Brothers Grimm - Blog Posts
WE GOTTA CANCEL FAIRYTALES THEY'RE USING THE F SLUR AND THEY AREN'T GAY
Fairytale characters
Fairy Tales
Oldschool Fairy Tales from pre-industrial times: "These are cautionary stories for all ages, and also reminders that sometimes life is terrible for no good reason at all, or just makes zero sense."
Fairy Tales from the 1900s: "These are kids' stories where we try to teach that everything in life has meaning and moral lessons, and that if you work hard, believe in yourself, and are basically a good person, then you WILL be successful in life."
Me now: "The oldschool nonsense tales had it right, and basically all the other stuff is a lie."
(To be fair, I do believe that people should work hard, should believe in themselves, and should be basically good people because those are things that make life tolerable... I'm just convinced now that doing those things is no guarantee of success and that "anyone who says differently is selling something"
...also, I think it's weird when people make edits that seem to suggest that statement is in any way inspirational. It's not 'inspiring', it's just realism. It may be comforting sometimes to know that life is terrible for a lot of people out there and even if a person's suffering is unique to them, they're still not the only one suffering... but to act like that's uplifting in some way is weird to me.)
Are our own parents any different than the step mothers in the fairy tales?
I was watching a documentary series on Netflix called ‘Myths and Monsters’. At a point where they were discussing about ‘The Grimm's Fairy Tales’, which is a book of collected folktales of Germany by the Grimm brothers, they said that the brothers had actually modified the stories to make it acceptable to the children. And one such particular change was that in the story of ‘Hansel and Gretel’. Though worldwide we all know that the siblings were a victim to the cruelty of their stepmother, the original story tells otherwise. They were rather abandoned in the woods by their poverty driven parents.
Now the questions come: Why did the brothers exchanged the real parents with a stepmother? If it was so unrealistic or unacceptable for the real parents to have abandoned their own children, why would the original story has them in the first place?
The series also gave an idea to that. Basically the myths we know have some really deep morals into it. They usually portray the inner dark nature of humans through the images of monsters. So, it is not unlikely to put the real parents’ images as some cruel versions of humans. Because we humans, are capable of such cruelty. It is embedded inside all of us.
But since the civilizations started, we are trying our best to tame such nature within ourselves. As if the wilderness inside us is considered a taboo in the modern world we live in. So, we made another character to drive away this from ourselves. In this case, it is the stepmother. The stepmother has become a disguise for all the dark parts of a parent. Hence, we see this character in almost every fairy tales in the place of a cruel guardian.