I think now that we’re in 2017 we can stop villainizing the witch from Hänsel and Gretel. Some kids ate her house. She gets to eat them. It was a fair deal.
counterpoint: Hänsel and Gretel were led out into the woods to starve at the urging of their mother, so both parents don’t have to ration any more food for them during hard times. Hänsel and Gretel were underfed and desperate, and when life gives you a gingerbread house in that state, you eat the windowsill and the front stoop and every gumdrop you can find.
conclusion: if the witch prompted the children to explain themselves she’d realize it was ultimately parents’ neglect that led them to this point.
solution: eat the parents. everyone wins!
Not the solution I was expecting, but honestly, yeah, it makes sense.
Here is “Knot”, a short comic I drew to sell at Mocca and TCAF this year. The printed version is going to be SO PRETTY. I’m in love with the cover (which I will post later).
I just wanted to do something fairy-tale-like that talked about doubts and frustrations and how to deal with them. I’m really happy with how colorful and adorable the story turned out to be.
If you enjoyed “Knot”, please consider reblogging it and/or checking out my ongoing webcomic Namesake! HUGS TO ALL OF YOU!
fantasy book with witches and wizards and magical people but all magic has a price, like
main character, in awe and slightly terrified: what did you have to give up to be able to control storms with your mind?
powerful enchanter, fighting back tears as they pull down the hood of their cloak to reveal a knotted oily mess: my beautiful luscious hair….no matter how many times i wash or brush it, it always looks like this
main character: [horrified gasp]
fortune teller: and speak up when asking your question, these are my cards so they share my partially-deafness
other character, sympathetically: oh, had to trade good hearing for seeing the future?
fortune teller: no, asshole, i was born with it. i got seeing the future for trading in my ability to wink
there’s a legend in this fantasy land about a powerful enchanter who traded their ovaries for the power to create earthquakes. the grumpy semi-sentient force of nature who negotiates these magic deals had thought it was pretty great one, sure to make the recipient of the deal regret making it soon enough (after all, the point is having to suffer a bit in exchange for magic, because life sucks even in magical fantasy kingdoms)
however, soon afterwards, the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature realized the enchanter had been ecstatic to be rid of periods and didn’t care about not having biological children. the GSSFN felt somewhat cheated by this and ever since has had a strict no-trading-internal-organs policy
“fucking humans messing with the system,” it was quoted as saying
actually, cheating the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature out of the suffering it hopes to inflict with the magic deals is a time honored tradition in Magical Fantasy Kingdom, which is primarily made up of sassy little shits. most of the kingdom’s mythology is made up of trickster figures
there’s the legend of the smooth-talking thief who managed, by describing a certain talent of hers as “the ability to form small growths out of her skin and then reabsorb them” with enough quick confusing descriptions to trade the ability to get pimples for the power to become invisible
there’s the boy who brought the GSSFN a bucketful of cold, liquid silver in exchange for the power to cure a certain sickness, only for the GSSFN to realize once the sun had come up that the bucket contained only water reflecting moonlight
there’s the monarch who offered to trade in their power to destroy people with only their words for the seemingly much less valuable power to turn one grain of rice into two grains — only for the GSSFN to realize later it had gotten the ruler’s cutting sarcasm in payment for a power that could end a famine
every year the Grumpy Semi-Sentient Force of Nature gets visits from tens of jewish witches and wizards solemnly offering to give up eating all foods that come from pigs or eating meat at the same time as dairy in exchange for the powers they want
“DO YOU THINK YOU’RE FUCKING CLEVER” says the GSSFN, who has frankly had enough of this shit
The stories were compiled by German historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth in the 1880s – around the same time as the Brothers Grimm folk tales – from across the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz.
While the well-known Grimm fairytales often feature a vulnerable princess and dragon-slaying hero, Schönwerth reverses their roles – offering readers powerful female and vulnerable male characters.
In Schönwerth’s fantastical version Cinderella, for example, the heroine uses her golden – not glass – slippers to rescue her lover from beyond the moon.
yoooooooooo omg
HOLY SHIT I WANNA READ THESE
Very cool – though as a nitpick, it’s not quite accurate to call the tales of Schönwerth’s collections ”role reversals”. Many scholars believe that they actually represent a more accurate reflection of the oral tradition of the late 19th Century than the Grimms’ better-known compilations; if anything, it’s the Grimms’ stuff that’s got it reversed.
(In a nutshell, the Grimms are known to have had some very particular ideas about gender roles, ideas which were doubtlessly reflected in the types of fairy tales they chose to compile. Indeed, most fairy tales tend to have several versions floating around, which makes it highly unusual that some of the versions presented by the Grimms are found nowhere else. Several of the Grimms’ more popular tales are now believed to have been heavily redacted prior to publication to remove “unsuitable” attitudes and motivations from female protagonists.)
Why do witches like always wanna fatten kids up before they eat them?? fat is like the grossest part of meat
“Why hello there, little children~. Please follow me to my magical… FITNESS ROOM. NO P A N S I E S ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT. LEAVE YOUR WHINING AT THE DOOR BECAUSE IT’S LEG DAY AND WE’RE ABOUT TO GET R-R-R-RIPPE D.”
Because they’re always cooking said kids in cauldrons and ovens – aka long cooking times at lowish heat. If you do that to fatty meat, the fat melts completely and the meat gets tear-it-apart-with-a-fork soft. If you do it to lean meat, you get tiny little sad meat bits that bring no joy to anyone.
well you did ask
Also there’s wisdom in fattening them up on sweets and other carbs. A meatless, carb-rich diet makes for more tender and flavourful meat.
you are arguing over the semantics of EATING CHILDREN
Well yeah, you gotta get this shit right or it’s a waste of 40-80 lbs of meat.
Rewrite a classic fairy tale by telling it backwards. The end is now the beginning.
Once upon a time there was a queen whose husband was beastly.
At first, he was not beastly in face or form – for his visage was saintly, as if he had stepped down from the cames of a stained-glass window. But he was a beast, and more than a beast, and as the days passed he became ever more beastly, until the queen could not look upon him without her flesh crawling in revulsion. Even a beast, she thought, would know better than this.
Even my dog, who is a dumb hound, knows that this is wrong.
At first the servants talked freely, and she knew that the castle was on her side; but as the master’s whims grew ever more dreadful, the servants’ tongues stilled like the clappers of bells when the leather sleeves are put on. Her handmaidens, who had once succored her and held her confidences, now carried stories to the king. The queen felt besieged, pulled out by the roots.
“Tell me you love me,” said the beastly king, “And I will stop.” And she told him, but only to make him stop.
Though high summer was approaching, the castle was growing ever colder, and the air had soured. The sparrows that she once fed from her hand had flown away; and what can frighten away a sparrow, when sparrows so freely make friends of prisoners and the condemned?
She thought about killing the master; but she thought more about getting away.
The master killed her dog – only a dumb hound, but it knew right from wrong.
When the queen left, she planted a rose, and bade its roots to grow deep and its thorns to ensnare, to trap the whole rotted-out heart of the castle until someone should come to destroy it. Before her very eyes the rose grew from stripling to a vast and frightening hedge, and she plucked one fine rose from it, and the bloom did not wilt.
The queen did not much care what happened next. She rode into the forest, and came out again on a different side.
The queen rode, her horse blown and her hems tattered, until she came near-collapse to the home of an old merchant and his two daughters.
They were very nice people. They stabled her horse and invited her to dinner.
“I will pay you,” said the queen.
“You needn’t pay,” said the family.
“Then,” said the queen, “I will give you this rose.”
The queen married the elder daughter, and together they had as many dogs as the house would hold.
Concept: you and your best friend lying in a fairies’ meadow, and the fairy’s make flower crowns for you, the sky is pink, the flowers sing, you are safe. You are okay
you are not safe. that is not your best friend. RUN
Yo ok what if there was a Cinderella story where Cinderella is a trans woman and that’s really why her stepmom treats her like shit and won’t let her go to the ball and when the prince and his men come around looking to try the slipper on every woman in the land her stepmom tells the prince there aren’t any women left in the house because she insists that Cinderella is a man, but Cinderella comes out and the prince recognizes her and says something along the lines of “well I’d say that’s a woman if I ever saw one”
That would explain the shoe size not being common among women as well.
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