Today’s cute fairy tales descend from scary tales

Dressing up as fairy tale characters for Halloween makes much more sense than a lot of people think and can also be much more creepy.

Society has changed a lot, and today people really care about  children’s innocence. That’s the reason why Disney has modified the stories so much. In Cinderella, for example, in the actual story,  the twin sisters cut a part of their own feet in order to fit them into the glass slipper. The prince is alerted to the trickery by two pigeons who peck out the step sister’s eyes, and they become blind beggars for the rest of their lives while Cinderella is happy with the prince. Creepy, right?

In the original Snow White, the Queen didn’t want her heart. She wanted her lives and lungs so she could eat them for super. And Snow White doesn’t wake up with a kiss. The prince actually finds her supposedly dead body and takes it to his castle on his horse, so she wakes up because of the jostles. At the end, the Queen is forced to dance to death in red hot iron shoes, in the Grimm version.

Red Riding Hood didn’t even see her grandmother in the original story, and there was no hunter as well. It was just a girl who went to a ride in the forest, trusted a wolf’s wrong instructions about the direction she should take to go to her grandmother’s and before she’s eaten by him. That’s it. End of the story. Some other versions have also strong sexual connotation, telling that Red Riding Hood wasn’t actually that innocent. The moral of the story is not to talk to strangers.

In Disney’s version, the Little Mermaid gets married to Eric, and they are happy ever after, but in the Andersen version she sees him getting married to a princess, and she despairs. She asks the witch of the sea for help. The condition is that she will lose her voice and her legs will hurt like if there were a thousand knifes stabbing them and, in case she can’t marry him, she will turn into froth. She, as you can expect from a dark story, couldn’t make it, but her sisters tried to help giving her a knife, so she can kill the prince and survive. She doesn’t kill him and jump back in the sea but instead turns into sea foam. Weird.

Even more creepy is Sleeping Beauty’s story. In the original, the princess falls in a 100-year sleep when she pricks her finger on a spindle due to a prophecy. She was supposed to wake up with the prince’s kiss, but in this version, the king sees her asleep, and rather than fancying having a bit, he rapes her. After nine months she gives birth to two children while she is still asleep. One of the children sucks her finger which removes the piece of flax which was keeping her asleep. She wakes up to find herself raped and the mother of two kids. So, no prince, no romantic kiss and no happy ending once more.

Now you can understand what made movie producers and other authors change the stories. They were written in a very different reality and mentality and for different reasons. Some of them still carry the original meanings, but they are told in different ways that fit our society’s perspective of life. As people change, reality changes, and due to this even fairy tales aren’t able to be the same.

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