a retrospective on fairytale retellings🌹

remember that time every young adult fantasy book was some kind of fairy tale retailing ooh it's the Beauty and the Beast retailing but she's the beast it's a snow white retailing but except for a prince who weirdly kisses her while she's asleep she falls in love for the hunter that's trying to kill her retelling fairy tales has been a thing for a very very long time Disney's animated features are often retellings of the Grim fairy tales but less gruesome to make them more palatable for a 20th century audience and let's not forget the most important and culturally iconic Fairy Tale retellings the Barbie movies Barbie Rapunzel is the original Rapunzel for me but in the 2010s there was a shift in the air some kind of spell had been put on writers of Young Adult media and suddenly everything was a retelling of Snow White or Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast Kristen Stewart got to shine in Snow White and the Huntsman Maleficent got her own movie and Hansel and grle were witch Hunters for some reason and of course I feel like all of this started with the show that truly shaped me as a teenager I feel and that is one spot a time and of course when it comes to books I remember adoring the still beloved Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meer which was basically fairy tales but it's the future and now they're on the moon and the incredibly popular ACC Court of thorns and Roses actually started out being marketed as a Beauty and the Beast retailing since it came out during that hype in this video we're going to be looking back at all those fairy tale retellings of the 2010s I'm going to be making a timeline on the wall behind me I'll take the poster down soon and we'll also learn about what it means to retell a fairy tale because these young adult fantasy retellings actually say a lot about our norms and values as a society but before we start looking at all the individual titles let's get a little bit of a background on the S Guist in the 2010s and this really was just for dramatic effect I think we had enough dramatic effect for now so the ya fairy tale retelling hype came right after the ya dystopian hype kind of Bridging the Gap between the dystopian hype and the fantasy hype and I have videos about both of those eras and this may not be a complete coincidence Amy mons notices that fairy tale retellings have an inherent dystopian quality to them since the female main characters often go on some kind of quest to overthrow an authority like an evil queen she says that the Cinderella tale for example encourages young girls to resist totalitarian structures and that demonstrates that while you may not have absolute power yourself you can encourage those who do to defeat the unfair absolute authority of others so it kind of makes sense that the dystopian phase merge into the ya fantasy phase with fairy tale retellings readers of the hunger games were already used to stories about young girls overthrowing authoritarian governments so it made sense for them to fall in love with stories about young girls overthrowing evil monarchies now what actually is a fairy tale retelling and I know the answer may seem obvious but I fell down like a research rabbit hole for this video so the answer is actually not as obvious as you may think the common idea is that well a fairy tale failing means that you change something about the original fairy tale but is there really such thing as the original fairy tale before the invention of print fairy tales were told orally you know people were just telling them like audio books in real life so like a game of telephone the story changed little bit by bits and based on the person who was telling the story or the audience that they were telling the story to the story could change a little bit to kind of fit what people wanted or what the teller might want but then the printing press came around and fairy tales were written down by the Grim brothers and ever since then we kind of started seeing these Grim fairy tales as The Originals when in reality they just wrote down one of the many many versions of the folktales that existed out there and if you would touch the original story that was kind of looked down upon and now in like the past Century we've kind of come back to this idea of retelling fairy tales we are once again tweaking these tales as all this time to fit the current Norms notably Disney took out the gruesome parts of the Grim fairy tales to fit their mission of wholesomeness and magical Wonder feminist writers can use retellings to critique patriarchal power robera trits writes in rewriting folktales to advance feminist ideologies and to identify female subjectivity feminist writers are both protesting the powerlessness of women inherent in our cultures old folk ways and giving voice to a new set of values a set that allows for the princess to have power a set that allows Sleeping Beauty to wake up not to a destiny that immerses her in her husband's life but to a destiny that is self-defined so how an author chooses to retell a fair T says a lot about their values and also kind of the general Norms of society at that moment and as a reader you are encouraged to think critically about what exactly changed and what this new message means to you so if a fairy tale retelling was a reflection of its culture what culture was reflected in all those fairy tale retellings of the 2010s we can actually learn a lot about the values of our current Society by looking at how all of these fairy tale retellings ya fairy tale retellings were retold I'm going to take down these posters and we're going to make a big timeline of all of like the most popular fairy tale retailing around like 2012 to 2018 something like that you know fairy tales fantasy books are great escapism but unfortunately we cannot travel to their fantasy Worlds the closest eye I get personally is traveling on holiday there's plenty of places on Earth that are pretty magical and the best way to completely immerse myself in a country when I travel is to make an effort to learn the language recently I've been trying to refresh my French knowledge by taking online French Classes from native level speakers I would love to travel to France again and the best way to connect with people is to be able to speak to them in their native language that's where it really becomes a fairy tale I take my online classes with the sponsor of today's video lingoda it's super easy to fit into my busy schedule because their classes are available 24/7 and I can take them from anywhere if you want to take your language learning to the next level I think their best feature is their language Sprints if you take 30 lessons in 60 days or a lesson every day you get half of your money back and free classes it's the best way to build the learning habit because you're doing it almost every day and that is how you will see yourself progress fast so join the lingoda language print and let your language skills Bloom this spring I can actually give you €20 off so click the link in my description or use my code 20 Leoni and you will get €20 off the Sprint we're going to make a timeline but we're not going to go through it in chronological order when I looked at all these fairy tale retellings I found about four different ways that authors choose to tweak the original fairy tale so we'll go through it by that order let's see if you can guess the common denominator of the first books we're going to discuss I want to start off with Ella Enchanted by Gil Carson LaVine I think this is one of the earliest fairy tale retellings I remember reading published in 1997 it doesn't really fit into this like 2010s framework but I think a lot of the people that read a lot during this time remember reading Ella Enchanted when they were children this is a Cinderella retelling where instead of Cinderella being obedient Ella is cursed to be obedient but she doesn't like it and the whole book is just her kind of rebelling against the fact that she is cursed to be obedient then we have the book that I think think started the whole hype and that is Cinder which came out in 2012 the first book in this four book series is a retelling of Cinderella except Cinderella is a cyborg it takes place in a futuristic version of China there's people on the moon and instead of losing her mule she loses her entire foot cuz she's half robots Cinder is a very complex character and the whole story is about her starting a revolution to overthrow the evil queen all of the sequels to this book are also fairy tale retellings in their own way but from the perspective of another fairy tale character and each main character joins cinder's Rebellion we'll talk about Scarlet later but for example Crest is about Rapunzel but she's really cool cuz she's a hacker and she also joins the rebellion and in Winter we follow Snow White who is the princess of the Moon and we are also from her perspective she's a very complex character and also joins the Rebellion against her own mother in traditional fairy tales the message is very clearly that obedience is virtuous in women for example in red writing Hood the whole message of that fairy tale is that Little Red Riding Hood veers of the path even though her mother told her not to and as a result she runs into the wolf which kind of ruins her life in the original fairy tale Snow White and Cinderella are also praised for their obedient nature and on top of that these fairy tale main characters are often very passive it is often the prince that takes an active role in the story for example in Grim Snow White it is the prince that chooses to take the unconscious Snow White back to his castle it is him that asks her to marry him and save her in Grim Cinderella it is the prince that chooses to take action and find the girl who fits the mule thereby driving the plot forward but in a lot of ya retellings especially in these ones it is the female main characters that take action it is the female main characters that drive the plot and also stand up against evil the female characters are more complex as well here's another kind of older example that a lot of you may remember from your childhood it is the goose Girl by Shannon hail I didn't know the story of the goose girl so in case you also don't it is about a princess that gets tricked by her evil maid to switch places and as a as a result the princess becomes the person who has to watch the geese so the goose girl but at the end she marries a prince and then becomes the princess of a new kingdom and the goose go by Shannon hail is basically a novelization of this fairy tale where you really focus on the main character she is more complex cuz we really just focus the goose girl and her story kind of similar to Thorn in 2012 which was also a goose girl retelling where the focus of the story really is on the choice that the main character has to make like the choice between the two kingdoms that really is the focus of that story sometimes in these retellings a story that isn't mainly about the girl is made to be about the girl the Forbidden Wish by Jessica Cory from 2015 is a retelling of Aladdin except Aladdin falls in love with the genie and the genie is a girl and the story is told from the perspective of this female Genie not Aladdin so where the original story is focused on a male character this retelling decides to focus on a female character a Thousand Nights is a retelling of well 1,000 One Nights quite obviously from the perspective of sherad uh I'm not pronouncing that right I feel like there are so many ways to pronounce that world I couldn't find the right one sorry but this story focus a lot more on Sisterhood between Shar and her sister and we follow both of their perspectives which is not in the original fairy tale some of them actively challenge ideas of what a traditional female main character should be for example in Winter by Marissa Meyer Snow White is dark skinned therefore challenging the traditional idea that the beautiful most beautiful person in the land must be pale like Snow White and in 2019 we got a curse so dark and lonely this is a Beauty and Beast story relling where we follow both the Beast and the beauty and I think the beauty is from the normal world and has to like go through a magical world which by the way I think we need to bring that Trope back a lot more I love it when like normal world people go to a fantasy world can we bring that back thank you anyway the beauty character in a curo dark and lonely has cerebral paly which gives us some quite needed disability representation which you don't often see in traditional fairy tales but also not very often in these retelling so what do all of these so far and honestly all of the fairy tale retellings we're going to be talking about today have in common they focus on the inner worlds of the women in these fairy tales in traditional fairy tales the female characters are often very uncomplex most of the characters are to be honest because these stories are so short you don't really have time to really go deep into the psychology of them traditional fairy tales tend to be omniscient point of view you know there's this like narrator that doesn't focus on any specific characters whereas almost all of these and the ones we're still going to talk about are either firsters point of view from a female character or close third person point of view where you are still very focused on their inner thoughts and feelings making these female main characters more than just two dimensional pretty girls well they usually are still pretty but we'll get to that I think this really reflected in need at the time for more stories fantasy stories with young female characters in the lead I mean the audience of ya fairy tale retellings and ya fantasy books in general has been mostly young women so it makes sense to retell these old stories with a focus on characters that the ya audience can relate to and give them some sorts along the way okay moving on to the next common twist let's see if you can guess it we've got little thieves by Margaret Owen which came out in 2021 very recent this is a retelling of the goose girl where you follow the evil servant that changes places with the princess in the traditional story and you follow the story of the servant aisle of the lost by Melissa de la Cruz this was published by Disney's publishing house and it is about an island where all of the Disney villains live and you follow the children of these Disney villains the queen of fairy tale retellings Isa Meer did not stop after The Lunar Chronicles and in 2016 she wrote heartless this is a retelling of Ellis in Wonderland where you follow the early days of the evil queen the Queen of Hearts before she yelled off with our heads all of these are fairy tale retellings where we are now following the villains creating some Sympathy for the Devil like I said a lot of traditional fairy tales didn't have very complex characters and especially the villains were very black and white like they were just you know literally called the evil queen and they were evil because they just were wasn't really common to give a backstory to a villain but a lot of these retellings reflect a need in like the current literature landscape to give some more sympathy to villains we want to give them backstories we want to give them complexity when a villain is evil just for the sake of being evil that is often like something to be criticized about a story I think it shows that nowadays we just have a need for more nuanced stories that aren't so black and white okay next category of fairy tale twists let's see if you can guess it the Wrath and the Dawn by Rene J is another retelling of a thousand one Knights just like the original Thousand and One Nights there is a king that kills his wife every morning Shar Z is married to the king but she keeps herself Alive by telling him a story every night and because he wants to know how the story ends he keeps her alive but of course they fall in love because of course they do the main difference with the original is that in this retelling shahada chooses she volunteers to marry the king because she plans on killing him the Shadow Queen by CG red wine is a retelling of Snow White except she doesn't fall in love with the prince instead she falls in love with the Huntsman that is trying to kill her hunted by Megan Spooner was a beauty and beast retelling in this story it is implied that the Beast kidnapped the main girl's father so she sets out into the woods because she's like a really good Huntress and tries to hunt down the Beast and kill him but you know how the fairy tale goes of course they fall in love te Killa kingdom is a Little Mermaid retelling except the main characters are pretty bloody thirsty instead of immediately falling for the prince our siren character is tasked to kill the prince and also the prince is a siren Hunter who's trying to kill sirens and last in this category I'm sure you already know what the Common Thread is by now we've got cruel Beauty by rosant Hodge I always want to call her a rosan pike I wish this is a beauty and a beast retelling but I personally feel like it is more a Blue Beard ret telling if you don't know the story of Blue Beard it is about this noble man named Blue Beard that takes a wife and he tells her that she can enter any room in the castle except for one one day he goes away on some kind of trip and our girl lets her curiosity get the best of her and she opens this forbidden room and there she finds that this room is filled with blood and the corpses of blue Beard's past wives it does end well for her though because her brother and sister end up killing killing Blue Beard and she becomes ruler of the castle in this retelling ourain Gurley isn't Just Married to the Blue Beard character but she also actively plots to kill him um and they also fall in love of course so as you may have noticed by now it was very common for the twist in the retelling to be that they're just trying to kill each other in this one turning the romance into an enemies to lovers even if the original fairy tale already kind of is enemies to lovers like beauty and beast and a lot of the ones that we mentioned were beauty and beast retellings we've got to add the element of them trying to kill each other I think this really reflects how young girls in this time were just no longer interested in very clean romances where the prince just falls in love with the prince and then that's it but we wanted the added drama of them trying to kill each other we want them to hate each other if he trying to kiss her while she's asleep that's weird but if he's trying to actively kill her now that's hot and of course these kill happy main characters are a stark contrast with the obedient women that they are based on I also found that the most retold fairy tale out of all the ones that we're going to be talking about today by the way I didn't mention this but I based which fairy tale to put on the timeline based on how many Goods ratings it got and if it got over 10,000 good reads ratings I put it on the timeline the most commonly retell fairy tale was beauty and beast and I wouldn't be surprised if this is because Beauty and the Beast already inherently has enemies to lovers in it and a complex female character sorry I forgot to talk about AAR thorns and Roses which I think has become the most popular fairy tale retelling it was marketed as a Beauty and the Beast retelling I think it's a little bit misleading since the Beast character in this one is like a really hot Fay except he wears a mask so she can't fully see his face but I think it's more of a retelling of east of the sun west of the moon in east of the sun west of the moon a girl is forced to marry a bear every night when the bear comes to bed with her he turns into a human but because he dark she can't fully see him and one day when she breaks the curse she does find out that he's like a beautiful man which I think fits a lot more with the story of cth roses and the last myth that serg M has said this book is based on is the legend of Tam Linn I mean the love interest is literally called Tamlin so it's not very subtle and yes in Beauty and the Beast retellings the beauty character already kind of has some agency makes her own decisions is book smart in a court of thorns and roses our main character Farah has a lot of agency she has to fight she has to go through trials and just like in the original fairy tale she is in the and the character that lifts the curse and saves the kingdom basically the last beauty and beast retelling does anyone remember beastly this came out in 2007 so that is around like Twilight time um I haven't read this but I do unfortunately remember the Abominable film adaptation with Alex pattier and Vanessa hudgin this one is from the perspective of the Beast so I guess it's kind of like a retailing now let's get to the last common twist that I noticed we've got Crimson bound also by Rosman Hodge this is a very very loose retelling of Red Riding Hood where Red Riding Hood is very badass the wolf is basically these Forest creatures that the main character has to fight and there's also a love triangle in this one even though Red Riding Hood doesn't originally have any kind of romance there's a love triangle in this one tiger L is a retelling of Peter Pan this book is from the perspective of tiger LLY The Fearless heroine that has a crush on Peter Pan so this is also another example of a story that wasn't originally about a female main character becoming about a female main character and then lastly I finally want to talk about Scarlet the second book in The Lunar Chronicles this is a retelling of Red Riding Hood where the wolf is this like Street Fighter and Red Riding Hood falls in love with the wolf he's a human but his name is Wolf don't worry she doesn't actually fall in love with the wolf that would be weird and inappropriate for young adult audiences and for any audience to be honest what do these stories have in common they all add romances where in the original story there was none yes Tiger Lily is also in love with Peter Pan in the original but it's not the focus on the story also cruel Beauty a Blue Beard retelling in the original Blue Beard there is no romance Blue Beard is the villain but here they fall in love I mean what else can you do after you try to kill each other of course heartless also has the Queen of Hearts fall in love with a Jester character whereas in I'm pretty sure in Ellis and Wonderland there's no romance for the queen of hearts and of course all these romances are between a girl and a boy so focusing a lot on a romance is definitely already in line with the genre conventions of young adult fantasy these books almost always had a romance in them and fairy tales of course also lend themselves very well to romances but I do think it's interesting that a lot of the twists that we found is that you know the female characters are made to be more complex we get to see from their perspective they're not obedient anymore they're ready to kill their love interests but even if the traditional fairy tale doesn't have any romance one is added the message overall all of these fairy tale retelling seems to be that she doesn't need a prince to save her she's ready to kill anyone but in the end she does need a prince for love and if there isn't one we will make one up in traditional fairy tales the message is often that as a girl your life is not complete until you marry someone or at least find a man and this message kind of doesn't change in these retellings it's actively reinforced there are still many ways in which these fairy tale retellings remain conventional Jill costy writes in her article on ya dystopian fairy tale retellings fairy tale retellings still tend to repeat familiar Journeys young girl teaches others that beauty is not as valuable as Integrity young girl learns to say no to domineering Prince and Forge an unconventional path young girl rescues boy instead but her ultimate pairing with said boy reprodu produces a heteronormative scenario there was only one queer retelling with more than 10K good read ratings that I found and that is the often recommended Ash by Melinda low this is a Cinderella retailing where Cinderella falls in love not with the prince but with the Huntsman except the Huntsman is a girl in this one but things have definitely changed like we're looking at the 2010s here now in 2014 there's already so many queer retellings of traditional stories coming out just this year already we have um Evergreen by Devin Greenley this is a lesbian reimagining of Jane air we have so let them burn by Camila Cole this is Jamaican myth inspired and also lesbian and most ardently is a queer reimagining of Pride and Prejudice with a trans boy as the main character so it's interesting to kind of notice what parts of traditional fairy tales are retold and which parts s weren like the feminism part was definitely retold the romance part not so much the heterosexual part not so much retold most of this is like very western western fairy tales not a lot of focus on other cultures that hasn't really been retold in this era and of course the main characters are all still really pretty and beautiful these stories in the end will always be escapism for young girls and it's interesting to see what it means to like Escape into a dream cuz being like an obedient girl at this time wasn't like an Escapist fantasy anymore being a cool girl with a sword was but finding romance being pretty that was still part of The Escapist dream and I would like to hope to see that change as well now at this point I kind of thought that fairy tale retellings you know they really had their figs here as you can tell tell like most of it was in 2015 during like the boom of Y fantasy um but no it it actually never stopped it there's more there's more in 2019 we also had spined Dawn which was a retelling of Mulan except the girl doesn't dress up as a boy to join the military she dresses up as a boy to become a tailor like a magical Taylor 2019 also gave us House of salt and Soros which is kind of like a horror retelling of the 12 Dancing Princesses the hype didn't even die in the 2020s in 2021 we had six Crimson canes which was inspired by many myths and fairy tales the Wild Swans the bamboo cutter Cinderella and the legend of chongu I would even say that there is currently kind of a trend going on in ya fantasy where we focus on stories that are inspired not by like traditional Western fairy tales but Asian myths less than two years ago we got daughter of the Moon Goddess a story inspired by The Legend of Cha about the woman in the moon and that same year we also had The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea which was based on Korean myths don't these also count as retellings when we think of fairy tale retellings we probably are thinking about these like Beauty and the Beast Cella like European Western European folk deal retellings there are actually many ad books that are based on folklore as well like the be and the Nightingale spinning silver uprooted are all based on traditional Slavic folktales aren't these also fairy tale retellings and now that I think about it there's actually currently this big Trend going on in adult fantasy where traditional Greek myths are being retold from the female perspective aren't these also s similar to fairy tale retellings actually we don't just love retelling traditional myths and folktales we also retell stories of classic literature like Pride and Prejudice retellings The Great Gatsby retellings Shakespeare retellings Dracula retellings can we really say this was just a phase when those books are technically also retellings and we don't just copy retellings of stories whose copyright has expired like Pride and Prejudice we love retelling modern stories as well just not down the traditional published route but down the endless Labyrinth of AO3 the fanfiction websites with thousands and thousands of alternate universe retellings of familiar stories and characters I think humans just can't stop retelling old stories I think we will always have this need to tweak familiar stories to give us what we need at that moment it's been happening thousands and thousands of years in the past before the printing press was a thing and people just retold stories when we were telling them to each other and still today we just can't stop like making coffee shop Fanfictions of our favorite characters and the way we decide to tweak these stories will always be a reflection of what we want at that time so just to kind of round up what kind of wants and needs were reflected in this ya fantasy phase these are all Escapist stories so they tell us something about what kind of girl young girls want to escape into this phase reflected a need for more complex characters more complex female characters that have agency that stand up for what they find important we wanted to read about girls with swords but we still wanted to escape into stories where the girls are pretty where the girl gets a boyfriend at the end because we hadn't quite challenged those ideas yet but now things are changing we get more retellings that are queer more retellings based on myths that are not just Western who knows what will happen to fairy tale retellings 10 years from now let me know if you have any kind of predictions on in what kind of way we're going to want to retail stories maybe 20 or 50 years from now I think there's going to be retail of the secret history I'm pretty certain of that oh it was so fun to go back to this fairy tale era cuz I really fell in love with reading by reading all these books thank you so much for watching and I want to give a special shout out as always to my patrons with the names of my Elite Patron members here if you join my Patron you gain access to our book club I really hope you enjoyed this video I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and I will see you soon with another video very soon [Music] goodbye

Channel: The Book Leo

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Id: ZD96BSaZCW4

Length: 34min 22sec (2062 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2024