Le Petit Prince

Currently listening to: Song to the Siren (Paula Arundell)

Currently pondering: Please, please, please, let me get what I want this time

It is something past 1a.m. and I have been watching very short clips of a video I haven't seen since I was...well, I dunno, "knee high to a grass hopper": The Adventures of the Little Prince. Urrbody throw your hands up if you know what I'm talking about (sorry...I've been listening to a lot of Usher and Ludacris today, but please note the heavy irony).

Ta-daaaa! Anyone? No?

I was a fairly fickle child, and whilst I enjoyed the adventures he had (finding out what made Mitzi mean, bringing the flowers back to the valley, asking Sean to play it again etc) I would always rewind and watch the first few minutes over and over again before going onto the rest of it because 1. He flew wild geese and captured comets to travel around space and 2. Because you'd catch a brief glimpse of his Rose Girl.

So preetty..I loved how her hair looked like petals. Couldn't get over it. Astounding. For aaages I wanted to be the rose girl, but err, she was the only regular female character and until I made it into my "Tomboy" phase, I rejected all male roles.

I then decided tonight to do a little study on the Little Prince, and apparently- it's a lot deeper than childish whimsy I'll have you know! So different is the concept of the book from the re-telling of the video, I'm now hell bent on reading the thing to see for myself at the risk of shattering my childhood illusions. Well, too late for that really, I just found out the Rose Girl is a complete and utter cow.

 Admittedly, I didn't own the full video set, just a few episodes from the later series (yeah this thing had a series timeline- who knew?!) and unless you see the first few episodes apparently you miss out on the majority of the Rose's horridness. 

Basically, the Rose Girl lands on asteroid B-612 as a seed carried by a really strong wind, and the Prince plants her, nurtures her and builds a little rock garden around her to keep away mischievous caterpillars and butterflies. When she blooms though, Rose is really stuck-up, scornful, mocking and vain- really vain- demanding that the Prince dotes on her all the time. When he decides he wants to go travelling for a while though, she gets even more annoying and whiney, guilt-tripping him into staying, and then threatens to rips herself out of the ground if he leaves but spikes him with a thorn when he tries to calm her down. (Told you she's a cow). Having had enough of her guff, the Prince leaves anyway, and as he hooks himself onto a passing-by shooting star, then she's sorry, and really worries that she's put him off ever coming home again. Then some episodes happen in-between, but from then on, the Rose Girl is a lot nicer to him when he is around and is a general delight to have living with you on a tiny asteroid.

The Prince loves the Rose Girl to bits, in the episodes I remember, towards the end of his trips he's always anxious to get back to her to take care of her and tell her his stories, because he knows she hates being alone for too long. I just did a little sparknoting on the characters of the book, and came across this:

 "Although the rose is, for the most part, vain and naïve, the prince still loves her deeply because of the time he has spent watering and caring for her."

...Am I the only one who finds that really sad? That it seems like he's only with her just because he's spent that much effort on her, it'd be a waste to let it all go? I preferred to think that he came to love her because he could see her softer side and loved her in spite of her flaws- aha! and he even says it himself!

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly;what is essential is invisible to the eye"

Men who are willing to be patient with a girl throwing a supreme strop and take care of her when she really needs to be taken to the glue factory are worth their weight in gold.

 
There. Take that spark notes. Oh wait, I think I've just obliged myself to give the Rose Girl a second chance...

But I certainly don't want to be her anymore, nobody wears "high-maintenance" well.