Snow White twist where Snow White is played by a dark-skinned woman with snow white hair
- another twist: the story focuses on beauty in the context of racial prejudice
- the stepmother is white and known as the ‘fairest of them all’ but then this girl with dark skin grows to be more beautiful than her and she doesn’t understand and she doesn’t like it and she is threatened by it
- you can see where this is going
I.
Can you taste it in the air? There are wolves, baby. This time, there’s no huntsman to save you.
II.
You’re the beast, and there’s no beauty left for you to love.
III.
The glass slipper shattered long ago. You’re holding the shards up to your wrist. You’re thinking, why not?
IV.
Life was better before your tower came crumbling down.
V.
Where’s your happily ever after?
Oh little prince.
If only you had loved me back.
I saved you from the seas -
could you not tell?
Why did you believe the false princess?
I could not speak, but my dancing feet told a pretty story.
Oh little prince.
Do you know what happened next?
I died of a broken heart, quite literally.
I became the very same sea which almost took you.
You, my ruiner.
Oh little prince.
You should’ve stayed to watch.
They tell other stories of my birth.
In one, they say I was born of Ouranos,
bred from the blood and hate his son spilt.
Does that sound familiar?
Guess what gave me life.
Anger, fury, savagery, frenzy.
Do you now know why I’m the goddess of love?
(I prefer to think of it as heartbreak. Are they not synonyms?)
What good does love do?
Look at Ariadne. Look at Medea.
Hearts so wide they could encompass a whole sea, and for what?
Ares loves war for war itself, and look where the world is.
Do you know why I’m the goddess of love?
The world has not been good to me.
I want to watch it burn.
Okay so I’ve got a few points I’m going to address in this answer and it may get rather long but just bear with me I have a lot to say.
I. Fairy tales were written in times when women were viewed as vastly inferior to men. They were written primarily by men in societies where women were meant to be daughters and then wives and mothers, and have no other roles. However they are still a significant point of development in literature and the history of storytelling. From fairy tales we have the Aarne-Thompson system which groups stories by common, identifying features and hence we have frameworks and patterns for plots which we continue to use today to tell new stories. There is a reason there are so many versions of Cinderella that it cannot truly be accredited to one sole author. The importance of fairy tales in the evolution of the way we tell stories cannot we disregarded.
II. As well as the advancements in storytelling tropes and plot lines there is cultural significance which must be acknowledged. Fairy tales and folklore are the stories that whole cultures have been raised on. To some cultures they run akin to mythology, and there is so much to be learnt from then. What better way to know how people in ancient times thought (as many fairy tales have been believed to be preserved orally from long before they were written down by authors such as the brothers Grimm) than to read the tales they told their children at night? My question for you is this: do you think Shakespeare’s works ought to be thrown aside because of how Desdemona is treated in Othello? Or Hero in Much Ado About Nothing?
III. A (SHORT) LIST OF FAIRY TALES WITH REALLY RAD FEMALE CHARACTERS (BECAUSE THIS POST IS ALREADY GETTING REALLY LONG)
- The Snow Queen (Gerda is the protagonist and she is a fantastic heroine who saves the day after a long and arduous journey on which she has the aid of a variety of other really great female characters, many of them POC)
- Scheherazade is the narrator of ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, and she is honestly the coolest person ever I love her. The story begins that every day the king would take a new wife and the next day have her beheaded. Scheherazade volunteers to be his wife and once in their chambers that night she bids her sister to come in for their final goodbyes. Her sister begs her (they have planned it earlier) to tell her a story, and so Scheherazade begins to tell the most wondrous story but when dawn comes she stops in the middle of the story, saying there is no time left. The king decides not to kill her as he is so eager to hear the finish of the tale. The next night she finishes it and begins another, only to pause again half way through. This goes on for 1,001 nights and at the end of the 1,001 nights the king has fallen in love with her and her stories and decides not to kill her anyway.
- Snegurka the Snow Maiden - there are different variations of this but the one that I know most is that there is this couple who build a child out of snow and it becomes real and grows up quickly and she’s this very intelligent and clever child and when spring comes she begins to get very sad and nobody knows why and she doesn’t tell them and then one day they turn around and she is gone, there is nothing but a pile of melting snow and they - not realising she has melted - search all over for her and wait every day for their dear girl to return to them.
IV. People do take those wonderful, beautiful things about fairy tales and make new stories. People have been doing that for years. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” is an adaptation of “Undine” by Friedrich De La Motte Fouqué. Walt Disney then took Hans Christian Andersen’s story and created another version of it, in a different media even, to entertain the audience of a new time. Throughout them all though, the one thing that always remains the same is the magic and the mystery and the idea of looking at another world with wonder and awe. The new film “Into the Woods” is an adaptation of the stage show by the same name which takes the stories from well known fairy tales and stays true to the original tales while also twisting them to provide new messages. “Witches can be good.” All of these fairy tales; decades and decades worth of ‘once upon a time’s where witches were always the unquestioned villain because back when they were written people demonised women with independent thought, and now we have a gorgeous film that takes those same villains and says, ‘they can be good.’
V. Yes, romanticising fairy tales to the extent that you take them as exact guidelines for how to live your life is bad. I don’t know why anybody would do that. I completely agree on that point, however, on no account should fairy tales be dismissed because of that problem because to do so would be to also dismiss everything they have meant for storytelling and literature and peoples’ cultures. It is possible to appreciate fairy tales while still being aware that they are problematic, just as it is possible to like films about serial killers or Greek mythology.
Sure!! To learn more about the origins of fairy tales one would generally just needs to read fairy tales, as many as possible, as many older versions and retellings as possible, so I would suggest:
- Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and introduced by Cornelia Funke (this is a reasonably recent translation of some of the original tales, with a short introduction)
- Best-Loved Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (a huge collection of gorgeous Scandinavian tales)
- Long Ago and Far Away: Eight Traditional Fairy Tales introduced by Marina Warner (this one I put so, so much emphasis on; this book has eight of the first ever recorded versions of fairy tales that we know today: the original Sleeping Beauty as it was published in ‘Perceforest’, the tale ‘Undine’ that The Little Mermaid came to be based off, and other wonderful stories, as well as a brilliant foreword that provides context. It is the ideal book for learning about the original European fairy tales.)
- The World’s Best Fairy Tales: A Reader’s Digest Anthology (if you want a solid but basic introduction to fairy tales, this is the book for you. It has some German, some French, some Russian, Scandinavian, English, Arabian, and I am fairly certain I am forgetting some, as well as a short introduction on the origins of fairy tales in general. This book was my childhood, essentially.)
- Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov (the ultimate collection of Russian fairy tales and folk tales)
- Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs
- Fantastic Worlds - Edited and with Commentaries by Eric S. Rabkin (an anthology of fantasy stories including fairy tales, folklore and myths from a range of countries that discusses their origins and the genre itself)
- The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights (these stories are some of the best fairy tales you will ever read and I strongly recommend you read them if you have not already)
- A History of Irish Fairies by Carolyn White (this is not so much fairy tales as the myths and folklore of fairies, but it is a brilliant book and helps one to understand a lot of where the ideas of fairies in fairy tales come from)
- Mermaids: The Myths, Legends and Lore by Skye Alexander (again this is more folklore than fairy tales but it helps you to understand where a lot of the fairy tales have originated from)
This list is now excessively long I’m sorry but there you go xx
once upon a time, she consumed oblivion
and they tasted of crisp summer apples
where her lips kissed, they were as red as blood
where her teeth sank, their flesh was as white as snow
where her soul went, all was as dark as night
once upon a time, oblivion grew roots
and held her fast in a lake of ice
because of her kiss, they stood tall and proud
because of her teeth, their petals danced on the wind
because of her soul, they could bare fruit of their own
once upon a time, a huntsman found oblivion
and saw below them a love long lost
her lips, blood red, he kissed through tears
her teeth, snow white, his eye did not see part
her soul, now free, returned from the land as dark as night
once upon a time, snow white woke up
((okay frances, just for you, story time with ash again))
the red shoes is this story about this little girl who’s very poor and never has shoes in summer, and in winter has to wear these awful uncomfortable wooden shoes. a shoemaker in the village makes some shoes out of red cloth for karen - that’s the girl’s name - and they’re not great shoes but it’s the thought that counts, and karen’s like, ‘woah, red shoes! that’s totally rad i love how they’re red’. a while afterwards her mother dies and after the funeral she gets adopted by this old lady who looks after her well but throws her shoes away because she thinks they’re ugly.
one day karen sees the princess travelling through the country, and, oh gosh! she happens to be wearing some nice red shoes! they’re way nicer than the ones karen had but they have just as much significance for her because of the colour, and when karen is a bit older and ready for her confirmation she needs some new shoes and she finds in the store these red shoes exactly like what the princess had worn. karen’s a bit sneaky here because red is not the colour of shoes you wear to church but the old lady’s eyesight is fading so she doesn’t realise the colour of them and karen is so enchanted with these shoes that she ends up getting them, and she wears them for her confirmation. at church everyone stares at her shoes and later they all tell the old lady what karen did, and the old lady gets angry at karen and tells her she must never wear them to church again.
next sunday karen’s like ‘whatevs i do what i want’ and she wears the red shoes again, and outside the church they come across an old bearded soldier who asks if he may dust her shoes, and when she sticks her feet out he taps her sole with his hand and says ‘what lovely dancing shoes, they’ll stay on nice and tightly while you dance!’ (or something along those lines). now ofc the old lady may be blind as a bat but everyone else isn’t so once again they all stare at her shoes, and when they leave the old soldier taps her feet again and remarks on how the pretty dancing shoes and suddenly she starts to dance. she dances all the way home until she can kick her shoes off and only then do her feet stop moving.
now one night there’s a ball and karen decides to wear her red shoes only when she starts dancing her shoes carry her all the wrong way, and eventually she dances all the way out to the forest where she meets (surprise!) the old soldier, who it seems has cursed her shoes to stick to her feet and make her dance forever.
she goes to the church, hoping for mercy, but an angel stands in front of the door and tells her that she will dance till she dies, as a lesson for conceited children.
karen decides her only option is to have her feet cut off with her shoes still on them, so she asks an executioner to do so and her feet dance off without her. she tries to go to church a few times over the next few weeks but every time her entry is blocked by the red shoes, still with her feet in them, eternally dancing. sitting on her bed one day karen begs god to give her mercy and he finally takes her up to heaven where there is no mention of red shoes.
lovelylittlemonsters replied to your post “henrymaarchbanks OH YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE? THE ELVES AND THE SHOEMAKER…”
I actually know this one :D Tell us another (if you’d like of course)oh! certainly certainly so the princess on the glass hill:
this is quite reminiscent of cinderella in that there’s a fellow called cinderlad who sleeps among the ashes and such and is generally looked down upon but his father has a meadow with a barn in which he stores hay and once a year on the eve of some celebration they find that the hay has inexplicably disappeared overnight, so the man decides to set his eldest son to watch it - only an earthquake and a great rumbling shakes the barn and terrifies him and he flees from the barn. in the morning the hay is gone. the following year the same thing happens to the second son, and so the year after it is cinderlad’s turn. (ofc they all tell him he has no chance). when the earthquake comes he holds his ground and just tells himself to bear it out a little longer, and eventually everything falls silent. soon he sees a great horse come into the barn and begin to eat the hay, and he takes it away and secures it in a hidden spot. the next morning the hay all remains, and so for the next two years it is cinderlad’s job to protect the hay, and the same thing happens. he ends up with this nice collection of three big rad horses.
now we get on to the princess part; so there is a king nearby with a daughter who he has promised to the one who can ride to the top of a hill made of glass. she’s sitting up there with three golden apples and the victor has to carry off these apples to win her hand. many people tried to ride up this hill but it was very slippery, like ice, and nobody managed it. cinderlad’s brothers both went and tried but they wouldn’t let him have a go, as they considered him to be generally incompetent and they thought everyone would laugh at how filthy he was. when the riding was almost done for the day though, there appeared a fine knight in copper armor on a horse more beautiful than any had seen before. all the other men were like ‘don’t even bother man, there’s no point, it’s hopeless,’ but the knight rode onto the hill and got a third of the way up before turning around and coming back down. the princess was mightily put out, as she’d hoped he’d make it, so she threw one of the golden apples down after him and he picked it up, disappearing quickly afterwards.
the next day much the same thing ensued. none of the knights had been able to present the apple, so the attempts continued and nobody could do it until right at the end there appeared a knight in silver armor who made it two thirds of the way up and then turned and went back down. again, the princess threw an apple after him and he disappeared after taking it.
on the third day, right at the end, there came a knight dressed in golden armor, with such a beautiful horse the other men didn’t even think to tell him it was useless to try. he rode all the way up and took the third apple from the princess before turning around and riding away again.
so of course this left everyone in general uproar as they were like ‘woah, okay, some guy took the three apples but now we have no clue where we went’ and so the king demands that all of the men go to the palace to prove they don’t have them. cinderlad arrives at the palace and produces not one but all three golden apples, winning the hand of the princess and half of the kingdom, and there is lots of merriment and joy etc etc