The premise of the challenge is as follows: Seven Days Seven Virtues Seven Flash Fictions up to 100 words Starting August 7. I cannot refuse this Disney themed Seven Virtues artwork from http://pat7.deviantart.com.
The Seven Virtues are not as easily defined as the Seven Deadly Sins. Each virtue has a host of different meanings. So with my Seven Virtues, I’ll be defining which particular aspect of that Virtue I’m following.
Today is Temperance: Practising self-control, restraint.
I took her in my arms, and inhaled her scent. The warmth of her skin made me dizzy. My hands strayed from her waist to her back, but no lower. She shifted slightly, and the straps of her dress slipped from her shoulders. I wanted nothing more than to devour her, to possess her, to make her mine entirely. She belonged to me, after all: one half of my soul. I was hers completely. She was me. There was no longer any difference.
The premise of the challenge is as follows: Seven Days Seven Virtues Seven Flash Fictions up to 100 words Starting August 7. I cannot refuse this Disney themed Seven Virtues artwork from http://pat7.deviantart.com.
The Seven Virtues are not as easily defined as the Seven Deadly Sins. Each virtue has a host of different meanings. So with my Seven Virtues, I’ll be defining which particular aspect of that Virtue I’m following.
Today is Chastity: Abstaining from sexual conduct.
We raced over the moors, her skirts flying behind her and my vest flapping in the breeze. We laughed and shrieked and tumbled together, landing in a mass of limbs on the grass. I pushed the hair off her face.
“You’ll always be mine,” she whispered, and wrapped her arms around me. I laughed again, giddy, drunk on her love. Knowing that she meant it, even when she was engaged to another, and shared his bed and not mine. We would always run the moors together, childhood friends.
“I love you,” I said, although it meant something different to her.
Foreign Cover Friday is a weekly meme hosted by The Reading Fever, where foreign covers of the books we know and love are spotlighted and discussed. To join, either pick your favourite foreign cover, or pick many foreign covers, and start discussing!
I’ve decided to go with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone because it’s one of the most popular and famous works available. If you haven’t by any chance read any of the books or even heard about them, here’s a brief rundown:
All Harry Potter knows is a miserable life with the Dursleys, his horrible aunt and uncle, and their abominable son, Dudley—a great big swollen spoiled bully. Harry’s room is a tiny closet at the foot of the stairs, and he hasn’t had a birthday party in eleven years. But all that is about to change when a mysterious letter arrives by owl messenger: a letter with an invitation to an incredible place that Harry—and anyone who reads about him—will find unforgettable. For it’s there that he finds not only friends, aerial sports, and magic in everything from classes to meals, but a great destiny that’s been waiting for him… if Harry can survive the encounter.
There are more HP1 covers out there than I can possibly write about, so I’ve taken just a few that caught my eye for some reason or another.
This is the original cover, published June 26th 1997 by Bloomsbury Publishing. It shows Harry with his lightning scar and the infamous Hogwarts Express. It’s brightly coloured to appeal to children.
This is the American copy from 2003, published by Scholastic Press. Taking inspiration from a different scene, it shows Harry on a broomstick trying to catch the Golden Snitch. This was published some years later than the original, so it doesn’t need to work so hard to get out attention as the Bloomsbury version. It can afford to be more obscure; and really, where else are you going to see a boy with a scar on a broomstick catching a flying golden ball?
On the left we have the “Adult” version, published in 2004 by Bloomsbury in an attempt to get more adults reading the book. The idea was that it was embarrassing for adults to be reading gaudy, brightly-coloured books in public. I have to confess, I love the adult version covers. They’re the version of Harry Potter that I own. But the marketing people eventually realised that adults didn’t care whether or not they were caught reading a children’s book – after all, by 2004, Harry Potter was substantially famous and it even became the ‘hip’ thing to read the children’s versions. The cover on the right is the tenth anniversary edition by Scholastic, retreating once again to bright colours and a scene from the book: Harry facing the Mirror of Erised. To me, it looks too childish.
Here are two German versions, the left published in 1999 and the right being the hardcover version published in 2000. I absolutely love the hardcover version. I think it’s gorgeous. I don’t like the left version because it shows a scene from right near the end of the book. At least with the Bloomsbury edition they were showing a scene from right near the beginning of the book. The issue I have is that you shouldn’t have to go through the entire book to reach the scene being depicted on the cover: there should be plenty of interesting scenes before that. And there is. Scholastic choose Quidditch. Translation: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
These are the covers for the Italian 1998, the French 2007, and the Finnish 2008 versions. I don’t even know what the scene on the left is depicting. I haven’t read the book in a while, but I don’ remember a giant rat. The middle cover is OK, but it makes it appear like a children’s book, and I wouldn’t be interested in picking it up off the shelf based on this (but it is a children’s book, I hear you all yell. Well, yes. But adults love them too. So shut up). And the cover on the right… where do I even begin? It’s ugly. It’s like Alice in Wonderland meets Picasso. And what is up with their noses? Italian/French translation: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Finnish translation: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
This is the beauty I have been waiting to unveil. This is the Dutch/Flemish 2000 version. Isn’t it gorgeous? The text is clearly inspired by the film font. It gives us a broomstick and a hint of a boy riding it, and the Snitch in the bottom corner. I think it’s beautiful. Translation: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
What can I say about Disney’s 33rd animated feature, the seventh Disney Princess film, and Disney’s first princess based on a historical figure rather than a fairy tale?
I was about eight years old when I first saw this film. I liked it – it had awesome music and a heroine that although I couldn’t identify with, I did admire. I saw it in the movie theatre with my dad and my older brother. My brother had asked my dad if we could go and see the movie ‘about the Indian.’ He meant The Indian In The Cupboard. He was pretty pissed off when we rocked up at the theatre and saw this instead. My poor dad.
Not Your Typical Princess
Let’s face it: Pocahontas isn’t really a princess. She doesn’t get to wear big poofy ball gowns and a tiara and marry a prince. She doesn’t sit around waiting to be rescued. And she sure as hell doesn’t have that slim girlish body: she’s undeniably woman-shaped. I mean, and I know this sounds quite pervy, but she has this magnificent bosom and bum. Quite frankly, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She’s an absolute babe! This has nothing to do with her skin colour or that fact that’s she’s Native American: in fact, her body shape is the most drastically different of all the princesses, excluding the non-whites. Jasmine’s costume emphasised her unhealthily tiny waist and bigger hips, while Mulan, our other non-white princess (I can’t comment on Tiana yet because I haven’t ever seen The Princess and the Frog) has her boyish figure emphasised in an attempt to disguise her femininity.
Pocahontas shows a love for life and adventure. The first time we meet her, she jumps off a cliff, which, according to SMeyer more than ten years later, is a pretty common pastime for Native Americans. #Imjustsayin. Later in the film, as she sings a song about choosing her own path, she decides on the one that is going to lead to adventure. Now, I don’t mean to rat out on one of the Renaissance princesses because let’s face it, these girls are the girls I grew up with: but at the end of the film, Pocahontas seems to have learned her lesson or something. She opts out of adventure and for the simple life of living with her village, rather than going with John back to England. That would have been a remarkable adventure in itself (and apparently was, as Disney did end up making a direct-to-video sequel).
Cliff diving was cool long before SMeyer wrote it into New Moon.
Now that I’m older, I can appreciate Pocahontas for what she brings to the Disney Princess line up. It’s a lot of typical Princess attributes:
Spunk. Courage. Loyalty. Totally awesome songs (two Oscars, one for best original score and the other for best original song, ‘Colours of the Wind’ – yes I WILL spell ‘colour’ with a U because I am Australian, damn it!) Ahem. And a very healthy respect for nature.
Sometimes Pocahontas makes me feel bad for being white.
When I was watching The Little Mermaid with the fiancée, he asked me what kind of message was Ursula telling little girls when she said,
“The men up there don’t like a lot of blabber
They think a girl who gossips is a bore!
Yes on land it’s much preferred for ladies not to say a word
And after all dear, what is idle babble for?
…It’s she who holds her tongue who gets her man.”
I managed to explain to him that even as a little girl, you just know Ursula is a bad guy, and bad guys are not to be trusted. It’s the same with Radcliffe’s racism towards the Native Americans. When Radcliffe says,
“What can you expect from filthy little heathens?
Their whole disgusting race is like a curse
Their skin’s a hellish red, they’re only good when dead…
They’re savages! Savages! Barely even human…
They’re not like you and me, which means they must be evil!”
Quite frankly it’s impossible to agree with him. After all, the Native Americans aren’t digging up the land, chopping down all the trees and shooting everything that moves. Pocahontas shows us that her tribe has a healthy respect for nature, which is just wonderful. The use of wind and water as a recurring themes in the film make you feel as if nature really is sentient – I am of course not referring to Grandmother Willow, who is a sentient tree.
She does the windswept look particularly well.
Pocahontas’ Un-Happily Ever After Romance
The other thing about Pocahontas is that she’s the first ‘Princess’ (and I use the term loosely – Disney market her as one of the 10 but she’s not a princess, she’s the daughter of a chieftain) – who doesn’t end up marrying her ‘prince.’ The awesome thing about that is it’s a bittersweet ending. He sails off back to England for medical treatment, and she watches him (although I often yell at her to swim out to the ship) with the promise that she’d be happier making peace between the settlers and the natives in her homeland. She’s the first princess not to choose her man. How’s that for a role model! She even turned down local hunk Kocoum because he was too ‘serious’.
Seriously. Hunk.
It’s a surprise ending, one that doesn’t end with a wedding or with the promise of one. That’s what makes Pocahontas different. She embodies the typical attributes of the Disney princesses while still managing her very own strong personality, storyline, and destiny.
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Remember, you can enter my giveaway competition to win a copy of my very first novel, The Edge of Darkness, a soft sci-fi about cyborg prisoners of war and their mutiny on board a large transport ship. If you like strong female leads, you’ll love this book! Visit this page to enter!
Just a little note to anyone on Goodreads, I am ALSO giving away a copy of my first published novel, The Edge of Darkness, a soft sci-fi about cyborg prisoners of war and their mutiny on board a big transport ship, on Goodreads.
If you’re on Goodreads, follow this link to enter this giveaway as well. This one closes on September 1, so if you miss out on the blog-hosted giveaway, which closes on August 26 (my birthday, by the way, I’m just sayin’ *wink), you can have a second chance to win this one!
HOW COOL IS THAT?
I suppose you could enter BOTH giveaways beforehand if you wanted to risk winning two copies… but that would just be silly. Even though the cover is SO PRETTY I just want to sit and stare at it all day long.
Lady Antimony is hosting a week-long Repentance: The Seven Virtues flash fiction challenge.
Lissa Bilyk 