers, I wanted to make even more changes, even as I brought back some of the 1812 elements.

I also combined my favourite Shakespearean tropes of cross-dressing for protection with true love complications, but I did keep the 'true loves' queer in keeping with my theme of this series. Ialways loved the idea of a woman disguising herself as a man in order to do what she needs to do, and my favourite stories growing up was a princess getting a knight to fall in love with her, and then, she would be revealed as a woman and they could be together: Zelda/Sheik, Mulan, Viola from Twelth Night amongst others. Now, as an adult, I understand and support just making them all queer, which, looking at the meaning of the word, they are. There is some really good Viola/Orsino genderfluid Fanfiction on A03.

The framing narrative is back as well if you missed that.