This is something I really wanted to write as a comment after watching Disney’s one-year re-do of Milk-Coffee-Brown and the Seven Weird People, but that’d be censored.
I would essentially reccommend watching @TheCriticalDrinker video, but you don’t have to, it’s not in his top1000 videos to watch. I know most of my readers are German, but I already started writing that in English, so, here we go with a summary for you:
The woke-feminist version of “Snow White” was ridiculed all over the internet for being exactly that, and now, after lots of hefty remakes and a year later, Disney posted a new trailer.
Watch any video ridiculing everything, or read any top-voted comment, but my bone of contention was that @TheCriticalDrinker said that “maybe it’s not about beauty, it’s ‘mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?'”.
The German original question to the mirror is “Spieglein, Spielglein an der Wand, wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land?”. “Fairest” is a necessity of rhyme and syllables. “land” doesn’t rhyme well with “wall”, and it’s more words to use comparatives (beautiful-est is not a word) or diminitives (mirror-y) in English.
So, of course the fairytale is about beauty. Show Whites beauty is what would have gotten her killed in the first place. But I guess the original fairytale wasn’t suitable for “modern audiences” (in 1937). That has obviously gotten worse.
I’m a bit bewildered that @TheCriticalDrinker didn’t read the original material, but the (5-page-long) fairytale (German / English) isn’t too hard to understand when you’re not a 7-year-old girl with a vain evil stepmother in late-medieval what’s-now–partially-Germany.
The 1937 Disney version is about a young teenage girl who’s taken into the woods to be killed by the Evil Queen’s Huntsman, who then cannot bring himself to kill Snow White and reveals to her the Queen’s plot. He then urges her to flee into the woods and never return.
She then finds the Seven Dwarfes’ dirty house, cleans it, which frightenes the dwarves when they come home from their work in a diamond mine, but she’s so nice and beautiful and asks to stay, so while they work in the mines all day, she sings happy songs doing a little housekeeping, most of which is done by magical woodland animals.
The Evil Queen learns from the magic mirror that Show White is still alive, she creates a magic poisoned apple, which won’t kill her, because true love’s first kiss will cure the death-like sleep.
Along comes prince charming, kisses the dead girl, everyone rejoices. Happy end.
So, let’s compare that to the original and explain why it’s about beauty: Evil Queen stepmother notices that 7-year-old (!) Snow White is gonna be more beautiful than her someday, she’s “proud and arrogant” in the fairytaile; I’d rather call that ‘vanity’, so she asks (plot point #1) her magic mirror if she’s the most beatiful female on this planet, to which the mirror honestly replies: No.
That gets Snow White sent to die by the Huntsman, but she – still a little girl – begs him for her life, couldn’t she run away?, (plot point #2), and because she was so beautiful, the huntsman took pity on her, and he said, “Run away, you poor child.” (see below, that’s also #8).
Magically, a boar appeared, which the huntsman killed instead; the Evil Queen wanted Snow White’s lungs and liver for dinner, but the Huntsman felt “as if a stone had fallen from his heart, for he would not have to kill her”, and he knew how to tell the Evil Queen’s cook how to prepare that dish (yes, there’s a rudimentary recipe in the fairytale; you’ll soon learn, why).
After running until she couldn’t run anymore, being jumped at by wild animals, who didn’t hurt her (plot point #3), she finds the house of the seven dwarves. The house was small, but “neat and clean that no one could say otherwise”. She was hungry (notice, plot point #4: Snow White doesn’t have any feelings except for #1, not wanting to die), so she ate, and “drank a glass of wine”, which tells us that she’s aged a bit in the meantime, and then goes to sleep.
The exhausted dwarves, home from strenuous work, notice in OCD-manner every little detail she wronged in their perfectly neat house, then find the beautiful girl sleeping in one of their beds. Since they’re decent, hard-working people, they leave her alone and share a bed, expecially the dwarf whose she took, because all other beds are smaller.
Since the dwarves immediately came up with a one-hour sleep rotation, someone was awake when she started to wake up, so they all were awake when she finally noticed that she was alone in a house with seven men, “But they were friendly and asked, ‘What is your name?'”.
After answering the question on wtf she’s doing there, the dwarves offered her: (plot point #5): “If you will keep house for us, and cook, make beds, wash, sew, and knit, and keep everything clean and orderly, then you can stay with us, and you shall have everything that you want.”
“with all my heart”, she lies instinctively, and the dwarves warn her to be careful about her vain Evil Queen stepmother.
Time passes, mentioned (again) by the Seven Dwarves living behind seven mountains, Snow White is still very young, but the Evil Queen asks her mirror again, learns that Snow White is still alive, and goes on to try to murder her again. “Bodice laces (plot point #6) in all colors”, she sells to Snow White in a disguise, which the latter lets her tighten, and that happened “so quickly and so hard that Snow-White could not breathe”.
The dwarves save her (again), and, she’s old enough now, to tell her “let no one in when we are not with you”.
The wicked woman (the Evil Queen) learns, again from her magic mirror, that Snow White is still alive (again), so she tries to kill her again, and, again, the disguised Evil Queen poisons her with a magic comb.
The dwarves save her (again), and, “once again they warned her to be on guard and not to open the door for anyone.”
“”I am not allowed to let anyone in. The dwarfs have forbidden me to do so.”, Snow White tells the Evil Queen on her fourth try to kill her.
“It’s all right”, says the disguised Evil Queen, and thus Snow White eats the poisoned apple – see? We’re back to the Disney story just 3 out of 5 pages later. This time, she dies (again), and the dwarves can’t help her anymore. So, they put her in a chrystal glass coffin, preciuosly engraved in golden letters saying who she is, because she’s too beautiful to be buried in the dirt.
The Evil Queen’s “envious heart was at rest, as well as an envious heart can be at rest”. I’ll just quote what happens next:
“Snow-White lay there in the coffin a long, long time, and she did not decay… Now it came to pass that a prince entered these woods and happened onto the dwarfs’ house, where he sought shelter for the night (plot point #7) . He saw the coffin on the mountain with beautiful Snow-White in it, and he read what was written on it with golden letters (plot point #8).
“Then he said to the dwarfs, ‘Let me have the coffin. I will give you anything you want for it.'”
“But the dwarfs answered, ‘We will not sell it for all the gold in the world.'”
Prince Charming then explains why he really wants to have the coffin with Snow White, and the dwarves let him take it. One of his servants carrying the coffin droppes it, she coughs tho poisoned apple out, asks “where am I?”, and he just says “You are with me.” (#9)
They get married, and at the wedding ball, the Evil Queen is made to wear “red-hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead” (plot point 10).
The attentive reader might have noticed a bit of a difference between the “modern audience” – friendly 1937 Disney version and the original, but the upcoming 2025 version stars milky-coffee boss girl, and by the trailer, Snow White makes the seven dwarves clean the house. You go, girl!
I’m not sure what’s the actual message of a fairytale is, but I mentioned ten important plot points above, and I’m pretty sure that plot #1 ends in plot #8, a story without a good plot and a good ending wouldn’t survive for half a millennium. For the modern audience, the running away (#2) might be construed as that being a sexual abuse of minors story, but plot point #3 certainly contradicts that idea, and #4 essentially shows that it’s just about the furious feelings of 7-year-old girls, in a bedtime story you can read to 4-year-olds, and it literally tells us that it’s all about Snow Whites feelings, which are as essential as hunger.
Plot point #5 is essentially nice people (unlike the Evil Queen) who simply ask her first – and tell her what to do and what not to do. Won’t help (#6), she’s still a young girl and wants to wear that bodice , but like the Evil Queen, that, two tries later, actually kills her. But she’s not actually dead, yet, it’s a fairytale and thus a metaphor, and along comes Prince Charming – not out of thin air (#7), but by accident, who not only notices Snow Whites beauty just as everyone else did (including herself, but she’s too dead to get the point), but who explicitely reads what the dwarves wrote on that dead girl’s coffin (#8), which convinces the dwarves to allow him to take her.
“You are with me”, everything will be fine (#9) is essentially all he has to say to then have the Evil Queen dance herself to death (#10).
Sure, the Disney version has a touch of necrophilia (that’d be Sleeping Beauty, and I’m pretty certain that that fairytale has nothing to do with that, as much as this one with the current-year girl-bossiness has anything to to with the 500-years-old fairytale here), and it’s really a timeless tale, so:
Watching the important scenes from the 1937 movie for the first time since I was ~7 years old myself, I do understand what Zeitgeist in the 1930s resulted in current-year reproduction rates way below any chance for the survival of civilization as anyone who can read this knows it to be.
And yes, all I had to do to make my wife love me is tell her “You are with me, everything will be fine”. And, like the dwarves, I wouldn’t give her away for all the gold in the world. But real life isn’t a fairytale with Evil Queens and good dwarves. Dwarves are now politically incorrect, says an actual dwarf. And the dead Evil Queen casted another dead Evil Queen for the main role in a film litereally raping that fairytale. Pity.
(And since my lovely wife, who’s now at an age that most real-life even good queens would long since have been dead, doesn’t get the point: It’s really good storywriting to have your main character have conflicting feelings about herself, and as a good author, you can personify those feelings. In this case, it’s about young girls. The evil queen and the know-better nice dwarfes are the closest approximation to “what girls think” I’ve ever read. I don’t have kids, and if you haven’t learned that the hard way (or by being read a fairytale years before age 7 like Snow White), if you’re female, you probably never will understand. I’ll now tell my wife that everything will be fine, she’s with me. Only thing that changed is the ‘knitting’. That’s been replaced by “where’s the boarding pass I printed out and put exactly here?”
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