[ SECRET POST #2273 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2273 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 117 secrets from Secret Submission Post #325.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - posted twice ], [ 1 2 3 - trolls ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[childings.livejournal.com]

How many fairy tales have male leads? Usually they center around a woman (even if the original story is sexist or misogynist)

[wldcatsprstr_14]

This is what I'm wondering. I mean, speaking in terms of popular Disney movies anyway.

[truxillogical]

Pretty sure we went into this last week, but off the top of my head: Puss in Boots, Jack and the Bean Stalk, the Brave Little Tailor, Peter Pan, Godfather Death, The Firebird, the Boy Who Set Out To Know What Fear Was, Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, The Twelve Brothers, The Jungle Book, The Three Dogs, and any of the numerous stories about the clever youngest son.

And again, as we pointed out last week, there is a huge difference between a story having a female lead (a protagonist) and centering around a woman (a MacGuffin). A protagonist Does Things and effects the climactic change in their own story. Characters like Sleeping Beauty or the Twelve Dancing Princesses have stuff done to them. (Snow White falls in the middle--she gets rescued by someone else at the end, but she takes action herself for at least a portion of the tale).

[(Anonymous)]

I think the director (?) meant that there is a perceived dearth of fairy tales with RECOGNIZABLE male leads. Out of all those you mention, the only ones I can see the general public being familiar with are Puss in Boots, Jack, Mowgli, Peter, and Aladdin (and can we add Pinocchio to the list?). No one who isn't well-versed in fairy tales is going to be familiar with stories like Iron Hans, the Brave Little Tailor, etc. On the female side, we have leads that everyone knows about, like Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, the Little Mermaid, Dorothy, Alice, Wendy, Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, Rapunzel, Beauty, Mulan, Thumbelina etc. While I do think the director made a comment that was extremely asinine for a number of reasons, I believe it is safe to say that as far as fairy tale protagonists go, there are more iconic and well-known females than males. Which doesn't mean his comment wasn't problematic (seriously, it's not like there's a shortage of movies for children with male protagonists), but I get where he was coming from, even if it was poorly worded and sloppy.

[truxillogical]

A) Pinocchio counts if Wizard of Oz counts.

B) Ali Baba would also be recognizable. Open sesame, Popeye cartoons, etc. Same goes for the Brave Little Tailor.

C) Sleeping Beauty, for reasons mentioned, doesn't count as the female lead of a fairy tale. She doesn't lead and is not the protagonist, she makes no decisions, she only has stuff done to her. Wendy isn't the lead, Peter is. And Mulan is something that pretty much no one in the States had heard of until the cartoon. And if Thumbelina counts, then Tom Thumb surely does as well.

[(Anonymous)]

B) Ali Baba, maybe (although I'd wager that most people who say "Open sesame" don't even know where it's from). Brave Little Tailor, no. Maybe the older generations might recognize the story from the Disney short, but that came out all the way back in 1938. Modern kids? No way.

C) Regardless of whether or not Sleeping Beauty is proactive, she IS the female main character. She's fairly boring (imo) but very iconic, and what the whole story revolve around. As for Wendy, eh. I never read the book, but the Disney movie is very much about Wendy's journey and her realization that she must grow up, whereas Peter has zero development iirc (he's there to hold her back, basically). And so what if no one knew about Mulan before the cartoon? Now (mostly) everyone does, and her story is the post popular Asian folk tale. And if you were to poll random people I'm sure Thumbelina is more recognizable than Tom Thumb due to the 90's movie, even if Tom Thumb was around longer.

[truxillogical]

B) Came out in 1938, but kept playing on TV well into the 90's. Modern kids might not have any idea who Thumbelina is either.

C)
1) The story revolves around her as if she were an item. She is NOT the protagonist. She is NOT the lead. In the Disney movie, the fairies and the prince are the leads. In the fairy tale, the Prince is the lead. It's like saying that the Firebird is the lead character in The Firebird--it's just the object that sets things into motion.

2) Firstly, Mulan isn't a fairy tale any more than Pocahontas is a fairy tale. Secondly, her story isn't nearly the most popular Asian folk tale (Into the West/Monkey King would be that one). Thirdly, why are we only talking about fairy tales that are immediately recognizable in this generation or about the movie versions of things instead of the actual tales they're based on? I'm pretty sure the stupid quote was him lamenting the sort of source material he had to draw from. And it proves you can take any source materiel, even something as obscure (to Western audiences) as Mulan, and turn it into a popular movie.


And none of this changes the original point, which was that there are a lot of fairy tales that feature male leads (or animal leads, which get cast as male characters ninety percent of the time), and that fairy tales don't "usually" revolve around female characters--it's actually a pretty even split. If anything, fairy tale-based movies get made with female characters because it's one of the few things studios can figure out how to market to girls ("Princesses! You all want to be Princesses, right?").

[(Anonymous)]

B) Kids today? Maybe not, but I think a lot of girls of the nineties would recognize Thumbelina. As far as the Brave Little Tailor goes, I have to ask what channels it kept playing on, and how frequently, because I never once saw that short played on TV. It was only after I looked up the summary did I vaguely recall the basic plot, and that was because I read it in one of those Disney picture books when I was a kid. Either way, I think we may have strayed from the initial point, which was that the Brave Little Tailor and the like do not have the same level of recognition as stories like Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, etc.

C)
1) Yup, she's basically a prop. Still gets top billing and is the most iconic element of the story though. Compare how many people remember Phillip's name, as opposed to Aurora.

2) Wtf? Pocohontas is a person that actually existed. Mulan is a legendary character from a poem. While there may have been a woman that dressed as a man to fight in the army (or multiple women, more likely), the character of Hua Mulan is only that, a character. There is a helluva lot more reliable evidence going for Pocohontas's existence than Mulan's.

Mulan is the most popular Asian folk tale for contemporary audience's, yes. Does anyone in Western society outside of academic circles or folk tale buffs actually know what Journey to the West is?

Well, I brought up movie versions and recognizable characters because that's the whole draw of the Oz movie: taking a character everyone is familiar with and giving it a fresh new take. It's a lot less risky to adapt a property all moviegoers are familiar with than to try something new.

As far as his actual quote goes, I read his lament of the lack of "good strong male protagonists" to refer to the possible pool of male leads that could draw in good, strong box office numbers. Like I said before, adapting a well-known property like Cinderella or Snow White is a lot less of the risk than making a movie about the Boy Who Went in Search of Fear. With Cinderella and Snow White, you already get a built-in fanbase who will see the movie based on the premise alone. Same with the Wizard of Oz fans. After opening up Wikipedia and reading the whole quote again in its entirety, I don't know if this is what he was getting at; probably not. In that case, he clearly is unfamiliar with fairy tales beyond the basic ones that everyone knows, which goes back to the point that there are much fewer ICONIC male fairy tale leads.

And yes, if you look at the source material there are a lot of male leads, but like I said, I assume he's approaching the topic from the POV of someone who has just a basic pop culture understanding of the different fairy tales, and not someone who has done extensive reading on the topic. Are there fairy tales with male leads he could have used? Absolutely. But using the Wizard was a much stronger choice from a money-making standpoint than picking a tale from obscurity. And I would still say that, as a whole, the female protagonists in fairy tales definitely outnumber the males (not that that's necessarily a bad thing). Aside from the obvious ones that I've listed, there are plenty of obscure ones like the heroine of Donkeyskin, Brother and Sister, Gretel (really, she was the heroine of that story), the Maiden with No Hands, Snow White and Rose Red, Maid Maleen, Tatterhood, the Farmer's Clever Daughter, the mother in the Little Shroud, the Snow Queen, etc.

That being said, I agree there need to be more movies marketed towards girls that do not center around princesses, and that the whole idea of someone whining that there needs to be more male protagonists is laughable.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm a lot more into fairytales now than I was as a kid, but I knew Brave Little Tailor before my fairytale obsession.

Alice and Wendy aren't from fairytales. TBH, Wizard of Oz and Beauty and the Beast shouldn't count as a fairytale, either, so the point that this discussion was even made should be moot.

[(Anonymous)]

Of course Alice/Wendy/Pinnochio/Wizard etc. aren't from fairy tales, but the director included Alice and the Wizard in his comment, so that's why I felt it was appropriate to reference them. He uses the term "fairy tale" very loosely.

[truxillogical]

Eh, at the library I work at, Alice in Wonder Land, the Oz books, and some versions of Peter Pan get put in the nonfic section with the rest of the fairy tales. There's a pretty broad definition of "fairy tales" (I mean, heck, take Fables).

[(Anonymous)]

I just assume Fables included what it did because there's only so many characters in Grimm/Perrault you can use without it coming across as so-and-so is a Mary Sue.

While I hate Jack of Fables, I love that it included all the American folk tales.

[truxillogical]

I kind of got a kick out of Sam, because that was one of my favorite stories when I was little. (It ends with buttered pancakes, what's not to love? Also, the version I had was pretty clear in the illustrations that the characters were Indian and the clothes were pretty too. Doesn't make it not problematic, but...well...)


I think there's just a pretty broad definition of "fairy tale." Like how people also refer to Star Wars as "modern myth." It may not be something that people use for religious purposes (usually), but it's a shared cultural story.

That said, it drives me and my fellow low-level workers insane that we have to keep fiction books with known writers in the nonfic section. Almost as irritating as having to keep the Doctor Seuss books under "G" and sorting the Castle books by title.

[charming_stranger]

Fairy tales are nonfiction? *scratches head*

[(Anonymous)]

('nother librarian here)

Yep, if they're English literature classics/written 100+ years ago, like Peter Pan or the Wizard of Oz. That makes them Literature, which puts them in the 800 class of the Dewey Decimal system. Nonfiction.

[truxillogical]

Oh, good, actual librarian weighing in. I'm just a circ worker; I stopped paying attention to the why's and wherefores shortly after it became apparent that nothing any of us say has any bearing on anything. Also, we use bisac, so...yeah. That.

(rassm frassm manager refusing to put MetaMaus in lit crit...)

[truxillogical]

They're considered folklore. Other things that also get classified by Dewey numbers include poetry, plays, and some very old literature (Beowulf, Homer, Chaucer).

[saiika_von_maou]

even if the original story is sexist or misogynist

I think this is the problem most people have with that "we need more male leads in fairy tales" comment. Sure, there are more female leads in fairy tales, but they are rarely the hero of the story. The male leads always get to be the hero of their own story. So the problem is more that saying that there are not enough male leads in fairy tales is completely missing the actual problem: That women rarely get to actually save the day.

[celestinenox]

It's not a fairy tale.