Mostly Fairy Tales
These Mostly Fairy Tales came from an idea I had about a writing game. The idea is this: take a well known fairy tale or children’s story and drop one of the main characters. Then retell it.
What happens without one of the key elements?
Fairy tales are, for the most part, very simple and highly distilled stories. They have been reduced to their essential elements through generations of recounting to impatient children. Everything in them is there for a reason, and if you take it out, well, it tends to scuttle the entire plot.
The challenge, then, is to take the characters that *are* there and do something with them, to route their paths around the missing element, and take them somewhere. To drag them, all the way from where they are right up to the place they ought to be. Removing a crucial piece destroys a rightness. That rightness must be restored.
Generally Mostly Fairy Tales arrive in piecemeal on this blog every Monday. But to strike a blow in the never-ending fight against chaos, I’ve stitched together the pieces, and given each story its own permanent page as a sub-page beneath this one.
[...] time. Now he’s reorganized his site to make the stories super easy to access. I recommend Mostly Fairy Tales for a good [...]
Nostalgia Time, big time!!
I hearken back 50+ years when Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Charles Perrault were major parts of my literary consumption.
I remember being most distressed in grade three when my class watched Sleeping Beauty a la Walt Disney and the wicked witch dissolved in a chuckle–what a violation to my sense of natural justice.
Of course my fascination with the folk tale didn’t end when I reached puberty. I didn’t discover Carl Sandburg till I was in high school and was listening to CKUA, which broadcasted tapes of the man himself reading Rootabaga Tales.
Thanks for bringing all that back to mind.
What part of your natural justice was offended?
Malificent stands out to me as unique among Disney villains. She is portrayed directly as evil, with a strong association to the demonic, invoking the powers of hell before her transformation to a dragon.
Other villains are evil, certainly, but with a flavour of human, rather than ethereal, evil
So evil is she that the prince kills her directly. For the hero to *actually deliver a death blow* is unheard of in Disney’s kingdom (perhaps Eric, who runs a ship through Ursula, has a case), but Malificent lacks any human aspect and is instead a pure symbol.
That clear and undiluted symbolism doesn’t exist so much in more modern Disney stuff.