@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social
2026-09-23 07:29 UTC
Replies (28)
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@GreenSkyOverMe@ohai.social 2026-09-23 07:30
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social 👍
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@NuclearSquid@piaille.fr 2026-09-23 08:00
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social I don’t think this framing of "high / low classes" in fairy tails is an ill-intentionned choice. I saw a guy on Youtube called Shnee (I believe) talk about a very similar phenomenon between Disney and Pixar. Basically Disney writes aspirational movies (the girl who rises against misogyny and proves she is a fierce warrior in Mulan) while Pixar writes relatable movies (the top athlete tries to build meaningful connection in an environment he doesn’t know in Cars). This is basically the same thing here. Knights and queens are aspirational, peasants are relatable. I prefer the latter personally, but the former is fine too, for me.
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@isaackuo@spacey.space 2026-09-23 08:15
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social I wonder if it's a side effect of the rise of photographic visual media, such as movies. I mean, castles are visually cool, so there's a natural desire to shoot in a castle setting...
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@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange 2026-09-23 08:24
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social N K Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy was written as a partial reaction to this. She was fed up with all of the heroic stories of people restoring the status quo.
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@Jeanniewarner@wandering.shop 2026-09-23 08:28
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social Disney would have a hard time with The little girl who trod on a loaf.
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@Oggie@woof.group 2026-09-23 08:31
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social I think this is a narrative choice that is especially prevalent in anime, of all things- almost every character is 'by birth' in various fashion. Their strengths are predetermined by bloodlines, family ties, though less explicitly by aristocracy than in most modern fairy tales. Once I noticed it, it was striking how many times even the 'everyday person' ended up having a pureblooded father/mother/ancestor. It often overwhelms the 'work hard' message, instead 'awaken'.
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@hjwp@fosstodon.org 2026-09-23 09:01
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social I've been reading Robert Bly lately. If you're reading for symbolism, the king doesn't have to be a literal king, but instead a representation of wisdom and inner will. similarly an exiled prince can be anyone that's on a journey to find their true potential.
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@flyingpenguin@infosec.exchange 2026-09-23 09:32
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social Hans im Glück! trades gold down to nothing and walks home happy... that's the good stuff. court literature flatters the court, spinning-room tales flatter the spinners. even Grimm's peasant usually wins by marrying the princess. to be fair, Perrault told Cinderella as a gentleman's daughter in 1697, dedicated to Louis XIV's niece. the big turn was when Disney ripped off "his" identity from Neuschwanstein with a fairy-tale king. :hot_shit: truly a villain. 1955 Disney ran disinformation on TV to sell the fantasy of Nazi SS Officer Wernher Von Braun, whose failed V2s (rip offs of American Goddard designs) were built by slave labor. captured German engineers told Americans they learned virtually everything from Goddard and asked why nobody went to him instead. and so, while he was laundering Nazis, Disney opened the themes of Disneyland copying Tivoli, behind a castle copying Neuschwanstein, to promote Nazis copying and stealing from American rocket scientists. examples: Rapunzel was daughter of an ordinary couple whose mother craved greens from the witch's garden. then Disney Tangled made her into a stolen princess. Andersen's Kai and Gerda are just some poor kids in attic rooms. then Disney Frozen turned them into royal sisters. Disney even forced Mulan to be royalty, who never was royal ever in any version. his company kept rewriting peasants into royals for decades after he died in 1966. Little Mermaid was intentional profit-driven corruption pushing tradwife nonsense. for me it's just like legendary American women getting written out of the space race. the Jupiter-c that put Explorer 1 in orbit in 1958 flew on hydyne, the fuel Mary Sherman Morgan invented to get it there. the press instead ran photos of Von Braun, the Nazi Disney had put on TV three years earlier to sell Nazi ideas of Tomorrowland (literally a Nazi fantasy ship).
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@Thatfeministwoman@mastodon.social 2026-09-23 09:40
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social that's probably why fantasy is not my style. I hated the Witcher storyline, I stopped watching it
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@Npars01@mstdn.social 2026-09-23 09:56
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social There's always something a bit creepy about Disney narratives and dead parents... ... orphans of that era didn't have romance, adventures, or find riches. ... they tended to die of neglect, malnutrition, overwork, human trafficking, and contagious diseases more than children with living parents. The average lifespan of a teen sex worker was 18 months after entering the trade.
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@SomeVeganCheeseIsOk@mastodon.social 2026-09-23 10:09
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social see also: romance books. The choice is because of the fantasy being fulfilled. A strong desire for safety, comfort, and simplicity, or at least solvable problems.
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@rcosta@archaeo.social 2026-09-23 10:25
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social A choice probably related with the social status of folk tales anthologists. But I think the major responsible for that situation is Disney. Wealthy Americans, like 19th c. European bourgeois, love castles, palaces and nobility. The educational/social background of the anthologists is always a filter for many elements. ie European oral tales are full of peasant eschatological humor that "well educated" people generally remove in the books.
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@melindrea@beige.party 2026-09-23 10:34
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social I'm actually currently somewhat grappling with this scenario and can't decide which way to go. main character finds out that she's a changeling—a fairy exchanged when an infant for a mortal infant—and is being pulled into the world of the fey as an adult. She will meet her ... let's call it "twin sister", who's had a good life among the fey (the changeling myths I'm drawing from have the mortal child being treated the same by the fey parents as the changeling one is by the mortals, and main character's parents treated her quite well, so ...). But now I need to decide ... what "status" does she have among fey creatures (or, in particular, what status does her fey parent(s) have). Unlikely to be the equivalent of a peasant ... but I also don't particularly want her to find out that she is truly the daughter of the fey queen.
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@Colman@mastodon.ie 2026-09-23 10:50
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social any idea when the transition happened?
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@adaddinsane@mastodonapp.uk 2026-09-23 11:12
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social That's very interesting. (Especially since it isn't true of my books 🙃 even the MCs who are born to money ... only one or two ... do not remain privileged.)
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@em_and_future_cats@mastodon.social 2026-09-23 11:14
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social I had one story that was a “spin off” of “Donkey skin” the protagonist was a person who was learning how to make special dyes for unrealistic fabric to appease the king (and grant the wishes of the princess) .. I think it was called the “Dyemaster?” It was in a magazine several years ago. I agree that this “trope” has become prevalent, but I will try to find the ones that don’t have it and recommend them to as many people as possible !😹 (Pepper & Carrot comic is a great read 🩷)
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@thvv@social.vivaldi.net 2026-09-23 11:35
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social my favorite fairy tale is The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber.
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@gimulnautti@mastodon.green 2026-09-23 11:43
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social Exactly. It’s no wonder people with any narcissistic or sociopathic tendencies (and those are quite common), grow up to be neofeudalistic techbros. In fact, based on my knowledge about developmental psychology and cognitive science, especially on what functional brain scanning has revealed, this choice is extremely important. I’m afraid our heriditary lines contain so much propensity for authorianism and violence, we need to work very hard to keep a lid on it
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@peterb@mathstodon.xyz 2026-09-23 11:56
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social Wouldn't this be a natural consequence of writing the fairy tales down at a time when only nobles or clergy were literate? (I'd imagine that this level of rewriting did not happen as much for oral tales, but I don't know the statistics.)
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@aoanla@hachyderm.io 2026-09-23 12:12
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social I always think that the English Robin Hood myth is an interesting variant on this - in the earliest stories, he's a yeoman (so not a peasant, but certainly not nobility), but as the tales get and repeated and "enhanced" by more "educated" writers, he suddenly becomes Secretly Robert of Locksley, a noble who even knows Good King Richard...
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@llewelly@sauropods.win 2026-09-23 12:25
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social it gets more interesting when you consider that the very word "villain" is " ... from Old French vilein (modern French vilain), in turn from Late Latin vīllānus, meaning serf or peasant, someone who is bound to the soil of a Latin vīlla, which is to say, worked on the equivalent of a plantation ... " https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/villain#Etymology the classism runs deep.
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@NicelyManifest@mastodon.social 2026-09-23 12:52
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social Akin to biased history that relegates billions of people to near nothing.
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@Chancerubbage@mastodon.social 2026-09-23 13:48
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social Class struggle seems inherent in most myth and folklore through recorded history. The exceptions might lie in the east were a fable might be more about interpersonal gaining of wisdom or experience outside the hierarchy. Aesop’s Fables also, although I haven’t read them as an anthropomorphic analog much; heroes and villains will pop up in a dog eat dog world.
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@Tapewolf@meow.social 2026-09-23 13:54
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social "The man who would win the hand of the princess would be a kitchen lad, or a stable boy, or a young thief. Rabalyn's dislike for those tales centred on the endings. It always turned out that the stable lad was the secret son of a great king, or a wizard. Princesses, it seemed, just didn't fall in love with common folk." -White Wolf, David Gemmell, 2003
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@sidereal@kolektiva.social 2026-09-23 14:29
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social I wonder how much of this is a cultural memory of people marrying into the aristocracy and then making up fake bloodlines to retroactively justify it, or if I'm thinking too much into this
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@weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz 2026-09-23 14:35
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social Canonical German folk-tales featuring a decidedly non-noble protagonist: Till Eulenspiegel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Till_Eulenspiegel
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@BoysenberryCider@mastodon.social 2026-09-23 14:38
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social I agree. I remember I first became aware of this bias when I read 'for the term of his natural life', a narrative about a convict sentenced to transportation to Australia. Of course, unlike all actual victims, the hero is of aristocratic birth, to make sure society can sympathise with him. I don't blame the author, he was working with the society he was born into, but it's abominable that literature of a democratic age retains the trope that only aristocrats possess humanity.
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@ratsnakegames@mastodon.social 2026-09-23 15:40
@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social i'm wondering how much of this is Disney's fault