In Which Fairy Tales (whether Disney-fied or not) Are Discussed

I remember reading a book once that said:

People need to be storied to get over their fears. Apparently, people who have never read fairy tales have a harder time coping in life than the people who have. They don't have access to the lessons learnt and significance of, say, the journeys through the dark woods or of the kindness of strangers treated decently. The knowledge that can be gained from the company and example of Donkeyskins, cats wearing boots and steadfast tin soldiers. The kind that seep up from your subconscious and give you moral and humane structures in your life. That teach you how to prevail and trust. And maybe even love. The people who have missed out on them have to be re-storied in their adult lives.

As a child, I had never really been read fairy tales by my parents. They deem it sufficient enough for me to be 'storied' through the books brought home from the library and the movies that we watch together. I don't have snippets from my childhood of me lying curled up in bed with either my mother or father sitting by the side, letting the lilting tone of their reading voice soothe me to sleep eventually.

My parents have never really been the 'read out loud to your child' type, and falling asleep mostly consisted of flopping down onto my bed till fatigue or boredom drives me into the clutches of slumber. My parents were not the touchy-feely type (no hugs or bednight kisses here) but I didn't really mind as I wasn't one either. We each had our own way of showing our affections and that was enough.

Out of all the fairy tales that I had had a passing acquaintance with through my childhood, the one that I was most fond of had to be Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid. The former because I could connect with the main character, Belle. A bookish girl with her head almost always either in a book or stuck in the clouds. Even so, when the situation called for it, she met the challenges head-on with considerable strength and determination. She was thrown into a huge, cold castle with just a cranky (and often times quite violent) Beast as the only other (living) tenant, but over time, decided to not not let it faze her and managed to win over the hearts of the occupants and the Beast himself in the end.
Those traits appealed to me even when I was young. They were the sort of traits I wanted to have when I grew up.

As for the latter, it was simply because it fascinated me that a mermaid, who should surely have a much more wonderful time Under the Sea, could ever want to become a human up in this sticky, sweaty, polluted land of ours. It has something of a similar theme to Beauty and the Beast too in the fact that both protaganists have been thrown into different environments in which they have to adapt to.

And now as I type this, I realise that those fairy tales have had a slight influence on my taste in later years. I have a penchant for tales involving unrequited love. It makes my heart ache in a good way, although of course, I would much prefer it if it were to be requited in the end. If I like the story and characters a lot, I will get emotionally involved and when I am emotionally involved a Happy Ending is a must. Oh yes, they could get thrown into utterly appalling and dreadful situations or trampled on again and again but the Happy Ending makes all that forgiven. Books that have characters that are deemed Different by other people and who generally tend to get avoided due to their eccentricity, weirdness, personality trait... etc. usually make me want to read it more.

(On a rather long side-note: I'm not going to reveal the title but there was one series that went for 40-ish volumes and it is very hard indeed not to get emotionally invested into something like that. The characters suffered from a very, very bad case of unrequited love through several centuries. Yes. You would have thought that several centuries would be enough time to get over all the issues - and they have a lot of issues - but after each re-incarnation they went through, somehow, it just got worse. The ending had the main character dying in the end, and I remembered being utterly miserable after finishing the series. One of my net friends confessed to flinging the book across a room in public after she had finished the series.
There was another one in which the girl had to make the choice between the Respectable, Safe, Dependable Guy and The One that could make her heart beat in a way that the latter guy never could. Unfortunately though, The One is the kind of guy that your parents would never want you to marry. He's temperemental, cold, manipulative and has even stated once that he is not the kind of man to make a woman happy. Still, you can tell that he cares deeply for her, something which he doesn't do much for people, and that despite everything, they do go very well together. Guess who she chose and got married to in the end?
Hint: It is a realistic choice. The kind of choice that most people in real life would make. A choice that made me miserable for days on end too.)

I also admit that I have a penchant for romantic relationships that are rocky at the start, but that turn out well in the end. A tad cliche maybe, but it has shades of what Beast and Belle had which is why they appeal to me.

It has only been recently that I have discovered the real versions of the Disney-fied fairytales. A note, you can stop reading here if you do not want to know as the true versions might not be to your liking.

Luckily, Beauty and the Beast remains more or less the same, but not so for The Little Mermaid. In the true story, she gets killed. Like in the Disney version, the Prince marries somebody else, but he does not - to quote a modern term- 'ditch' that somebody else in the end for the mermaid. A knife is given to the mermaid, and if she kills the prince, she will get to turn back into a mermaid again. She chooses not to at the last moment and turns into sea foam.

=(

In Sleeping Beauty, the prince's mother has cannibalistic tendencies and sent Sleeping Beauty and her children to a secluded house where she proceeded to give orders to the cook to prepare the boy for her dinner.

The Wicked Queen in Snow White was forced to wear heated iron shoes and to dance in them till she dies as a punishment.

Goldilocks, in some versions, actually gets eaten by the Three Bears.

The story of Little Red Riding Hood might also have sexual connotations to it, with the Wolf representing the laviscious man preying on young girls.


As you can see, the original versions might not neccessarily be all that suitable for young children. I understand why it had to be altered and some of the parts cut out. I would have certainly have been horrified as a child to find out the true ending to The Little Mermaid.

It is best for children to remain children, in which such things as True Love and Happy Endings are as believable as that letter from Hogwarts that would come round eventually, that umbrellas saved you from falling off buildings and that your toys secretly came alive at night.