I enjoy a joke about fucked up German fairy tales as much as the next nerd, but it's genuinely striking how often the source for the really fucked up stuff turns out to be "yeah, this is only in the Brothers Grimm version and doesn't appear in any extant oral tradition, and we're like 80% sure they added it themselves". To a large extent it's not German fairy tales that are fucked up, it's two specific German dudes.
in retrospect we probably should have given the fairy tale writing to the Brothers Happy instead
"average German fairy tale is full of fucked up shit" factoid actualy just statistical error. average German fairy tales are no more fucked up than others. Fucked-Up Shit Enjoyers Wilhelm and Jacob, who lived in cave & wrote fucked up fairy tales each day, are an outlier adn should not have been counted




















