106 – Qualities of the Fairy Tale Genre

Once upon a time, Fay once again joined Oren and Chris, this time to discuss fairy tales. The first question on our minds: what is a fairy tale, exactly? Is it any story with fairies in it? Does it need to have a happy ending? We also talk about when a fairy tale transitions into a normal fantasy story, the morals fairy tales are famous for, and why people complain about eagles in Lord of the Rings but not the Hobbit. You’d better listen, or else your kingdom will fall under some kind of unrealistic but very ironic curse.

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Sonia. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris:  You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Mike Hernandez and Chris Winkle.

[intro music)

Chris: This episode is brought to you by our patrons, Kathy Ferguson, professor of Political Theory in Star Trek and Ari Ashkenazi. This is the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is?

Oren: Oren.

Chris: And we have a special guest for a second return, Fay. Fay is from Writing Alchemy. It’s a podcast and also I think Fay has writing on writingalchemy.net. 

Fay: I do. 

Oren: Writing? On Writing Alchemy? No, you wouldn’t. Never.

Fay: Yes. [laughs]

Chris: So, we’re gonna talk about fairytales and what kind of unique properties they have. Fay, do you wanna give us an introduction to fairytales? 

Fay: Yeah, so right now I’m basically writing fairytales, so I’m very passionate about it. And so basically what we’re talking about today specifically is unique aspects of the fairytale genre. And I think one of the biggest things we need to start this conversation off with is, what is a fairytale? Because it’s actually pretty complicated, because there’s this history of folk tales, which are oral stories, and then we have a modern conception of fairytales, which is still rooted in that, but it’s kind of, I consider it to have kind of morphed into this kind of genre that kind of spans the original folk tales, but also original written works. So, okay. According to Miriam Webster Online, a fairytale is a story involving fantastic forces and beings. So when we look at the folk tale genre specifically, there’s a wide range of stories. You got animal fables, and you got kind of myth kind of things. There’s this wide berth of things.

Fay: So fairytales are specifically ones that are involving these kind of fantastic forces and beings. So, like witches and fairies and mermaids and all of these things, but also a lot of things like magic items and unexplained curses and these other things. So that’s pretty much what I consider fairytales to be. I consider fairytales to be tales of wonder, but that have roots in folktale traditions, which means that we typically associate them with a pseudo-medieval setting that’s kind of a, if you’re looking at the Grimms, Germanic traditions, we associate that with Europe. Medieval Europe as well as creatures and magic are the specific ones we expect from folk tales.

Fay: So we wouldn’t necessarily expect to see a more modern creation or entity like you wouldn’t necessarily see vampires in them, right? But you see like dwarves and elves and fairies and those sorts of entities.

Oren: So does that make D&D a fairytale?  Because D&D has all of those things.

Fay: It also has a lot of other stuff too. And that’s kind of the complexity of every genre has its origins. And modern genres grow and change and they shed some stuff, but they continue some stuff, you know, and they always have sets of criteria. And so I feel like what’s weird about fairytales is they’ve sort of shed some of their original folk tale stuff. For example, Hans Christian Andersen wrote many fairy tales. 

Fay: Now some of the stuff he wrote was like things he remembers from his childhood, but some of them are actual original stories that were never oral stories, like The Little Mermaid, which are very much considered classical fairytales, but they were never oral stories. But he was writing at that historic time point when they were being codified. So like even the Grimms ones, a lot of people don’t know this history, but they were collecting fairy tales. They rewrote them. They made major modifications because what works well orally doesn’t necessarily work well written.

Fay; So they made major modifications and a lot of the moralization that we associate with dramatic fairytales is actually from the Grimms Brothers. And that historic time period they were writing it, they inserted more morality, they removed a lot of sexuality because there was like promiscuity and stuff and references to adultery. And so they removed that. They added more violence. So like Rumpelstiltskin, the original ending, he flies off in a spoon. Okay. Giant spoon flies off, you know? But in the Grimms version, he tears himself into, because he’s so mad that he failed. Yeah. 

Oren: So what you’re saying is that the Grimms Brothers were basically the American movie industry. 

Fay: [laughing]

Oren: It’s like, hey, let’s adapt this story. You know what it needs? More explosions. Done. 

Fay: So I guess part of what I’m trying to say is, there’s this huge complex history, even in the folktales themselves, where the things we think of as oral stories even are heavily modified. Now I do wanna mention that right now we’re starting to get some publication of original unmodified fairytales.

Fay: So it’s called the Turnip Princess. There was this recent discovery of this giant box of original Germanic fairytales  that was from a guy who never made it famous because he didn’t alter the fairytales. He collected them faithfully, and he actually did more of going to the actual rural storytellers than the Grimms brothers did.

Fay: The Grimms Brothers actually had a lot of women and other people who are invisible behind them, who actually did the actual collecting, and their names are not famous. Just thought I should mention that, a lot of women and stuff. But this guy actually went around and I wish I could remember names, but I’m not good with names.

Chris: That’s fine.

Fay:  It’ll be in the links. And he went around and collected these original fairytales and they’re starting to publish some of them in English and the Turnip Princess is the name of the book. And what’s fascinating about them is some of them are actually very similar, but they’re more diverse in terms of gender roles, in terms of not having the heavy moralization. And some of them are extremely dreamlike. If you read some of the original Grimms stories, some of them are very dreamlike. Like there is no explanation for anything. It’s really surreal. But some of these are even more so. It’s really like, I swear this person is just retelling a weird dream they had. 

Chris: Hans Christian Andersen also had some very trippy stories. He had a huge variety. If you actually look through his entire collection, and some of them are, yeah. He was tripping on something. Maybe he wrote his stories-

Fay: Heavily inspired by dreams. 

Oren: I mean, that sounds pretty logical to me. Like based on my understanding of fairytales, like the definition that I’ve always used to differentiate, say, a fairytale from a D&D campaign, is that it just has a lot of the same elements. Whereas in a fairytale, I’ve always felt that themes are more important than anything else. I’d certainly say that that’s true of the Little Mermaid, or the Snow Queen or Peter Pan even, which is pretty recent, right? Like Peter Pan was written in the 1890s, I think, but we consider Peter Pan a fairytale. And I think it’s, and the reason Peter Pan is considered a fairytale and not high fantasy, I think, is that it is more about themes than anything else.

Chris: Do you wanna elaborate on what, like you mean by theme? 

Oren: Well, like Peter Pan is all about not growing up, right? And being a child forever and that’s what it’s about. And nothing else really matters. It’s not saying there’s nothing else in there, but it’s just that that is the prime mover of the story. And if you want, I could get into a way that that can clash with other stories, but Fay, it sounded like you were gonna say something. I think I cut you off. 

Fay: Oh, I’d have to disagree that that would be, I would say it’s maybe a common trait of fairytales, and maybe it’s something that is increasingly a part of the modern or the more current fairytale genre. But I’d say if you look at some of the original fairytales, like especially these original oral stories that are much less modified. It’s really like someone was just telling the story and they were mixing and matching pieces from different stories and they’re like, Hmm, what’s gonna make an interesting twist? I know I’ll steal this piece from this story. And they just plunk it down. I know, I’ll take this piece from this story and it’s really like you took six stories that we would consider like well characterized and with a good narrative structure and they put it in a blender and they pulled out pieces from the hat and they just wanted to make an interesting thing for their audience.

Fay: So I have to say that there’s not, a lot of the original ones, or actually, I can’t say a lot, but some of the original ones definitely don’t have anything in regards to a theme. 

Chris: I would call folklore the original crowdsourcing where it doesn’t really have one author. What it has is an evolution as it’s retold and again and again and again, and I feel like if I were to draw a line between what I consider a fairy tale and what I consider, you know, modern stories, although it’s very, very blurry so that you don’t have to draw a line there. But I would say that the primary difference is that just things that are retold orally, sort of have different characteristics because of the way they’re retold. They tend to, they have no single architect, so trying to keep a cohesive theme would be very, very difficult. And they tend to just drop all of the details. 

Chris: Like if you actually look at some of the original ones and the original, you know, Grimms collections, they’re incredibly short, way shorter than a writer who is writing down a story would ever write. Because all of the details are gone because nobody remembers it. You know, if you keep repeating them orally and that’s why there’s no names usually or there’s only a few, like very, you know, Rumpelstiltskin is obviously a very memorable name. That is the kind of iconic name of that story. But in general, most names are forgotten, so it’s just the Prince and the Princess and other titles that people can actually remember, which I think creates some differences. But that shortness does give the feeling of simplicity to the story, I think. And I think, when we take those fairytales and we form them into sort of what I would call fairytale fantasy, which is like the modern equivalent. It’s like a fantasy shove genre that is meant to be like the original folklore.

Chris: I think that we wanna, part of it is sort of maintaining almost that simplistic narrative, and that includes some strong theming. And some strong moralizing.

Fay:  Sometimes. 

Chris: Sometimes, yeah. I don’t think moralizing is necessary either.

Fay: I think seeing moralization is on a continuum, right? There’s a lot of playing with themes of virtues and vices, for example. I wouldn’t call it mild, but it’s kind of the medium form and some stories just play with the virtues and vices and they never fully moralize, but you know, people with vices leads them to a fall, whatever. And then other things actually have like a full on, this is the moral of the story. But yeah, I would definitely say there’s kind of a continuum from the actual historic oral traditions to the modern fairy tale fantasy where modern fairy tale fantasy, you often have things that modern audiences expect. Rich characterization, right? 

Fay: There’s one fairytale that I’ve read in the Grimms Brothers books that actually has characterization. At all, like outside. I mean, I don’t think “this blank person was happy or sad” really counts. You have to actually dig into some aspect of this person’s complex emotional life. And I’m pretty sure it only happened because you were trying to add a moral to a story that didn’t have morals. So it’s called the Master Thief, and this guy basically runs a series of pranks on people and including some priests and stuff, and the local nobility. And I’m pretty sure that was probably just a story where, and there’s other versions, where the master thief ends up as a king or whatever.

Fay: So I think part of it is just the enjoyment of the tricks and you know, the enjoyment of these powerful people being made fools of. Right. But the Grimms Brothers are like, we have to make a moral, so they actually added this whole beginning piece. I suspect, I believe they probably added this, but someone added this whole beginning piece, which is about him showing up and meeting his father and having this talk with his father that shows that he regrets becoming a thief, and yet at the same time, he’s really proud of his abilities. And that is the only time I actually have ever seen characterization in a Grimms fairytale. And it’s added, I think, either by the Grimms Brothers or some other storyteller, simply to add morals to an immoral story about a prankster who makes fun of powerful people.

Chris: To me it sounds, that was definitely my theory when it came to the Princess and the Frog. Looking at the Grimms Brothers version, with the Princess and the Frog, the Grimms Brothers are very misogynistic. They make a lot of things more negative for women and in Princess and the Frog, the Princess is basically the villain in the story, and the Frog Prince is like kind of a victim. And there just this whole section at the end of the Grimms version that’s about like, the Prince has a loyal servant, Hans, and he just like pops in at the end. And he has this great love for his master, and it’s like they were writing fan fiction or something and I don’t know for sure, but I felt like they were trying to demonize the princess and then they were, they wanted an example of what like moral goodness was for the end. And so they inserted this morally good character, which is, of course, a man. That, that’s what it feels like to me. 

Chris: But, you know, some of these things, it’s hard to trace where they come from. No head canon accepted for sure. One thing that I found very interesting is if you look at the same tales in different collections, is seeing the different moral lenses of different time periods and different collectors.

Chris: I really like comparing Peralt to the Grimms Brothers. Because Peralt was not as sexist as the Grimms Brothers. His stuff was much less problematic in that way, but he was classist.  And so you get all of these classist messages in Peralt’s versions instead of the misogynist ones.

Fay: Yeah. And then a lot of the Grimms brothers, it’s like, all about the proud princess and the noble commoner who somehow forces her to marry him, which is just…because she was prideful and now she needs to be humble or whatever. And it’s just like, okay, pride is bad, but this is so sexist. 

Oren: Look, you gotta spin the wheel of what kind of bigotry you get in this story. Okay. So like sometimes, you know, sometimes you get double. Why not? Could be fun.

Fay: And that’s like the history, you have this kind of weird rooting in history, like again, Hans Christian Andersen writing new stories, which aren’t oral stories. So that’s why I kind of really considered a continuum towards the modern fairytale fantasy where I think one of the biggest pitfalls of the genre is this historic moralization and trying to make sure you’re not accidentally recreating symbolism. That’s actually pretty messed up because you fell in love with a particular story. For me, one of the aspects of the genre that I absolutely love and think is pretty unique to fairytales is the type of magic that is in fairytales. 

Fay: So, so I know you guys all had this episode about limits on magic, and the interesting thing about fairytale magic is it’s so unlimited. It’s very creative and I kind of consider it a dreamlike sense where it doesn’t necessarily have limits, but you will have specific things where this magic item does this one thing, and every story just takes a totally different take on the magic. But it’s very creative in terms of creating surreal imagery and humor and strangeness, and it’s people are willing to accept weird, surreal things in fairytales more than other genres, and to accept magic, where kind of the point is that the heroes don’t necessarily understand how magic works. They’re in a world of magic, but they don’t necessarily have access to doing magic.

Chris: Yeah, I would say that fairy tales tend to have what is soft magic instead of hard magic. And people have different words for this, but soft magic is a magic that, its job is to instill a sense of wonder. And for that it needs to be mysterious, you know? And for it to be mysterious, we can’t know exactly how it works. And usually the trick to soft magic is you don’t usually have your heroes wielding the magic themselves. 

Fay: Exactly. At most they wield a magic item.

Chris: At most, they wield a magic item. We don’t really understand this item, but we know it does a specific thing and, yeah. So it kind of keeps that, and I think it’s worth returning to Tolkien a little bit because Tolkien also had soft magic. That was one of the things that he took a lot of inspiration from folklore. I mean, he’s thought his work is thought of as the origin of the modern fantasy genre in general and his work is also supposed to be archetypal of the high fantasy subgenre and specifically, but like his inspiration was all folklore.

Chris: I’m wondering if maybe the divergence between that and also, so D&D modeled off of Tolkien, so I think this might apply to D&D as well. The divergence point I think might actually be some of the complexity because again, fairytales were very short, very simplistic, and Tolkien made this elaborate world with so much detail and it made it feel very real. And I’m wondering if that’s kind of what divides it from a lot of what we would consider fairytale fantasy. 

Fay: I would make an argument though that that’s not always the case. Like it really depends on culture. Tolkien was based on European fairytale traditions, which do seem to have these short stories and they’re very short and simplistic. I would argue if you look at some of the stories in the Arabian Nights, for example. They’re very long connected series of stories. Like some of them aren’t totally standalone, short-ish stories, but even some of the standalone stories. They go on for pages and pages and pages. And I don’t know as much about the history of that in specifics,  but I do think we have to kind of separate different cultures have different traditions, and the European traditions seem to have been more short stories as far as at least what has become popular.

Fay: But there’s other cultures that have very lengthy plots that are weird and interconnected, and they do have some of these great surreal imagery and magic that the main characters don’t wield, but experience. And again, it’s that wonder of the soft magic. 

Chris: Well, Arabian Nights is a written work, and I think, and it’s hard to say how much of it started as oral. How much of it is a collection? How much was written? I think Arabian Knights or 1 and 1000 Nights. I think the history of it is actually kind of mysterious.  Like people know that’s about specific authors that supposedly wrote more and added to it. And there was claims that it, it came from Arabian folklore, but I’m not sure how much people know to what extent it actually did come from oral stories or how much was made up by Europeans. 

Fay: Some of it definitely, like Aladdin was made up by Europeans, though I would say that there are Syrian manuscripts. I believe they’re Syrian. Oh, I’m pretty sure. I have one book that claims to be the oldest, like that has this whole long introduction about why this manuscript and it’s incomplete, but it’s basically, this is a Syrian manuscript and its cohesive narrative structure and aspects of that. And there’s a lot of arguments. This particular translator is, I believe the translator is making around why he chose this work as the true Arabian night or 1001 nights and that this is a specific manuscript with a cohesive structure. And the idea is that later it got taken and dumped into and had a lot of stuff dumped into it. So some of them are stories from different cultures and there’s influences from stories that might be from India and there’s a lot of local stories from various parts of the whole region. Egyptian, Persia, like all of the different cultures, plus a bunch of Europeans added some stuff. So you’re right that it’s mysterious.

Fay: But I did wanna mention that there are some manuscripts that are older that have fewer stories, but maybe a little more cohesiveness where maybe like one person maybe could have written this. 

Chris: I mean, it is complicated when you have so many stories together, right? Because it’s not just one story. It’s many stories. And so some of ’em come from one place and some come from others. 

Fay: But I think your point around epic fantasy, having this more intricate plots, and I would say that maybe it’s not just having more complexity so much as the type of complexity, such as an intricate plot in terms of not just a weird series of events that are maybe only sort of connected and they’re just the experiences of this adventurer, but that high fantasy tends to have these really intricate political plots or whatever they are, they operate differently than a fairytale plot. The fairytale plot’s more like running you through a series of weird, fun things that this adventure faced versus a cohesive, maybe there’s an antagonist or there’s this larger, overarching, cohesive thing like what Tolkien did so well.

Oren: So maybe I’m bad at words. This is a distinct possibility because when, earlier I was talking about how I think that one of the defining themes of fairytales is that, or the defining aspects of fairytales is how important themes are. What you guys were describing is what I meant. 

Chris: [laughing] Which part of what we were describing?

Oren: If we go back a little bit, describing how in fairytales, like the magic is just kind of. Like strange and mysterious and, and nobody really stops to question it. It just happens.. And like, one of my useful distinctions is between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings because the Hobbit, to me, feels like a fairytale because it is about these themes of adventure and greedy dwarves and like a dragon with treasure, right? No one who’s reading the Hobbit, or at least I don’t, I have yet to read these pieces is asking why didn’t the Eagles just take them all the way to the lonely mountain?  But we ask that question about Lord of the Rings because Lord of the Rings has a much more complex and much more concrete world where we actually, in Lord of the Rings, we actually care about whether or not there are enough orcs in this army to realistically take Helms Deep. We don’t care about that in The Hobbit because the Hobbit isn’t about world building or character motivation or believability, it’s about themes. That’s how I feel about a lot of fairytales. 

Fay: And it’s a sequence of interesting events that maybe are interesting in and of themselves and they are perhaps themselves the most interesting aspect of it and maybe also bring out themes around greed or whatever.

Chris: I would also like to mention that scale I think, is important here because fairytales are almost always on personal scale where it’s about one person in and the adventures they go on, whereas the Lord of the Rings, and this is how it’s different from the Hobbit, is world scale. It’s about a world and what is happening to that world, and it has multiple characters in different places of the world. And that’s definitely a very epic fantasy thing to have world scale, like massive conflicts. Whereas I think that fairytale fantasy is one of the genres that really focuses on personal conflicts 

Fay: And family and small community conflicts. I mean, there are some situations where other people are affected, but I think that point is really good that it’s focusing on a smaller scale in terms, and oftentimes you will have fairytales where you have an evil king and some person becomes king instead, who’s better. Or maybe just better at doing bad things, but in some cases, but it is focused on the individual, it’s not focused on, oh, this king is awful, so this hero rises up to depose them because they have some idea of justice. It’s really focused on here’s this interesting trickster character, and the king keeps interacting with him until he replaces the king. 

Oren: So like, to give an example of how this works, I think in one book in a way that I think it showed the difference in a bad way is the novel Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Which starts off very much like a fairytale. It feels like a fairytale. It’s we live in this valley, and in this valley there’s a wizard and the wizard takes one girl every 10 years and she has to go live with him in his tower for 10 years. And nobody knows why he does that. It’s just a thing that happens. And then when of course our protagonist is that girl, she starts to learn magic. And in her magic is that she can, one of the things she can do is summon a hugely elaborate silk dress, like for a ball, that probably costs the income of like 50 peasants would make in a year. And she can do that instantly. And we don’t question that. But then later it becomes more of an epic fantasy where it’s like, well, now we’re talking about the politics with our neighboring kingdom, and the politics between these wizards. And you start to ask, okay, why is this wizard taking a girl from the village and making her live with him for 10 years?

Oren: He’s not romantically interested in them. He’s not teaching them magic. He does teach her magic, but most of them he doesn’t. He and. Like, why is he doing that? And the explanation is just because he’s that kind of guy.  Yeah. It’s like, you need an explanation now because you’ve made it more complicated.

Oren: And now we start to ask questions like, wait a minute. If magic can create huge lengths of silk instantly with no cost, why isn’t everybody wearing silk? You know, and no one asks that question in the original, in the fairytale format. But then you switch it. So that’s like, I could tell when the story tried to shift gears and I was like, Nope, nope. Go back. You can’t. You can’t just ignore that. You can’t just pretend that never happened. 

Fay: Once you start as a more pure fairytale, you gotta live in that world. Unless you want to subject yourself to a whole new set of criteria, which your plot might not be ready for. 

Oren: But then again, the reviews for that book are very good. So maybe I’m the only one in the world who was bothered by that. 

Fay: One of the other aspects of fairytale genre, which is not true of all folklore, but I think is kind of tied into the fairytales genre specifically is the idea of happy endings being kind of expected. And I, I thought I’d just kind of bring this out because this is actually something that I am very attracted to, both as a reader and a writer. Now, part of it is I have high anxiety. So as a neurodiverse person with high anxiety, I actually find suspense hard to take. I actually have to specifically spoil books for myself so that I can read them because suspense very quickly becomes unpleasant for me because of my anxiety. And so one of the things I like about fairytales is that they have happy endings.

Fay: It’s almost a guarantee, you know, it’s gonna work out and you know, and I think it’s not just that, you know, people like me who have high anxiety appreciate that. But what I also as a writer appreciate about it is it does several things which are very interesting. It shifts the focus from the suspenseful what’s going to happen question to a more wonder filled what’s gonna happen next question, where it’s less about, again, the suspense of worrying about the characters, ’cause you know they’re gonna be okay. And it’s more about what weird or interesting thing is gonna happen next. So it’s a different type of plot, but the other thing that it really allows, and I think you see this in a lot of original fairytales, is because you’re creating this kind of sense of safety, with the happy ending, you can actually delve into some pretty intense stuff, and that sense of safety makes it more easy on the reader to handle. So like a lot of fairytales, I would argue, have some deep symbolism where they’re really kind of dealing with, I would argue perhaps even abusive family dynamics, where you might have one parent split into two and one is the abusive parent and one is the good parent, and the abusive parent is literally trying to kill the child.

Fay: Like in most cases, that’s not true. Uh, there are some rare cases. But I would suggest that trying to kill the child might simply be the metaphorical experience of feeling like who you are as a person is being crushed. The experience of abuse where you feel like something important about yourself is under attack in a way that it might be destroyed. And I think that it allows people to delve into some of this really intense stuff in a metaphorical way or not, because you have this structure of, you know things are gonna turn out well for this character. And it creates a sense of, I can go to this dark place, or actually, I don’t like to say the word dark, this intense, painful place.

Fay: Because I know that in the end, they’re going to get to a better place and they will get to a place where they are valued and not under this kind of attack. So I think that that is a useful mechanism for that. And one of the things I like about fairytales. 

Chris: And I think that is certainly one of the things that a lot of the modern fairytale fantasy is kind of made a strong convention. Yes. I think if we go back and look at the, the original fairy tales, a lot of them do have happy endings, but there are also a few that are moralizing that have bad endings. I think probably a fairly well known one is Hans Christian Andersen’s, I think it’s called The Red Shoes, and it’s a moralization story about vanity, about a girl who gets these red shoes and she doesn’t think about anything but her red shoes and how beautiful her red shoes are, and then ends up dancing for all eternity. 

Oren: Look, I would hazard that when your red shoes look this good, you don’t have to think about anything else. 

Fay: I think that’s a good point, and I think it’s also that kind of transition from the historic, more original folktale where Hans Christian Andersen is part of this transition, but he’s still really heavily inspired by the original folktale traditions where you have some bad endings. There are some fairytales that have bad endings. But I think the transition to the modern fairytale genre, like fairytale, it’s gotten lighter. 

Chris: It’s gotten lighter.

Fay: And sometimes you have that I intense abuse stuff still, but there is in the modern fairy tale fantasy, an absolute expectation of happy endings. Whereas historically, you’re absolutely right, it’s not always the case. 

Chris: And, it’s been interesting to see because right now in sort of, popular stories, it’s all getting into all this like grimdark stuff and like, the movies. It’s interesting to see all these, like retellings of fairy tales is a very dark thing. And kind of like, but it’s not, it’s still not the same as the originals. I thought of another one, I think probably more famous, is it Midas? It’s about a king who everything he touches turns into gold.

Fay: Well, that’s a Greek legend though. 

Oren: King Midas. 

Chris: Oh, really? I’ve seen that told with fairytales. 

Fay: I thought that was a Greek legend. 

Chris: You could be right. 

Fay: Well, of course legends and fairytales are all folk traditions. Right. Well, I do wanna briefly mention that the modern genre, like some stories are just fairytale inspired, like where you, just a core plot piece. Mercedes Lackey has a series about the elemental Masters where she takes. It’s almost unrecognizable by the time the story’s done, but it’s core is based on a fairytale plot, which is like one extreme of almost no fairytale left, where there’s other extremes where she actually has another series called The 500 Kingdoms Series, where it’s a fairytale world with fairytale magic and she makes up some really fascinating rules where it’s like the magic wants stories to be completed and people who know the magic have to manipulate events so that, oh, hey, this situation looks like a story underway with a plot I want the ending of, and the magic pushes it and it comes true. So I wanted to mention that there’s this interest, that continuum, but I think there’s also an interesting continuum in that the historic fairy tales had a lot of humor and a lot of darkness so that you get modern fairytale fantasy where some of it’s really humorous, like the 500 Kingdom series is a really good example of humor, but then you get the super grimdark stuff too, and so it’s like they’re isolating half of the fairytale and exploding it into a full thing. It’s just the humor or just grimdark. 

Oren: Alright. Well, that will be, that is a good thought to end on ’cause we are past time. 

Fay: Sorry.

Oren; No, it’s great. This has been a great discussion. We clearly have not even gotten close to being done. We didn’t even get to my theory about how superhero movies are the modern fairy tale.

Chris: Oh my God. I feel like another episode on just talking about what a modern fairytale is. With the same kind of idea of crowdsourcing generation would be very interesting. Oh yeah. 

Oren: But for now, thank you again for joining us today. Pleasure to be here. You guys at home, if anything that we said piqued your interest, you can email us at [email protected]. Otherwise, we will talk to you next week. 

[outro music]

Chris: This has been the Myth Grant Podcast opening, closing theme. The Princess who saved herself by Jonathan Colton.

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