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calliecat93 · 4 years

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Callie’s Disney Princess Retrospective: Cinderella

(Snow White Review)

The year was 1950, 13 years after Snow White’s release. Despite that film’s mass success, Walt Disney’s next feature films during the 1940’s such as Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi would all bomb. His only true success at the time was Dumbo, and that film was dampened by a mass strike during production that saw many animators walk out. It didn’t get any better when America entered World War II and the military took over many different animation studios, including Disney. They not only had to produce propaganda shorts but due to the limited funds, they were forced to rely on Package Films and live-action to survive. As the 1950s began to dawn, it was clear to Walt that if he wanted to stay in business, he needed another hit. But not just any hit, he needed the same kind of success that Snow White brought him. But what film could give him that success?

For that, he returned to fairy tales, and he found one. A story that he could relate to as a Missouri-born boy who began with nothing. A tale that could appeal to just about anyone. A true rags to riches story of one down-on-her-luck girl having all of her dreams come true. That film would be Walt Disney’s twelfth animated feature, his second fairy tale-based film, and of course the creation of the second Disney Princess who quickly became one of the most famous. Thus, let us discuss the 1950 film, Cinderella.

Overview

Since a young child, Cinderella has been in servitude by her cruel stepmother Lady Tremaine. She is regularly mistreated and worked to the bone by both Tremaine and her nasty stepsisters Drizella and Anastasia. Despite this, Cinderella keeps a cheerful and hopeful demeanor, caring for her mouse friends and hoping that someday the dream that she has wished for will come true. A day that seems to have arrived when the family gets an invitation to a ball held to find a suitor for The Prince. With all eligible maidens asked to attend, Cinderella believes that her chance has arrived, but Lady Tremaine has other plans.

Just as it looks like all of her hopes have been shattered, Cinderella’s kindness and hard-work are rewarded by her Fairy Godmother giving her what she needs to attend the ball. She has a lovely time but is forced to flee at midnight with only a lone glass slipper to remind her of that night. But the ended up charming the Prince and left the other slipper behind, so now the girl who fits the slipper will be made the prince’s bride. Once more, Tremaine tries to prevent Cinderella from succeeding. But with the help of her animal friends and her own hope, Cinderella’s dreams will at long last come true.

Review

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As a little girl, there were many films that I would watch over and over again, such as The Aristocats or The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. But I think that Cinderella was the one that I would play back the most. I remember every single part of this movie. The music, the story, the characters, just everything. And even after all of these years, my feelings and love for the film haven’t changed. If anything, it’s only grown. I still remember when my family went to Walt Disney World, and aside from Mickey Mouse the only thing that I cared about was meeting Cinderella. I did so on the last day in the Magic Kingdom, and she was so kind and beautiful and was everything I ever dreamed of. It is a moment that I will never forget.

Looking at the film itself, it’s clear that it took a lot from Snow White. A fairy tale-inspired movie, a heroine in servitude who charms all around her, an evil stepmother, a handsome prince, animal companions, you name it. I don’t think that it was accidental either. As I said, Walt /needed/ another Snow White success story. He needed to replicate what made that film work and make it better. Which he did. While the two films are similar, it’s arguable that Cinderella improved on many of those elements. While we only really get told that Snow was a servant and only see it briefly at the start, we see Cinderella’s suffering throughout the film. While Snow could look a little off due to the animators still getting used to animating realistic humans, Cinderella looks realistic, moves more fluidly, and fits the style of the film much better. While The Queen never interacted with Snow until the end and therefore never see how she treats her, we see Lady Tremaine’s cruelty towards her stepdaughter in full force and it’s equally as chilling. It truly feels like Walt looked over Snow White, saw what could be improved on, and did so with Cinderella. It really shows how far the company had come since 1937.

But Walt wasn’t the only important person on the film. In fact, he was less involved than he was with Snow White since he was focusing more on live-action and developing Disneyland. This was the film that established Disney’s most talented and loyal animators, his Nine Old Men. These men not only worked on the first five features and the Package Films, but they would go on to work on every film up to The Fox and the Hound and some even went into Imagineering. These would be the men who not only pulled the company back onto its feet after WW2, but they would teach future Disney animators/directors such as Glen Keane, Jon Musker, Rob Clements, Andreas Deja, Brad Bird, and so many others who would continue their legacy. Cinderella herself was done primarily by Marc Davis, Eric Larson, and Les Clark.

Like Snow White, the story is pretty straight-forward. It seems to be based mainly on the version written by Charles Perrault and some of the Grimm Brothers version. It does some expansion, like showing what Cindy’s daily life is like. Having her dress get ripped apart, her getting locked up, and of course, giving an expanded role to the mice. Otherwise though like with Snow White, it’s one of the more faithful adaptations minus a few things. For example, if we go off the Grimm version, the stepsisters don’t mutilate themselves to fit into the slipper… and I don’t have an issue with that either. It can feel a little dragged out, like IDK how necessary the King and Grand Duke scenes were aside from establishing certain things like the ball and the slipper search, but it’s nothing that brings anything to a halt.

The animation is gorgeous. The Nine Old Men weren’t chosen out of random, after all. This film really shows off their talents. Characters like Jaq and Gus, Lucifer, and the Stepsisters are very lively and entertaining to watch. Ward Kimball, who was the main animator for Lucifer the Cat, used his own cat as a reference after Walt pointed it out to him, and you can tell that he was having fun with it. The more realistic characters like Cinderella and Lady Tremaine look and move very well despite the challenge the animators had keeping that realism up. I’d say that their work paid off though. Lady Tremaine especially has some of the most chilling, frightening expressions of any Disney Villain. Frank Thomas did a masterful job making her cold demeanor reach through the screen and to the audience. The art itself looks beautiful and we can thank artist Mary Blair for it as she did the concept art for the film. The use of colors and shadows were done very well. It’s just the right amount of brightness when necessary, and the right amount of darkness when necessary. It hits the mark perfectly.

Then there’s the sound and the music. On the latest rewatch, I noticed how they use music for characters a lot. Take the sequence where Jaq has to distract Lucifer in the first act for example. When he’s crawling across the wall, getting ready to get at Lucifer and kick him into his own milk bowl. They use strings for his movements as well as for strings, like the other mice shutting up Gus when he laughs. It’s nothing new for Disney, after all, it was doing this in Steamboat Willie that launched the company into fame. But it always adds so much even if you don’t realize it. The score uses a lot of strings and horns, knowing when to sound triumphant and when to be subdued. It’s a very good score.

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Cinderella’s soundtrack was the first to be done by the newly established Walt Disney Records, allowing the company to gain profit for their own music. The vocal tracks have two classics worth mentioning. The first is Bippidi-Boppidi-Boo, the Fairy Godmother’s song. It’s a super fun, whimsical song and even though I still struggle to get the words right, it really fits the Fairy Godmother’s nature and is just so darn catchy! The other is of course the theme of the film, Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes. There are several variations of the song throughout the film, but of course, the first time done by Ilene Woods (I’ll talk about her more when I do Cinderella’s character in-depth) is the one we remember most. It’s beautiful, hopeful, and was one of my favorite songs as a little kid. I used to annoy people with how much I would try to sing it, haha. It really tries to convince you that your dreams CAN come true, and by golly did I believe it when I was a kid… and deep down I still do, I supposed. Point is, it’s a lovely song~

What about the characters though? Well, let us have a looksie.

As with Snow White, there are many animals, though this time it’s mainly mice and birds. The mice are the main ones, as well as the only ones who can talk. There are other animals like the birds, a horse, and of course Bruno the Dog. But the main animals to discuss are Lucifer the Cat and the du of Jaq and Gus. Lucifer is a cat, so as expected he chases the mice. But it’s clearly not just due to instinct. It’s shown throughout the movie that he seems to take sadistic glee in chasing after them, especially Gus which is especially clear in the final act. But he also enjoys tormenting Cinderella, such as messing up the floor when she’s wiping it down during the Sweet Nightingale sequence and trapping Gus with the key in part to keep her locked up. He also enjoyed getting Bruno into trouble at the start of the film, which ends up being his downfall at the end. He seems genuinely cruel which...I mean with a name like Lucifer, is it a surprise that he’s a little devil? He has some great expressions thanks to Ward Kimball and was a fun challenge for our favorite mice.

Speaking of, Jaq and Gus serve as comedic relief and the unofficial heroes of the film when you really think about it. They drive many of the events forward such as making Cinderella’s dress and retrieving the key from Lady Tremaine. Jaq is the unofficial leader of the mice and the most talkative by far. He’s charismatic and crafty, usually unafraid (for the most part) of going up against Lucifer or from helping Cinderella whom he cares greatly for. We don’t know how long he’s known Cinderella, but he’s the one who assures Gus that she’s a nice person. Gus the newbie of the mice and a little dim-witted, but well-meaning. Due to being new, he ends up getting into several incidents like nearly being caught by Lucifer several times. Jaq and Gus make a fun duo and I always enjoyed seeing what the two would get themselves into. Also for added fun, both mice were voiced by Jimmy MacDonald (nowadays they’re played by Rob Paulsen and Corey Burton respectively). Jimmy was not only the main sound effects man for the studio but at the time he was also the voice of Mickey Mouse himself. Guess he’s a natural fit for mice, huh?

Next, we’ll go to the royals. Sadly, like with Snow White, the prince is more or less a plot device. I guess they were still having a tough time with realistic male characters. He’s a handsome young man, but sadly that’s all there really is. He doesn’t even get a name, being dubbed as Prince Charming in most material and IDK if that’s really official. They DID plan on giving the Prince more of a role, such a planned sequence with him hunting a deer but it turned out it was play hunting, but this never happened. He doesn’t even go looking for his mystery girl in the end, the Grand Duke does which is pretty disappointing. It’s a shame too since going off the King’s dialogue about how he’s been evading mariage he could have been like the male version of Jasmine. A royal who’s being pushed to get married, even though he wants to find true love on his own time and just have some freedom. They did do a bit more with him in Cinderella III: A Twist in Time. They also did more with him in the live-action remake, expanding his and Cinderella’s relationship and giving him an actual name (Kit). But we’re focusing on the original, and it’s sad that he didn’t get more to him.

The King and Grand Duke are also comedic relief and overall pretty good ones. The King is loud, blusterous, and quick to anger. He’s not a bad man, after all the only reason he wants his son to get hitched is because he feels lonely and wants grandchildren. It’s kind of cute when you think about it, even if unfair to his own son. He can be very friendly, but as I said quickly to anger. After all, when the mystery girl got away, he outright attempted to /behead/ the Grand Duke until he told him about the slipper. In comparison, the Grand Duke is more timid, but quite sarcastic as well. Very much the straight man to the King’s blusterous personality. While very much afraid of the king (though not unwilling to backtalk him), up against anyone else he takes no crap from anyone. Just watch him as he tries to endure the Tremaines, it’s amazing how absolutely done he is with all of them, and he wins points for shutting up Lady Tremaine when Cinderella makes her way downstairs. A good man!

The Fairy Godmother is only in the film briefly, but she leaves a major impact. She is the first decent person to Cinderella in a long, /long/ time. She is very grandmotherly in her design, voice, and demeanor. She’s a little forgetful and scatterbrained, as she forgot where her wand was and it takes a good while for her to notice Cindy’s torn up dress. But she is a kindly old woman who was summoned by the hope remaining in Cinderella’s heart. She came at the girl’s darkest hour and gave her the one night that she had always dreamed of. She is voiced by Verna Felton, who was a pretty regular VA for Disney at the time. Though she often did much harsher characters such as The Matriarch in Dumbo and the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. But she perfectly portrays the Godmother’s kindly grandmother persona. Her modern VA was Disney Legend Russi Taylor, who also took over Drizella, who sadly passed away last year. It is unknown who will do the Godmother in the future, but I have no doubt that she will emerge again one day

We now come to the Tremaines. First, the daughters. Drizella and Anastasia are ugly, loud, snooty, and mean to both Cinderella and each other. They argue frequently, outright hitting each other during their… ugh… we’ll call it a music lesson. They’re spoiled in the worst way, never being happy with what they have yet get angry if Cinderella dares wear the things that they outright discarded as trash. It’s clear that their mother raised them to be as horrid as her, though they’re nowhere near as calculating. She pretty much raised them to be her attack dogs against Cinderella as well as to use them to marry off and move up in the world. Their obnoxiousness is their only real character trait, though their character animation via Ollie Johnston is quite fun to watch. Anastasia would gain more depth in the two direct-to-video sequels at the very least, more or less also getting a redemption arc. She was also voiced previously by Lucille Bliss, who played the teacher in Invader Zim, and is now voiced by the legendary Tress Macneille.

Then there is Lady Tremaine. Ho boy, Lady Tremaine. If I had the time, I could do an entire essay on this woman alone. She is one of the most chilling, yet memorable Disney Villains despite being nothing but an old woman. Why? First, her voice. In the film, she is voiced by Eleanor Audley, which remember that name cause it’s gonna come back later in this series. She is able to keep the perfect balance of calm and methodical, yet sharp when necessary. Perfectly in control. Actually, that’s a great way to describe Lady Tremaine, in control. She knows what she wants and is willing to go to any length to get it. She carries herself with confidence and regality, very rarely losing her cool. She’s calculative and methodical and you never quite know what she’s going to do until she does it. But most of all, she is cruel and petty, especially towards Cinderella.

Unlike her obnoxious daughters, Tremaine’s abuse towards Cinderella is calm and subdued, preferring to use emotional abuse and manipulation. She has brow-beaten the poor girl so bad that she becomes obedient as soon as the old woman speaks up. Tremaine is jealous of Cinderella’s beauty and therefore tries to make the girl’s life as difficult as possible. She enjoys mistreating and controlling Cinderella, wearing a cold smirk any time that she ramps up the cruelty. Probably her cruelest act in the film is manipulating her own daughters into ripping Cinderella’s dress right off of her after she managed to get it on for the ball. Despite having agreed to let Cindy go to the ball if she got her work done, she ruined her chances anyway just because she could. She’s not only horrible to her stepdaughter but even to her own daughters with how they ultimately turned out and clearly only interested in marrying them off

What makes Tremaine scary though is because… well, compare her to The Queen/Hag and later villainess Maleficent. In the real world, you’re not likely to encounter an evil queen who uses witchcraft and turn herself into an old hag just to poison you. In the real world, you’re unlikely to encounter an evil fairy witch who can curse you to die and transform into a ferocious dragon. But running into a cruel, petty old woman who will abuse you due to jealousy and for her own enjoyment? Oh yes, that can and does happen. Lady Tremaine is real. She is a perfect depiction of an abusive stepparent. Plus as I said before, Frank Thomas did an excellent job depicting her expressions as utterly chilling. I was afraid of her as a child, and I still am now. Even at the end after her daughters failed to get on the slipper, she breaks it just to keep Cinderella from achieving a life of happiness out of pure spite. On the upside, seeing her plans all fall apart and especially her face when Cinderella reveals the other slipper is deliciously satisfying. One of the greatest all-time Disney moments.

Well, that was a lot more than I thought. But with all of that out of the way, there’s only one more character to discuss. Strap yourself in folks, because I have been waiting /years/ for this.

Cinderella Analysis

As I said above, Cinderella was one of my favorite princesses as a child. She was beautiful, had an amazing singing voice, was kind, and I wanted to have my dreams come true just as she did. She is one of the most famous Disney characters by far. I remember her pretty much being the face of the Disney Princess line when I was a kid. Nowadays I’d argue that Rapunzel is more of the face (or if we wanna count Frozen, Elsa is) but that doesn’t mean that Cindy has faded out of the public eye. After all, it is her castle that stands as the main landmark at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. That alone will ensure that she never fades out of popular consciousness.

In return, however, Cinderella is probably the most criticized princess of the Classic Three. It’s mostly for the same reasons as those two. She was a damsel-in-distress. She was domestic and passive. She got together with a man at first sight. She needed others to save her. It’s all the same thing you hear about pre-The Little Mermaid, but since Cinderella is probably the most well-known, she’s the one who gets it levied against her the most. As I said in Snow White, there is some truth about this portrayal furthering the depiction of women as domestic/passive in film. But it truly baffles me as to why Cinderella is the one who gets this criticism the most. It really, really baffles me. I can somewhat get it with Snow White and I can get it with Aurora, but Cinderella? Ugh… no. Just… no.

First of all, let’s get this part out of the way. Cinderella is an abuse victim. I think that Cinderella is meant to be about 19 years old in the film. While we don’t know how old she was exactly when her father died, we see in the opening narration that she was still a child. A child. Let’s say that she was around nine years old. That would mean that she has been under Lady Tremaine’s thumb for ten years. A full decade. If you are under abuse for that long at any age, but especially ever since a child, then that is going to affect you. So Cinderella being passive? Yeah, that’s likely in part because of the abuse that she went through. She was conditioned to not fight back, or if she did she would pay the consequences. As great as imagining standing up and fighting against your abuser is, it is unfortunately very rarely that simple especially when you are under years of psychological conditioning like Cinderella was.

But it is also unfair to say that Cinderella is blindly obedient and broken either. She isn’t. Cinderella is introduced as kind, cheerful, and playful when she teases her bird friends and gets ready for the day. Cinderella is a kind young woman, facing every day with a smile despite her treatment. The girl lives in an attic, yet she happily sings as she gets her day started. Cinderella’s defining trait is that she is a dreamer. As she herself says in the opening, her dreams are something that no one can control. Not her step-family. Not the clock telling her that it’s time to get on with a new day. In her dreams, she is able to do whatever she wants. It is her escape. The one thing that gets her through the day, hoping that one day the dreams that she wishes in her heart will come true.

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This is what fuels Cinderella ahead. It is what allows her to remain kind. It is what allows her to be sympathetic to others. What shows this most is her treatment of the mice. She treats them as her friends, making them clothing, feeds them, and frees them from traps. This is important for what happens later, but we’ll get to that later. She is also kind to the other animals, such as the horse and to her dog Bruno. In fact, it’s pretty interesting when she scolds Bruno for wanting to chase Lucifer. She tells him that it’s bad, how he’ll lose his warm bed, and quote “you know the orders”. She expects Bruno to obey the same way that she must obey. Doing so otherwise will mean consequences such as losing one’s own bed. The only animal that Cinderella doesn’t get along with is Lucifer, who is also the only character she is willing to speak against. At one point she was even willing to smack him with her broom when he ruined the floor she just finished scrubbing. It makes sense since Lucifer not only goes out of his way to make things more difficult for her, but he can’t order her around or really do anything to her as Lady Tremaine can. So in a way, it’s one thing that she has some power over.

Still, the first act shows what Cinderella’s life is like. It doesn’t seem too bad at first glance. She seems happy and treats her morning more like an annoyance than anything. But once we meet the Tremaines, it becomes clear just how bad it is. Anastasia immediately accuses Cindy of planting a mouse under her cup on purpose and Cinderella gets no chance to defend herself, though she is able to make Lucifer free Gus. She’s then summoned into Lady Tremaine’s room, clearly uneasy. Whenever she tries to explain herself, Lady Tremaine snaps back at her, making her go silent. There is no arguing. Lady Tremaine likely knows that Cinderella did nothing wrong, but doesn’t care. Whatever makes the girl miserable works for her and gives her an excuse to pile on that misery. Thus she piles on the workload, even making Cinderella do things that she already did once over again. Cinderella is unable to do anything but listen to the commands.

Everything changes, however, when the invitation to the ball arrives. Now we go back to one of the criticisms against Cinderella. Many accuse her of only going to the ball to meet the prince and get married. Now I will go more into this later, but there’s a reason why I am bringing it up now. Cinderella never at any point time from this point until the search for the mystery girl starts, even so much as mentions the prince. The ones who want to go to get married are the Tremaines. The whole reason that they go is because of the royal command for every eligible maiden to attend. Lady Tremaine wants to marry off her daughters. The sisters obviously want to get hitched to a good-looking man of power like the prince. Cinderella though? She just wants to go to a fancy ball because she can. By royal command every maiden is to attend no matter their status, so a lowly servant girl like herself is allowed. She even points this out to her step-family in one of the few cases she does stand up to them. Not by getting angry or defensive, she just outright points out the fine print. But no, nothing about getting with a guy ever comes up until much, much later.

Lady Tremaine agrees that Cinderella can go if gets her work done and finds a dress. But she uses the first part of that deal to bombard Cinderella with orders to make her unable to accomplish the second half. Cinderella has the dress picked, one of her mother’s, but she has no time to mend it up. As Jaq points out to the other mice, the Tremaines are going to make her do everything to make her unable to get her dress. But this is where Cinderella’s previous kindness kicks in. It’s clear that the mice really care for her because of how she cares for them. As such, they decide to fix up the dress for her. Jaq and Gus outright risk their lives against Lucifer to get some discarded trimmings.

Sure Cindy ultimately didn’t mend the dress herself, but it shows how her kindness came back to reward her. Just look at how downcast she is when the carriage arrives. She realized far too late that her step-family was never going to give her the chance to go to the ball. She is saddened as she returns to her attic-dwelling, looking out at the castle from the window and trying to convince herself that the ball would have been boring anyway. It fails. She is standing in darkness until the room lights up via candlelight and the mice reveal the mended dress to her. You can just hear the glee and gratitude in her voice as she swings around the dress and is at a loss of words before thanking her friends. Her kindness was rewarded… but sadly, not for long.

We now come to what is by far the darkest scene in the movie. Cinderella comes down to the door, shocking her stepfamily that she actually got a dress. At first, Cinderella is elated that she can actually go… until Lady Tremaine begins to approach. The old woman doesn’t seem to be doing anything wrong, agreeing that Cindy kept her end of the deal and even compliments the dress. But then she points out the beads to Drizella, who previously discarded them. It provokes her and Anastasia into a bitter, angry frenzy. They outright rip the dress apart while Cinderella is still in it. It is disturbing, Cinderella unable to do anything as her dreams are literally ripped away from her bit by bit. By the end, Tremaine calmly calls her daughters away and bids Cinderella a good night, leaving the girl standing in a pile of rags.

This is the final straw for Cinderella. She runs out to the back garden and breaks down. After trying so hard for so long to keep her hopes up, she can’t. All that she wanted was to go to the ball. Not to get married, just to have one night where she could have a good time. That was it. But her stepfamily just couldn’t allow for even that and tore it all away from her. Can you blame her for crying after all that? After dealing with that kind of treatment since she was a little girl? I can’t blame her. Her friends can only watch in sympathy and sadness as she says that there’s no use in dreaming and that she can’t dream anymore. She has hit her breaking point, a far cry from the hopeful young dreamer she was at the start of the film.

But not all is lost. In her despair, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother is summoned. So a big question I’ve seen some ask is how the Fairy Godmother was summoned to begin with? Well, it’s as she herself said, she couldn’t be there if Cinderella didn’t have hope in her heart still. She is essentially a manifestation of Cinderella’s hopes and dreams. If I had to guess with Cinderella reaching her breaking point and ready to give in to despair, the Fairy Godmother manifested because she now truly needed help. It was to restore her hopes and allow her to get to the ball after the chance was so cruelly ripped away from her. I know what some are going to say, once again Cinderella got something handed to her. But this is a case where Cinderella herself more or less summoned the one who would help her. Her kindness caused the mice to help her, now her hope summoned up her Fairy Godmother to help her. It’s not happening just because.

So The Fairy Godmother creates her carriage, makes her new dress, and gives her the glass slippers. But like all dreams, this can’t last forever. She has until midnight, after which the spell will be broken. Which is perfectly fine with Cinderella, she’s just grateful for what her Fairy Godmother has done for her. Seeing her smiling and hopeful again after the previous moment and her just receiving some motherly kindness from someone is just really nice to see. Thus, she is whisked away to the ball, and almost as quickly as she arrives, she catches the eye of The Prince himself. While Drizella and Anastasia are trying to get him to look at them, funny enough.

So let’s get back to the ‘Cindy only wanted a man!’ critique. As I already said, she never mentions a man until near the end. But here at the ball, it’s not even her who goes to The Prince. Heck later when midnight hits, it’s pretty clear that she didn’t even know that the guy she was dancing with was The Prince. No, it is Prince Charming who approaches her. We outright see him look up, notice her as she enters, and is stricken by her beauty. It is him who walks to her and presents himself to her, a major contrast to how all the other girls were going up to him with him clearly bored. So no, Cinderella never wanted to get a man. It all happened purely by chance, and again she didn’t even realize that he was The Prince until after the ball was long over.

Cinderella dances with the prince throughout the night, getting so caught up that she loses track of time until the clock goes off. Once again, the clock is telling her that it’s time to wake up from her dream. She flees, but loses one of her slippers along the way. Midway on the road home, the spell is broken and she is once more in her torn-up dress. She apologizes to her animal friends for losing track of time, but happily recalls the night. But the mice then point something out to her: her glass slipper is still on her foot. Now… why is that? Well what summoned the Fairy Godmother to begin with? Hope. It is my opinion that this is why the slippers didn’t disappear as well. Cindy’s hope kept them manifested, to the point that I don’t believe that her losing one happened by chance. It is the key to her having a chance at a better life. It slippped off her foot due to that, and the other one remained for the same reason. Cindy seems to think it’s the Fary Godmother’s doing as she thanks her, but the truth is it is herself who caused both of those.

Thus, we come to the next day. The Grand Duke is looking for the mystery girl, and Tremaine is ready to leap at the chance. At first, Cinderella is pretty much ready to resume her regular life now that she’s gotten the one night that she had wanted. But as Tremaine explains the new development to her daughters, Cinderella hears it. This is when she realizes that it was The Prince that she was dancing with. That it was her slipper that was found, which means that she’s the mystery girl. Which means that she’s the one who can fit it and thus she will become The Prince's bride. This is the point that she wanted to get married to a man. In the final fifteen or so minutes. But look as to why she wants to. This will absolutely ensure that she is able to have a better life than she has now, so can we blame her for being happy?

Cinderella is so elated that she outright ignores her stepsisters demands and starts to day-dreamingly go to her room to prepare for the Grand Duke’s arrival. But this turns out to be a mistake. Because of her elation, Lady Tremaine immediately puts the pieces together. Cinderella not only managed to defy her and go to the ball, but she is now in the way of her plans to marry her daughters off. If she is there when the Grand Duke arrives, then that’ll be it. She’ll fit the slipper, be taken to the palace, and will marry The Prince not long after. That is something that Lady Tremaine simply cannot allow. Not to mention that she can’t allow the girl to go unpunished for her defiance. Thus, she locks Cinderella in her room. To both keep her out of the way and to make sure that she can never leave.

So… it looks like that’s it. There is nothing that Cinderella can do at this point. She realizes that she’s once more going to be trapped in a cruel life and begs Tremaine to let her out before just breaking down. She had her chance once more, and once more her stepmother took it away. But once more, Jaq and Gus act to help their friend and manage to get the key. But of course Lucifer interferes, trapping both Gus and the key and Cinderella is now in a position where she can’t make him stop. All of her animal friends try to help, but it proves futile. That is, until Cinderella has a realization. There is someone who can chase off Lucifer. The same someone that she previously scolded because it would be going against orders; Bruno the Dog.

Remember when I pointed out how Cinderella got after Bruno dreaming of chasing Lucifer because he’d lose his home otherwise? Yeah, it comes back around here. She’s now close to getting out of her situation, so why not allow Bruno the same thing? She has her bird friends alert Bruno, and indeed the dog rushes in and causes the evil cat to jump from the window. I think it was supposed to be implied that this killed Lucifer, but we see in the later sequels that he survived. But with him out of the way, the mice slip Cinderella the key and she is able to get out and to the stairs just as the Grand Duke is beginning to walk out. And he’s clearly glad to see her to, outright making his way past Lady Tremaine and reminding her that he’s supposed to give every maiden a chance when she tries to ward him away,

But, of course, Tremaine can’t just accept defeat. She trips the earl and the slipper is shattered. It looks like once again, Cinderella’s hopes have been for naught. But this time, she doesn't cry. She doesn’t even get sad. Why? Simple, because it wasn’t for naught. She pulls out the other slipper, proving beyond doubt that she is the mystery girl. It was her hope that created the slippers. It was her hope that kept them manifested when the spell was broken. Now it is her hope that gave her the key to at long last break free from her stepfamily for good. She gets married to The Prince (we don’t know how long after, so there is a window open for those who want to get after her for marrying a guy she just met) and is whisked away to a better life. The wish that she made at last came true.

Cinderella is defined by hope, kindness, and dreams. It is these things that fuel her to continue on with her life. It is these things that allow her to remain a good person and not be broken by her stepmother’s attempts to humiliate and demean her. Even at her lowest moment, her hope couldn’t be truly broken. Sure in real life you’re not going to be able to magically summon a Fairy Godmother or be married into royalty because of a shoe. But this is NOT real life. This is a fairy tale. It is escapism. It doesn't have to adhere to reality exactly. Plus even then, there is something to be said about not giving up hope and remaining kind in the face of adversity. It is that lesson that I have carried with me since I was a child, to remain kind no matter what. I’ve had my own breakdowns, especially since it’s still 2020 at the time of this writing. But even so, I’ve tried to remain kind. Because Cinderella taught me to do so.

It is why I have never understood the hate against her, and never will. I love the modern princesses and yes, they did need to become more proactive and strong. But this does NOT make the first three bad. Especially not Cinderella. She is an abuse survivor. She is a dreamer. She is a young woman who only wanted to have some happiness in her life. Her kindness and hope was eventually rewarded, and in a way was granted to her by herself. The mice helped her with both her first dress and to escape the attic because she was kind to them. Bruno and the animals liked her because she was kind to them, so they repaid her. The Fairy Godmother manifested because Cinderella wanted to give up, but hope still remained in her heart and gave her the help she desperately needed. The glass slippers remained because of her hope, and became the keys to her achieving a better life. Sure she didn’t have to physically fight for it, but it doesn't change the fact that things happened, that others helped her because she was kind and hopeful. Because of herself.

The last thing to note is her voice actress, Ilene Woods. She was originally hired to do the singing for Cinderella, but after Walt heard her he cast her to also do the speaking lines. She did a beautiful job. She conveys Cinderella’s grace, kindness, and hopeful nature absolutely beautifully and her singing voice is outright angelic. Do you want to know a sad, yet beautiful story? Well at the end of her life, Ilene Woods had sadly been inflicted with Alzheimer. I think we all know how devastating that disease is. She was living in a nursing home, unable to recall anything. Reportedly, the nurses would often play A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes for her. Even though Ilene couldn’t recognize that it was herself singing, it was the one thing that could make her happy all the way up to her passing in 2010. Mind you that story is from Wikipedia /TV Tropes and I haven’t been able to find an actual source saying this, but I’ve never seen anyone contest if this was true. Either way, Ilene was and will always be the Cinderella, a legacy that the current actress Jennifer Hale is keeping alive and well today.

Final Thoughts

Cinderella will always be special to me. She’s not my overall favorite princess, we still have quite a while before we get to her. But she is firmly my second favorite. The film is outright my second favorite of all time (again, we’ll get to number one later). It’s the first movie that I remember seeing in my life. I would watch it for hours over and over again. I had dolls of her. I would dress up as her. The whole reason I wanted to go to Disney World was to meet her, and I did. The film looks beautiful. The music is beautiful. The characters are memorable. The story is an outright classic even before Disney adapted it. To quote Beauty and the Beast, it is a tale as old as time. Maybe it’s just nostalgia talking, but even after all these years, I love this movie just as much as I did when I was a little girl. Maybe even moreso now. It is a true Disney Masterpiece.

Disney was hoping for a miracle, and he got it. Cinderella was the biggest hit that they had had in a looong time. Audiences and critics loved it. It was the moment that Disney was back in business and able to return to feature film, launching them into the Silver Age of Animation. While his next film, Alice in Wonderland, didn’t go very well, both Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp helped keep the studio afloat. As the decade came to a close, the studio decided that it was time to release another fairy tale-inspired film. Would this one strike gold like the first two? Come back next time to meet the final Classic Princess, Sleeping Beauty.

Image Sources: Disney Wiki, Animation Screencaps Other Sources: Rags to Riches: The Making of Cinderella Documentary

#cinderella #disney princess #disney princess reviews #callie reviews

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aliteraryprincess · 4 years

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All the Ever Afters by Danielle Teller

Warning: Contains spoilers

Welcome back to Fairy Tale Friday! It’s been a very long time. My semester is over, so I’m hoping to post a few of these during my summer break. But considering I’ve been trying to get this finished for a month and a half, I’m not sure how that will go. I’ve also decided to continue using the special banner I made for Fairy Tale February because it’s prettier than the original one.

Today we’re taking a look at the fourth “Cinderella” retelling of this feature. You can read the previous ones here, here, and here. Let’s jump into All the Ever Afters!

As a Retelling:

Teller mainly draws from the well-known Perrault version of the story. There are glass slippers and a godmother (though not a fairy godmother, as we will discuss later). However, there are a few things taken from other versions. In reference to the Grimm tale, there is a rumor going around the royal court that Ella’s stepsisters cut off parts of feet in order for the slipper to fit. It also draws from the Italian “Cat Cinderella” for the stepmother’s backstory. In this version, the stepmother starts out as a governess to Zezolla, the Cinderella character. It’s the only variation I’ve read so far that gives any detail on the stepmother prior to her marrying Cinderella’s father. Agnes, the main character in All the Ever Afters, is Cinderella’s stepmother and we follow her story from childhood until after Ella’s marriage to Prince Henry. It is not a particularly happy life story. She is born into serfdom and goes to work as a laundry girl at Aviceford Manor. She slowly works her way up in the world, moving through roles of maid at Ellis Abbey, owner of an alehouse, nursemaid to Ella (which is where we see the influence of “Cat Cinderella”), and finally lady of Aviceford Manor and wife of Lord Emont. In the end it is her rather than Ella who has the more traditional Cinderella arch. We even see her covered in ashes when she is working in the laundry and Fernan, who becomes her first husband, teasingly calls her “Cinder Girl” several times.

Elfilda, called Ella, is our Cinderella character. I really enjoyed Teller’s take on her. Ella is coded as on the autism spectrum. Since the book takes place in medieval England, the word is never actually used, but it becomes quite clear as we get to know Ella. An early hint is when her stepsisters describe her as quick with lessons and music but oblivious to social cues. It is confirmed as we watch her grow up; she doesn’t start speaking until she’s four, she has meltdowns, she doesn’t have a filter when talking to people, and she takes an extreme special interest in clothing and fashion. She is extraordinarily beautiful and from a wealthy family, which causes most everyone to dote on her. Her father in particular gives her everything she wants. Agnes is the only one to treat her the way she would any other child and try to discipline her. Though she once declares that Agnes treats her as a servant and dresses her in rags and apparently tells similar things to people at court, Ella is never truly mistreated by her stepfamily. These statements are the result of her misunderstanding situations in which she doesn’t get her way or is punished for her bad behavior. The misunderstandings seem to be partly because she is so spoiled and partly because she is on the spectrum. The rags she refers to are the mourning clothes she has to wear after the death of her father. Her stepsisters are able to get new gowns but she is not until she is out of mourning, which causes her to throw a tantrum. She is forced to do the work of a servant once in her life as a punishment. She leaves an unused dress in a heap on the floor, making more work for the laundress. Agnes, infuriated since that was once her job, sends her to work in the laundry for the day. Ella returns crying and covered in ashes, resulting in the nickname Cinderella.

Agnes’s daughters from her first marriage to Fernan are Charlotte and Matilda. Most people consider them ugly, as are the stepsisters in most modern interpretations of the fairy tale. I’ve yet to find an actual variation of the tale that includes this. Either their physical appearances aren’t mentioned at all or they are simply described as less beautiful than the Cinderella character. I’ve wondered if perhaps the Disney movie originated the idea of the ugly stepsisters, but I haven’t been able to find anything about it. Charlotte and Matilda’s situation is far more complex than simply being unattractive. Fernan is black, so the girls are mixed race. Charlotte has dark skin like her father’s, which causes people to consider her ‘ugly’. Agnes remarks that she is actually pretty despite society’s views. Matilda is lighter skinned and considered beautiful as a child. Unfortunately, she catches smallpox, which results in extreme scarring that renders her ‘ugly’. Their relationship with Ella is also much more complicated than in the fairy tale. They mostly get on well. She wants them with her once she becomes a princess and moves to court, and they often play together as children. However, they fight as well, often because Ella calls them ugly. It seems to be more due to her lack of filter than actual maliciousness, but Charlotte and Matilda are understandably hurt. It results in them fighting and Ella claiming that they are being mean to her. They do hold a bit of resentment about her behavior and how much she is doted on, and they do sometimes make fun of her, such as nicknaming her Cinderella after the laundry incident.

As mentioned earlier, Teller uses the godmother from Perrault’s tale. This version is the only one to feature a fairy godmother, though all variations have some kind of magical helper. It is more often an animal, such as the fish in “Yeh-hsien,” or a plant, such as the tree planted at the mother’s grave in the Grimm tale. Teller’s godmother is Mother Elfilda, the abbess of Ellis Abbey. She is both Ella’s godmother and maternal aunt. This book is historical fiction, so she does not use magic, though there are rumors among the court servants that she is a fairy who conjured Ella’s finery for the ball. It is understandable why a rumor like this starts; Agnes describes Mother Elfilda having a very powerful charisma when speaking that could easily be taken for supernatural power. And she does grant Ella permission to attend the ball and provide her with the dress, shoes, and carriage. She does this with the authority and wealth she has a the abbess. Aviceford Manor is one of the abbey’s several holdings, so Mother Elfilda has a large amount of power over it. She is able to afford all these luxuries for Ella and give her permission to come out of mourning early for the ball. After Emont’s death, Agnes and her daughters could be turned out of the manor at any time, so she must comply with what the abbess wants.

Agnes does not deny Ella’s request to attend the ball out of spite as the stepmother does in the original fairy tale. Rather it is because she and Ella are still in mourning for Emont. Charlotte and Matilda can attend because as stepdaughters their mourning period is shorter. Agnes believes it will also be good for Ella to not get something she wants and that it might help her learn patience. Most European variations of the tale feature three major events, whether they are balls, festivals, or church services, but Teller only uses one. This isn’t unprecedented in folklore; “Yeh-hsien” features only one festival. It has become common in modern interpretations such as the Disney film. As previously mentioned, Teller includes the famous glass slippers. The extravagantly beaded gown Mother Elfilda sends comes with a pair of equally extravagant shoes with so much beading that they look like they are made of glass. The shoes are left behind at the ball not because Ella is fleeing to meet her midnight deadline but because she throws a tantrum when she doesn’t want to leave. Agnes sets the midnight deadline because young ladies staying later would be improper, but when the time comes, Ella wants to stay to continue dancing with Prince Henry, who she has been with all night. Agnes accidentally tears Ella’s gown while forcing her out to the carriage, and Ella throws one of the shoes at her in a fit of rage. The shoe misses Agnes and breaks a window, after which Ella runs to the carriage, leaving the other shoe behind on the stairs. There is no shoe fitting, though rumors of it do go through the royal court. Prince Henry is able to find out who she is by asking the hosts of the ball, which is far more realistic than the prince simply finding Cinderella through her lost slipper. Agnes, Charlotte, and Matilda are eventually invited to live with them at court for a dual purpose: to give them a place to live since they must leave Aviceford Manor and for Ella to be more comfortable at court by having people she knows and cares for around. This seems to be a slight twist on Perrault’s ending in which Cinderella forgives her stepsisters and sets them up with marriages to noblemen.

My Thoughts:

I adored this book, and the characters are one of it’s best features. Agnes and Ella are the two that particularly standout, but all of them are well-developed and feel real. I loved Agnes’s voice and following her life story. I saw another reviewer compare the book to Jane Eyre, and I agree with that wholeheartedly. Both are stories of women growing up in a society that oppresses women and the lower classes. Agnes is similar to Jane in her resourcefulness and practical life outlook. I also liked that Teller develops her as morally grey. While she certainly isn’t a bad person, she’s not quite a good one either. She loves her daughters and will do anything for them, but she also has a slight conniving side and admits that she has a hard time loving Ella.

I’ve mentioned time and time again that fairy tale retellings are not a particularly diverse genre, so I was delighted by the representation in this book. There are black and mixed race major characters and an interracial relationship, which I feel I see very rarely in literature, much less fairy tale retellings. This is also one of the very few books I’ve read featuring a major character on the autism spectrum. It’s certainly the first I’ve seen in this genre. It also felt well-handled, though I can’t say for sure since I’m not on the spectrum nor do I have any significant experience with it. Interestingly, I haven’t seen any reviewers really talking about this aspect. I mostly just see people calling Ella spoiled and bratty, which I think does a major disservice to the character, the book, and the author. The situation is far more complex than that, and it seemed to me that Teller does not intend for Ella to be read as simply bratty.

Though this is a fairy tale retelling, it is not fantasy. It is straight historical fiction. At first I did have a bit of a hard time identifying the place and time period. It’s clearly a medieval setting, but I didn’t know it’s England until Teller clearly states it. A more knowledgeable reviewer placed it in the 14th century. I love seeing how authors translate the magical aspects of fairy tales into a non-magical setting, so that was a lot of fun. There are a few aspects that reminded me of Gregory Maguire’s Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, but really only because it is also a historical fiction retelling of “Cinderella.” All the Ever Afters is quite original in it’s take on the fairy tale and a truly beautiful story.

My Rating: 5 stars

Other Reading Recommendations:

The starred titles are ones I have read myself. The others are ones I want to read and may end up being future Fairy Tale Friday books. To keep the list from getting too long, I’m limiting it to four that I’ve read and four that I haven’t. This was Teller’s first novel, so she doesn’t have more to recommend. Hopefully she will soon! I’d especially love to see what she does with another fairy tale.

Other Retellings of “Cinderella”:

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire*

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine*

Ash by Malinda Lo*

Stepsister by Jennifer Donnelly*

A Dream Not Imagined by Shantelle Mary Hannu

The Stepsister’s Tale by Tracy Barrett

Bella at Midnight by Diane Stanley

Five Glass Slippers edited by Anne Elisabeth Stengl

About the Fairy Tale:

Cinderella: A Casebook by Alan Dundes

Cinderella Tales from Around the World by Heidi Ann Heiner

#aliteraryprincess fairy tale friday #all the ever afters #danielle teller #booklr #book photography #fairy tale retellings #cinderella #books

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ginnyzero · 5 years

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Retelling Old Stories

I've written a book based on old fairy tales and legends and am currently reviewing the Shrek movies in Action Movie Friday. (Shrek 2 post coming next, I hope.) I thought I'd talk about retelling fairy tales, myths and legends.

Myths, fairytales, legends, these are the stories that are near and dear to our hearts. And let's face it, they're familiar, comforting and popular. Fairy tales such as The Sleeping Princess, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast have been told over and over to young children for generations. These stories are oral traditions passed down from generation to generation and have strayed quite a bit from their horrific and sexist roots. So much, that outside of a few key points their original creators may not recognize them anymore.

These oral traditions form the basis of the hero's journey which can be found in high fantasy stories such as Lord of the Rings and Science Fiction stories, such as Star Wars. They've been satirized (Ella Enchanted, the movie), parodied (Shrek) and outright made fun of (Mirror, Mirror) and also taken far too seriously (Snow White & The Huntsman.) Just as much as they've been played straight (see the Elemental Master Series of Mercedes Lackey.) And they've been mixed together until almost unrecognizable. (The Princess & The Frog, Frozen, Once Upon a Time, the 500 Kingdoms also by Mercedes Lackey.)

The great thing about fairy tales and myths and legends is that they have a very low risk level. People are far more likely to pick up something to read of watch that is relatively familiar to them and that they know they already enjoy rather than a brand new concept they don't understand and aren't sure they'll like. Fairy tales are comfort food. People know they like them. And given a choice between a concept they aren't sure of and a fairy tale based media, they're more than likely to choose a fairy tale based media.

So, how do you go about retelling these fairy tales and making them fresh and new for your audience? This was a question I (sort of) asked myself when I started to write the Dawn Warrior. (Available in Ebook & Paperback.) How do I take Sleeping Beauty and make her different without relying on, say, what we know of her through Disney or from Grimm, not the TV Show. (Which honestly, isn't much in either case.) And make them partly relevant without losing making a good story?

Change the Roles:

What if the Princess really isn't the Princess? What if she's the bodyguard in disguise that's protecting the real princess from assassins? (The Decoy Princess, Dawn Cook) What if the Princess is also a spy? (The Princess Series Jim C. Hines) Maybe Prince Charming is actually an actor!

I mean, come on, in real life unless your Prince William and Harry and work for the British Royal Navy, royals don't really have adventures. (I wouldn't want to get on the bad side of Queen Elizabeth either.)

Or, maybe the Princess and Prince aren't really the good guys after all. Maybe it's the Big Bad Wolf or the evil stepmother or even the sea witch. (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire) Or, to borrow from Hoodwinked, the Big Bad Wolf is really an investigative reporter trying to do an expose on Red Riding Hood. (I mean, she can't be all that sweet and innocent.)

A good example of this was a recent Sleeping Beauty movie that was in the horror genre. (Unfortunately I heard it was a really bad horror movie.) The Sleeping Beauty in the movie was supposed to be the damsel in distress and ended up being both the trap and the villain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdEo_t-iVbM

(I'll just leave this here.)

Change the Setting:

Fairy tales in SPACE!!! (Lunar Chronicles, Marissa Meyer) Okay, there aren't a lot of fairy tales in space. I think I saw another example on instafreebie the other day. In fact, there aren't many romances in space either. (I was listening to a podcast about an indie author who was doing this and she was the first writing romances set in the backdrops of aliens?) But, this is like Star Wars. Greek Myths in SPACE!!!! (Seriously, Star Wars is built around the classical hero's journey. The franchise even freely admits it in their authorized literature. I've got a book by Bantam called Star Wars: The Magic of Myth that goes through it step by step.)

This is one of the easier ways to make fairy tales seem more relevant and seems to be currently the most popular. Grimm the TV Show, Once Upon a Time (in Wonderland), The Harry Dresden Files, and Fables, all take fairy tales and legends and drop them into the middle of the modern world. I include Harry Dresden, not because he's playing out a fairy tale so to speak, but he's some sort of misguided Prince Charming type on his own hero's journey. The book Charming by James Eliot, takes the character of "Prince Charming" plays it straight, and makes it a bloodline that is involved in some sort of knighthood charged with keeping the mundane world safe from the evil things that go bump in the night set in modern times.

Mercedes Lackey took a slightly different approach with her Elemental Masters series. She took fairy tales, played them straight, but set them in Edwardian times right up through the First World War. By doing so, she was able to show how the beginnings of the modern world like industrialization and rail roads and wars fought with machine guns instead of swords were effecting the world of magic and the magical creatures. (For instance, all the pollution made it easier for evil or nasty type elementals and creatures to thrive and good elementals and creatures that couldn't abide cold iron were dying off or going into hiding.)

Change the Genders:

Let's face it. Fairy tales are pretty sexist, no matter what your gender is. I had in the first draft of the Dawn Princess an entire rant by Roxana, who is a 'Beauty Asleep' about the differences between how a female Princess who is cursed to sleep and a male Prince is cursed to sleep and how neither tale does royalty any justice whatsoever.(Seriously, in the male version, when the Princess who had been sitting by his bedside took a nap, the clock should have reset, the Prince shouldn't still have sneezed and been woken by the maid.)

Maybe it's really Prince Charming asleep in the Castle and well, Beauty has to belt on her sword and gird her courage to get through the hedge and kill the dragon. Or, the tower bound male Rapunzel is intruded upon by a Pirate Princess who is looking for gold, not love. Maybe it isn't a brave little tailor but a brave seamstress! Or it is a male who is captured by a bunch of cannibalistic female bandits.

...

Okay, there is taking some things too far. (That story is terrible no matter what.)

Apply some Common Sense:

In fairy tales, things don't always make sense. I read them and go "why? why would they do that?" A lot of times Princes don't get punished for their ill deeds. Another Prince comes along, "saves" them and they go about their adventures without showing any sort of remorse for what they did in the first place. Princes don't become goose boys or shepherds or kitchen tweenies.(Or at least, not very often, I think Faithful John/Hans is about the only one I can think of.)

No, those punishments are reserved for Princesses who have been tricked into changing places with their maids and end up being goose girls or in the kitchen. (I can think of half a dozen variations of that tale.) And the Princess, instead of finding a nice baker or farmer to settle down with who appreciates her, instead figures out how to reveal her plight to the Prince who actually married her uppity maid/sister and seems happy with the maid/sister and once the maid/sister is out of the way, marries the Prince. (The Prince was tricked, happy to be tricked and the Princess took him anyways? That makes no sense.)

A really good example of this is the original and horrific Beauty Asleep tale. In the original tale, the King comes upon Beauty Asleep in her tower and rapes her, while she's asleep, repeatedly. In fact, he gets her pregnant with twins. The babes are born and he doesn't even take them with him! No. He leaves them with their sleeping mother. One of the babes gets hungry, as babies do! And sucks the thorn out of her finger that was keeping her asleep. Beauty wakes up. The Queen finds out about her existence. Tries to kill her. The King kills the Queen in turn and ends up marrying Beauty and bringing her and his twins to the castle.

Just what the ever loving hell?

It's good to be king?

No, really, the Queen should have taken Beauty's side. They could have killed the King for being an adulterer and ruled the kingdom together setting up the twins as the heirs. Female solidarity. Because the story as written is insane.

There's a post wandering about tumblr about swan maidens and selkies. And how awful the stories are about the men who take the swan maiden's cloaks and the selkies' skins to force these women to be their brides. One of the reblogs adds the caveat that it feels like these stories don't take into account the actual nature of swans and seals. Swans are pretty. They look graceful.

Swans are mean, they hiss, they bite, they're incredibly aggressive and they can break bones. Approach with caution. Don't try to steal from them. Don't try to pet them. Aggressive swan is aggressive. Okay. Anyone who steals a swan maiden's cloak deserves the punch in the face!

And seals, seals aren't all that nice either! Zefrank1 hasn't done a true facts about seals, but maybe he should. Male seals are called bulls for a reason! Elephant Seal bulls charge at each other when they fight. Leopard Seals are considered one of the ocean's more dangerous predators and take on whales and sharks. Seals train well to do tricks. Look, just, don't mess with them because not only are they cute and have sharp teeth and claws, they're smart. Do you really want to mess with the woman who can steal all your nets and drive the fish away and beat you to a bloody pulp? Seal fights involve mud wrestling.

Add some reality to the stories. Give the actions of those involved real consequences. Change the personalities to actually reflect the animals they are sharing their bodies with.

Mash things together:

This is another popular tactic and TV Tropes calls it the "Fractured" Fairy Tale. Think how in Once Upon a Time, (spoiler alert) Rumpelstiltskin is also the Beast of Beauty and the Beast and his father is Peter Pan. And he's the grandfather of the Truest Believer and thus the "father in law" of Emma Swan the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming. And that barely dips a toe into the confusing of Once Upon a Time Family relationships.

Mercedes Lackey also did a version of mixing up of fairy tales in her 500 Kingdoms. In the 500 Kingdoms, The Tradition is a form of magic that ties to make fairy tales happen no matter what type of tale they are and no matter if all the pieces are actually 100% correct. Fairy Godmothers are there to steer the tradition so that disaster doesn't strike constantly. (Because what if the Prince of the Cinderella tale was actually a Princess or well, a Prince who was too young, too old, or just liked other Princes.)

Fables does this as well. Prince Charming is the same Prince across Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty ends up marrying the Beast in her second marriage. (Prince Charming is good at wooing, not staying.) The Gingerbread witch of Hansel and Gretel ends up being the witch who puts most of the tales in action across the Enchanted Forest. The last arc I read, Rose Red was making her own version of Camelot (and there was much trepidation about how that was going to turn out, probably badly.)

Grab a bunch of different stories that seem to work well together, stitch them together in a way that makes sense or seems fun. It's okay not to always tell the exact same tale.

Add Real People's stories:

Look, if you're going for a more empowered woman in your stories. There are plenty of women in history that were actually pretty awesome. And I'm not just talking about Esther from the Bible or Rahab. (Both pretty awesome ladies.) There were female pirates and female queens who outwitted and beat their male counterparts to be on the throne and to keep themselves out of jail. There are female scientists, female snipers and well, I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find something a woman did in real life that men get praised for more often.

In fact, one person go so fed up with the way fairy tale princesses are praised at places such as Disney, they created a site/book for girls about such heroines at Rejectedprincesses.com.

Youtube has videos labelled things like Top Ten Badass women from History you probably don't know about. (But if you'd read Rejected Princesses you actually might!)

So, don't be afraid to use some real world inspiration to give you ideas about how awesome your female characters can be.

And these are just a few ideas on how to take something old and make it something "new."

In the Dawn Warrior, I took a bunch of these. I applied some common sense. Changed the Princess' role. And really mashed some things together. But, I kept a medieval fairy tale like setting because I wanted to keep this series different from my other series, Heaven's Heathens MC, which is a light science fantasy that could read urban fantasy if you squint at it. (Or maybe it's the other way around.) Two series set in the modern/future world seemed a bit silly to me.

Mostly, my advice is if you want to retell a fairy tale or myth or legend, have fun with it. Take your ingredients, mix them up as needed and don't sacrifice your story for message. (Because really, that gets old very quickly.)

Whelp, now if you like fairy tales there are plenty of pieces of media in this post to check out. Happy reading/watching/researching!

#writblr #wrtblr #writing advice #writing tips #fairy tales #myths

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shizukateal · 13 days

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Grimm Variations - Episode Two Review: Little Red Riding Hood

A blonde, blue-eyed woman in a red dress gets picked up by a man while they are in some form of virtually-enhanced reality saloon. She's nervous at first, not just because of the date but because she's clearly not used to the fine establishments. But she starts to have fun with her new sexy partner for a moment... until, of course, the man brutally murders her when she drops her guard. Obviously he was going to be the the Big Bad Wolf in this story. He rips everything away from her, her dress, her tongue, and the technology hiding the fact that she's actually old. Granny gets eaten with no repercussions for the Wolf or "Mr. Gray" -first name not confirmed to be Christian- as he's called here. After all, he is truly rich and young and handsome, not just holographically pretending to be; and more importantly he is part of a club of other wolves like him who get each others' backs to make sure they don't get the heat for their actions.

We learn that in this futuristic setting, society is stepping further away from reality each day. Transhumanism has succeeded in uploading human consciousness into servers although, again, there's a way to interact in virtually enhanced reality through some special eyedrops. However people keep abandoning their bodies and uploading themselves into computers, probably because resources are so scarce there's hardly any real food at all.

It makes a certain sense, then, that our Patrick Bateman-like protagonist has developed an actual bloodlust. The man practically starves himself with a vegetarian diet because he does not want to eat the fake meat they serve him. Surprisingly for how gory the episode is they never explicitly show him eating the meat of his victims, though? Although he does explicitly like the smell of blood. In any case, Mr. Gray has an all-around comfortable arrangement with his fellow Wolves of Wall Street where he gets a safe space to butcher as many women as he can get his hands into 👍

But it's not enough. At some point the arrangement stops feeling like a proper hunt and more like shooting fish in a barrel. So Mr. Gray starts acting out the safety of his kennel. Before he can get far, however, he is stopped by his pack-pal, Mr. Brown, who gives him an address for a place to arrange another, more outdoorsy and risqué hunt. Mr. Gray goes to a slum still in his clean, tailored suit, where he meets Charlotte (once again, the little red haired girl from the promotional poster) acting as an old madam pimp. And so, she orchestrates a meeting between him and our Little Red Riding Hood: Scarlet.

(Boy can you tell the CLAMPs preferred designing her over the other characters in the story. They love themselves some short, straight-haired ladies)

This time, Mr. Gray goes to a rave in the slums wearing a leather jacket that also does fuckall to conceal the fact that he's some rich dipshit nepobaby. It's like watching Marty Mcfly in his ridiculous cowboy costume from the third Back to the Future. He follows Scarlet and helps her knock out some rape-y looser that was bothering her and the two go to her house. Mr. Gray acts just as demure and shy as the first woman we see him kill, as he has a hard time swallowing the fluorescent booze Scarlet offers him. She teases him about this. That's real alcohol after all, just like everything else in the room is real, outside the purview of the curated cyber-enhanced-world. Mr. Brown had offered him an authentic bottle of wine earlier, and he drank that easily, but in a sense the clearly artificial alcohol is the real deal because that's the everyday beverage of the people who actually live there.

He downs the rest of the glass and the atmosphere is almost sweetly romantic if you ignore the fact that this grown man paid to stalk a girl so he could kill her with no repercussions from the law...

And then Mr. Gray wakes up and finds himself tied to a dissection table. Turns out Red Riding Hood is already a much more vicious and experienced hunter than she was at the end of the Grimm's version of the story (for context, Perrault's version, which came earlier, simply ended with her death) and the hunt between them was always a battle between eating and being eaten. The Big Bad Wolf of Wall Street learns the hard way that, on an uncultivated forest away from his pack, he's prey to even a little rabbit. For all his pretensions of the reality of pain and suffering in blood and gore, at the end of the day he still lives a perfectly manicured life in his white silicon valley palace, so how was he to win against someone who is actually willing to get hurt and die for the sake of the hunt? What's the use of him having a perfect body with 8-pack abs, perfect eyes, and manicured nails if he's not willing to withstand the pain he causes others?

Scarlet faces no repercussions, of course. After all, if the Wolf decided to stray from the territory of his pack, then no one can go avenge him, as Charlotte informs Mr. Brown. Hearing this, Mr. Brown decides to upload himself to a computer. Might as well, replies Charlotte. The real world -even in this dystopic setting- has too many temptations.

All in all, I'd say this episode is better than the last one, in part because it's not a subversion, but it still has a bit of the same pitfalls that prevents it from reaching greatness. "Cinderella" suffered because it turned its protagonist into the antagonist in a way that ultimately proved to be shallow, and it undercut the genuinely interesting commentary the story was otherwise doing. Scarlet doesn't do that here since, again, the Grimms themselves turned Red Riding Hood into a hunter; however I also think that there's a lack in depth of flavor to the episode for not getting us into Scarlet's mind as intimately as we get to know Gray. The probably felt like it would take away some of the punch from the twist if they showed her "hunting" before, but I think that could have simply been avoided by simply getting to know the setting a bit more through her eyes and allowing that to also be an opportunity for characterization. You know, add to the reveal a little by making it seem like a more personal tragedy about sending a lamb to slaughter and then pull the rug from under our feet.

There's also this similar problem between the two episodes in that the post-climax reveals are kind of confusing because they are not all that well set-up. What I mean is that since Mr. Brown was the one who suggested Gray to go to this place after he acted out of line, he might have been deliberately trying to set him up to die, but the ending reveals that this is not the case and it implies that he's genuinely so upset about his friend dying that he decides to escape reality so that he doesn't end like him. Mind you, I'm not complaining that that's the truth of the matter, since it still fits the story thematically. It's just that it left me wondering why would Mr. Brown suggest this risk at all if killing him wasn't his intention. A nitpick, perhaps, but still a discordant note in an otherwise solid script.

Other than that, I'd like to talk about what the series as a whole might be building up to. These two episodes so far have shared caged bird imagery. First Makiko and Sawako in a gilded cage with two birds that are set free when they escape de Otawara house, and now Charlotte freeing another bird from its cage to let it fend for itself in the wilderness.

The next episode is going to be Hansel and Gretel, so that's one big juicy opportunity for that as well, and it makes me wonder if the prevalence of the symbol ties into whatever is going on with Charlotte and the Grimm Brother's in the background. We don't get much about that in this episode either, but I am interested in one of their dialogue exchanges. Charlotte says that the aspect of the story that worries her the most about the story is not the Wolf on its own, but that there may be more of them out there. William, however (the one with the glasses) laughs it off and says that there's only one wolf eating little girls and grannies, which is... patently untrue in the story? The original and this one? However given the tone of the series at large, and that a similar statement was made in the previous episode, its easy to take it as a deliberate contrast. I mean this episode does make a point that the wolves are an organized club, but the theme about the upper class joining forces to prey on the vulnerable with no consequence feels just a tad too secondary to everything else; and given the thematic fumbling in the previous episode I am afraid that the writers might not have any plans for all this commentary they're making and instead the focus will ultimately fall on making the good guys bad for the shock factor.

But we can still be cautiously optimistic since at least this episode has raised the quality a bit. See you next week!

#grimm variations #grimm kumikyoku #little red riding hood #anime review #CLAMP #episode 2

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razieltwelve · 5 years

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Terror (Final Effect/Gate AU Snippet)

When not one but two gates into other worlds had opened, the Saderan Empire had been convinced that the gods were on their side. It didn’t take them long to realise how wrong they were. Alnus Hill soon fell to the enemy, but even worse news was to come from the other gate. At least their opponents at Alnus Hill were human. The same could not be said of the beings that came through the other gate.

Not a single soldier had returned from the other gate. All twenty thousand of them had been lost. The empire had mustered a further forty thousand to try to hold the gate. They had died in less than an hour, overrun by a swarm of monstrous creatures that poured out of the gate in numbers beyond counting.

By the end of that first disastrous day, the entire area around the gate was coated in a strange purple slime and pulsing, quivering structures made of flesh were rising up toward the sky. Late that night there was an explosion. The gate itself had been destroyed - something that should have been impossible. Yet from the ruins, the strange creatures constructed a gate of their own, and from it emerged still more of the foul beings.

Within a week the entire province had fallen. The creatures slew any who dared to oppose them, and it wasn’t long before the empire began to notice disturbing similarities between new breeds of the creatures and the war beasts the empire had deployed against them. These… these things were assimilating the war beasts and taking the best characteristics of each to increase their own power.

Worse, the creatures had demonstrated the ability to counter magic. Not all of them could do it, but amongst them were powerful beasts capable of bending reality and unleashing storms of psychic lightning that could slaughter entire formations of troops in a few moments of horror. Soon, the skies and even the seas were full of the creatures, and the empire’s forces were annihilated time and time again.

For centuries, the Saderan Empire had prided itself on the discipline and skill of its troops. But against these creatures that combined brutal and unrelenting fury with unnatural cunning, they found themselves rendered all but helpless. At the forefront of the assault were titanic creatures so large that they could simply trample entire legions beneath their feet. They seemed immune to even the heaviest bombardment, and the great blades they wielded could cleave entire buildings in half with ease. Not even the empire’s mightiest fortresses could resist them, and a single such creature was responsible for levelling a renowned fortress that had stood unchallenged for more than a thousand years.

As the Saderan retreat turned into a complete rout, their fleeing troops were ruthlessly run down by packs of swift, nimble creatures that could cover ground at speeds that put even the fastest horses to shame. Worse, these creatures were even faster on the strange purple slime their fellows constantly spread, making any attempt to ambush the creatures impossible. They would strike with impunity, ripping and tearing into vulnerable groups of soldiers, only to retreat when help arrived. If the soldiers tried to form into larger groups, they would find themselves boxed in by the swifter creatures while stronger, more heavily armoured foes crushed them without mercy.

In less than a month, the Saderan Empire had lost more than half of its territory with military losses placed in excess of two hundred thousand legionnaires and more than double that number of militia and emergency levies. The creatures were tireless and fearless, and each battle only further refined their tactics. Grimly, the Saderans realised that the creatures did not behave as individual soldiers. Instead, they fought as though they were all part of one gigantic organism, every one of them fighting in perfection harmony and unison.

With nothing left to lose, the collapsing empire turned to its other foes for help, to the ‘green men’ who hailed from a country they called Japan. The creatures paused for the first time when they encountered the Japanese. From amongst their number came one of the inhumanly intelligent creatures that served as a leader. It reached out with psychic powers far beyond the understanding of either the Japanese or the Saderans, and the message it sent was simple.

Stay out of our way.

And with the words came visions of a swarm numerous beyond counting and of massive starships that could smash solar systems and turn planets into dust.

The Japanese retreated.

And then creature spoke again, this time to the Saderan Empire.

We are the Imperial Zerg. Surrender or be consumed. You thought to attack one of our colonies. You failed. Surrender or be consumed. Mercy will be offered only once. Resistance is futile. Surrender or be consumed. You have three days to decide. What can you hope to do against us? You are fools, and we are the children of an empire that has conquered universes. Surrender or be consumed.

On the second day, the Saderan Empire offered its unconditional surrender.

X X X

The Dia-Farron frowned. “I think we might have a situation here.”

“Oh?” Her superior raised one eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“You know how we sent that punitive force through the gateway after some dimensional anomaly appeared near one of our Imperial Zerg colonies?”

“Yes…?”

“Well, we wouldn’t normally wait a month before asking for a formal report, but things were going so smoothly after the initial engagement that we decided to let them handle things themselves. We have been meaning to test how capable the new Coordinators are, but I think they might have gone overboard.”

“…” Her superior sighed. “Please tell me they haven’t exterminated the locals. I know they started the fight, but extermination seems a bit extreme considering they inflicted about, what, a hundred casualties before we wiped out their expeditionary force?”

“It was a hundred and five casualties,” the Dia-Farron replied. “And we just got the first formal report back. Have a look.”

The older Dia-Farron read through the report. “Oh… crap.”

“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

“You think? They’ve basically conquered most of the world, wiped out just about anything even vaguely resembling a military force in this ‘Saderan Empire’, and they’ve also encountered what appears to be people from an unmapped alternate version of Earth.”

“On the upside, the Coordinators did offer the Saderans a chance to surrender, and they were smart enough to take it. They didn’t just go nuts and wipe out the Japanese either.”

“That would have been awkward considering a decent proportion of the people who live in this sector are descended from Earth. Sure, it’s a different Earth, but I doubt they’d have been happy if they got wiped out.” The older Dia-Farron sighed. “At least we know the Coordinators are capable if a bit aggressive. The tactics and strategies are all sound if not necessarily subtle. But we’re still going to have to explain this.”

“Technically, we were within our rights to launch a counterattack.”

“I know, and by all accounts, the Saderans are a nasty bunch who seem to believe they can pillage, murder, loot, and whatever else they feel like doing without consequences. However, the Imperial Zerg aren’t exactly known for their restraint, especially if we’re not around to keep an eye on them. For crying out loud, they’ve been assimilating mages and using them to create Imperial Zerg who can use magic.”

“In fairness, those variations do seem very handy to have around. Sure, we’ll need to test them and review their genetic sequences more closely, but I’d give them high marks for the modifications. If nothing else it shows that the Imperial Zerg are more than capable of performing genetic alteration without our assistance although it’s far less sophisticated and way more instinctual than it would be if we were involved. It’s a bit blunt too - like trimming a hedge with a bazooka.”

“Yes, we’ve collected a lot of useful data, but we need to think about how we’re going to explain this.” The older Dia-Farron grimaced. “I might have to call in a few favours. Still, the current emperor is a quarter Dia-Farron. We might actually be able to make this work if we can just frame it correctly.”

“Let’s hope so.”

X X X

Author’s Notes

This is a little snippet detailing what might happen if a gate from Gate opened on a world occupied by Imperial Zerg. After annihilating the invading force, the Imperial Zerg were given free reign by the Dia-Farron to execute a counter attack, so they could test the competence of a new form of Imperial Zerg. These coordinators are much like cerebrates in that they function as tacticians and strategists in command of the Imperial Zerg forces. Note that the Coordinators are heavily socialised. Indeed, they are reared in basically the same way as children to ensure their loyalty to the Empire. And much like children, they are eager to prove themselves to their parents, which is what led to the Imperial Zerg getting a bit overenthusiastic against the Saderans.

In practical terms, there was nothing the Saderans could have done. The Imperial Zerg have been genetically enhanced to fight the worst the Grimm can offer, along with nightmares and power-mad species from countless other universes. They have faced technologically advanced species with firepower comparable to the Grand Empire Alliance and proven their worth, and they have faced biological horrors that make even the Tyranids look like cuddly puppies and emerged victorious. A bunch of people in Roman-era armour with a bit of magic aren’t even a speed bump.

Still, the whole campaign is actually extremely important since it provides the Dia-Farron with a data on how the Coordinates behave when unsupervised. They are, in typical Imperial Zerg fashion, prone to aggression toward those they view as enemies, which means it is likely necessary for Coordinators to be supervised by Imperial personnel throughout their campaigns in much the same way that titanolisks are generally personally hand-reared and supervised as well.

You can find me on fanfiction.net, AO3, and Amazon.

#final effect #gate #fanfiction

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loretranscripts · 5 years

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Lore Episode 24: A Stranger Among Us (Transcript) - 28th December 2015

tw: death, gore, death of children, disease

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

Folklore is a living thing. In many ways, the stories we tell and the lessons we pass on are like a tree - the branches reach out into generations and cultures, sometimes in obvious ways, and other times reaching surprising new places. One good example of this would be of the folklore surrounding small fairy people that we’ve discussed here before. Pukwudgies, trolls, goblins, puka and dozens of similar variations are scattered across the world with amazing consistency and reach. How or why is something we’ll probably never fully understand, but it shows us how folklore can spread, how it can migrate, and how it can build upon the past. At the same time, though, folklore has roots, and they run deeper than we might expect. Some stories that we still whisper about in the dark today have crossed the lips of people for centuries, and in some cases, millennia. When I hear a story for the first time or discover a new collection of tales that have been widely distributed, I often stop and ask myself the same questions: where did it come from? What lies at the bottom of the narrative? What are its roots? Outside of Halloween, there is no other time of the year (at least for European cultures, that is) where folklore rushes to the forefront of everyone’s lives with such significance, such power, and such ease as the Christmas season, and rightly so. There is so much there to unpack and explore: the tree, the gifts, the food, and the nocturnal visit from a stranger, one who has seemingly stalked our lives all year long, and yet we blindly welcome into our home. And if there’s one lesson that folklore has taught us over the centuries, it’s to beware of strangers – they aren’t always who they seem to be. I’m Aaron Mahnke and this is Lore.

When we think of coal in our stockings and food and drink left out for a visitor, we rarely pair those ideas with the image of a woman flying through the air on a broomstick, but in Italy there are those who still tell the story of La Befana. Befana’s story has been told since at least the 13th century, originally connected with the Christian feast of the Epiphany. But while many people have never heard of her, the details of her story are eerily familiar. During her visit, Befana was said to enter homes through the chimney. She’s typically depicted carrying a basket or bag full of gifts, but is also known to leave behind a lump of coal or a single stick for children who fail to behave during the year. Before leaving each home, Befana would sweep the floor with her broom, something scholars see as a metaphor for sweeping away the deeds of the previous year, and then she would eat the food left out for her – oftentimes sausage and broccoli. Side note: cookies and milk sound so much better, don’t they? Interestingly enough, Befana is not the only Christmas legend with a passing resemblance to a witch. In the German Alps, there have been stories of another female figure dating back to the 10th century. Some call her Perchta or Berchta, or later Bertha. Jacob Grimm, while researching his Deutsche Mythologie, theorised that she was one of the ancient Germanic mother goddesses. She and her sisters were said to have taught humanity the arts of agriculture, spinning wool and cooking. Over time, though, her legend began to integrate with parts of the Christmas season. Because of her role in teaching humanity the basics of home management, Perchta’s meaning began to shift over the centuries, turning her into the punisher of those who worked during the holidays, failed to feast properly and, much later, hunting down the lazy, and what better time for her to conduct an end of year review, so to speak, than Christmas? Just how did Perchta dish out her punishment on the people of Germany? Well, a hint can be found in her other popular title: the belly-slitter. During the 12 days of Christmas, she would travel through the towns and inspect the people’s behaviour. If they had followed the rules and done right in her eyes, they were rewarded. If they had not been good, though, she was known to have a very nasty side. Anyone disobedient enough to warrant punishment, adult or child alike, would have their stomachs ripped open. Perchta would scoop out whatever might still be inside, pull out the full length of their intestines, and then stuff the victim’s belly with garbage, straw and rocks. While a stomach full of refuse might seem… a little over the top, that distinction actually goes to another ancient female in folklore.

While stories of Grýla, the mythical giant goddess, are far outside the common narrative of Christmas for many of us, for the people of Iceland she is still a whispered source of dread among children. One of the earliest mentions of Grýla dates back to the 13th century collection of Icelandic mythology known as the Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson. According to the many stories told about her over the centuries, Grýla possesses the ability to locate disobedient children. She can do this year-round, so they say, and because of that she was often used as a parental tool to coerce children into doing what they were told. It was in the Christmas season, though, that Grýla became even more monstrous. That was when she was said to climb out of her home in the mountain and make her way toward the towns. She would hunt far and wide for all the naughty children and then take them back to her cave. Once there, she would cut them up, place them in her stew, and devour them. And, according to the legend, she never ran out of food.

There have been other stories of strangers told throughout the centuries, but not all have happy endings. In fact, there is often more loss than gain when it comes to the visits of some of those legends. In the northern Alps, stories have been told for generations about the travelling stranger known as Belsnickel. Considered to be one of the helpers of Saint Nicholas, Belsnickel travels ahead of the big, red man and dispenses his own form of Christmas cheer – with physical abuse. Descriptions of Belsnickel liken him to the wild men of old, with torn and dirty clothes fashioned from animal skins and furs, and a face that is covered in a snarled, filthy beard. Some stories report that he wears a mask with a long tongue protruding from the mouth. According to the legend, which spans centuries in both Germany and the American state of Pennsylvania, Belsnickel would enter the home of a family and scatter nuts and sweets on the floor for the children to collect. And then, with their backs to him, he would lash out with a switch made of hazel or birch, whipping their backs and leaving red marks. And Belsnickel isn’t alone – another travelling stranger from the same region, one who has seen a rise in popularity around the globe, is a creature known as Krampus. At first blush, Krampus sounds similar in many ways to the other strangers in European folklore, but what sets him apart is truly frightening. It is said that Krampus visits the homes of children during the Christmas season, but he doesn’t have a dual nature – there is no reward or special treat when he comes to town. No, his sole purpose and passion in life is to dole out punishment on children who have failed to obey and do their work. Like Belsnickel, he too carries a switch, but in most stories there are more than one. Apparently, he beats so many children that he needs a few spare branches, so he carries them in a bundle. In addition, he is often depicted wearing chains and some form of large sack or cart because ultimately, Krampus isn’t as interested in beating children as he is in taking them. When he arrives in each legend, we are greeted by the appearance of a wild, demonic creature with long horns, cloven feet and a twisted face. After beating the disobedient children, Krampus chains them up and tosses them into his sack before vanishing as quickly as he came, taking the children with him back to hell.

The origins of Krampus are still unclear, but some scholars think that the legend predates Christianity. Instead, they believe that the story has roots in an ancient alpine myth of a horned god of the witches. Even the switch, his weapon of choice, might have been a carry-over from the initiation rites of witches, where the novices were beaten. Far from forgotten, festivals are held throughout Europe to this day that feature many of these legends; events like Krampusnacht in Germany and the Befana festival in Urbania attract tens of thousands, who dress in masks and dance and celebrate. Like Halloween, these are instances where monsters and strangers have been embraced and elevated to something of a children’s story, which is ironic when you understand the roots. Stripping away the detail, Krampus has (from a 30-thousand-foot view) more than a passing resemblance to Pan, the Greek horned god of nature, shepherds, flocks, and mountains. Along with his musical flute, Pan is often known for robbing the innocence from people, usually through sexual means. In a culture that saw the threshold between childhood and adulthood as the loss of virginity, Pan figuratively stole people’s children, and when you think of it that way, it’s more than easy to see similarities, not only between Krampus and Pan, but also between Pan and a character that Disney has helped us all fall in love with: Peter Pan. While he might be able to fly, has no horns and is missing the cloven feet that Pan sports in every image and statue, Peter Pan fulfils the role perfectly. He arrives at night, he carries a flute and lures our children away to another place. It’s a modern story with a familiar ending, but it was far from the first of its kind. That honour, according to some, falls to a small German village in 1284. You might already know the story, but the truth beneath it is far worse than you’d ever expect. In 1284, the German village of Hamlin was struggling with an infestation of rats. Now, I’ve only seen a few rats myself over years, but I also don’t live in a densely populated urban area like New York City or London. But in medieval Europe, from what I can gather, rats were as abundant as squirrels, only bigger and more disease-ridden. It’s hard to imagine the impact that an infestation of rats could have on a town today. If we found a half-eaten bag of flour in the cupboard, there’s a grocery store down the street where we could get more, year-round. But in the Middle Ages, food was grown locally and used throughout the year. If rats ate and ruined the food supplies, there was little a town could do - rats meant death in many instances. According to the story that has been passed down through the centuries since then, a stranger entered Hamelin in the Spring of 1284. He was dressed in colourful clothing, possessed what we might call today as a “silver tongue”, and claimed to have a very unusual, although also very timely, skill – he was a rat catcher. As a profession, rat catching dates back centuries, but it’s rarely seen as a safe and sanitary job. The risk of being bitten or contracting some disease carried by the rats has always been a hazard of the job, and while the exact nature of their involvement has been up for debate for decades, most scholars agree that rats have been key players in the spread of plague - particularly the Black Death of the 14th century, and there were few truly effective tools at their disposal, which made the job that much more difficult. Some rat catchers used a special breed of terrier while others made use of traps, but the most effective tool for centuries was also the most minimal and inexpensive of them all, bare hands - and seeing as how most rats prefer to stay hidden inside dark places, this was a risky technique. The motivation for it all, though, was the meritocracy of it; the more you caught, the more you earned, and while there’s no documented proof of this rumour, it’s been whispered for centuries that rat catchers would sometimes raise their own rats in captivity and then turn them in as part of the job, inflating their numbers and then their pay. This allowed them to pad their pay checks when business was slow, and it also earned them a shady reputation. As a side note, one of the most famous rat catchers in London’s history was a man named Jack Black, who claimed that his black-tan terrier was the father of all the black-tan terriers in London, and who pioneered the art of breeding rats and keeping them as pets. He even wore an outfit made entirely of scarlet cloth, with a big, wide sash across his chest that had two cast iron rats on it. He was probably also a riot at parties, but I can’t confirm that – just a hunch.

The man who walked into Hamelin that June wasn’t any less of a character, if the legends are to be believed. He wore an outrageous outfit, although his was reportedly one of multicoloured fabric that was known back then as “pied” (which was typically a sort of blotchy pattern), and he carried a tool that no other rat catcher claimed to use - a flute - and the mayor of Hamelin trusted the man. Maybe it was the not-so-subtle allusion his appearance made to the ancient stories of the god Pan, a deity who tended flocks of animals and played a flute; maybe it was the man’s marketing ability, that silver tongue and outrageous outfit; perhaps he overpromised and won the mayor’s approval - whatever the reason, this stranger was said to have struck a deal. He would catch all the rats in town, he told the mayor. He would lead them out of the town and away from their lives and he would do this, he said, with his musical instrument, a pipe that he claimed would lure them away. Now, I don’t know about you, but I would have been sceptical. The mayor, though, was desperate. Sure, they haggled over the price, but in the end the stranger won. The exact amount of money differs from version to version of the story, but in all of them it’s an exorbitant sum, and that’s the point. Hamelin was so desperate that they were willing to overpay for a solution, and then he got to work. According to all the stories, and even the children’s tales we were raised on, the piper picked up his flute and began to play. As if driven by some magical force, all of the rats in Hamelin scuttled out of their hiding places and began to crowd around him; streams of them, thousands of them, all writhing in a mass at his feet. Then, when it seemed like they had all come out, he marched out of town and down to the Vesser river. The stories say that he was beyond successful. Most accounts say that all but one of the rats drowned in the river that day. Hamelin’s troubles were over, for a while. You see, the piper returned later to collect his money - he had done the job they had hired him to perform, the rats were gone, but for some unknown reason, the mayor refused to pay him. Now, the stories don’t say why, but we can speculate. Maybe it was because the stranger didn’t return with any bodies to show for his work, as was the custom for a rat catcher. How could the town pay him per head when there were no heads to count? At any rate, the mayor turned the stranger away and the man, clearly taken advantage of, stormed out of the village, but not before turning to face the people of Hamelin and proclaim a curse on them. He would return one day, he said, and when he did, he would have his revenge. Remember, this is a story that has been passed down for 800 years - most of what we know about the real events is pure legend, based loosely on scattered reports of a stained-glass window in the church there, in Hamelin. The window itself was lost in 1660, but there a drawings of it that predate the destruction as far back as the 14th century, and the earliest mention of these events is a 1384 entry in the Hamelin town records. The events were recorded, of course, because the stranger did return. According to the story, though, he changed clothing, trading in his colourful robes for the uniform of a hunter. Gone was the salesman; the stranger was returning for vengeance. While the adults were in church on June 26th, the stranger strode into town and began to play his flute again. This time, rather than crowds of writhing rats, it was the children who clambered out of the houses. They flooded the streets, gathering around the strange visitor, and then, when they were all present, he marched them out of town, never to be seen again. There are, of course, a number of morals to this story, but the one that has stuck with us for centuries remains ever-true: never trust a stranger.

Folklore is full of strangers. In many stories, it’s flat-out amazing just how much freedom we have given them in our lives. Even stories of someone as benign as Santa Claus have an element of danger when you view them from outside cultural fishbowl. Here’s the story of a strange man who stalks our children year-round, noting their behaviour and secret desires, who then breaks into our homes, eats our food, and leaves a few presents to prove that he was there. For the people of Hamelin, though, that stranger cost them far more than a plate of cookies. Their ill treatment of the man who came to town led to the loss of their children, and as difficult as it is to believe, the story of Hamelin is true – part of it, at least. Scholars are in agreement that the rats were a later addition to the tale, showing up about 300 years after the events were said to have taken place. But as far back as the records go, there has always been a stranger, a visitor from the outside, who leaves with the children, and although it’s taken a very long time to figure out why, some historians think they have the answer. To understand the truth, they say, we first have to understand the political culture that Hamelin found itself in. In 1227, about 50 years prior to the events of Hamelin, a battle took place on the border between what was then the Holy Roman Empire and Denmark, pushing the Danish border north of modern-day Germany. As a result, a whole new territory opened up that needed colonists. Men called “locators” were assigned to travel the land and find volunteers to populate this new territory, who often wore colourful clothing. They were eloquent speakers. They were, in a sense, a lot like today’s door-to-door salesmen. The empire needed farmers and craftsmen and soldiers to protect these new lands, but it was hard to find people willing to uproot their lives and travel north, especially when that new land was alongside a contested, military-heavy border. It was a hard sell, and so when the locators came knocking, rather than shipping off a handful of adult volunteers, townsfolk would sometimes get creative. Instead of paying with their own lives, they would sell their children to these men. The proof, it turns out, is in the phonebook, and on Google maps. Many town names along a line between Hamelin and Poland bear a striking resemblance to town names from medieval Germany, oftentimes even showing up more than once. Even more compelling, surnames from the 1284 Hamelin town records still show up in phonebooks in Pomerania, a region of Poland along the Baltic sea. The folklore, you see, tells a colourful story, one that’s as easy for children to swallow as a spoonful of honey, but the truth that the story hides turns out to be far less palatable. An entire town, desperate for a solution to their economic and social challenges, actually sold their children off to recruiters hoping to colonise new lands. It’s a plot reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, in that these people constructed a fantasy around certain events, and then passed that lie on to later generations in order to justify their actions and avoid questions. In the end, an outsider did indeed come to Hamelin that day, but he wasn’t the one who took the children. No, it turns out that the true monsters were already there, living in the house next door, shopping in the market, farming the fields. The most dangerous stranger, it seems, isn’t the outsider – it’s the one that hides among us.

[Closing statements]

#lore podcast #podcast transcripts #aaron mahnke #christmas #krampus #pied piper of hamelin #folklore #italy #iceland #germany #transcripts #24

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feministdisney · 6 years

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Consent in Animated Shows & Movies

Since the issue of consent has been at the top of conversations lately, I thought it might be interesting to link this back to kids’ media. I think in some scenes (like the Gaston one below) it’s really easy to see how responses like “but she never said no, so it’s on her if something happens!!” are just not cutting it. This is not meant to be an exhaustive review, since there are hundreds of movies and shows to consider, so feel free to chime in.

(note: since this is discussing movies, there may obviously be spoilers.)

May We? Asking is a Great Start:

Frozen’s kiss scene at the end was a good example of consent. He makes a verbal request to make sure it would be desired on her end, and I’d guess he would have stopped if she hadn’t said “no” but also looked disgusted by the request. Because: consent is a multi-step, dimensional, ongoing process, not a piece of paper swapped across desks in class that says “will you consent? please circle yes or no.” and then you never think about it again.

As far as other Disney movies go, I was fairly pleased that most of the kissing scenes I reviewed (with the obvious exceptions below) seemed to show the idea of enthusiastic consent. It would be great to see both verbal and non-verbal consent shown together more frequently so that people stop seeing it as some dramatic, silly thing that only takes place on comedy skits about over-the-top feminism, but rather, a great tool to have, especially if you don’t know a person that well and may misread one or the other.

(if I missed any obvious bad moments in movies, though, let me know, since there’s a lot of them!)

Saying No Without Saying “No”:

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The Gaston Proposal scene in Beauty in the Beast (Youtube link) is a great example of what consent DOESN’T look like, the sort of behaviors women do to “softly” say they’re not interested, and what qualifies as a coercive tactic. It’s worth stating that Beauty never says “no” to Gaston - she doesn’t even really say a variation of it. In fact, she says things that could be interpreted positively, on the surface; “Gaston; what a pleasant surprise.”

Would any person really watch this scene and believe she’s “leading him on” or that she’s “into it” though? That her not immediately running upstairs should be taken as a sign that she wants to be in the room with him? Every time he proposes something, she attempts to de-escalate the situation with her joking comments and by taking a few steps away from him. Gaston, meanwhile, continues to follow her around the room (even though she’s obviously moving away from him) and when he doesn’t get the response he wants, instead of leaving, he continues to escalate his body language and get closer to her until he’s got her pinned against the door.

Trust Can Be Used to Manipulate; This is Not Enthusiastic Consent:

Several people referred me to Steven Universe Season 2 Ep 11 and I could see why - it really does hit on the concept of consent and manipulating people into giving a “yes.” Pearl tricks Garnet into being Sardonyx with her (they combine powers... I haven’t watched much of this show so sorry if I get the terminology wrong haha). I think the show does a good job of conveying how Garnet feels and had lines like “I just wanted to share a few more victories with you.” (to justify the trickery)

“Those weren’t victories!”

“We’re so much weaker than you...fusing with you is our one chance to feel stronger!” (justification given by Amethyst for trickery)

The point is clear that even if your goal is something that would normally feel good for both parties, manipulating people in order to get it does not result in a nice, “shared” moment. Whether you intentionally get someone drunk to lower their guard and make them more likely to say “yes” when they’re originally saying “no,” and/or ignore multiple verbal/non-verbal cues that they’re not ready or interested in moving forward because you think more pushing will eventually result in a yes, you are responsible for creating a situation where consent has not been enthusiastically given.

And since Pearl and Garnet have an ongoing friendship, the point is also clear: in this type of situation, you are using someone’s trust in you as a tool to manipulate them.

The Best Plots Don’t Ignore Consent:

People often get very upset over the idea that the scene presented in Sleeping Beauty is completely non-consensual. They forget this is a fictional storyline, in which “he HAS to kiss her to save her” is not an excuse, if that requirement itself has been made up.

From a prior consent-related note I have posted, about Sleeping Beauty:

Sleeping Beauty only works as a positive romance because we know how it’s supposed to end. Handsome nice prince rescues the lovely sleeping princess. He kisses her to wake her even though this is an action she can’t consent to.

This doesn’t mean the prince is a bad person- it means consent wasn’t considered important enough when they made this movie, that it would alter that scene more from the original.

Consent wasn’t considered a “big deal” because we KNOW she likes him from that one scene where she did, and we presume she wouldn’t disagree with him (which is often used to excuse actual crimes, rather than happy-ending story plots)… because kissing is romantic and that trumps making sure a movie’s plot is fully consensual.

Worth noting, the actual story of Sleeping Beauty (though it exists in several forms and variants, as many fairytales do) is really disturbing:

The version of Sleeping Beauty with its chaste, true-love kiss that most of us remember from Disney or the Brothers Grimm derives from a 17th-century Italian tale called Sun, Moon, and Talia by Giambattista Basile, based on folk legends dating from the 14th century. In these early versions, the sleeping princess is raped and impregnated by a passing king – but it all ends well because after she wakes and recovers from the initial shock of finding she has twins, he returns and marries her.

Via The Guardian. You might find this article enlightening

Snow White experiences a similar tale.

The Loss of Consent - Betrayal:

Maleficent goes back into examining consent with the loss of Maleficent’s wings. Stefan drugs her and rips her wings off her body. While this scene is brutal, it is successful in conveying, through metaphor, what sexual assault can be like as an experience. Her pain isn’t just the literal pain of having this done; it’s the betrayal of a friend that causes much of the long-lasting sorrow that follows her through the rest of the film.

To quote my review linked above:

Later in the movie, Maleficent brings Phillip to Aurora for the sake of kissing her, because none of them watched Frozen and realized it could be Maleficent. His lines are pretty much everything anyone’s pointed out about that film from a critical feminist perspective.

“It wouldn’t feel right,” he says as the fairies urge him, chanting KISS HER! in unison.

“But I’ve only met her once,” he hesitates again. And finally, another pause, “What was that about the curse?” (dialogue should be pretty close but might have errors since I accidentally wrote it on top of other notes I took)

Finally, he does kiss her, but I think his hesitation was important for what it established about the questionable nature of the scene. His hesitation, and the way the scene is set up, makes the kiss and the premise behind it seem questionable to us – a call-to-awareness that is missing from the first film.

And it’s also important to note that, in this retelling, his kiss isn’t rewarded with her waking up. (Note: though Maleficent also kisses her, it’s on the forehead, which I think has a somewhat different connotation esp. when the prince had previously expressed a desire to get to know her better, and Maleficent’s kiss is performed without expectation).

But anyway, please let me know your thoughts! This is not meant to be the end-all, just a jumping point.

#disney #consent #feminism

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