Oh good, I get to debunk fairy tale ridiculousness again. It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to use my fairy tale knowledge on here.
Okay, first of all, there is no such thing as an “original” version of a fairy tale; there are only “popular” or “accepted” versions. All versions of fairy tales are as valid as any other version given their history as oral tales; each tale twists and changes as it spreads to other cultures, and several tale types have similar tales that formed independently of each other in various places around the world (Cinderella is the most famous example, with over 1,000 recorded variations and some of the oldest versions being found in Greece, China, and Egypt).
Second of all, several of these are patently false. I’ll just go down the list.
Snow White and Hunchback are the two that are actually true. In the Grimms version of Snow White (”Little Snow White”), the Queen does ask for her liver and lungs (though this was later revised to the Queen asking for her heart) and she is forced to dance in red hot shoes until she dies. This is the norm for Snow White tales, though the specifics vary quite a lot. Hunchback is similarly grim, which makes since given that it’s based on a book by Victor Hugo (like, come on. This is the same guy that wrote Les Mis. You expected something different?). The Rapunzel one is also more or less true, as is the Hercules one.
Clarification on the Little Mermaid one: she doesn’t actually wind up in purgatory. Since she was a mermaid and not a human, she didn’t have a soul and so when she killed herself, became a “daughter of the air” and can earn a soul (and thus proceed up to heaven) if she does good deeds for mankind for 300 years. Purgatory is a Catholic construction, and the probability that Hans Christian Andersen was Catholic is very very small considering that Roman Catholicism remained illegal in Denmark for nearly three centuries after the Lutheran Reformation in the mid 1500s.
Cinderella: This is only true in the Grimms/German version. I’ve actually written a paper on revenge and retribution in Cinderella tales across the world, so I can tell you with a great deal amount of certainty that it greatly depends on which Cinderella tale you’re looking at for the fate of the stepmother/stepsisters. Perrault’s Cinderella/the French version, on which the Disney movie was based, ended with Cinderella forgiving her stepsisters and inviting them to live with her in the palace. The only thing they are denied is the ability to marry the prince.
Pocahontas: this one is pretty half-and-half; there is absolutely no evidence that John Smith raped and impregnated Pocahontas before, during, or after his time in Jamestown. Historical accounts maintain that Pocahontas was friends with John Smith and often visited Jamestown during the years he was there. When the English reported that Smith had died after being sent back to England to treat him for injuries from a gunpowder incident, she stopped visiting the settlement for a couple of years. It’s also maintained in the historical accounts that when she visited, she often brought food and kept several of the settlers from starving. Historical accounts do not say that they were lovers, that she was of suitable age for a relationship (period), or that there were any sexual implications to their relationship. It is only in fictional accounts of their relationship (particularly in the Disney version, where she was significantly aged up) that that relationship is portrayed as romantic.
(cont) There are a couple of scholars that say she was raped during her captivity by the English (which happened long after Smith left for England), but the majority of the scholarship agrees that she was not raped.
Her only child is by John Rolfe and he was conceived after they were married, so the ‘raped and impregnated’ claim is wrong as well.
She was also not kidnapped and taken to England. She and John Rolfe were married before they left for England…for a good two years, in fact. She and Rolfe traveled to England, stayed for a year and a half, and then boarded a ship to return to Virginia, where Pocahontas died of an unknown disease along the way.
Mulan: false. I’ll let this post do the explaining for me, because it explains it better than I ever could. The actual ballad of Hua Mulan says no such thing; the ending this post describes is from a book called the “Sui Tang Romance” and is basically fanfiction of the actual Hua Mulan legend. The tragic end is “a detail that cannot be found in any previous legends or stories associated Hua Mulan.”
Beauty and the Beast: patently and blatantly false. I have never been so insulted by a statement about a fairy tale in my life, and I argue about Cinderella on a regular basis. There is no BATB variant tale where the Beast ends up eating the girl after the wedding. The Beaumont/French tale (again, the version on which the Disney version was based), has the Beast dying of heartbreak because Beauty was late returning to the castle, but ends with the Beast and Beauty happily married after she proclaimed her love for him. Here are links to BATB tales around the world, just because I want to correct the awful monstrosity that was “the Beast ends up eating Belle after the wedding.” Also, here’s a link to my favorite BATB variant, the Norwegian “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” and a link to “Cupid and Psyche,” the tale on which many BATB tales are based. The Aarne-Thompson tale type for Beauty and the Beast is 425 for anyone interested (425A tales are Cupid and Psyche tales and 425C tales are BATB tales).
Basically, this post is a hodge-podge of mostly true to embarrassingly and infuriatingly false information. Do your own research, and don’t believe everything the internet tries to tell you about fairy tales.
Also, the Huncheback is right, but it’s missing lots of stuff. In the novel, he is deaf (which both the disney movie and the musical erased btw) so when Esmeralda’s friends come to rescue her (like, hundreds of them?) Quasimodo thinks they’re coming to kill her, and MURDERS HALF OF THEM DEFENDING NOTRE DAMME LIKE A FORTRESS.
Also Phoebus was a TOTAL DICK who had a fiancée named Fleur-de-lys and who wanted to bang 16-year-old Esmeralda as a final “treat” before his wedding.
But surprisingly enough, the goat was 100% real in the book.
There are a lot of Harry Potter theories that have existed in the series’ fandom, such as Snape being a vampire or Sirius and Remus being secret lovers. Many of these theories have been contradicted by the books themselves, and others seem to have little evidence supporting them in canon.
One such theory, however, bears notice. Draco Malfoy is an annoying antagonist throughout all seven Harry Potter books, but noticeably less so in the sixth and seventh. Presumably, he stops his sophomoric pranks as a consequence of his highly stressful year-long assignment to play a key role in the assassination of Albus Dumbledore.
However, there may be an even more powerful reason for the trajectory of Draco’s character development in these latter books. This is that between the fifth and sixth books, directly after Lucius Malfoy has failed to retrieve the prophecy, Voldemort allows Fenrir Greyback to bite his son, Draco.
We’ve gone back through the 6th and 7th books, and compiled some of the most convincing evidence below:
Draco is not a Death Eater At the beginning of the 6th book when Harry is hiding in Borgin and Burkes, Draco threatens Borgin, and shows him something on his arm. Harry thinks the thing on Draco’s arm is a Dark Mark, but we never see this. Harry always immediately assumes things and they turn out to be false. If Harry wakes up in the middle of the night months later it is usually right, or if he talks about it with Hermione and Hermione gets it, then it’s right. Hermione doesn’t think Draco is a Death Eater, so he probably isn’t. Another reason Draco probably doesn’t have a Dark Mark is that at the end of the sixth book there is a barrier to the Astronomy Tower that you can only pass through if you have a Dark Mark. This barrier goes up immediately after Draco goes up to the tower, and comes down just before he goes down. Additionally, Draco is never treated as a Death Eater (and there is no reason for Voldemort to give Draco a Dark Mark). So what is he? One ongoing arc in the 6th book is that Draco is sickly and stressed out. This is supposedly because of his quest, but Rowling does this misdirection a lot. Fenrir Greyback is introduced as a character who specifically punishes people who’ve messed up by biting their children. Remus Lupin is explicitly mentioned as an example of this. Why set this up if not to use it later? Relatedly, Lucius’s demonstrated punishments do not seem severe enough for his transgressions at the end of the 5th book, by the standards we are supposed to expect from Voldemort by this point in the series. It is also important to keep in mind that Lucius also mishandled Riddle’s Diary, resulting in the destruction of one seventh of Voldemort’s soul. It is likely that Lucius’s additional punishment was unspeakably terrible. Voldemort says, “Maybe you can babysit the cubs,” to Draco when the Death Eaters find out that Remus and Tonks are having a baby. This is a throwaway if he is not a werewolf. For us, the nail in the coffin is that, while showing Borgin the mark on his arm, Draco says that Fenrir Greyback is a close personal friend and he’d hate for him to have a to pay a visit. And if the thing on Draco’s arm in Borgin & Burkes’ was not a Dark Mark (which it’s not), what else could he have possibly shown Borgin to make him so frightened? Finally, Rowling has said in an interview that one scene in the third movie, there was a moment that foreshadowed something she knew was coming that gave her chills. In that movie, Draco impersonates a werewolf and does a wolf howl. This also works for the arc for the flipping of the Malfoy family, who take care of themselves instead of following Voldemort. It makes more sense for them to throw away decades of servitude if one of them has been turned into a half-blood, making them idealogically incompatible with Voldemort’s pure-blood regime. So why hide it? There is precedent for J.K. Rowling revealing only the tip of the iceberg in some of her characterizations. For example, Rowling was originally going to write a whole arc about Dean Thomas’s family, but instead she focused on Neville. Additionally, Dumbledore’s love of Grindelwald is never addressed during any of the books, and was only revealed by J.K. Rowling during a Q&A after all the books had been published. There are likely many other elements of the story that have been left behind the scenes for one reason or another. It may be entirely possible that Draco’s reveal was planned for the seventh book, for example, but got cut for pages. Rowling has new content being released by book, and could be saving this to reveal on Pottermore for the seventh book. One reason this would be really cool: It makes Draco’s relationship with Snape even more interesting if Draco is relying on him for Wolfsbane potion.
PiraticOctopus 