This is just a note for later exploration—

Sleeping Beauty pricks herself on an old spinning wheel and falls asleep.

Her entire kingdom then follows suit.

SLEEPING BEAUTY IS PATIENT ZERO. The disease needed a human in order to spread. The people who found and tended to her then caught the disease and it spread outward. This is also how her story survived, because some people escaped before they were infected.

In some versions of the story, the young king rapes Aurora, but what if his pricking of her was far more mundane? What if it was only a needle (but the story grew bawdier in the retelling)? And then her body was used to incubate the cure. This is why he leaves her behind.

Then the cure works faster than expected and she wakes alone. Or, she wakes the next time he visits and he’s bent over her (and she assumes he’s kissed her).

And the king’s ogre mother hates Sleeping Beauty because (a) she is distracting her son from statecraft with a medical mystery; and (b) she represents a new power (a ‘new’ old power) to the political game.