silver

Noooooo that's a terrible resolution! No! Especially since it's an adaptation of Sleeping Beauty! I reject your attempts at making an ending!

You don't do that. It's not grimdark or gory, it's just not right. This is the sort of ending that starts books, McKinley, not ends them!

I really like the air of the novel, for the most part; it doesn't take itself too seriously. Katriona's village is named Foggy Bottom! The princess-tomboy extremes I could have done without* but it was basically delightful for the majority of the book. But the ending was weirdly off.

( SPOILERS )

I was on YouTube and I was reading about fairy tales, specifically the Disney ones. And the general ranting. Together with my English teacher's acerbic comments about fairy tales, I thought I should do a little thing about them.

It’s true that many of the fairy tales are quite politically incorrect. I mean, Snow White, Aurora, Belle and Cinderella did just wait around for their prince. It’s true that many of them appeared weak, at least on the surface. If you go deeper, though, there's more meaning to the fairy tales.

For instance, examine Ariel, from “The Little Mermaid.” She does want to give up her whole life for Eric, the prince. However, she also has the urge to change her life. She is discontent with her life under the sea—as pleasant as it is—and will do anything, even bargain with the evil Ursula, to change that. In my opinion, that isn’t weak. She has a goal, and she’s putting all she has into it, even if it means abandoning her friends and family. Somehow, that strikes me as a similar story to people who immigrate to other countries….

I’ve never seen Mulan, so I think I’m not justified to talk about that movie. Instead, look at Belle. Somehow (between the invention of books and today) the stereotype that book-readers and unattractive women are one and the same has formed. If you tell me that Belle is stereotypical, I will wave that fact in front of your face. Not to mention that the Beast is nearly a walking example of ‘beauty is only skin deep’, which is an interesting juxtaposition to Belle’s own beauty (especially considering her name means beauty).

Cinderella reminds me, oddly, of Melanie from Gone With the Wind, particularly one line: “she saw [that]…beneath the gentle voice and the dovelike eyes of Melanie there was a thin flashing blade of unbreakable steel” (page 430). Cinderella’s mother is dead, her father is dead, and her only living family is cruel relatives who are not even blood-kin. She is sixteen. By all accounts, she should be a broken, hopeless girl. It’s an enormous effort to even move past the death of one relative, never mind two that she obviously loved. But her spirit is unbroken: despite the fact she is a servant in all but name, Cinderella says: “Have faith in your dreams, and someday your rainbow will come smiling through.” There are things that captivity and hopelessness can’t take away from you.

Even if you choose not to look at those themes, you can see that the concept of fairy tale is fluid. The Grimm brothers (they are well named) had dark stories; Disney put his own sparkling touch on them. How many countless adaptations, re-tellings, re-workings of these fairy tales exist? They don’t need to be gospel, written to tell little girls exactly what to do, or else you’ll end up like so-and-so. They can be a springboard for new ideas. Fairy tales are not carved in stone.

Edited to get rid of the typo.