The marketing around the new live-action Beauty and the Beast has been nonstop, but so have the half-baked hot takes looking for what's problematic in this story. To be clear, we're not saying there's nothing wrong with Beauty and the Beast or the classic fairy tale it's based upon—but the endless parade of "OMG BATB is about being attracted to a furry!" and "OMG BATB is about Stockholm syndrome!" can feel willfully unenlightened. It's a movie based on a fairy tale! It doesn't have to make logical sense to make emotional sense. It's a magical love story; maybe we don't need to spend hours debating whether or not Belle is a feminist (which, for the record, she's technically not; feminism as we currently understand it started a full century after Beauty and the Beast was written, so even if you see Belle as an embodiment of feminist ideals, you can't align her with a movement that didn't exist when the character was alive. That's just not how sociopolitical movements work.).

So to really understand the cultural context that gave us this myth, we spoke to Maria Tatar, professor of folklore and mythology and Germanic languages and literatures at Harvard and editor of Beauty and the Beast: Classic Tales About Animals, Brides, and Grooms From Around The World."

The biggest surprise from our talk? We had no idea what this story was actually about.

Many think the story of "Beauty and the Beast" was inspired by the case of Petrus Gonsalvus, a sixteenth-century man who grew hair all over his body and face and was nonetheless a member of French novel society. (Catherine d'Medici even found him a wife.) But according to Tatar, this myth isn't based on anyone in particular; it's truly a tale as old as time. "This is a story that originated before print culture, so it goes back to adult storytelling cultures when you had no adult entertainment," she told us. "I always love John Updike, who tells us that fairy tales were the television and pornography of the early age. You needed these dramatic stories, and many of them are not at all child-friendly."

This certainly checks out. People have been, let's say, "falling in love with" animals in stories at least as far back as the tale of the Minotaur. If you look at other stories like that of Tarzan, the princess and the frog, or even the myth of the mermaid, the line between human and animal is always being played with. BATB isn't about a weird kink; it's just another example of humans confronting their similarity to animals.

The first printed version of Beauty and the Beast is a novel by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, but the version we know today, the one suitable for children, was adapted and written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and published in 1756. According to Tatar, "[de Beaumont] uses [the story] to teach children good manners. So Beauty is suddenly sincere, kind, self-sacrificing, sweet. She's got every possible virtue." Yeah, the "table manners" part of the movie was actually integral to the original version.