The idea that children love fairy tales because fairy tales treat them seriously and do not shy away from the violence and danger the world has in store strikes me as very correct, but the fact it is generally expressed as "it is dangerous to go alone in the woods because there are wolves there"... gives me pause.
To begin with, this is just one fairy tale narrative (little red riding hood), which is thus elevated to the rank of "quintessential fairy tale" (debatable at best); secondly, this is a (deliberate?) misrepresentation of the tale's *actual* danger, which is the wolf specifically *as it lowers the child's defenses by impersonating her grandma after eating her*. It's not about the child being attacked by a wild wolf in the forest, it's about the horror of using familiar and comforting surroundings within the family sphere as a decoy (the plan is quite an elaborate one, too). And finally, this ties into my main remark, which is that in many fairy tales (a majority? I don't know), the danger children (or more generally fairy tale protagonists) face is less related to a foreign monster than the family itself: snow white, obviously, but also hansel and gretel - abandoned in the forest by their parents, twice!; rumpelstiltskin: the heroine was sold to the king by her lying, greedy father, and risks being executed by her master for most of the tale; donkey skin (self-explanatory); bluebeard (similar forced marriage situation); cinderella (and all the cruel step-mother stories in general...) - also self-explanatory...
Fairy tales tend to admit freely that families and parents can be actively harmful to children, whose perspectives the narrative centers; which is a (well-known) fact that makes everyone uncomfortable Always. So I think it's disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst to act as though the violence comes from the wolves outside and not the family inside.
ellievsbear
amandla
stormborns
romaincrisis
areudirty
