alchemical fantasy
Today’s WANAFriday blog prompt is: Share an image from Wordle. For those of you who don’t know, Wordle is a web gadget that generates word clouds (that is, lovely patterns of the most used words) from text that you input.
I created this image from the text of A Crackling of Thorns, a short story from my upcoming broken fairy tale collection (click to embiggen):
Updated with links to other wordles:
Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty. Snow White. Beauty and the Beast. These popular fairy tales (along with a few more I haven’t mentioned) have been illustrated, retold, fractured, and adapted countless times, and they are still going strong. They’re only a small handful of the great number of fairy tales available to us, though. Today I want to highlight five of my favorite lesser-known fairy tales.
The Twelve Dancing Princesses
This is the most popular of the lesser-known fairy tales on this list. It’s enjoying a resurgence in YA fantasy fiction, with such offerings as Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George and Entwined by Heather Dixon.
I loved the imagery of this tale–the tattered shoes, the princesses in their ball finery, the magic staircase and the invisibility cloak, the groves of silver, gold, and diamond leaves, the well-lit castle in the center of the lake. That, and I’m a sucker for the kind man of humble origins solving the mystery and winning the princess.
Tatterhood and the Hobgoblins
I didn’t discover this until a few years ago when I got the Lauren Mills’ picture book retelling out of the library for my children. I instantly adored the wild-haired feisty Tatterhood with her red cloak and her white goat and her big wooden spoon for whacking hobgoblins with. I loved her fierce bond of loyalty to her sister, her courage, her adventurous spirit. And when she does finally settle down to become more of a conventional fairy tale princess, it’s with a twinkle in her eye and on her own terms.
King Thrushbeard
I hesitate to add this one, though I loved it as a child. A haughty princess taunts and rejects all her noble suitors. After dismissing the last one, mockingly calling him “Thrushbeard”, her father loses patience with her and declares he will marry her to the next man to come to his gates. The weeping princess thus finds herself wed to a beggar, who insists she earn her keep. Long story short, the beggar is really King Thrushbeard and the princesses, humbled and kinder, takes her place as his queen at the end.
I like fish-out-of-water stories, and lesson-learned tales, but I don’t like the Taming of the Shrew method of a husband schooling his wayward wife. I include this tale–but with reservations. That, and because I think it would be fun to break some time!
Snow White and Rose Red
I enjoyed the rural setting and loved the non-romantic relationships in this one–the love between mother and daughters, the sisterly bond between Snow White and Rose Red, and the friendship between the bear and the girls. I also found it highly amusing that the girls’ every encounter with the ill-natured dwarf led to the latter losing a piece of his beard as a result of their help!
Liang and the Magic Paintbrush
This is the version I read to my children, though I grew up with a different one, whose illustrations I still remember vividly. Liang, a poor Chinese boy, is gifted with a magic paintbrush that makes pictures come to life. When the greedy emperor discovers this, he hunts Liang down and Liang uses his wits to put an end to the man and escape with his paintbrush.
What are your favorite lesser-known fairy tales?
ALERT! ALERT!
HERE BE SPOILERS.
You have been warned.
Seriously.
So. Season One of Once Upon A Time is over.
WHAT DID YOU THINK??
Okay, since it’s my blog, I’ll go first. In random order:
* I was pleasantly surprised by how much they moved the plot along by the end. I was totally convinced that they were going to s-s-s-s-t-r-e-t-c-h out the revelation of why Regina had it in for Snow, what Rumpelstiltskin’s game plan was, who August was, when Emma would FINALLY believe, and then add in more stretching out until the curse was broken, everyone’s memory was restored, and then we could go back to living happily every after.
Instead, they gave it all to us in the first season. Except for the living happily every after part. Erp?
Now what? The curse is broken, but everyone is still in Storybrooke with a giant purple cloud descending on them. Magic is BAAAACK in the world again (okay for the first time in our world). Uh oh. What are the magic users–who happen to be our antagonists–going to DO with it? Lots of evil stuff, I hope. Judging by Regina’s expression at the end, she’s already spinning plans.
Personally, I’d love to see a melding of Storybrooke and Fairy Tale World, where the boundaries between them have gotten fuzzy and permeable. So that on your way to Granny’s Diner for your morning doughnut you might (oops!) fall into a siren’s pool. Or run into a werewolf. Or take a wrong turn into the Infinite Forest.
* You know, they went to a lot of trouble to make Regina sympathetic, but really? Having it in for Snow all those years? You do realize that she was a KID at the time and that her intentions were not at all malicious?And maybe, if you were going to run away with the stable boy and a kid knew of the plan, perhaps you might want to watch the kid more closely and make sure your evil mother was never alone with her. And then you tell Snow that your stable boy crush ran away to spare her feelings, but you go ahead and murder her father and send a hunstman to carve her heart out anyway? Wha–? *blink blink* Soooo, hurting feelings = bad. Carving out heart = acceptable. Mmm.
In short (too late!) the scriptwriters did not do an adequate job of convincing me of the motivations behind the Evil Queen’s vengeance.
(Speaking of which, what happened to the evil mother? Is she going to show up next season? I’d have expected Regina to have done away with mommy dearest, but it would be COOL if she showed up as as antagonist.)
* I still love Mr. Gold. Favorite character. Complex. Dry humor. In control. Hidden depths. I was SO looking forward to his learning that Belle was still alive. Unfortunately, they missed the mark on that one. Sure, Mr. Gold was reunited with Belle, but it happened in the middle of all that other stuff going on and lost much of its emotional impact. That, and it didn’t CHANGE Gold’s actions in any way. He betrayed Regina and Emma before he even knew Regina had locked Belle up. After meeting up with Belle, he went ahead and did what he was going to do anyway. So, she might as well have stayed locked up and Regina could’ve used her as a weapon against Gold next season, much as it would’ve pained me to have to wait. I think the writers dropped the ball there.
* Nice to know that there’s still a lot of Fairy Tale backstory we don’t know yet. Like how Snow and Charming managed to wrest the kingdoms away from King George and Regina. I hope that this backstory gives Regina more believable motivation for cursing all the fairy tale characters to a hideous, miserable existence in–small-town Maine?
* Also, I think Baelfire is Henry’s dad. And my reasoning behind this? Because I’m a writer, and that’s what I would do. 😀
* I like that the true love that broke the curse is maternal love. Nice to see something other than romantic love get its day in a Love Conquers All scenario.
Your turn. Thoughts?
Writers have been retelling or fracturing fairy tales for a long time. Now the film & TV industry have gotten into the fray big time, with two Snow White movies releasing this spring and a couple of fairy tale-inspired TV shows. The one that I’ve been faithfully following is Once Upon A Time.
Storybrooke, Maine is your average idyllic New England small town–with one difference. Every inhabitant is a fairytale character, brought into this world by the Wicked Stepmother from Snow White (Snow White, again! What’s with the popularity of that particular fairy tale this year?). They remember nothing of their former lives, and they’ve been trapped in time for 28 years, ruled over by Mayor Mills, aka Evil Queen. No one comes to Storybook, and bad things happen to anyone who tries to leave. The Evil Queen’s revenge on Snow White (now separated from her Prince, and a school teacher) is complete. Until the day the mayor’s adopted son brings his birth mother into the small town–and time moves forward once more.
Er, I mean this of course:
While the framing story is that of Snow White, Once Upon A Time draws from a number of fairy tales, blending them so that they are all part of the same tapestry of events. These are fluid fairy tales, fairy tales without boundaries, where Hansel and Gretel find themselves at the Gingerbread House on an errand for the Evil Queen, Cinderella bargains away her first-born child to Rumpelstiltskin for a chance to go to the ball, and Beauty’s Beast is–well, I won’t spoil that little detail here. Secondary characters get their own subplots, and backstories are fleshed out. Each episode has a Fairy Tale Land thread and a Storybook thread, which, for the most part, work well together, revealing not only the changes happening in Storybook but also the mysteries of the past (like why the Evil Queen enacted such a bizarre curse on everyone in the first place–which is a season-long, if not series-long, mystery).
The writers pepper the Storybrooke narrative with little clue as to the true identities of its inhabitants. Snow White is Mary Margaret Blanchard, Rumpelstiltskin is Mr. Gold, and the Evil Queen is Regina Mills (thus making me believe that she’s the original miller’s daughter from Rumpelstiltskin, and is yet another indicator of how fluid the boundaries of the fairy tales are in this show). Because the Queen has replaced everyone’s memories (breaking up relationships she found offensive, I suppose), their happy endings have turned into never-afters. Cinderella is a pregnant teen whose boyfriend’s father won’t let him see her. Hansel and Gretel are the results of a brief fling. And Snow White and her prince may feel they belong together, but he’s married to someone else, and their attraction only bring lies, betrayal and heartache.
There are some parts of the worldbuilding that are hard to swallow. If everything’s stayed the same for 28 years, why has the mayor’s adopted kid managed to grow up while his schoolmates haven’t aged a day? And I only realized a couple of episodes ago that the creators of Lost are behind this series, so I’m not at all confident that they can keep the storylines under control and nail the ending.
Do you watch Once Upon A Time? What do you think of it?
