Fairy tales are a quintessential part of childhood, unique to every culture and yet similar in their lifelong significance. One can find incorporations from fairy tales in language, with “ugly ducklings” and “wolves in sheep’s clothing” and beginnings of stories with “once upon a time’s”. Fairy tales extend to every form of entertainment; from being inspirations for plays, pantomimes, and movies (especially famous are those by Disney), to more adult interpretations, such as Guillermo del Toro’s film Pinocchio set in a fascist Italy, and Alice: Madness Returns. Here, a video game based on the classic Adventures in Wonderland but instead having Alice hallucinate Wonderland’s existence to cope with the death of her family in a house fire. 

Fairy tales and children’s stories always share a few similarities, outside of their impact on wider society. They always: are easy to follow with few characters, are written to be child-friendly, and – most importantly – they always have a happy ending. There is only one caveat to this list of similarities, however, and that is that it is completely untrue. Fairy tales, right up until the last couple of centuries, have been intended less as fantastical works for children to admire and enjoy but more so as dark fantasy worlds for adults to explore. Akin to many of the ‘parodies’ of fairy tales seen today – parodies whose dark moods often match the intention of authors better than modern adaptations to amuse the young. Just to test out this theory, I’ll explore a few classic fairy tales distinctly within their genre to judge against the list of criteria given above. For fairness, I’m excluding stories claimed firmly by other genres that are well known to children, such as the gothic claim on Frankenstein and Dracula, and making sure that they are written works over a hundred years old, such that modern child fiction is not included. 

To compile a list of tales to consider, I’ve consulted the ultimate authority on what is and isn’t a famous fairy tale: the Shrek movies, truly a paragon of animation and a beacon of guidance in these trying times.  

Here’s to hoping the stories you read to your children don’t forever traumatise them. 

No recount of fairy tales would be complete without Cinderella, a tale often attributed to linguists and writers the brothers Grimm, but appearing in its first form as Rhodipis, a story of a Greek slave girl with a magic slipper that led to her marriage to the Pharaoh, originating from the 6th century BCE. The story of the Ash-Girl (or Cinder-Ella, hence the name), in Grimm’s tale, is particularly gruesome – a feature customary of many of the Grimm tales. Everyone knows the story in one form or another so I won’t be recounting, but the truly sadistic abuse of Cinderella by her stepsisters is often brushed over, with them wounding her and working her to the bone by creating problems and messes just to force her to fix. The ‘fun fact’ often touted about Cinderella is that the stepsisters carved off parts of their feet to make them fit in their sister’s slipper, and as gruesome as that is, I think one can do better. Cinderella isn’t a tale unique to the Western hemisphere by any means, and a Chinese version of the tale over a thousand years old, Ye Xian by Han Wen Li, is perhaps in part responsible for the spread of lotus feet, the binding of a girl’s feet from an early age to permanently alter their bone structure and leading to lifelong mobility issues and disability- popular with Chinese women as a status symbol and sign of beauty right up until the 20th century. And now for our test: 

• ✅ The characters are very few, and are easy to keep track of!  
• ❌ This story is definitely not child-friendly, I do not condone sawing off body parts to fit in others’ clothes (no matter how insecure you are about your size), nor do I condone psychological and physical abuse of your siblings 
• ❌ A happy ending for Cinderella and her nameless prince, yes, but for her siblings who get their eyes pecked out by magic birds for trying to become royalty? Not so much. It could be said this is a good ending, but considering there’s also an ending where the two stepsisters are killed by flying rocks in Ye Xian, I think this fate is preferable. 

The Wicked Witch from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by American writer L. Frank Baum is another character featured in our fairy tale compendium. To some, fairy tale is not a word to be used with such a tale, as it is only from the year 1900, relatively recent when one tries to think of how timeless fairy tales feel. To these naysayers, I call you confidently incorrect. The story of The Three Little Pigs was first published in 1890, only 10 years earlier, and is a quintessential story that no one would doubt as a fairy tale. Regardless, the first instalment – as well as every other instalment – in the Oz series was intended as a child’s tale, though the 77 books in the series (not including the 141 non-canonical but still licensed works in the Oziverse) begins to defeat the point of a single self-contained story and, even if you limit yourself to purely the work of the original author – Baum, there remain 101 characters in the original Oz. Sadly, my newly discovered favourite character in this series (Mops, the chef for the Scarecrow mansion) is not amongst them. The intended audience of this text was one of children, but the use of comedy to conceal the degree of brutality is a trope more fitting the description of a fairy tale. A pack of wolves are hacked to pieces, the Witch is killed by a vitriol attack, another is pulverised by a building, and – worst of all – the Wizard of Oz is originally from Nebraska. Is there even anything in Nebraska other than fields of maize, much less human life? Is the Wizard a liar? A happy ending can’t at all be said, as he chooses to return to Nebraska, perhaps to live a happy life as a corn farmer. So now to see if Oz fits the bill: 

• ❌ Over a hundred characters is a bit much for children, subjects whom often cannot be expected to remember that there are a hundred numbers 
• ✅ This one is actually intended for children, and inspired by stories told by the author’s young children, forever leaving me to question the inner machinations of a child’s mind, leaving me pondering how such barbarity exists in something allegedly so cute 
• ❌ A happy ending appears for our protagonists, though the Land of Oz itself remains in ruins, with the two Good Witches and two Wicked Witches acting as counterparts to each other, maintaining a balance, and destruction of entire ecosystems follows with the slaying of the Giant Spider. The silver shoes, instruments of great power, are lost in the Deadly Desert surrounding the Land of Oz and, if the Lord of the Rings series has taught me anything – such instruments are meant for nothing except to be destroyed, lest they fall into the wrong hands.  

The story of Pinocchio is a perfect example of the complete failure of this type of characterisation of these stories. To cut a 36-chapter-long story short, Pinocchio – a living puppet – is created by puppeteer Gepetto out of a talking block of wood. Pinocchio constantly rejects acting responsibly in favour of having a good time (for which I can’t exactly blame him, especially with how long I’ve put off writing this article). In the original version of the text, the story ends with his hanging for his actions that repeatedly endanger others. The Italian story’s writer, Carlo Collodi, who wrote the piece from 1881 to 1883, was known for his politically satirical publishing, which this is no exception to. The story of Pinocchio includes themes like the abuse of power by police, extortion and deception by thieves and criminals, and slavery, just to name a few. During Collodi’s life, the country of Italy was unified into a single kingdom, leading to many members of the lower classes trying to enjoy themselves and ending up in (what was to them) novel and absurd situations as they tried to navigate their new lives in big cities following industrialisation. This is very much parallel in the life of Gepetto’s puppet, where Collodi repeatedly makes clear that Pinocchio is rejecting responsibility due to naivety, even when told the consequences of his future actions by supporting characters. So as far as the checklist goes:  

• ❌ 32 characters are slightly more than I’d consider a few. 
• ❌ Killing a puppet and imprisoning his creator for his actions is not particularly child-friendly. 
• ❌ Hanging a little boy is not a very happy ending. 

I could go on and on with other tales, but I also want to touch on a topic just as interesting, if not more so to non-adolescents; the parodying of fairy tales. As mentioned already, many in their original forms are simply barbaric and serious in tone, something not captured in most modern depictions, such as in Shrek, the aforementioned compendium of fairy tales. By parodying these works and giving them a more sinister tone, these stories are simply being reverted to the morbidity that they originally held, instead of acting to corrupt the stories as many believe.  

This article itself was inspired by one of such adaptations, the video game Lies of P, inspired by the work of Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio. I had originally intended to use this article as an excuse to myself to beat the game as “essential research” but it proved a more difficult task than expected. In Lies of P, each antagonist from the original tale is turned into a ‘video game boss’, an enemy that must be slain of great size and strength, but – in this game – they are all puppets, of which there are 22, interspersed amongst exploring the fictional Italian city of Krat, its ambiance dark and gloomy.  

The story of the original features a puppet of Gepetto, Pinocchio, escaping his creator’s workshop and getting caught by a police officer who arrests Gepetto on suspicion of abusing the puppet boy. In the parallel game, the police officer is turned into a giant deformed puppet beast bearing only the police custodian helmet as resemblance to the original antagonist. And I swear I didn’t take seven hours to beat him 🤥. 

Why do I share my anecdote about having beaten a video game boss within a very (un)reasonable time? To be honest, there are two reasons: one is my unending search for validation, but the other is far more important – it’s to acknowledge the impact that these silly stories have over every aspect of life. I discussed a few sayings from fairy tales in my opener, but they are so pervasive in every aspect of life that I was inspired to write this article by a video game from a Korean company inspired by a Japanese director about an Italian story by a satirist almost 150 years ago. If that comes off as a convoluted sentence, that was the intention, as it shows the layers of influence that fairy tales still hold to very real non-infant people in the world.  

Modernity has begun to reduce the impact and severity of these stories as parents cry out for a safer, less traumatising world for their children, but it is imperative that these stories be preserved and told in their original forms at least somewhere such that they aren’t lost to time, and what better place to start than with children?