1, 13, 14?
(from this post) Thanks for always sending me asks for games :)
Your favorite fairy tale retelling
Beauty! Robin McKinley is a wonderful reteller of fairy tales. She's actually got another version of Beauty and the Beast too, called Rose Daughter, but I've not been able to read that yet. Beauty does a great job of establishing Beauty's character and how it relates to her family (rather than just making her sisters into the evil stepsisters from Cinderella like so many adaptations). It is very slow and gradual in how it breaks the curse, both in the development of the romance and in how the castle changes the longer Beauty is there.
A traditional fairy tale retelling (traditional setting, follows the plot of the original tale, etc.)
The Tale of Snow White and the Widow Queen (2023). This is a beautifully illustrated retelling by Jonathan Pageau (illustrations by Heather Pollington). I got it a few months ago when I was particularly piqued over the Disney remake of Snow White. I don't pay much attention to Pageau's work in general, despite being a fan of Dr. Peterson. But this book made me want to explore his videos more.
The book is very beautiful to look at, and completely without anachronistic additions. It's faithful to the story, though it's not just a word-for-word retelling of the Grimm version. The ending may be the only change to the traditional tale, but it exemplifies the kindness of Snow White, much like how Cinderella's last speech to her stepmother in the 2015 movie was a change that most people accepted due to how in-character it felt.
A retelling that twists the plot of the fairy tale
Definitely Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarves. While I'm not the biggest fan of it, it was completely screwed by the marketing team, and I think it's a pretty good kids' film for this decade.
It's a pretty unique take on Snow White, completely embracing the idea that the most beautiful version of yourself is your real self, not an idealized illusion of you. She's very fat in real life, much like her father (who actually IS a good parent and tries to foil the evil queen before being enchanted by her). They never talk about the health consequences of that, but it's clear that no one who makes fun of her is doing so for the sake of her health. One of the things she loses with her idealized new body is the strength that came from living in that heavier body. This message was the big reason I avoided the movie for many years. When I did watch it, while I can't say I totally agree with it, I can see what they were going for. If beauty is truly meant to be an internal thing, she didn't need to look perfect to be beautiful. And if she chose to lose weight later, I don't think she'd look like the illusory version of herself. Due to her strength, she'd probably still have a bulkier figure. The movie isn't anti-weight loss or pushing the idea that everyone should be fat. For that reason, I think it's not a harmful message for children overall.
The dwarves are also not really dwarves, but cursed to appear as dwarves whenever someone looks at them. One of the dwarves is the love-interest/prince, and his insecurity about his own appearance is something he has to grow past. His character was pretty compelling, having his problem be almost the opposite of Snow's.
The Evil Queen's magic is intertwined very closely with her magic apple tree, which grows the red shoes of the title. The Magic Mirror (voiced by Patrick Warburton in English) is complicit in her evil and another source of magic that she draws upon. They did a good job of making her creepy and having consistent visual language around her magic and her cruelty to others.
While some of the mixed fairy tale elements felt awkward to me, it was hard to tell how much of that was based on the Korean origin of the story and how much of it was an attempt to modernize the story to make it 'make sense' out of its original context. But overall I think it worked pretty well as a standalone story and as an adaptation of Snow White!
