you know I've noticed something people really seem to love making fairy tales just
super dark not that fairy tales aren't pretty dark already but that's a topic for another video yes
we have plenty of Tamer versions the classic Disney adaptations countless children's books
an ocean of bizarre content farmed videos with zero quality control slathered across YouTube
the lighter half of fairy tales has been well established for Generations but what's with this
and this what is the obsession with taking fairy tales and turning them grim
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okay it's not actually that strange of an Impulse to want to make fairy tales dark or at least
darker I can see the appeal there's depth to find here stories like Pan's Labyrinth and Coraline
are able to elevate the form of fairy tales by embracing the darkness inherent within it which
feels really powerful in the face of the sterility we so often see in popular entries and adaptations
of the genre I actually think there's a surprising amount of room for horror drama and Melancholia in
fairy tales but what feels really strange to me is when it crosses over into the territory of
grimdark not bad per se just strange if you're not familiar grimdark is sort of the Outer Edge
of Darkness in Science Fiction and Fantasy and I use the term edge here with a lot of
intentionality these are stories built with such a strong aversion to light and joy that they often
border on what I am going to call misery burlesque edginess think Warhammer 40K A Song of Ice and
Fire Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight movies at times even the manga berserk by kintaramira
if you want to see it at full force watch repo the Genetic Opera that one does not pull a single
punch these are all worlds and stories where blood guts oppression Reckless Hedonism and
general misery are used to Unapologetic excess rough places for rough people Grim dark Heroes
rarely get to be heroes at all usually swapped for morally indistinct anti-heroes who in a saner
reality would be pretty hard to distinguish from villains characters who are innocent and pure are
likely to be corrupted or killed if only to put a finer point on just how bad things really are
evil can certainly just be evil but it's often so well reasoned that it almost seems necessary
in the few places where light does manage to filter through it's so adult by the suffocating
darkness that it only shines a dim Gray in the land of grimdark there is not much room
to balance both light and Shadow that's not actually a critique of the genre by the way
sometimes you just want to plunge into this murky grayed out territory sometimes little
misery is a welcome change sometimes you just need to see people battling it outright
but when you consider all of that the trend of combining this genre with fairy tales does seem
a bit bizarre doesn't it trying to apply these murky gray Dynamics to one of the story forms
with the clearest distinction between light and Shadow it can have some really odd results you
get these stories like the 2013 movie Hansel and Gretel witch Hunters where the kids from the story
have grown up and rather than moving on after their experience with the witch they've become
entirely defined by their trauma spending their lives hunting down and killing all the witches
that they can with an over-the-top arsenal of pseudo-medieval weapons or the 2012 movie Snow
White and the Huntsman where the evil queen isn't just evil she is very literally a victim of the
patriarchy and perpetrates much of her evil as a form of Revenge we even had one way back in 2005
called the brothers grimwich that was a weird movie suffice it to say that it took the idea
of fairy tale Darkness to quite an extreme like look at this some of this I could sort
of see happening in fairy tale but probably not with that level of detail even outside of
film a surprising number of adaptations across media get this treatment the old stories change
acquire a grit and darkness that carries them away from the Simplicity of the original story
adaptations of Alice in Wonderland often develop in details of trauma and mental illness Snow White
is surprisingly prone to becoming a vampire who needs to be put to rest even now we are waiting on
a game that presents as a combination of Pinocchio and Dark Souls what again I need to stress these
ideas are not bad they can be really interesting they can add a surprising amount of depth to a
very simple and well-known tale but it's hard not to feel as though there's a sacrifice being made
here as authors and artists push these stories out of the light and deeper into the shadow
they stop feeling like fairy tales a process which tvtropes.org fittingly refers to as grimification
there are a lot of reasons to do this I think the most obvious of them is that so many of
these fairy tales have actually been taken in the opposite direction chances are the first time
you heard them you were hearing the sterilized versions cleaned up for your tender little child's
brain the bowdlerized version the disney-fied version and as they say opposites do attract it's
not hard to see the novelty in taking something so saccharine so bright and steeping it in Gloom
not a very deep reason to take it in this direction but not all stories need to be deep
I'm sure they had better reasons for the aesthetic decisions they made but this is
always where my mind goes when I think of Tim Burton's 2010 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland
when you read the Lewis Carroll original you get a sense that the characters live in a world full of
magic and life overflowing with shimmering ball gowns and precious metals and gems and treats
despite the patches of Darkness the sun is always shining somewhere
Burton's vision of Wonderland is not quite that way the world he's created is so muted and empty
of light it almost looks like a sepia photograph of Wonderland save for a few brightly colored
characters and iconic touchstones it's sort of hard to know that you're in Wonderland at all
it's certainly a novel take on the story but is this really the fantasy we were hoping for
I also think this can be a much less seemingly shallow decision as well part of the grainness
of grimdark is also the presence of complexity you'll have to ask hard questions about characters
and their motivations because the ethicality of what they're doing just isn't always clear
sometimes it really throws you into internal conflict although I'm not really sure I'd call
it Grim dark in the same way that something like repo is the 2014 movie Maleficent is a pretty
great example of this in the original Disney adaptation the regions of light and Shadow
are extremely clear the dark sorceress shows up for the flimsiest reason imaginable and decides
not only to put a cursive sleep on Aurora the King's Daughter but a curse of death it's only
through some magical intervention that she ends up as Sleeping Beauty and not in unalived Beauty
the evil is pretty unmistakable here but in their reconceptualization of the story with
Maleficent in order to introduce that complexity roles needed to be adjusted
Darkness needed to crowd out some of the light light needed to shine in through the Shadows
in this version the Sorceress is simply getting revenge after a gruesome betrayal at the hands of
the king many years back what's more she actually ends up taking on the sort of parental role for
Aurora so as the girl gets older the sorcerer starts to feel pretty bad about sacrificing
her for the sake of a feud undoubtedly a more interesting villain a more interesting story
but so far removed from the Simplicity of the fairy tale form I wonder does it really count
but a lot of the time I think there's a motive stronger than novelty stronger than complexity
Behind these decisions one you may not really be expecting a desire for justice I mentioned
how often the first version of these stories people hear is also the cleanest version
I'll bet anything that after hearing the decidedly lighter tellings when you finally heard the older
darker versions your brain stopped in its tracks wait a minute you may have said to yourself the
hunter didn't really cut open the big bad Wolf's belly did he hang on what happened to Cinderella's
Wicked stepsisters at the end of the story oh God tell me the prince only kissed the Sleeping Beauty
and didn't do any other weird stuff while she was unconscious shocking stuff after all the Whimsy
of the versions you've been told very easy to feel lied to as if most of the story was kept from you
and you're only now hearing the reality of things easy to want to correct that Injustice represent
fairy tales in all of their true darkness and despite their genre weirdness I think that's
part of why these Grim dark retellings seem like such an oddly natural progression why they're
so resonant why so many people make or have made them I mean how many videos are there on YouTube
promising the original version of a well-known fairy tale the Dark Truth behind the story it's
a common feeling a common thought a common desire but I think it's also more than a little misplaced
one of the Hallmarks of fairy tales is that much like mythology they're more like story
forms than very specific Tales remember most of these were collected from oral traditions and
transcribed there's no telling what the actual original version of the story is really like
just the oldest known or first recorded versions and sometimes we don't even have that behind most
fairy tales there's a diverse body of tellings and retellings which create more of an impression than
anything resembling a cannon the Arn Thompson index does a pretty good job of demonstrating
how this works for instance it designates the story Rapunzel as tail type 310 which falls
under the categories Tales of magic Supernatural adversaries and most obviously Maiden in the tower
the story may change it may be called Rapunzel here petrocinella there prunella elsewhere Juan
in clotild the canary Prince but the contents are all there this story has a form which we recognize
regardless of the differentiating details who are we to say any of them is the true story the truth
is that there's a maiden in a tower the rest changes with the telling even in the case of
stories with distinct authors and known original versions like Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
and the Shadow by Hans Christian Anderson the symbolism and meaning of the stories have come
to so far outweigh the adherence to Canon that through tellings and retellings over and over they
now resemble less stories and More Story forms they become fairy tales which is why I think
this Justice seeking is sort of misplaced honestly the bowdlerized sterilized Disney fight version of
Any Given fairy tale is usually just as valid as your gritty over-corrected misery burlesque both
versions still use the story form they just tell it differently like fairy tales have pretty much
always done so now that we've done away with the notion that grimmifying a fairy tale is just doing
right by it I have to wonder how is steeping it in Shadow any better than bathing in light
well I mentioned the urge to do this for the sake of complexity earlier and like we saw in the case
of Maleficent it can sort of elevate the story experience but this is where I think the sacrifice
happens another Hallmark of the fairy tale form is that by virtue of being built from archetypes
rather than very specific tellings these stories are just simpler the symbols are very clearly
symbols and the ethics are pretty well defined you almost always know evil when you see it in a fairy
tale instead of complex philosophical lessons fairy tales often provide metaphors simple enough
that we can pick them apart and examine them symbol by symbol quite easily the separation of
light and Shadow the Simplicity of the symbology is one of the reasons I think fairy tales are
one of the most persistent story forms and why everyone loves to play with them so very much they
are stories but also toolboxes and in creating so much complexity in obscuring the clear boundaries
between light and Shadow the Grim dark retellings remove that quality almost entirely but then that
is a form of play after a fashion this is still people using the toolbox of fairy tales to create
their own stories which I do respect I don't think the goal should be to preserve the Virgin story
form of the fairy tale or anything like that but I do think some things end up Lost in Translation
I do think shorn of their distinctive complexity the symbols writers call on to create these gray
retellings end up sort of powerless and awkward not wrong not bad but I mean look it's hard for me
to feel the same way about hansel's confrontation with the witch when the movie also gives him magic
induced diabetes which he has to take a shot of insulin for every few hours or he'll die
something just feels lost in that these stories feel confused to me because they simultaneously
want to be fairy tales but they also try so hard not to be they want to be complex or serious or
adult and unfortunately very much of the time it kills the power of the fairy tale reducing
it to a mere aesthetic decision painted over an otherwise entirely different kind of experience
and I find that unfortunate because I really do think there are ways to find this complexity this
meaning this form of rescue for a form of story as Tolkien put it that's been relegated to the
nursery we could and probably will at some point do a whole video on Stephen sondheim's
incredible musical into the woods but for now I just want to pull one idea from it there's a song
somewhere near the end where the witch says to a cast of characters from across various fairy tales
you're so nice you're not good you're not bad you're just nice and I think that introduces an
interesting third access to the fairy tale Dynamic the darkness doesn't have to blot out the light
the light need not cut through the Shadows there can exist a world that still feels like this stuff
a fairy tale and it can have depth and complexity and Nuance without turning into a murky gray Haze
most people aren't good or bad they're just human they may fail they may decide poorly but they
need not curse an innocent child for the sake of their Feud with someone else or be this stunning
and Gallant Prince come to save the damsel sometimes you're just a person lost in the woods
it can be scary but it will never fail to be beautiful [Music] and I think part of what makes
a fairy tale is that those things are allowed to coexist if you really mean to speak in their
language and use their symbols let the light and the Darkness be no need to correct for either
of them I think you'll find that there's more than enough room for both and plenty in between
before we end I just want to remind you that this show is in part possible thanks to all our
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a huge thanks to everyone who decides to help as you navigate the dark wood take a moment to
appreciate its beauty too stay Brave stay curious and as always keep making stuff up bye [Music]
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