On Fairytales and Their Importance
(or Why the Woods Must Remain Perilous)
It’s a crime fairytales have fallen to the wayside. People have been robbed of many life lessons they should’ve learned growing up, and, make no mistake, this was done on purpose.
Fairytales are crucial to any culture - and to proper childhood development. Not only do they contain moral lessons about right and wrong, courage, compassion, and the virtues, but they reinforce and preserve the culture itself.
The last two books I’ve written happen to be fairytales. Now, granted, they are dark fairytales. Some might even go so far as to say “grimdark”. But they still contain a moral and a reinforcing fear, and are well-tuned to attract the readership that need fairytales the most. I’ll explain in a bit.
The Absolute State of Fairytales
What we’re seeing in the mainstream these days are subversions of fairytales.
For example, famous fairytale villains are now “misunderstood”. Turns out they were never evil; maybe even the good guys all along. Evil characters like Shelob from Lord of the Rings and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty have been given this treatment–painted as sympathetic victims. And in some cases the story is retold with them as the main characters.
But fairytales must teach a moral lesson. And it typically uses fear to get its lesson across.
The fairytales of olde were aimed at children, so the story elements were understandably childish. Fairytales should always feature 1) a moral and 2) a reinforcing fear.
The moral: Don’t wander into the forest on your own. (Be obedient to your father and mother.)
The reinforcing fear: The forest is a scary place. (Some kids never come back.)
Cinderella teaches about perseverance and kindness. Hansel and Gretel cautions against trusting strangers.
But look around you: Today’s adults are morally bankrupt. They seem to be the ones in need of emotional support animals, adult coloring books, rage rooms, and plastic nostalgia-bait toys just to get by.
Many aren’t even adults: By their own admission, they’re merely “adulting”. And, as you may have seen in any grocery store, they’re often more emotionally immature than their own children.
In fact, adults are setting such a bad example these days, they’re ironically becoming living fairytales, walking warnings to their own children about who they could become if they grew up without any semblance of morality or self-control.
So I suppose the audience I’m aiming for with my darker fairytales is twofold: Adults who have the moral grounding to appreciate these lessons, and adults who still need these moral lessons … but don’t realize it. In the case of the latter, I would hope my endings would tap into that lost childhood of theirs’ and disarm them with a decisive gut punch.
Chio Pino: A Reverse-retelling of Pinocchio might be broken down this way:
The moral: Child trafficking/grooming is a clear and present danger.
The reinforcing fear: Your child could be next.
I won’t share the moral or reinforcing fear of The Machine, but the ending should be one hell of an emotional kick for those who wind up reading it.
The Wood Perilous
I believe it was L. Jagi Lamplighter who coined this phrase. She wrote a fantastic series of posts over the course of five years called In Defense of the Wood Perilous, and it is well worth your time.
Traditionally, the woods were portrayed as a magical place in storytelling, but also a place wrought with peril. It is a place of hidden things, of danger. And being there alone, unprepared, is never a good idea.
The wood perilous is crucial to fairytales because we need a heightened sense of fear to be aware of threats as they come.
Without fear, we become complacent, like the villagers in Obscura. And that’s the point of modern subversive fairytales. To portray the forest as a “safe space” is to leave us disarmed and unaware when a looming threat arises.
The Anansi Boys - The Tale of Tiger the Hunter
In Lamplighter’s series, she cites the fairytale found within Neil Gaiman’s The Anansi Boys.
Anansi the Spider isn’t Gaiman’s creation. It’s a prominent character in West African folklore, though it originated in Ghana and has made its way over to Caribbean culture as well.
Anansi is always portrayed as a trickster; as one who gathers knowledge and keeps it secret, hording it for himself. Leveraging these secrets, Anansi uses cunning to lie about his weaknesses and pretend they are virtues.
Sound familiar? Anansi is a magus. An alchemist. And just like Anansi, our propaganda machine uses these exact same techniques.
The particular fairytale featured in The Anansi Boys tells of how Anansi the Spider is mortal enemies with Tiger the Hunter.
Tiger not only threatens Anansi, but the people of a nearby village. He is fierce, but only eats when he’s hungry. Because he’s a creature of nature.
When Tiger next comes to the village, Anansi the Spider is there waiting for him, ready with a story. He tells Tiger a tale so frightening, it causes Tiger to run away, tail between his legs.
When the people of the village see Tiger afraid and running, they laugh. They decide they no longer fear Tiger and consider Anansi their hero.
Hauntingly, the story ends there, which leaves hanging the disturbing question: What happens when Tiger gets hungry enough to come back and try again?
Well, thanks to Anansi—and the magic of lies—the people are now complacent.
It turns out Anansi’s true goal wasn’t to defeat Tiger at all, but to disarm the people against him, because as much as Anansi hates Tiger, he hates people even more.
Anansi knows his story has perverted the cycle of nature itself, and like a rubber band stretched too far, it will one day snap back into place.
The moral: Through the art of storytelling, a bad actor can make your entire village complacent to a clear and present threat.
The reinforcing fear: Tiger the Hunter will one day come back furious, and more hungry than ever.
What if Anansi the Spider were to write a Modern subversive fairytale?
If Anansi were to write a modern subversive fairytale, it would probably look something like Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses, a book series frighteningly popular among young, impressionable girls.
If Anansi were trying to disarm the young female populace, to that end, ACOTAR couldn’t start out more perfect: It starts with Feyre, a teenage girl … in the forest … alone, hunting for food for her entire family.
She hates her sisters and quietly judges her father at every turn, treating her family like dirt because she has to do literally everything for them. But she takes care of their every need like a know-it-all girlboss, only because it was her mother’s dying wish for her to do so.
(Adulting, mirite?)
When she’s not doing literally everything for her hopeless family, she premaritally bonks a local boy within the confines of a barn. But it’s okay because she always forces him to drink a “contraception potion” prior to doing the deed.
Well, Feyre turns out to be such a badass hunter that it turns out she managed to “accidentally” kill a powerful and influential Fairy being, thus she unwittingly activates an ancient contract which gets her spirited away to the Fairy realm, which we have so far been led to believe is very, very dangerous.
And it is. But fortunately for Feyre, she’s a girlboss who’s being protected by a powerful and hunky Fairy Lord. And she gets to live in a cushy mansion full of servants.
While living in the lap of luxury and being an awesome painter, Feyre must find a way to keep true to her final promise she’d made to her dearly departed mother … while also vacationing in the wood perilous.
If she can somehow satisfy her oath from afar, she can then safely kick back like the princess she is, make her sisters jealous, and flirt with all the hunky Fairies free of guilt once and for all.
While Putting the Patriarchy in its Place, of course.
Belle and Beast hijinks ensue.
The morals: You don’t need no man. (You shouldn’t be stuck caring for a stupid family when you can be bedding beast boys in mansions like the spoiled princess you are.)
Premarital sex is good (so long as you force the man to use contraception.)
Also, society is wrong and the wood is totes not perilous at all (thanks to your sick bow and arrow skillz.)
The reinforcing fear: The wood can be sometimes kinda-sorta dangerous. But not rly.
Early on in the story, there’s someone in town trying to tell the villagers that the Fairyfolk aren’t dangerous at all. The villagers know better, rightly shunning the crazy lady and/or admonishing her.
It’s very telling that Anansi the Spider - I mean, Sarah J. Maas - carefully constructed the story so that it sets up society as wrong—and seemingly racist and paranoid—and paints this crazy person defending the wood perilous as right.
Everything in a story is there for a purpose. Remember, an apple is never just an apple.
The Deeper Magic
There are two kinds of magic in the real world: The magic of Truth, and the magic of lies.
For that reason, fairytales—even fractured fairytales—are inherently magical.
The morals in traditional fairytales reinforce Truth. And the magic inherent in Truth is the magic of God Himself. The Deeper Magic, also known as “Natural Law”.
The morals in subverted fairytales, on the other hand, reinforce lies. They are designed to disarm us so threats can swoop in and have their way. This is the magic of alchemy, and, by extension, the magic of Lucifer.
Bad guys are good guys. The wood perilous are not perilous at all. Darkness is Light. Tiger the Hunter isn’t a threat. If you invite a snake into your home, it won’t bite you, it’ll become your best friend.
The more liars there are involved in a scheme, the stronger the subversive magic becomes. One liar is a threat, but two liars can be outright dangerous.
A magician’s tricks become all the more convincing when he has a friend in the audience willing to lie about having ever known him. A miracle cure potion is a difficult sell, unless of course you have a liar willing to give testimony to the audience on how it changed his life.
C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle portrays this concept perfectly. The main villain gets his dim-witted best friend to lie with him, and they’re able to fool almost everyone in Narnia with a scheme involving a fake Aslan.
(And in this case, it’s literally a skinsuit walking around, demanding respect. Could there be a more apt analogy for the world we live in today?)
Simply because the main villain’s schemes are reinforced by his friend, what starts as a simple lie leads to the Anti-Christ… and even the end of the world.
Now, imagine liars controlling nearly all of news media and pop culture. An entire network of liars.
There are few things more powerful than a coordinated lie, but in the end, the immutable truth always wins. This is so even in the final pages of The Last Battle.
But if we don’t want the world to burn before the truth has a chance to re-establish itself, fairytales need a major comeback, and it’s up to us to write them.
Very interesting and thought-provoking! Also, thanks for one more good reason to continue avoiding ACOTAR like the plague.
As usual an amazing piece. I think that the “on fairy stories” lecture by tolkien may be of interest here.