19th Century Memoir - Ch. 0

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OMG!! This Looks So Good!! <3 <3 Thanks For Translating This!! <3
 
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@colonelcrisp maybe they didn’t and couldn’t kill him so he was just locked away....maybe the trick the story wasen’t that he left on business but in that room....but that last part is a stretch
 
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"they hated him bc of his blue beard" oh ok.
"and because of his many wives who disappeared" OK SO IM PRETTY SURE ITS NOT BC OF THE BEARD
 
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Blue Beard: Don't do this thing.
Wife: *immediately does thing*
Blue Beard: Holy shit, that's a new record.
 
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I wasn’t expecting to see the actual Bluebeard fairy tale used as the prologue but I’m really digging it and the art. It felt somehow nostalgic.
 
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Oh well, this was quite surprising, tbh I didn't expect a story with this fairytale.

When I was a kid I used to read Bluebeard a lot (along with other stories), the art was obviously different than here; in my book he was portrayed as a bald and bulky/enormous man, with black eyes, ofc with a blue beard and a mustache (idk but I always thought of him as a rich pirate, lol). It was said that he wasn't attractive, not as a flower boy nor as a prince, but that didn't affect him because he was an extremely powerful man, with big confidence (one of his strongest points) and obviously, with an enormous fortune. It was indeed true that his beard was peculiar, but nobody hated on him because of that, the main reason people rejected him it was because he had tons of wives in the past, but all of them disappeared one day without explanation. One after another, all of them were simply gone, and with that fact in mind, no woman wanted to get close to him and no family wanted to marry their daughters to him.

Yeah, he wanted to get married again, but in the version I read, nobody was willing to do so, he even had to offer his money 'randomly' to even be able to meet some of the families. In the family of the two sisters and two brothers, actually none of them paid attention to him, but somehow Bluebeard got more attracted to that, particularly to the older sister. As overbearing and confident as he was, he began to send letters and gifts to her, despite that, she remained uninterested, as any gift wasn't enough to gain her heart and the whole purpose of that part was to show that she wasn't interested in anything material. One day he proposed to her "let me invite u for a week with your family, if I don't hold up to your expectations, I'll retract". And so she did so.

The whole point in the story was to show that actions but not looks, and intentions but not money, matters. Bluebeard made a HUGE effort for conquering one of the sisters and his efforts were rewarded, not his gifts, not his money. He was judged solely on his actions and if it wasn't for that, he'd be pretty loved because contrary to this version, he was considerate a capable and effective man. The older sister just agreed to marry him because she saw how much effort he put to get closer to her, and how considerate he was to her family.

While it was true that her friends went to her house, she never wanted to show off her wealth nor did she want to disobey Bluebeard's orders. Bluebeard told her to never open that little door with the words "don't open that door or you'll regret it for the rest of your life". It was said that one day she was opening the doors of her house in order to see what the keys he gave her were for, so one after another she was opening door after door, every door was more exuberant than the previous one and that's why, when she saw that small and old door, her curiosity got bigger.

Yes, its ending is almost identical as the one here, but the truth is that she wasn't a materialistic girl, she didn't obtain all Bluebeard's money just because, she had to pay a high price to obtain it. She also didn't get married to another man just to forget his trauma, she was supposed to be willing to live the rest of her life alone while helping the rest of her family, but luckily she met a good man who truly loved her (and once again, money wasn't the reason for that). Yeah, she indeed helped her bros, but they got a better position as knights because they killed Bluebeard (thanks to his death, the room filled with the dead bodies of his previous wives was the proof for them to earn that position). She was supposed to be a brilliant woman who thought carefully about how to scape in the situation she was in. She didn't scape because she knew he was about to come back and her house was far away, so the quickest way to react was to wait for her brothers instead of trying to run to her sister, however, she suffered a lot in the process.

I'm telling all this because I feel some of the real intentions of the story was missing, and because for me, Bluebeard has always been a "villain" who left me thinking. I never knew how to feel about him because yeah, he had the basement full of the dead bodies of his previous wives, but at the same time he adverted her to not betray his only order (because she was free to do whatever else she wanted, except for that door) or she'd regret it for life. And yeah, he was a crazy murderer, but what if the woman wouldn't have opened that door that day, would she still be killed in the future or not? Would she still be willing to open that door if it wasn't that day? It was a trap from the very beginning and Bluebeard was a psycho who enjoyed playing with his victim's minds? What did his 1st wife do in order to be killed since at that time there were no bodies, or there were?

So yeah, who knows, the woman was punished for disobeying or it was just a pretext of him to kill them?

Edit: WHATEVER, the art is amazing and I'm excited for this, tnks for your hard work <3
 
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wowwww

the art is so so good!! and the story of the blie beard is so creepy too. thanks so much for translating!!
 
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Why was blue beard killing his wives tho, was he just insane?
 
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FYI, Blue Beard is a French tale written by Charles Perrault (he also wrote Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Cendrillon, Diamonds and Toad...) in the 17th century and is thought to be widely inspired from King Henry VIII, King of England who had 6 wives and killed 2 of them
 

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