Briar Rose

**Briar Rose**, also known as *Sleeping Beauty*, is the second princess introduced in the series. He is cursed by Hira to prick his finger on a spindle wheel on his fifteenth birthday, and sleep for a hundred years.

## Appearance

Briar has strawberry blonde, curly hair, baby blue eyes and rosy skin. His fringe is shaped like a rose .

His outfit consists of a white shirt, a pale green, orange and yellow tunic, as well as a yellow sash that ends in a bouquet of roses. He also wears a pair of pale green and yellow ornamented knee-length boots.

## Personality

Briar is an easily distracted, curious child. He is rather oblivious of the outside world, due to growing up overly sheltered in his parents' castle.

Briar is lonely, due to his parents often being too busy or to preoccupied with their own fun to care for him and longs for a friend.

## Synopsis

### Before Forever After

Due to being a resident of Forever After, Briar's entire life and story had been played out and reset by the Fates for an unknown amount of times.

### Forever After

Briar's birth started the story of Little Briar Rose. His parents threw a celebration in his honor, inviting twelve Wise Women alongside a number of their subjects. The Wise Women blessed Briar as thanks, giving him the gifts of beauty, grace, innocence, warmth, cheeriness, cleverness, modesty, sweetness, softness, tranquility, humility and generosity.

Just when the last Wise Woman finished her blessing, the Thirteenth Wise Woman arrived, angry over not being invited to the celebration. Despite the best efforts of everyone present, she succeeded in laying a curse on Briar, decreeing that on his fifteenth birthday he would prick his finger on a spindle and fall into a deep slumber.

Briar grew up in the castle, with his parents keeping him inside for all his life. They also did not tell him about his curse or what a spinning wheel is, leading to him going about his life unaware that he was cursed.

On his fifteenth birthday, Briar witnessed one of the statues in the garden come to life and inquired if that would happen to any of the other statues to which his father answered that it would not, due to none of the other statues being cursed people. Briar was then introduced to the "statue", in reality a Prince Charming named Robin.

The king and queen excused themselves to go to a function, despite Briar's obvious disappointment over them working on his birthday. He was left in the care of Robin and her fairy companion Tank. Robin attempted to warn him away from spindles, but failed as Briar didn't know what spindles or spinning wheels were. They spent the day playing hide-and-seek, with both of Briar's guardians getting increasingly exasperated by his energetic nature and tendency to try and hide in dangerous places. At sundown, Briar convinced Robin to play one more game of hide-and-seek again, to which she tiredly obliged. Briar ran off to hide just as his parents returned home.

As he hid behind a corner, Briar saw a room opening up in the castle wall and curiously entered. The room inhabited an old woman (really Hira in disguise) and a spinning wheel, the latter of which Briar did not recognize as such. The old woman told him that the wheel was a magic wheel that could grant wishes, if one touched the spindle on it. Briar at first didn't know what to wish for, as he already had everything. He then asked whether he could wish for a friend and after getting confirmation that he could, touched the spindle and pricked himself, activating the curse.

Briar was woken up after Hira lifted his curse some time later. She wished him a happy birthday and Briar was immediately awestruck by her beauty. He attempted to hug her, exclaiming he wanted to be Hira when he grew up. Hira got flustered and pushed him away with magic, but Briar was not discouraged by this, instead asking whether Hira could teach him magic too. Hira agreed on the condition that Briar only use it for "petty evil". Briar asked his mother whether he could and she agreed, desperate to revive their kingdom's textile industry.

Briar was seen in the background laughing with his family as Robin gave the story it's Happily Ever After.

## Relationships

### The King and Queen

The king and queen are Briar's parents. Both of them adore him very much, often praising his beauty and talking fondly of him. Briar seems to love his parents as well, but is often disheartened by their neglect and tendency to ignore him in favor of partying with each other. While Briar's parents do love their son, they often seem at a loss what do with him or how to deal with his habit of zipping around and asking a million questions at once.

### Hira

Hira cursed Briar at the celebration held in honor of his birth. Briar is never told about her by his parents or anyone else. He meets her again fifteen years later, disguised as an old woman, briefly irritating her when he claims to have everything, before she manages to trick him into activating his curse. Despite all this, Hira doesn't seem to have anything against Briar personally and even scoffs at his parents' continued neglect of him.

After releasing Briar from his curse, Briar is shown to greatly admire Hira, showering her with compliments and seemingly becoming her pupil as his story comes to a close.

### Robin

Robin attempted to prevent Hira from cursing Briar when he was still a baby, but failed. When she meets him again fifteen years later, she and Tank become his guardians for a short while. She is horrified when his curse takes hold and is determined to free him when she and Tank return to the fairy tale after finishing Momotaro.

### Tank

Tank was present at the feast held in honor of Briar's birth. He, alongside Robin, was briefly made to babysit Briar on his fifteenth birthday. Him and Robin ended up utterly exhausted by Briar's running around at the end of the day, with Tank questioning where Briar was getting the energy. He was as terrified as Robin when Briar's curse took hold.

## Abilities

### Blessings

Briar received numerous blessing by the Wise Women, leading to him growing into an incredibly beautiful teenager. However, it's debatable whether the blessings actually worked.

## Etymology

* Briar is a gender-neutral name of British origins, meaning "thorny bush of wild roses" and "brambles."

## Trivia

* He staples roses to his sash every day.
* Briar Rose is 5'4ft (162.56cm) tall
* Alexandra stated on her Twitter that she imagines Briar has ADHD and that "his parents don't know how to deal with it."

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 https://twitter.com/HannahAlexArt/status/1408459402340835329
2. ↑ https://www.thebump.com/b/briar-baby-name
3. ↑ https://twitter.com/HannahAlexArt/status/1419758073988583429
4. ↑ https://twitter.com/HannahAlexArt/status/1408459036429750272