- Not one word is out of place, whether it is a short story or a fairytale novel.
- There is usually a strong moral in it but it is conveyed without preaching.
- It is often humorous (which is by far the best way of getting any message across. People remember funny).
- Justice will out.
- A good fairytale will show us something about ourselves and often it isn't that nice. To take Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince to name one example, there is a lot of implied criticism of materialism in it. The Little Match Girl is even more condemning of poverty and people walking by the needy.
- You remember it long after you read it.
- Disney have trouble adapting it because the original version is violent (see the original Hans Christen Andersen version of The Little Mermaid and then see what Disney had to do to be able to make an acceptable tale that wasn't going to land them with, in the UK, an 18 Certificate, completely bypassing their core audience).
- It will often spark other stories because the theme behind it is so strong.
- It will use the downtrodden and/or the unlikely as hero material. For anyone who is considered a geek, this really is a good thing!
- It warns you of the perils of taking big, red shiny apples from an unknown saleswoman! (Though the tale in question is happy to accept the concept of older people still being in a sales job and not dismissed and replaced by some pretty/handsome young thing as being more in keeping with "image"!).
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI'm Allison Symes and write fairytales with bite, especially novels and short stories. Archives
October 2019
Categories |