Which Do You Prefer?

As you have read previously, there are a lot of differences between the gruesome tales and the delightful renditions.  I have had a hard time trying to figure out which version I like better. 

The gruesome ones seem more realistic to our violent ways of life than the Disney-type stories.  Princes do not randomly appear and marry a stranger within the course of one day.  More realistically, they would date around, lose interest, find someone new, and then eventually settle down.  If only life could be like a happily ever after fairytale. 

To decide between these two different versions, I would have to go with my mood for that day.  If I am feeling like a hopeless romantic, then I would definitely choose the delightful, unrealistic fairytales that gives everyone the hope of finding a prince.  If I am feeling angered or frustrated, I would choose the gruesome tales so that I could see the evil characters suffer and get what they deserved.

Overall, if I had to choose one, I would go with the delightful renditions.  I like seeing a happily ever after ending and like pretending that they do happen a lot, even though the chances are very slim.  For me, there is nothing like watching a good ol’ Disney Princess movie.

So, if you had to choose one version to read, which would you prefer?



Ever After

Ever After is a version of the fairytale Cinderella.  In this story, Danielle (Cinderella) is happy living with her father on the farm.  One day, he brings home a stepmother and two stepsisters.  The father dies of a heart attack and the stepmother takes control of the farm.  The stepmother, jealous of how much love Danielle got from her father, treats her Danielle like dirt.

One day, the prince comes across Danielle and, thinking that she is of high status, falls in love with her.  She pretends to be a countess for some time with the prince.  Throughout their times, she provides her “slave” opinions to him without giving away her secret.  These opinions make him fall even harder for her.

So far, this movie seems very similar to the original fairytale.  However, there are some controversial themes within this story.  After Danielle punches the rudest stepsister for stealing her mother’s dress, her stepmother whips her.  The next scene shows the other stepsister cleaning up Danielle’s wounds and speaking kindly to her.  At least in this story one sister has compassion!

After the stepmother finds out that Danielle was secretly seeing the prince, she has her sold to a creepy man.  This man always wanted Danielle to keep him company and be his sex slave.  She is able to get away from this man (by threatening to kill him with a knife) and reunite with her prince.  The stepmother and the evil stepsister are punished by forever doing the kingdom’s laundry.  The nice stepsister was able to live peacefully in the castle with Danielle and the prince.

Thankfully, this was not as gruesome as the Grimm Brothers’ version.  However, I do prefer the ending of the Grimm Brothers’ story because the evil characters do not get off easy.  They deserve a much harsher punishment than doing laundry! 

The 10th Kingdom

The 10^th Kingdom was a television series that was eventually combined into a 4 hour-long movie.  The plot takes place two centuries after Snow White and Cinderella had their fairytale adventure.  Snow White’s grandson, Prince Wendel, is about to be crowned King of the Fourth Kingdom.  The evil queen, the successor of Snow White’s evil stepmother, wants to take control of the Fourth Kingdom.  She escapes prison and turns the prince into a golden retriever.  Wendel escapes through a magic mirror that sends him to New York City (the 10^th Kingdom).  Virginia, a typical New York City girl, is dragged into this world with her father, Tony.  They are forced to help Wendel become human again so they can return home.

During the movie, there are evil creatures trying to prevent this heroic act from happening.  Wolf (the one from the three little pigs), who is actually a human, is manipulated in prison and sent to hunt Virginia by the orders of the evil queen.  He ties Virginia’s grandmother up and almost eats her; but decides not to when he realizes that he fell in love with Virginia.  In another scene, he is blamed for killing and devouring Sally Peep (Bo Peep’s relative).  It is found out that he did no such thing and that she was actually killed by her father for not winning the Shepherdess Competition.  Wolf turns into a good guy and helps Virginia and Tony try to save the prince and find their way home.

Also among the evil creatures are the trolls.  There are three teenage trolls and one father.  The father troll has magic shoes that allow him to be invisible.  However, when he wears them too long, he becomes dependent on the shoes, which makes him aggressive towards everyone around him and makes him extremely weak when he takes them off.  The father troll, who is under the loyalty of the evil queen, has to answer to her every call.  When she contacts him, she makes him suffer by creating agonizing pain in his head until he finds a mirror to answer her call.  When he gets fed up and denies her, she finds him and decapitates him.  She tells his three children that Virginia is responsible, so they get an even bigger vendetta towards Virginia.

Even after the princesses have been dead for about two centuries, violence is still occurring in their Kingdoms.  This just goes to show you that there are no true happily ever afters.

Beauty and the Beast (part two

A long time ago, there was a Roman writer named Apuleius.  He created a story similar to that of Beauty and the Beast.  His story was called “Cupid and Psyche”. Beauty and the Beast has been said to originate from this myth.

Psyche was a beautiful girl who had trouble finding a man.  Her stunning features mesmerized all men, but none wished to marry her.  Venus, being jealous of Psyche’s beauty, instructed Cupid to shoot her with an arrow and make her fall in love with a serpent.  Cupid is mesmerized by Psyche’s beauty just like all the other men. He decides to shoot himself with the arrow.  Psyche was told that she would fall in love with a serpent, but it was actually Cupid.

Every night, Cupid would enter her bedroom to make love to her, but she was forbidden to look at him.  Psyche’s sisters tell her to look at her husband because they are jealous of her wealth and knew that it is against the rules.  Psyche turns on a lamp and looks at her beautiful husband and realizes he is truly not a serpent. Cupid deserts his wife because there cannot be love without trust.

Psyche goes searching everywhere for her beloved husband.  Venus tries to trick her many times and almost kills her.  Venus succeeds in making Psyche curious about a magical box. When Psyche opens the box, she immediately falls asleep. Cupid, looking for Psyche, finds her and requests that Zeus makes her immortal. Psyche is awoken, is turned immortal, and marries Cupid.

I like how this story teaches you about love through trust. But, why is all the trust on the woman’s shoulders? The man saw beauty, desired it, and obtained it. He did not have to prove his trust like Psyche did.  I rather read a story like the new “Beauty and the Beast” than this version.  It is more romantic and equal between the man and woman.

Beauty and the Beast

This is my favorite Disney fairytale movie.  It is about a girl named Belle who doesn’t feel like she fits in anywhere.  Eventually, she ends up trading her life to save her father who was captured by a hideous beast.  She is forced to live in a creepy castle with an angry beast.  The Beast falls in love with her and she also falls in love with him.  Belle ends up saving the Beast’s life and ending the curse on the whole castle.  They live happily ever after, of course.

Another version, by Villeneuve, has a lot more heartbreak, murder, and sexual parts to it.  The Beast, a prince, lost his father and never saw his mother since she was defending their kingdom in a war.  The Beast was left under the care of a fairy that turned out to be evil.  When the Beast became an adult, the fairy tried to seduce him.  He refused and was turned into a beast. 

Belle was the daughter of a King and a good fairy.  The evil fairy attempted to murder Belle in order to marry her father, the King.  To protect Belle, she was put in the place of a merchant’s dead daughter.  This way, no one would be able to question her existence and past.

In the end, Belle falls in love with the Beast.  Even though the story line is a bit crazy and wrong in many ways, the ending is as romantic as the Disney version.

Snow White

Disney’s version of Snow White is so romantic.  A prince hears Snow White singing and he falls madly in love with her right away.  When the queen gets jealous of Snow White, she orders her to be killed. Snow White is able to get away and takes refuge with seven dwarfs.  The queen finds out where she is hiding.  She disguises herself as an old lady and presents Snow White a poisoned apple. Snow White eats it and falls into a deep sleep.  The queen is chased by the dwarfs and falls backwards off of a cliff.  The prince eventually finds Snow White in a clear casket.  He wakes her up with a kiss and they live happily ever after.

The Grimm’s version is not so much romantic as it is creepy.  First of all, the queen attempts to kill Snow White in a lot more ways.   She uses lace, a poisoned comb, and a poisoned apple.  The poisoned apple made Snow White stop breathing and the dwarfs thought she was dead.  The prince shows up in the story for the first time when he comes across the dead body in a glass casket.  He insists on taking the girl home with him.  He feels as though he cannot live without her.  As his men carry the casket, they stumble over a tree stump and the apple is lodged out of Snow White’s throat.  She awakens and marries the prince.  The queen is punished in the end by being forced to dance in heated iron shoes.

I do not understand why the prince wanted a dead girl’s body.  Even if she was the prettiest girl he had ever seen, it is extremely disturbing!

Cinderella

Cinderella loses her beloved father and becomes a slave to her evil stepmother.  She is forced to do all the chores for her stepmother and two stepsisters.  Eventually, she is visited by her fairy godmother and is able to attend the Prince’s Ball.  There, she dances with the prince and falls in love.  At midnight, she is forced to run away, leaving only a shoe behind.  The prince, who is madly in love, sends his messenger to go door to door in order to find Cinderella.  The glass slipper fits her foot and they are married at once.  Of course, they live happily ever after.

In the Grimm’s version of this fairytale, Cinderella still has a happy ending, but the stepsisters pay for the harsh things they have done to Cinderella.  During the time that the prince’s messenger was trying to find the mystery woman, the stepsisters devised a plan.  The first one cut off her heel in order to fit into the shoe.  Following shortly after, the second one cut off her toe.  A bird saw the blood coming from the glass slippers and revealed the truth about the stepsisters.  Cinderella is discovered to be the true mystery woman and she happily marries the prince.  The stepsisters, who did attend the wedding, had their eyes pecked out by birds.  They were forever punished by blindness.

The stepsisters had it coming to them!

The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid, Ariel, trades her voice to an evil witch, Ursula, in order to acquire legs.  She then proceeds to woo the random prince she just happens to spot and fall in love with.  Ariel fails to fulfill the requirements of the contract with Ursula and therefore Ursula begins to attack everyone.  In the end, Ariel and Prince Eric are able to defeat the evil witch and get approval from King Neptune.  The two lovebirds get married and live happily ever after.

This is not the way the writer, Hans Christian Andersen, intended the ending to be.  He originally wrote two endings to the famous story.

In one version, Ariel sees her beloved prince marry a princess.  She is offered a knife to kill the prince, but refuses.  She then jumps into the water and dies by turning into froth.

Hans decided to modify the ending to make it more enjoyable.  Instead of killing Ariel, he makes her a “daughter of the air” who is waiting to go to Heaven.  Either way she dies, but in this version, she dies in a nicer way.

For once, the original fairytale was not bloody or disturbing like the other fairytales previously discussed.

Sleeping Beauty

The Disney version of Sleeping Beauty is about a princess who is cursed by a witch, pricks her finger, and falls into a deep, seemingly endless sleep.  Eventually, a prince finds her and wakes her up with a kiss.  Of course, they live happily ever after.

An original Italian version provides Sleeping Beauty with a more gruesome plot, making it more entertaining and horrifying.

While Sleeping Beauty was asleep, a King finds her and rapes her.  Because of this, she gives birth to twins while she is still in a deep, endless sleep.  The fairies that watch over Sleeping Beauty help the children suckle.  One child attempts to fed from Sleeping Beauty’s finger.  This removes the poisoned splinter from her finger which finally woke her up.  The King finally returns and becomes even more in love with Sleeping Beauty now that she is awake.


However, the King is already married to the Queen.  The King’s wife finds out and is enraged.  She creates a plan that involves cooking the twins and feeding them to her husband.  The cook, however, only pretends to cook the children.  The Queen tells her husband that he ate his own children.  The King flips out (rightfully so) and buries his wife alive.  With his wife dead, the King is single again and decides to marry Sleeping Beauty. 

It sounds just like the random, twisted plots from Soap Opera on television!

Hansel and Gretel

The sweet version of Hansel and Gretel is already a bit violent with the ending.

It tells about two children, Hansel and Gretel, who go wandering into the forest and get lost.  They come across a gingerbread house and decide to enter.  The witch who lives there kidnaps them and fattens them up to eventually eat them.  When she is about to cook them, Hansel and Gretel escape by pushing the witch into the fire.

Even though the story is violent enough for children, the French version, “The Lost Children”, takes it a little step further.

The witch is actually the devil’s wife.  The devil’s wife puts together a sawhorse to put one of the children on.  She wants the children to bleed slowly.  The children pretend not to know how to get on, and so the devil’s wife demonstrates.  As she is lying down, the children slice her throat and are able to escape.

Surprisingly, the endings do not have that much of a difference.  Either way, the witch/devil’s wife is brutally murdered.  It only depends on the reader’s preference to the villain being burned alive or getting their throat sliced.

Moral of the story: Never take candy (or any kind of food) from strangers... especially one that lives in a gingerbread house that is deep in the woods.

The Pied Piper

The story most of us know about the Pied Piper is that there was a town that was being infested with mice.  No one knew how to get rid of this swarm.  Finally, a hero emerged.  This hero was a man who played some type of wind instrument, most likely a flute, to lure the mice out of the village.  He was successful and the village was saved.

In the original version, this story was theorized to have actually occurred in Hamelin, Germany.  This version does not have a happy ending.

The town was able to rid themselves of the mice by hiring the Pied Piper, but when it was time for them to pay him for the wonderful job he did, they refused.  The Pied Piper was enraged by this and so he came up with a revenge plot.  He uses his magical instrument to make every single child in the town follow him.  The parents and elders just stare at him, thinking their children will stop eventually.  The Pied Piper lured the children into the cave, the cave door shut, and the children were never to be found again.  Only one lame boy survived because he could not keep up with all the other children.

Some versions have the children being drowned by the Pied Piper, while others have them safely returned when the elders finally pay up.  The version that ends with the children being stuck in a cave is worse than any other.  It causes your mind to wander about what could have actually happened to those poor children who were captured by an angry man.

This fairytale teaches you that promises, especially ones about money, should never be broken.

Little Red Riding Hood

Little Red Riding Hood is a story that teaches children not to talk to strangers.  The girl's grandmother is eaten by a wolf, who then tricks the girl, but gets thwarted when the axman arrives.  The grandmother is safely taken out of the wolf, and the wolf is killed.

When there is a wild animal involved in a story, the characters are most likely going to be eaten or mauled. In children's fairytales, they take it down a notch by making the characters come back without even a scar.  The original Austrian version of this fairytale makes sure to include graphic details that make it somewhat more realistic and rated (at least) R.


The original story goes like this: Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother gets eaten by the wolf.  The wolf then uses the grandmother's intestines as a string on the door latch and her teeth, jaws and blood as rice, chops, and wine for Riding Hood to consume.  After Riding Hood eats her own grandmother, she gets into bed with the wolf, without any clothes on (who the heck knows why she was naked).  Once she is in the bed, she notices something "hairy" and the wolf eats her in one gulp.  There is no axman to save her.  The wolf actually wins.

If I heard the gruesome version as a child, I would be scarred for life and never talk to strangers!

Rapunzel

Rapunzel is a story about a girl with abnormally long hair who lives in a tower with a witch.  One day, she is rescued by a handsome prince who climbs her hair and sets her free.  They both live happily ever after.  This is a typical ending that occurs in all the delightful versions of fairytales.

An older version was not so kind to the characters in the stories, but this makes it all the more entertaining to read.

Rapunzel, who is given away to the witch in exchange for some plants her mother is obsessed with, goes to live in a tower far away from the world.  As she grows, her hair grows.  The witch uses Rapunzel’s hair as a means to get into the tower.  A prince happens to witness this strange event after hearing a lovely singing voice from above.  Once the witch leaves, he climbs Rapunzel’s hair and they meet for the first time. The prince goes to the tower every night after this first meeting and the two teenagers have some fun.  Rapunzel, not knowing what it meant to be pregnant, wondered why her clothes were getting to small for her.  When the witch found out about the prince, she tricked him into entering the tower, pushed him out of the window.  He landed in a thorn bush which injured his eyes and blinded him.  Rapunzel was then sentenced to a life of loneliness in a deserted place. 

Surprisingly, this gruesome story actually has a happily ever after.  The prince, still blind, comes across Rapunzel, who recognizes him immediately.  Her tears, which randomly have magical powers, heal the prince.  The prince, finally being able to see, finds his out he is the father of twins.  They are able to get back to his kingdom to live happily ever after.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

The delightful rendition of this fairytale tells of Goldilocks entering a stranger’s house, eating the food, and sleeping in the beds.  At the end, she is awoken by three bears, but manages to run away unscathed.

The two gruesome renditions of this fairytale are more violent and surprising, making it very entertaining.  In one version, Goldilocks is awoken by the three bears who rip her to shreds and devour her.  In the other version, Goldilocks survives, but at a high cost.  When frightened by the bears’ return, she jumps out of the window.  The story leaves the reader not knowing exactly what happened, but says that Goldilocks either breaks her neck due to the fall, or was arrested and sent to the “House of Correction”.