Remember the good old days when fairy tales actually had morals in them? I mean the old fairy tales taught children good life lessons. For example they taught that life doesn’t have happy endings. Disney and other new fairy tale authors have ruined the messages of the old fairy tales. Today’s fairy tales just teach us that there is always a happy ending and that the good guy will always win.
In real life how often does the good guy win? How often does life have a happy ending? The answer is not often. At least not as often as Disney wants you to believe. Good guys don’t always win nor does everything have a happy ending. Disney wants you to believe this in their depiction of fairy tales. Everyone knows the Little Mermaid right? In the Disney version she marries the man she fell in love with and lives happily ever after. The original had a far darker ending. Instead of marrying the mute mermaid he marries another woman. The mermaid overcome with grief throws herself into the ocean and drowns. This is a more realistic depiction and shows that all endings are not happy. Now I am not saying that all the old fairy tales had bad endings. In most though there isn’t a happy ending according to our standards of happy. For example in the most recent Red Riding Hood stories a woodsman saves the young girl. The woodsman even saves her grandmother. In the original work The wolf coerces our favorite girl into eating her grandmother. Then he forced her to burn her clothes and lay naked with the wolf. She got away by telling the wolf she had to use the restroom and ran away only almost escaping the wolf. Is this a happy ending though? She cannibalized her grandmother and ran naked through the woods. In those times the fact that she survived was in itself a happy ending. In our society today we see this ending as a tragedy. The Shadow is the perfect example of a story where the good guy does not win. The Shadow is about a writer and his shadow. His shadow goes away for a while and comes back with the attitude that being nice will get you nowhere. So the writer doing the right thing gets poorer and unhealthier as his shadow gets richer and fatter. Long story short the writer gets executed while his shadow marries and lives a rather happy life. The moral of the story as you can see is that evil always wins. This is the opposite of what we want to teach our kids today. We want our kids to do the right thing rather than to resort to the things that the shadow did.
In most fairy tales today it shows the good guy prevailing over people like the shadow. The Shadow teaches children the harsh reality of the world where there is no such thing as a good guy. It teaches that there is no such thing as a knight in shining white armor. We all wear dingy gray armor.
Disney and some of the newer authors of fairy tales have ruined the morals and teachings of the old ones. They attempted to teach us that the good guy always wins and that there are always happy endings. The old fairy tales gave us harsh life lessons. They told us that good guys don’t always win and that sometimes you won’t have the happiest ending if any at all. So you should all remember this. You have to work hard to maintain your happy ending. The old teachings fairy tales taught are better compared to the new distorted ones.
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