Fairy Tales: Cinderella versus Beauty & the Beast

I will likely return to Cinderella and Beauty & the Beast on my fairy tale list at a later date. For now, I want to address the fundamental difference. 

Basically, Cinderella is Sleepless in Seattle. Beauty & the Beast is You've Got Mail. 

That is, Cinderella is about all the stuff that the heroine (and sometimes, the hero) go through before they meet. The family squabbles. The hopes and dreams. The suffering. The angst. The best friend discussions. Dancing mice. And so on. The meeting matters--all events lead up to it. And writers can pack a great deal of purpose into the meeting, so Martha in Castle can honestly state that the evening she met Castle's (spy) father, they made a real connection. He quite literally had to go off the next morning and save the world. 

Beauty & the Beast is about the relationship--the hero and heroine getting to know each other over time. 

Many pieces of literature, like Pride & Prejudice, will combine these two romance plots. And the plots will borrow from each other. But fundamentally, the difference is between focusing on the world of the protagonists versus focusing on the world of the relationship. 

I greatly prefer the latter to the former. The former always seems to involve (1) soap opera; (2) contrived ways of separating the protagonists; (3) shoe shopping and its equivalent; (4) shindigs (rather than conversation and shared interests). 

The focus on the close relationship comes with occasional red flags, such as a Stockholm Syndrome, but I'll take it (as will many people) for the sake of delightedly watching the protagonists grow closer. 

It's a comparison that keeps on giving, so one could argue that suspense where the big bad isn't revealed until the end is using the Cinderella plot while suspense where the protagonist and antagonist form a relationship, like Bourne Supremacy and Die Hard, is using Beauty & the Beast. 

In any case, the plot of growing affection explains why McKinley's Beauty is still a classic while the plot's classic rendition, Jane Eyre, places all other romances in the shade.