Sleeping Beauty Again

Hello, reader. You may have noticed the title of this post is a little unusual. I'm making a few changes to this blog, and I thought we'd start with something familiar. I've been thinking about this format, and realized that fairy tales aren't meant to be static stories. They aren't cannon, written once and never changed again. People change fairy tales all the time to fit the audience they're speaking to. So, I thought I would do the same. One week, I'll pick a fairy tale and analyze it. Then, the next week, I'll rewrite the story and make it my own. This week, I thought we'd start with a story most of us know, and one I covered earlier in this blog, and that is Sleeping Beauty. You can read the version of Sleeping Beauty I'm basing this off of at the link. Then, read below as I analyze things I didn't have the space to look at last time.

She's too pretty to get bedhead.

Let's start with the fairies. There are eight of them, but the only ones who matter are the old fairy and the wise young fairy. I might be overly forgiving, but if someone didn't know I was still alive and therefore didn't invite me to the christening of their child, I wouldn't cast a curse on the kid because of it. That's a little bit of an overreaction for a missing invitation and a plate that isn't made out of gold. As far as motivations go, this is pretty weak. This makes me wonder if there was something else going on with her and the royal family.

Then you have the wise young fairy. She did say that she couldn't fully undo what the old fairy did, but did she have to set the princess up to sleep for one hundred years? For everyone that knew her, that would be like her dying, and for the princess, it would be like throwing her into a foreign country by herself and expecting her to survive. A lot could happen in one hundred years. Would the castle still be sound at that point, or would it crash in on top of her? What I'm saying is that this fairy made an effort, but she didn't really fix the problem. The problems of continuing the throne and a curse remained. It's not surprising that all of the fairies disappeared after she did that.

Let's take a look at the prince as well. He is possibly related to Sleeping Beauty (although distantly, if at all), and he is foolish. He hears about a beautiful princess trapped in a castle behind a ring of trees and immediately rushes off to get to her. The barrier stops anyone else from following him, but he doesn't seem to think much of that. Then he sees all of the servants in the castle asleep and doesn't think much of that, either. I suppose at least the fairy kept all of their food from spoiling or the fires in the castle from burning them. It was the least she could do. Then, when the prince makes it to the princess' room, she's so pretty that he just has to kiss her. There are tales where the man who finds her does worse, but that doesn't mean this is okay. However, Sleeping Beauty is immediately in love with this man and they get married the same night he woke her up. I guess she waited for him for one hundred years, but another day or two couldn't have been that difficult.

The moral of this story is: even when fairies are trying to help you, sometimes they don't do much. Alternatively, if you're going to be cursed, make sure you're pretty so there's no problem breaking the curse.