Hey, Allyson! Tell Kristen that my friend's daughter (named Nikita) loves the show. I can't believe R lets her watch it (she's like, 7), but apparently so, it's their girltime. They both are fans.

The original versions of fairy tales were pretty gruesome. No one remembers anymore that Disney didn't actually create these stories.

No one remembers anymore that Disney didn't actually create these stories.

Seriously. I'm weirdly disappointed in how much this article misses the point of fairy stories, and treats Walt like he has any ownership of the plots and characters in other than a transient and mercantile sense.

Meredith replied to me that it's his repetitious implication of them as sexual violations that bothers her, but that just makes the guy one note and unimaginative--Walt Disney is the one that fucked with the stories. This guy is not.

In the original Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off their own heels to fit into the glass slipper, and birds (iirc) peck out their eyes after Cinderella has married the prince.

In Sleeping Beauty, the mother of the price who wakes her either tries to eat or actually eats her children.

They were cautionary tales, designed to scare the shit out of little kids so they wouldn't misbehave, and reinforce cultural norms of the time. Not one of them featured singing mice, as far as I know, or wise-cracking lobsters.

I looked at the post, by the way, and I think the artist in question is just not very imaginative or very talented, but he's certainly not doing anything new. And he's certainly not the one tarnishing the stories.

I took a storytelling course as an undergrad. I'll never forget the day our prof, a Methodist minister, growled, "Whaddya think the evil queen was doing with Rapunzel up in that tower?"

We read early translations of the fairy stories shared on the Silk Road. Disney they weren't.

Not a fairy story, but just as shocking...read Felix Salton's original Bambi sometime. It's a harrowing, anti-war screed right up there with Johnny Got His Gun.

Seriously. How anyone read that book and came away with the Disney version, I'll never understand.

"Whaddya think the evil queen was doing with Rapunzel up in that tower?"

OMG. I'm gonna have Rapunzel nightmares tonight!

Right???

Also, you know, Rapunzel's Prince is thrown out of the tower and has his eyes put out on thorn bushes, and Rapunzel is sent to wander alone in the desert and bears twins.

An aunt told me, my mother, and my sister to forgive the cousin who threatened to have me deported and blackmailed my parents. Said it might cure my migraines.

In your shoes, my response to this would have been "Is the cold air from Hell freezing over supposed to soothe headache pain?"

"Is the cold air from Hell freezing over supposed to soothe headache pain?"

Having her sit across from her sister and say that her sister's cancer would be cured by the same thing was "all" I needed in terms of talking back.