Sleeping Beauty was awoken by true love's kiss. Or just by the prince falling in love with the sight of her. Or after one of her newborn babies sucked the spinning wheel splinter out of her finger. Because she gave birth to twins while she was asleep. Because the prince wasn't such a true love after all.
Oh, and why she was asleep? Because of a curse, right? Or because of a prophecy. Or because her mother makes a wish that goes wrong. Or because... well. There are a million different reasons.
When we think of "original" fairy tales, we tend to think of the stories written by the Brothers Grimm. But the Brothers Grimm weren't tale-tellers so much as tale collectors. They gathered together all the folk tales they could find, and wrote them down into a big collection. And as they searched for fairy stories, they discovered that many of the tales were told in many different ways, mostly by different oral storytellers who added their own spin to things. So when the Brothers Grimm recorded the stories, they put down what they thought was the "best" version. And so lots of other versions have since fallen by the wayside.
But we can still see traces of those other versions with a couple of famous stories. The first person to write down Sleeping Beauty sort of as we know it was a French guy named Perrault, and in his version, the prince falls to his knees at the unnamed princess's beauty, and the curse breaks. And then there's a whole second plot involving the prince's angry ogre mother. It's a bit weird. And Perrault based his story on one by the Italian Giambattista Basile, who went the whole "prince rapes princess while she sleeps" route. Or there's Red Riding Hood, which originated in France in the 10th century, where the girl faces an ogre or a werewolf who serves Red Riding Hood her dead grandmother for dinner. In Perrault's version, Red Riding Hood climbs into bed with the wolf before being eaten, and a little paragraph at the end of the story leaves us in no doubt what that's supposed to be a cautionary tale metaphor for. Even the Brother's Grimm did two versions: in the first, she's eaten, and in the second, she and her grandmother are saved by the woodsman and then drown the wolf through the power of the smell of sausages. Seriously.
So when we retell fairy tales, we're not just playing with stories written by the Brothers' Grimm. Not really. Fairy tales must speak to some deep part of us, because the urge to put a different spin on them has been around for the last thousand years at least. When Disney decided that Cinderella would be helped by mice, and that maybe her step-sisters shouldn't be blinded by birds at her wedding, they were just continuing the age-old tradition of tweaking fairy tales to fit the story that they want to tell. To give the message that that audience, that society, wanted or needed to hear.
Which is why it's so exciting to check out fairy tale retellings right now. We're living in an age where more and more people are pushing for diversity, for feminist narratives, for LGBT rights... and they're using fairy tales to do it. Writers are twisting these stories where girls got the prince they were given, where they became cautionary metaphors for rebellion or lust, where the patient and sweet were rewarded and the ambitious were punished, and repurposing the plotlines to empower their characters. And that's not lazy storytelling or failing to respect the original. It's just a badass continuation of something that storytellers have been doing for the past thousand years.
(This post is totally thanks to MarcyKate Connolly, whose post on loving the original dark fairy tales got me thinking about fairytale retellings and why we write them).