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cat_question wat is the worst fairytale ever
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The question I have is: What do you mean by "worst"? Are you looking for the fairytale that people like the least? Do you mean the most confusing narrative structure? The one that has the least meaning in today's world? The one that teaches the worst moral code? There could even be a feminist argument about which fairytale passes the least empowering message to young girls.
Fairytales originally were stories that were passed down through an oral tradition. They were vehicles to entertain
adults during the long nights and many had graphic scenes of sex and violence. However, these stories were also vehicles to reinforce common moral and ethical codes, and if the story was told a little bit differently the meaning would change. When these oral traditions were recorded in text, much of the meaning was lost, and has continued to be lost through time.
A lot of the meaning in the story was not in the text. It would have been understood in context by the audience, or would have been a reference to something that was well-known at the time. Some fairytales may have been undercover political protest. So very frequently when you're reading a fairytale and come across something that makes you go "...why in the hell would they do that?!" this is why.
More of the meaning of fairytales was lost around the industrial revolution when the idea became common that fanciful thinking was not a mature, adult thing to do. Adults should be concerned with the real world, it was thought. And so the fairytales were rewritten, removing the sex and violence, making the stories into morality tales for children. This has continued to the present day, with one of the most well-known being the move from a text to a visual medium in the form of the Disney movies.
So, looking at the purpose of fairytales and how fairytales get their meaning, what do you mean when you say "worst"?
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