Kinda Dark

I was raised on Disney animated classics. Beauty and the Beast is about as old as I am oh geez that's a little haunting and was definitely highly ranked on my preferred viewing list. My parents have fondly recalled me requesting a nightlight of "Beast-growl," who was the best character in my tiny child heart. That wasn't The Favorite of mine, though. Apparently I watched Dumbo so many times it's a surprise I don't have it permanently etched into the backs of my eyelids. But I digress...

There's something wholesome about the Disney animated retellings of classic fairy tales. I mean, that only makes sense. It's clear from the Disney branding that the end goal is family friendly fun. Family friendly fun wasn't much of the original focus for these stories, though.

It was a rude awakening for me, going into The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales. Perhaps a little less jarring than it could have been - I read those stories fairly early on in my childhood. Had I waited until I was older, the experience might have straight up concerned me. In fact, it was super grim(m). Cinderella's step sisters cut off parts of their feet to fit into the glass slipper, trying to con their way to princesshood. Sleeping Beauty has a whole second part where an Ogre Queen wants to eat the children of the awoken princess and her prince. Snow White has to thwart the evil queen three separate times, and in some editions, the queen dies dancing in red hot shoes at Snow White's wedding. Disney's Tangled was in theaters only six years ago, so hardly in my childhood, but the Grimm Brothers' version was a far throw from the chipper animated movie with chameleon and horse sidekicks and a frying pan-wielding princess. Rapunzel's parents gave her over to their neighbor witch as a new born because Rapunzel's mom craved the witch's lettuce (rapunzel) so badly, she promised her first born child for it. Oh and later the prince falls out of the tower Rapunzel's kept in and blinds himself on thorns. Oh and Rapunzel became a single mom raising hers and the prince's children on her own. Oh but he shows up years later and her tears on his eyes cures his blindness so it's practically a happy ending! 

... practically...

Not all Disney fairy tales are soft-edged Grimm Brothers adaptations, though. There's many more from different cultures around the world (though it would seem that Germany sure knew how to craft a mean folk tale) but I'm gonna turn the scrutiny on Hans Christian Anderson and his little ditty known as The Little Mermaid. This is the one that gets me the most, because Hans Christian Anderson doesn't really have the same reputation as the Brothers Grimm. Which almost makes it worse, in my opinion. The Brothers Grimm just published the fairy tales they dug up, even softening some things up for their audience like how they changed it to Snow White's evil jealous step-mother rather than her evil jealous birth mother. It seemed kinder to have an evil force come in from outside the family to want to kill Snow White. But oooohhh Hans, no, Hans Christian Anderson wrote all of the stories he's got to his name. 

So why's The Little Mermaid being especially singled out here? Well, in the original story, the little mermaid (or TLM to her friends) doesn't even have a soul. She's mostly fish. She doesn't get human emotions. She thinks the human prince is cute and wants his hot prince body but she doesn't truly get what love is, exactly. The sea witch is a pretty neutral player here, just telling TLM all the side effects of becoming human and the sacrifices she'd be making. TLM becomes human, and whoops, actually falls in love with the prince, but he doesn't love her (oh no). So TLM's sisters come to her with a knife to kill the prince that will allow her to return to the sea. But she loves him now, so she can't go killing him, and instead, she dies. What the heck.

Now, this is a pretty Christianity-based story. TLM can't go to heaven and have that concept of eternal life after death because she has no soul because she was a fish person. But! Good News! She ascends to join the daughters of the air, who can earn souls with 300 years of good deeds. But! Bad News! This is heavily reliant on children being good and bad. When a child is good, a year is taken off the 300. When a child is bad, the daughters of the air cry and a day is added to the 300 for every tear they shed. Which is a pretty messed up moral blackmail to slap onto the end of an already pretty messed up story about nobody being really happy except the prince, who gets to marry another lady and live none the wiser to the deeper story going on around him. 

And this is the stuff that children still watch today! People looked at the original works and thought, somehow, they could shave off all the nasty bits except the main conflict, and show this to small children. Except it was all originally written or told mainly FOR children! 

From all of this, I draw mainly two conclusions. 1) Children can handle a lot more darkness than they're given credit for. 2) Hans Christian Anderson was one messed up dude and probably would have had the Brothers Grimm going back to his works to liven them up a bit.