What I Learned From Fairy Tales
It doesn’t always end in happily ever after.
Once upon a time at 4 AM, I realised that fairy tales are full of BS.
I’m kidding. I love fairy tales; Disney was a huge part of my childhood and to this day I still listen to their music on Spotify. Fairy tales are a way to escape reality for a while, not to mention a great foundation to raise children on to make their childhood that much more whimsical.
This sounds like a good thing but while I do love a good Disney movie, I’ve learned a few things from fairy tales that probably go against the fairy tale’s entire essence but are things to be picked up anyway.
Damsels in distress are overrated
It’s a trope we’ve all seen; the princess is stuck in her tower and needs saving by the handsomest prince charming in the world. The princess gets into an unpleasant situation and needs a fairy godmother to wave a magic wand and get her out of it. The princess generally always needs saving.
Themes like this set feminism back 10 years.
Kidding. (Again, but not really.)
The thing is, in the real world that’s just not possible. No one is going to magically make all our problems disappear, and we can’t sit around in our ivory towers waiting for someone to come and save us from eternal boredom.
Modern princesses know that to get anything done, we have to do it ourselves. Who needs a fairy godmother when you can perform your own magic and get yourself out of whatever it is you stumbled into? Fairy godmothers just stunt your growth anyway; imagine having to rely on someone who can disappear at will. It’s like having a life coach that consistently ghosts you.
We need to start taking initiative for the things we want and making the first move to save ourselves. Otherwise, we’re never getting out of that tower.
Our quests are our own
You are the protagonist of your own story. Supporting characters should stay supporting characters; they aren’t there to make your plot line move, that’s your job.
A great example of this is Sam in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Frodo was the protagonist of that story, but really it should have been Sam; he did all the work and basically propped Frodo up the entire time. It’s a great example of what not to do — allow ourselves to become supporting characters in our own fairy tales.
Our quests are our own; we shouldn’t expect other people to slay our personal dragons. They’re ours to deal with, much like the problems we face in the real world. We can’t be Frodo who depends on Sam to see him through to the end of the quest. No one likes a Frodo.
There are multiple trolls on multiple bridges
In fairy tales, the hero sometimes has to best a troll on a bridge to get past him and continue their quest. This could mean anything from having to fight him off with a sword to outsmarting him at his own riddle.
In real life, things are similar but not quite so simple; most of the time, we have to fight off multiple trolls on one bridge or one big boss troll that’s protecting multiple bridges or a never-ending train of bridges each with its own individual troll — you get it. Challenges come in all shapes and forms, and they never really stop coming at us.
This can get pretty overwhelming especially when there’s so much to deal with at one time, but that’s our reality.
Sometimes, we’re even faced with having to defeat trolls that look a lot like us. Sometimes, what’s keeping us from our goals are ourselves.
How, then, do we best these real-life trolls?
We take them one at a time as much as possible, roll with the punches, and keep on until we’re better equipped to deal with the endless barrage of challenges. That’s because these don’t stop; we’re always going to end up having to deal with speed bumps along the way, and that’s okay as long as we learn from each one. It might make all the difference for the next one.
We can’t slay every dragon and achieve every side quest
We have the tendency to want to save as many people as possible; people with a savior complex will understand what I mean. However, it’s important to remember that we can’t save everyone, and we can’t be victorious in every undertaking. Most of the time, we will fail.
It seems so easy in fairy tales — juggling all the side quests and making sure the entire kingdom is saved. Not even a small portion of it, or just one person; it has to be the entire kingdom. Impossible in real life, but apparently as easy as breathing in fairy tales.
In real life, it’s not as easy. We can only do so much; we can’t save everyone. The sooner we accept that, the easier it’ll be to get on with our main quests — and maybe help a few people along the way, but that’s it.
Fatuous love is a very real threat to our real-life fairy tales
Love is rarely as easy as having a princess fall into your lap after climbing her tower on a rope of her hair. In the real world, love is hard, and people aren’t quite so perfect and polished.
I believe in the possibility of soul mates, but I also believe that we can’t possibly just have one of them. How can these princes and princesses get married after just knowing each other for a day? (Kristoff from Frozen really got this one right.)
In psychology, Robert Sternberg identified the Triangle of Love. This triangle is composed of the three different elements of love: passion, intimacy, and commitment. There are different types of love according to which elements can be seen in them, and the type of love that best describes this fairy tale “love at first sight” phenomenon is fatuous love, or the presence of passion and commitment. This is the kind of love wherein the two people don’t actually know a lot about each other (hence the absence of intimacy), but are passionate about each other enough to commit to the other.
So basically, it’s the plot line of every single one of the earliest Disney princess movies.
We need to be careful about fatuous love. We need to be careful about rushing into commitments without getting to know the other person first, because how are you supposed to make important life-altering decisions together if you don’t even know how the other person solves their problems? You could wake up one day, married to a person whose shoe size you don’t even know, and be stuck in that situation because you were infatuated enough to overlook the getting-to-know-each-other part — the most crucial part of any relationship, really.
In the end, we write our own happily ever afters. All we really have to do is decide to take charge of the narrative, kick whoever’s attempting to write our stories off their chair, and begin writing.
