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the Beanstalk has come down Jack the brave boy descending from the Giant's castle in the clouds
returns to his poor mother with enough Treasures in his sack to support the two of them in comfort
and luxury forever the glass slipper fits perfectly the wicked stepmother and stepsisters
get their comeuppance Cinderella no longer a servant is rewarded for her virtue and whisked
away to the Palace by the prince of her dreams the dragon has been slain the wicked fairy defeated
Sleeping Beauty awakens with a kiss finally reunited with her true love
now there's nothing more for these fairy tale characters to do but live happily ever after
the end well that's all for this video thanks for watching as always and we'll see you next time oh
wait wait actually you know happily ever after itself is kind of a complicated idea isn't it
it's one of those phrases we're so accustomed to hearing that we normally just accept it
we don't usually find it necessary to think about or actively interpret this particular series of
words the way we would with other phrases it's just become a formula the standard light fairy
tale ending but it's really quite a strange thing to say if you stop and think about it
what does it mean to live happily ever after does it literally mean to live happily ever
after are we really supposed to believe that these characters live perpetually
in an idyllic never-ending Bliss for all of eternity how is that even possible is it even
allowed what's really happening to all these characters who live happily ever after foreign
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humans have always been pretty confused by happiness you know you want it but I mean
what even is it happiness can be something you have it could be something you are some
say it's worth fighting for others believe it can't be attained through Pursuit at all but it
is rather something that alights unexpectedly on you of its own accord when you live a good life
some say happiness depends only on you and what you choose to do
others say it's largely fate Fortune luck and external circumstance
some believe the highest happiness comes from material things some believe it comes from God
but almost everyone can agree that happiness at least the happiness we see in light fairy tale
endings is transitory as fleeting as a butterfly that floats into your garden one spring morning
and is gone as quickly as the changing season happiness always leaves happiness always ends
some would even argue that this inevitable ending is what gives mortal happiness its meaning
that knowing the transitory nature of Happiness Is What Makes Us capable of being happy to be happy
but what happens to people who live happily ever after in a hundred million years if we
came back to the Palace of Prince Charming would we still find Cinderella and the prince
with the same unchanging Smiles on their faces for every youthful forever alive forever happy
isn't that kind of a strangely unsettling idea it has the Ring of the fake to it a taint of
pretense and unrealness of the plastic even perhaps of the corporate and faintly dystopian
the kind of happiness you find only in the Frozen two wide Smiles of Mickey Mouse toys
in Disneyland gift shops the literal meaning of happily ever after is happiness forever
but real life can never be idyllic or perfect real happiness can never be forever
happily ever after is fake as author Joshua Loth Lehman writes and they lived happily ever after
is one of the most tragic sentences in literature it is tragic because it tells a falsehood about
life that has led countless generations of people to expect something from human existence which is
not possible on this fragile imperfect Earth the happy ending Obsession of Western culture is both
a romantic illusion and a psychological handicap Lehman argues that the monolithic statement
happily ever after which most people have heard over and over again since their earliest childhood
is not only an illusion but a handicap which leads to disappointment and misery it paints
a false picture suggesting that it's possible for life and love to be permanent unblemished
Perfections that perfect moral Bliss in all senses of the word is a destination you can arrive at and
that Lehman argues is a dangerous idea because the belief even the unconscious belief in the
permanence and Perfection of Earthly happiness sets the stage for MB and anxiety when the real
world inevitably fails to meet your expectations as Liebman puts it life is not Paradise it is pain
hardship and Temptation shot through with radiant gleams of light friendship and love in other words
the fairy tale ending and they lived happily ever after is a false impossible empty lie when held up
to the realities of the world but then I suppose so are all fantasies dragons and magic beans
and Enchanted glass slippers aren't exactly realistic but we do still love them don't we
all this makes me wonder is it really so bad to indulge in an idealistic notion of permanent Bliss
just like we want to go on adventures want to be heroes want to live in a world with dragons
and magic and true love and Cosmic Justice for the good we want to believe in the idea
of a life with our loved ones permanently free from Pain loss struggle and heartache
that actually sounds kind of nice doesn't it is it really such a bad thing to let ourselves imagine
in my personal opinion and extremely unsurprisingly no not really sure happily
ever after is impossible but does that really make it harmful so harmful we need to reject it
happily ever Afters aren't real dragons aren't real either both are acceptable in fairy tales
both are fictional ideas that can give readers enjoyment escapism and comfort
this much I think we can accept but even if we do there's still sort of a problem
when I really stop and think about it and weigh both dragons and happily ever Afters against my
ability to suspend my disbelief why does the existence of Happily Ever After still feel so
strange to me strange in a way that the existence of dragons never has
what I mean by this is crazy things happen all the time in fairy tales don't they
people climb Magic beanstalks Ride in Enchanted pumpkin carriages fight dragons and talk to
fairies people turn into frogs and frogs turn into people we're able to accept without blinking an
eye that true love's kiss can undo death or that a big bad wolf knows enough to trick a little girl
but when I start analyzing the real implications of Happily Ever After I'm left scratching my head
why why does this particular make-believe seem to feel a little off what makes the fantasy of
Happily Ever After any different or any harder to accept than the others the answer I think
is that the impossibility of dragons and the impossibility of Eternal happiness are not equal
dragons are a falsehood in real life but they are real within the context of the fairy tale however
happily ever after is not only a falsehood in real life it's also a falsehood a contradiction within
the context of the story when we read fairy tales we know we're supposed to suspend our disbelief
and let the weird happen but they like all stories have their own internal rules in Cinderella we see
that a pumpkin in the garden is turned into a carriage the Fairy Godmother tells her that it
will turn back into a pumpkin at midnight later when the clock strikes 12 it does ludicrous and
as Fantastical as the actual happenings in the story are they are internally consistent
however the equally fictional happily ever after feels weird to me because it's not internally
consistent it doesn't follow the same set of rules that the rest of the tale apparently runs on from
a Once Upon a Time through to the last sentence before happily ever after we see the characters
encounter risk pain loss bad luck Temptation physical danger and often even death throughout
the story the fairy tale universe establishes itself as a universe similar to ours a world where
conflict and hardship exist in fact those things are usually the Catalyst for the very story being
told yet at the very end we're suddenly told that everything's good now forever the protagonists are
happy and nothing will change that ever again and they lived happily ever after isn't simply
a statement of another thing which happened in the sequence of the plot it's a statement that
in order to be taken literally requires a change in the operational rules of the story itself
the story is built on conflict but happily ever after vanquishes the possibility of conflict
the story is built on the roller coaster ride of emotions yet happily ever after ends that right
if taken literally it would imply that the story Universe stagnates becomes a world of ubiquitous
Eternal sameness where nothing except for happiness exists
a state of equilibrium that's not really a kind of life but closer to a kind of death a lot of
science predicts that our Dynamic ever-changing universe is heading toward an eventual hate death
a state of thermodynamic equilibrium where entropy can no longer increase and nothing
will be able to happen or change ever again just so the monolithic statement happily ever after
seems to imply the same kind of stagnation for the fictional universe in this sense and they
lived happily ever after is not only inconsistent with the rest of the story it contradicts itself
as it informs us about the character's Eternal contentment it also implies the death of the
vibrant world we had come to believe they lived in and in a way the characters alongside it well
perhaps not the death of but the ending of happily ever after is an internal contradiction it's made
of different stuff than the other phrases in the story it has different properties in fact because
it's so unable to be integrated into the rest of the fiction it's almost a fourth wall Bend almost
an acknowledgment of the story's artificiality and this reminder even subconsciously that the story
isn't real is enough to break the immersion and send the reader reeling back into their own world
by breaking the internal rules of the story happily ever after ends the spell of the fantasy
in a way it's a dismissal a signal that we're done now but the story is over and everyone can go home
happily ever after is like another way of saying the end I think these three words in this order
have come to function more like a punctuation mark than a phrase just like a period is a signal for
the end of a sentence happily ever after is a functional signal for the end of a story
a signal that doesn't have to be and is not really meant to be interpreted literally
even still after all of this this simple fact that it can break immersion doesn't make happily
ever after bad impossible yes inconsistent certainly but sometimes you want to tie your
story up with a big red bow to leave a taste of satisfaction and finality in the reader's mouth
yes we often want to let the fantasy Linger Longer let the story end for the audience sometime long
after they close the book but it doesn't hurt to make things simple every now and then sometimes
you want simple [Music] you know there's usually about a week between each tail Foundry upload but
you really don't have to wait that long if you don't want to our next video is already
out waiting to be watched over on nebula we've got a bunch of stuff over there that will never
come out here on YouTube too like this video about why artists depict Angels how they do or
this one about an Epic Fantasy setting where the world itself has gigantic Geographic genitalia
actually we are making an entire video series over there called worldsmiths We tend to focus more on
the art than the artist here on hail Foundry this show is really about encouraging you to go and
make your own art take the ideas and techniques of great artists and find new things to do with
them but worldsmiths is where we peel back the pages and enter the world of the artist behind the
art see how and why they do the things that they do you'll be surprised how much you learn about
yourself in the process we've already done videos on junji Ito and Clive Barker and we've got plans
to cover plenty of other authors and artists too like Neil Gaiman H.P Lovecraft and so much more
you can watch all of it over on our streaming platform nebula if you are not familiar nebula
is just a paradise for video creators YouTube is kind of a crazy place to make content don't get me
wrong I'm happy to have this platform but you have to be so so careful about your topic choices your
packaging what you include in your videos you just start to feel like you're walking on eggshells
nebula doesn't have any of those concerns nebula really takes care of its creators making sure we
have all the love and support and money we need to make what we really want to make it's honestly so
nice because sometimes you just get tired of all the fuss sometimes you just want to be an artist
and nebula really lets us do that and here's the fun part you can get nebula for cheaper
than almost any other streaming platform on the internet like less than 125 per month that cheap
we want you to have access to worldsmiths and all our other nebula content so we teamed up with
another streaming platform called curiositystream who will give you a whole year of nebula for free
when you sign up with them so basically two streaming services and an entire series of
special tale Foundry videos worldsmiths for less than 125 a month and I cannot say enough about how
much I love curiosity stream as its own platform quality documentaries are hard to find but quality
documentaries about the things I care about myths and monsters literature The Madness of creative
minds yep yes this is definitely where I want to be curiosity stream has documentaries about
everything it'll definitely get your imagination working so here's how to see our new series
worldsmiths all of nebula and all of curiosity stream for less than 125 per month all you have
to do is click on the link in the description or go to curiositystream.com tailfoundry and sign up
for one year using the code tail Foundry that's it and that first year is only going to be 14.79
which again comes out to less than 125 per month frankly I'm not quite sure how they can afford to
do this for us but I'm definitely not complaining seriously take advantage of this offer while it's
still going I don't think any better one exists in the world of streaming once you
do come back and tell us what you think of our new series I cannot wait to hear your thoughts
now that we've explained literally every single thing there is to know about this
topic and there are certainly no more questions to ask or arguments to make you're free you can
go watch more YouTube videos or whatever it is you're going to do happily ever after enjoy the
rest of your unchanging eternity but do keep making stuff up I'll see you next time bye
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