Writer's Block: Happily ever after

[anagramofbrat]

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God, I had so many. As a kid i had these ancient hardbound copies of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales and the Arabian Nights (I think the translated bowdlerized versions count here) that belonged to Mom and I think I reread them like once a month, not to mention the $color Fairy Books were on pretty constant rotation in and out of the library. Course now I'm wondering where they all are since it just occurred to me they are missing from my bookshelves. :(

But my favorites... "The Snow Queen", "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp", "The Firebird", "The Six/Seven/Wild Swans", any tale that has three siblings in it and the two older ones prove to be utter dumbasses that then has to be rescued by the youngest while he completes their quest by DOING IT RIGHT.

I also like retellings of fairy tales that play with tropes: Fractured Fairy Tales from Rocky and Bullwinkle, Politically Correct Fairy Tales from a decade or so before, and Jay Williams' The Practical Princess and Other Liberating Fairy Tales, to take some examples. I used to have a gorgeously illustrated hardcover edition (apparently the edition with Friso Henstra illustrations never came in hardcover) of "Petronella" from that last collection. (That tale was cool because the youngest son ended up a girl who sets off to rescue a prince from a local enchanter, except the prince turns out to be a total douche and she decides to take the enchanter home to the King and Queen instead.) I also tend to like novel length retellings of fairy tales as well - I just got finished with a novel that explored the exploding AIDS crisis in 1980s New York using "The Wild Swans" as a backdrop. And I have a soft spot for Anne Rice's pornographic Sleeping Beauty series as well.

And yeah, I like Disney movies. Though inevitably the tales are so sanitized and saccharine that the only interesting bits left in those are the villains.

Comments

[breakableheart.livejournal.com]

The REAL Snow Queen is awesome. I loved my fairy tale book and read it over and over; it was not disneyfied. The girl with the red shoes got her feet cut off, the match girl died looking at her grandmother in the flame, the mermaid felt the pain of knives every step she took. Huzzah!