Rhiannon Thomas: 10 Questions that Fairy Tales Never Answered
I love fairy tales. But sometimes, their logic is not our earth logic. And although the stories are really fun to read, there are a few lingering questions that they’ve never quite been able to answer.
1. Why does Rumpelstiltskin want a baby as payment? Does he eat babies for breakfast? Has he always longed for a child, but Fairy Tale Adoption Services rejected his application? Is it just a spite thing? So many questions.
2. Why did Snow White keep answering the door? She knew the Evil Queen wanted to kill her. She almost died twice, once from a corset and once from a comb bought from random kindly old ladies at the door. Why would she eat that apple??
3. Why does true love’s kiss save people from near death? The Evil Queen doesn’t seem like the sort to make “true love” the antidote to anything. Was she secretly trying to pair up Snow White and the prince, but didn’t want to ruin her reputation with some straight-up matchmaking? And a good fairy put in the “true love” clause in Sleeping Beauty’s curse. Wouldn’t it be easier to wake her up in practically any other way?
4. And why was Snow White only sweet and passive until she had already won? I mean, she makes the Evil Queen dance at her wedding in red hot iron shoes until she dies. That’s pretty high up there on the evil scale. Perhaps she should have busted out some of that inventive cruelty when the queen was actually trying to kill her.
5. Why is everyone so attached to their gardens? First the Beast demands a prisoner because Beauty’s father took a rose from his garden. Then the witch in Rapunzel demands a baby because someone stole some of her herbs. They do know that flowers regrow, right?
6. If the beast needed to learn a lesson about inner beauty, why is his true love literally called Beauty? She learns to love him when he’s a beast. He loves a pretty girl who’s prisoner in his castle. He didn’t try all that hard.
7. Why did the prince need a slipper to find Cinderella? If he’s visiting all the houses in the kingdom, surely he could just see who looked like the girl from the ball. Shoe size is not a reliable indicator of identity.
8. And why didn’t he ask her for her name? I guess true love doesn’t need any introductions.
9. Is Red Riding Hood’s grandmother really indistinguishable from a wolf? Never mind “What big ears you have.” Shouldn’t the first clue have been that the figure in the bed was covered in fur?
10. How does Sleeping Beauty feel when a random stranger wakes her up with a kiss? Waking up to find a strange guy kissing you after a hundred years of sleep must be a pretty weird experience, to say the least. And how can he be her “true love,” when they’ve never spoken to one another before? What happened after the kiss seems far more intriguing to me than what happened before it. And that’s the question I wanted to explore in A Wicked Thing.
About A Wicked Thing: One hundred years after falling asleep, Princess Aurora wakes up to the kiss of a handsome prince and a broken kingdom that has been dreaming of her return. All the books say that she should be living happily ever after. But as Aurora understands all too well, the truth is nothing like the fairy tale. A Wicked Thing is a surprising, spellbinding reimagining of what happens after happily ever after. You can get started reading it here.
Rhiannon Thomas is an English lit grad from Princeton University. She currently lives in York, England, in the shadow of a thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral. When she isn’t lost in YA fantasy, she writes about feminism and the media on her blog.
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