Honestly, I'm having a hard time picking a worst. So many of these stories are filled with reprehensible people.
Either the characters are horrible or the story makes no sense. Perhaps the reason a good fairy tale sticks with us is because there are so many bad ones.
The Little Mermain. HCA version, not the Disney. The end is all kinds of messed up depressing. Russian Fairy tales tend to be a whole special kind of messed up.
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When I’m your master, I’ll come back with an army of battlehamsters and feed you to them!
That when you read it you thought 'what the heck?!'
The worst fairy tale I have ever read was the verdict on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Most especially noxious and confusing was the reasoning of how that which isn't a tax became a tax. A kiss of true love and ardour that awakens a hundred-year slumber is much more plausible by comparison.
Most of the fairy tales that Disney turned into animated movies are really horribly graphic and scary stories. I was given a copy of "Grimm's Fairy Tales" when I was a teenager. They were not the light fluffy stories that Disney makes them out to be. I don't think that they are bedtime story material - unless you want to give your children nightmares. When they were originally written, they were written as admonishments to children. {If you misbehave or if you don't listen to your parents, see what awful things will happen to you.} I'm not sure when they got turned into musical cartoons.
The Little Mermain. HCA version, not the Disney. The end is all kinds of messed up depressing. Russian Fairy tales tend to be a whole special kind of messed up.
Oh, Stupid Emilian, how I miss you!
As for short stories, the only one I can think of is more of a novella. I was greatly disturbed by Stephen King's An Apt Pupil.
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"I never understood why blessings wore disguises. If I were a blessing, I'd run around naked." - Sophia Petrillo
Russian Fairy tales tend to be a whole special kind of messed up.
The English ones are no joke either. I get it that they're supposed to teach lessons but dang! With some of these you have to wonder what exactly was the point?!
yeah, I remember the edning to the Little Mermaid was very sad, nothing like the disney flick.
The 12 wild geese freaked me out as a kid too. Mother in laws having their DIL's beaten and dumped in ditches left for dead...having to pick rows and rows of thistle, One armed/One winged princes.... so violent! Oy
I do like the darkness and hidden messages as well but I think they were probably meant more for adults. When I think about it now I think about the happy endings and wonder why the princess wanted the dumb azz pronce after all the carp she went through, lol.
I used to collect antique and vintage books of fairy tales. There was one story called "The C0ck and the Hen". In it the hen got greedy and didn't want to share a kernel of corn and started choking. So the rest of the story was the c0ck trying to get her help so she wouldn't die. He kept going from animal to animal and each one wanted something he had to get from another animal. Sort of round and round. At the end all the animals end up in the river and drown and the last line of the story was "so they were all dead together"
I mean it did have a good moral about helping without expectations, but it was sort of startling.
-- Edited by pollywog on Friday 6th of July 2012 01:56:50 AM
