The trope of the girl that most people like while someone else wants to capture.
We see tropes a lot in fairy tales, but one trope that stands out to me as different from the rest is the trope of a young girl. Specifically, this girl is loved and or worshiped by many, but there is someone out to get her. Let’s take a look at the context of a few stories…
The first story that portrays this trope is in the original Snow White story by the Grimms Brothers titled “Sneewittchen”. Sneewittchen — German for “Snow White”, focused on a story about the relationship between a beautiful young girl and her parents. Snow White’s father is the King, and he remarries to a new woman who practices witchcraft, also known as the Evil Queen. The Queen is very full of herself and every day asks her mirror, “Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” Every day, the mirror says the Queen is, but one day it says Snow White is, and so the Queen wants to use a poison apple to sentence Snow White to an eternal sleep. Snow White has been spending time with some new friends she has met in the forest, the dwarves. However, these dwarves don’t have names.
The most obvious story that this trope is present in Disney’s retelling of the classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. In this version, we are introduced to the dwarves with names, unlike Sneewittchen where they were known as “dwarf 1”. Snow White is loved by all of the dwarves (with the exception of maybe Grumpy, but to be fair Grumpy doesn’t like a lot of people). Snow White magically appears in the story, and the dwarves take her in as family. This is different as we do not learn that she is related to the Evil Queen and we never see her father, the King, in this version. Similar to Sneewittchen, the Evil Queen is upset when her mirror says that Snow White is the fairest in all of the land. So, the Evil Queen decides to poison Snow White and take her in so that the Evil Queen can be the fairest in all the land. However, in this version, we see a prince magically appear and wake up Snow White with a kiss. It is very magical.
The final story that shares this trope comes from a popular Netflix series, “Stranger Things”. In this story, we witness the story of a friend group containing four boys. The youngest and smallest of the group, Will Byers, goes missing in episode one. The other three boys — Mike, Dustin, and Lucas — run into a girl in the woods one day while searching for Will. Her name is Eleven. At first, the three boys are curious about Eleven and even consider telling their parents, but when they try to, Eleven shows them her secret powers. She can control people and objects with only her mind. She does not allow the boys to tell their parents as she slams the door shut with her mind when they threaten to go tell Mike’s mom. Eleven describes to the boys that there are “bad men” who are trying to get her. These bad men, specifically Dr. Martin Brenner (pictured below to the right with grey hair) are trying to capture Eleven as they once contained her in their lab to conduct experiments on.
