So. Since you've properly read Pinocchio now. What are your thoughts on how the book was adapted into Cedar and her dad in EAH
I need everyone to look me dead in my eyes, okay? I love Ever After High. I love Pinocchio.
No matter what I say later, you have to remember I love Ever After High, okay? Got that? Good.
That being said, Pinocchio and Cedar in EAH don’t really seem to be based on the book, as much as the Disney movie (I know, I know, booo and all that), in the way that most modern adaptations of Pinocchio are based on the Disney movie. Cultural phenomena and all that.
I would like to break down some points of Pinocchio, link them back to Ever After High, and then explain what this means to me later. Okay? Let’s go!
[Please note that I make points in the order they came to me and NOT in the order of how they reference each other. This isn’t a professional essay, and nobody is allowed to grade me. Also, this is purely from memory, so if I’m wrong, I’m wrong.]
What it means to be good (obedience, honesty, school/hard work)
The story of Pinocchio deals a lot with what it means to be good, a concept that does mostly carry over. Usually, good means honest, right?
Being good in the book means a lot of things. Pinocchio is often scolded and punished for being lazy, for being disobedient, and, yes, for being dishonest. He’s a complainer, he’s greedy, he wants to get rich fast without doing any of the work, and he loathes the idea of going to school. Classic little kid things, really.
School is the biggest one. As soon as Pinocchio is up and moving (and, y’know, after Geppetto gets out of prison— long story—), he is told he has to go to school. And he immediately, and I do mean immediately, skips. He sells his school book to go to a puppet show.
Later in the book, the reason the Blue Fairy plans to make Pinocchio human is because he did well and was diligent in school for a good part of the year.
Hard work is also a big one. After Pinocchio and Romeo get turned into donkeys, Pinocchio is sold to the circus, and is forced to do tricks and stuff to earn his food.
In the very end, to show he is good, and ultimately deserving of being real, he does hard work to earn money for his ailing father, and the Blue Fairy once he becomes aware of her being in a poor state. He grows from being an undeniably bad child, to being a good one.
Pinocchio lies to get out of trouble, more often than not. He lies to the Blue Fairy about being sick, about what happened with the Fox and Cat to get him hung from a tree, and about skipping school.
And eventually, he just. Stops. He must have figured it was more harm than it was worth.
Blue Fairy
The Blue Fairy is a pretty big part of the book, something not reflected in EAH.
She starts off in a little sister role, getting Pinocchio brought down from where he’s been hung from a tree. Then he gets out of jail (long story) and finds out she is dead.
Then she comes back, transitioning into a mother role as Geppetto has had an… unfortunate accident at sea. The Blue Fairy is a fairly forgiving figure in Pinocchio’s life, giving him numerous opportunities to prove he is good, and that he is worthy of being human.
The Blue Fairy is so so so patient with Pinocchio, and sometimes he doesn’t deserve it. And I love her for it.
All that being said, Farrah should have been way more important and involved in Cedar’s life, ESPECIALLY since Cedar has already lost a Blue Fairy.
Do you think I forgot?! Hell no! Did y’all forget that Cedar’s Blue Fairy went poof?
Considering how important the Blue Fairy is to Pinocchio (how they live together for a good while before the Donkey-ing, how quickly he mourns her), there is no doubt in my mind that Cedar’s Blue Fairy was very important to her.
We don’t know how she felt about the poofing, and we don’t know how their interactions went pre-poofing.
But this is about Farrah.
If Farrah is truly gonna take on the Blue Fairy role, they would have to do more than just say it. Let them hang out in the background, let them talk a couple of times.
I just think they should have been more of a Thing, y’know? The Blue Fairy is too important to the story for Farrah taking over to not be a Certified Big Deal.
Danger
According to my partner @the-lavender-creator and my good buddy @rarepairqueenmochi, the fox and the cat that appear in Darling’s horse’s tragic backstory would hang a child if it made them money. I would like to believe that it’s a point towards the fox and cat being very similar to their book counterparts.
Which means that maybe all the other super dangerous stuff that happens in Pinocchio could also happen in the Ever After High Universe. For example, Pinocchio almost gets battered and pan-fried at some point, could that happen in EAH?
What about the hanging? What about when the Black cat tries to stab Pinocchio? When he spends a little time drowning as a donkey?
I don’t know, and you don’t either. Moving on.
Pinocchio as a Character
Pinocchio starts off the story as a sort of gullible miscreant. He gets warned by numerous characters that “if you do this, things will go wrong” and he does it in spite of them. For goodness sake, he kills the Talking Cricket with a hammer because the cricket calls him an idiot for thinking he can lounge around and have fun all day. (The cricket kinda deserved it, tbf. Don’t call him an idiot. That’s a kid.)
Pinocchio is also (sort of) a sweet boy. He wants to do the right thing, but he also wants to do the easy thing, the fun thing.
Why go straight home to his father with five gold coins and go to school the next day like a good boy, when he can go with these two people he just met and make way more money really easily?
Why go home to the Blue Fairy when Romeo’s promising him endless fun?
What you have to remember is that during the story, Pinocchio is (to my knowledge) between the ages of 6 to 10, and it shows.
We don’t know a lot about Pinocchio in EAH, unfortunately. We know he was friends with King Charming and Goldilocks in high school, and that he’s notably a wooden boy still.
I don’t think teenagers can really go through the plot of Pinocchio (not saying that teenagers can’t make the decisions he does, just that they are older, more informed, and likely more cautious. It takes more effort to get a teenager to bury money in the hope that it’ll grow a tree, for example.), but that’s just me.
Cedar as Pinocchio
Cedar is not a gullible miscreant. Cedar loves her father too much to sentence him to two years in a stomach.
Cedar Wood wants more than ever to be human, and able to lie. I love her so much; she would never recover from going through book Pinocchio’s shenanigans. If we assume that the Legacy system will go through the same beats and lessons, despite prior personality and values, then she’s, quite frankly, fucked.
Cedar doesn’t need to learn the lessons book Pinocchio, or even Disney Pinocchio needed to learn, about honesty, hard work, and accountability.
Maybe she can learn about the divide between wisdom and age, which would lend itself well to the whole Rebel cause that Cedar aligns herself with. Being that she’s willing to call out Milton Grimm for lying, though, she probably doesn’t need to learn that one either.
—
Okay, now that I’ve gotten all of that out of my system, let’s talk about what that all means.
Nothing, really.
Ever After High, for better or worse, doesn’t dig into the fairytale theme as much as it could. This means that we never get a full picture of the exact version of the story most characters are being prodded towards. They mention that the stories have changed over time, but how.
Cedar and the story of Pinocchio are no exceptions. Many of the details can be inferred, but many are just hopeful guesses on my part.
However, while trying to tell a story about Legacy, they could have utilized elements of the story to add a little specificity to the nuances of Cedar advocating for choice.
It would make sense, given how the story of Pinocchio goes, that she wouldn’t want to go through with it, but she has to to get to the ending. The happy ending probably cancels out all the stuff she has to go through in everyone’s eyes, but it doesn’t to me.
Cedar will make choices that go directly against her personality, against her and her father’s wellbeings, and she will have to be okay with that when she becomes human. How does that make her feel as she heads towards her story? How does that make her feel as her friends choose not to follow their destinies? Does she decide to change how the story goes?
TLDR; it was adapted fine. I personally wish we had more Pinocchio themes and aspects referenced and mentioned by Cedar and her father, but considering how little Cedar is the main focus/a major character, I probably shouldn’t be picky. I’m just happy she was on screen/on the page.
