let me read you a story, let me read you a romance. — it’s very easy to tell the good satires and...

but if bluebeard had a fairy godmother we would have to pack it up i’m serious

i’m also glad this scene gives me the special opportunity to talk about fairy tales to a wider audience than i usually do on here. because while i certainly don’t believe curry barker intended to allude to the history of women as tellers of fairy tales, it’s appropriate that the projection puppeteering nikki’s body shrouds her possession, as well as nikki’s feelings of near-incestuous violation from a man she viewed as a brother, in the language of fairy tale. the feminized figure of the storyteller is present in modern perceptions of women as gossips who use elaborate language to obscure their meaning instead of saying it outright, a stereotype that frequently appears in discussion of heterosexual relationships. the derisive tone taken around this method of communication ignores the reality that women historically have not had, and still often do not have, the social freedom to speak openly about their experiences in mixed company. in from the beast to the blonde: on fairy tales and their tellers, marina warner spends the first three chapters interrogating the figure of the gossiping woman and the figure of the storyteller, focusing on the historical connection both roles have to women and feminized labor, from stories told by nurses to their young charges to the 17th century literary salons frequented by les conteuses, whose work was denigrated on the basis of being perceived as stories for uneducated lower class people, particularly women and children. “The collectors of the nineteenth century occasionally recorded the name of their sources when they took down the story, though they were not as interested in them as historians would be now,” warner notes. “One salient aspect of the transmission of fairy tales has not been looked at closely: the female character of the storyteller.” near the conclusion of the third chapter, she writes,

Gossip and fairy tales have in common a cavalier relation to accuracy; the truths they seek to pass on do not report events with the veracity of a witness in court. They are partial, tending to excess in both praise and blame; tale-bearing is a partisan activity. Though both forms of speech tend to be practised by the least advantaged members of society, they can achieve considerable, even dangerous, influence by such means. Defamation, scandal, hearsay, all aspects of gossip, reappear metamorphosed in fairy tale’s plots, featuring wicked stepmothers, false brides, bloodsucking ogres, and predatory suitors. […] Gossip and narrative are sisters, both ways of keeping the mind alive when ordinary tasks call; the fictions of gossip — as well as the facts — act as compass roses, pointing to many possibilities.

i’ve only seen three examples to my memory but three is enough to raise curiosity about origin: mordred in the post-vulgate and le morte d'arthur, being a child of incest between half-siblings, sent out to sea with all other babies born on may day by order of his biological father; the middle high german poem gregorius, in which pope gregory i, imagined as a child of sibling incest, is placed in a box on a boat and pushed out to sea with the expectation that god will protect him; fíacha fer mara in irish mythological and historical tradition, the son of a king and his daughter who is wrapped in a purple robe and set to sea by his father. mordred and fíacha fer mara both have folkloric record of being found and raised by fishermen, but fíacha fer mara has been the hardest for me to research. this is extra frustrating because, while i don’t know how far back his legend dates, as a figure he is easily the oldest. i have work in a few minutes so i can’t research at the moment but as soon as i can i’m hitting up every academic website i have access to. if any of you have any further stories within this pattern, please share! i’m looking for specifically children of incest returning after being sent out to sea, but stories that have at least one of these elements could also be useful. we’re getting to the bottom of this.

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imagine getting banned from fairy tales for saying what little red riding hood did to her grandma

💌 pearlsmutual Follow

what did she do to her grandma

🦪 iphigeniacomplex

she ate that old woman

YES SWEEP? i will totally commence in that case! in the meantime please message me if you’re a mutual and want to get involved (we do not need to have spoken prior to this) either here or on discord (riverdale2017). if anyone has any thoughts on what they’d like to see from the project overall, definitely feel free to send asks. i will be learning the ropes of poll-based contests like this, so any advice is also appreciated!

you want to go here so bad.

a well full of blood! i can’t stop thinking about it. to escape abuse in the home, only to find that, just as you were relegated to the hearth in your father’s house, there are places in your husband’s castle where you are not permitted to go. to be led, perhaps, by your treacherous sister to discover this mark of violence which exists outside explanation. to emerge with blood in your eyes, ears, mouth, and return without question to the track of your happy ending. your sister took the well of blood as an opportunity to steal your life, but the well of blood was always in the castle. your sister has been punished. it’s still behind the chamber door.

as this has taken off considerably, which i did not anticipate, i would like to clarify that the understanding of the form i speak of here is distinct from “love of the work”. to postulate that good satire must emerge from a place of personal love for what it is satirical of, for example, is a perspective that blatantly ignores the history and intent of satire. i don’t think catch-22 works as a novel because joseph heller loved military bureaucracy, it works because (among other things) the continuous use of paradox as a stylistic tool reflects heller’s own experiences encountering the absurdity of military logic.

in the context of fairy tales, lack of emotional attachment is not the problem. i believe the problem is a generally condescending and distinctly literary attitude around a form that often rejects literary structure, frequently coming out of a history of oral storytelling specifically among poor communities, which is altered through telling, and later through collecting, and later still through rewriting in an attempt at pedagogy (to say nothing of the précieuses). many attempts to reimagine, satirize, or pastiche fairy tales seem to me to fail because they are not approaching the medium of “fairy tale” as a legitimate medium on its own. people who love fairy tales do this, too, and i do not think presuming emotion is a solid base for any kind of artistic criticism. it does not matter if you like fairy tales. you just have to be able to pick them apart and understand how they work.

tl;dr satire does not require love to be good, and i made this post because i fucking love the musical into the woods and you can watch the complete obc proshot (with generally accurate closed captioning) here

a well full of blood! i can’t stop thinking about it. to escape abuse in the home, only to find that, just as you were relegated to the hearth in your father’s house, there are places in your husband’s castle where you are not permitted to go. to be led, perhaps, by your treacherous sister to discover this mark of violence which exists outside explanation. to emerge with blood in your eyes, ears, mouth, and return without question to the track of your happy ending. your sister took the well of blood as an opportunity to steal your life, but the well of blood was always in the castle. your sister has been punished. it’s still behind the chamber door.

and obviously while i’m approaching it here from a storytelling perspective inconsistent with the structure we see in non-literary fairy tales, the thing i really love most about this is how perfectly consistent it is with cinderella and the particular anxieties explored in that story. a well full of blood is marital sex, as in bluebeard*, but the presence of her vengeful sister and the false bride archetype furthers the present themes of sexual jealousy in a way that nicely rounds things out. the origin of the bloody well is not a concern, once everything is returned to its correct place. but the image of the bloody well! the concept of the prince figure shifting into a bluebeard figure for this brief episode in cinderella’s married life! “how does cinderella/her sister feel about this” is an irrelevant question for folkloric analysis, but for the purpose of storytelling it positively haunts!!

*designated nuance asterisk