...but apparently that's the wave of the future.
The movie will apparently be called "Brave," but at this point, it might better be called "Hackneyed." How many movies of this type have there been over the last twenty years? It's gone on so long that it would be brave to make a movie that told a traditional fairy tale.
The difference between a traditional fairy tale and this kind goes beyond the obvious -- the female hero who can outfight all the boys with ease, which is now the standard rather than the transgressive model. Rather, the real difference is masked by that aspect: you couldn't make this movie with a male hero, because people would be outraged to see young women portrayed as a pack of useless losers. People would hate the male hero whose attitude conveyed that it was an insult to his excellence to suggest he might marry some penny-ante girl from his village. The female lead allows them to tell the story they want to tell without running up against the uncomfortable truth about what kind of a story it is they are telling.
The real difference is that the love story has been replaced, in our age, by the story of the 'hero' in love with herself. Prince Charming, whatever his flaws, was driven by love for another: his service, and his sacrifice, were for a beloved lady he valued above his own life and for whom he would suffer any pain and dare any peril. The modern 'hero' is focused on her own fulfillment, resisting every duty to her family or her society as an injustice that interferes with her personal journey of self-actualization.
I can't wait for the "Princess Bride" remake: you know, the one where Buttercup escapes by knocking the giant out with a rock, swims out to the waiting pirate ship and takes command as the Dread Pirate Roberta, calling back to shore as Wesley is led away to his doom: "You didn't think I'd waste my life on a farm boy?"
Well, no. Of course not. True love doesn't happen every day.
32 comments:
Very good. Very, very good.
years ago, when my kid was in elementary school, they put on a play.
"The Three Little Pigs."
As the play progressed, and the little piggies straw and wood houses got blown down, and the big bad wolf came to eat them, guess what happened to the little piggies? They all came to shelter themselves in the stone house of the pig who had taken the effort and time to build a strong house.
The teachers had changed a parable designed to teach investment, hard work, delayed gratification, into a perfect little socialist meme. "do anything you want, be a spendthrift profligate idiot, and someone else will take care of you". It was disgusting.
"It's Hard To Write A Love Song To Yourself..."
Ohhhh, I don't know about that.
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The extended Red family is anticipating a new arrival in April. I've already decided that Aunt LittleRed is going to get all of the Colored Fairy books for 'Cupcake' so that she will get a more balanced view of the world, once she's old enough for unexpurgated tales.
LittleRed1
Sly, remember how the other day I sent you the Junior clip, and you said you knew what it was going to be before you clicked the link? That's just how your link today worked for me.
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I was wondering when you were going to comment on this.
I saw the trailer a while ago, but didn't bother to mention it, because as you said, it was hackneyed.
The modern 'hero' is focused on her own fulfillment, resisting every duty to her family or her society as an injustice that interferes with her personal journey of self-actualization.
I looked up the plot synopsis. Looks like pretty standard fairy tale fare: brash, overconfident, self absorbed young hero acts rashly and brings disaster on those he around him, then is taught humility at the hands of a mentor.
Except this time, the brash overconfident hero happens to be a girl. Same end result, though.
Would you really prefer it be a boy who gets his ego handed back to him with most of the hot air let out? :)
I haven't seen the plot synopsis you have seen, I expect. I'm not sure what you're thinking of when you say that this seems to you like a "standard" fairy tale "except" with a female lead; the fairy tale that most resembles the form you describe is Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
As the post says, though, the female lead is only the mask for the real issue. The real issue is the question of who is loved.
I just finished the book I mentioned last week -- When Knighthood was in Flower -- and it's a much more successful version of the story of the princess who doesn't want to marry the person chosen for her. The princess in this case is Mary Tudor, a real princess; she wants to marry Charles Brandon, but is being forced into a wedding with the elderly King of France.
The difference between that story and this one is that it isn't self-love that makes Mary Tudor attempt to avoid the bonds of family and duty: it's true love. There is in the one sense just that one difference between the stories; and yet, in that one difference, we have all the difference in the world.
Speaking of mentors, by the way (and Angry Papa Bear is the USMC DI of mentors), do you know who was the first one?
In his old age Mentor was a friend of Odysseus who placed Mentor... in charge of his son Telemachus, and of Odysseus' palace, when Odysseus left for the Trojan War. When Athena visited Telemachus she took the disguise of Mentor to hide herself from the suitors of Telemachus' mother Penelope. As Mentor, the goddess encouraged Telemachus to stand up against the suitors and go abroad to find out what happened to his father.
She turns up in the most interesting places.
Grim, I was reacting to this, among other things:
The difference between a traditional fairy tale and this kind goes beyond the obvious -- the female hero who can outfight all the boys with ease, which is now the standard rather than the transgressive model.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Where has the female hero become anything like the standard? The majority of Disney/Pixar heroes are still male. I checked.
you couldn't make this movie with a male hero, because people would be outraged to see young women portrayed as a pack of useless losers. People would hate the male hero whose attitude conveyed that it was an insult to his excellence to suggest he might marry some penny-ante girl from his village.
No, you couldn't make this kind of movie with a male hero because the idea that a male hero should give up all his hopes and dreams to get married is absurd on its face. That's not what happens in traditional fairy tales.
I understand that it really, really offends a lot of men to see women making the same decisions that men have always made. What I don't really understand is why?
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Where has the female hero become anything like the standard?
In "How to train your dragon," the female is not the lead, but is the most superior warrior. In the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, the cherished governor's daughter quickly becomes the equal of men who have spent their lives training with swords. In the most recent King Arthur movie, Guinevere's skill with a bow -- unremarked by the earlier legends -- allows her to stand on equal terms with any of Arthur's warriors. In the wildly-popular "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" television series, the girls are far more dangerous fighters. In the "Firefly" television series, the fifteen-year-old girl is able to best anyone, including professional killers; and in the movie version, "Serenity," she is able to fight off an entire horde of maddened killers with an axe.
I could go on, but the point is, the trope is well-established. It was kind of interesting in "Xena: Warrior Princess," but at this point, it's not very interesting because nobody even bothers to establish plausibility any more.
I understand that it really, really offends a lot of men to see women making the same decisions that men have always made. What I don't really understand is why?
I dispute that "men have always made" decisions on these terms -- one could establish that rascals and scoundrels have done, but the essence of manhood is and has always been making personal sacrifices for those you love. Indeed, this is what you've always said yourself about the men you admire.
We have plenty of examples of characters who are male, privileged in similar ways to this character, and who refuse to abide by their duties to the societies that have privileged them or the families that bore them. These characters are not heroes, however: certainly they are not heroes of fairy tales. When they turn up in fairy tales, they are usually the Evil Prince, Lucifer, the morning star who mistook great gifts for an entitlement, and betrayed the order that bestowed those gifts upon him out of rampant self-love.
This kind of story isn't just some sort of 'fair play for women.' It's turning the true story on its head.
Nor are such things mere matters of fashion. The traditional story has the form it does because it speaks to eternal truths. Children structure their lives on the myths we tell them; even well into adulthood, we do that.
There are grave consequences to teaching a false myth. There are few greater treasures than a true one. It may seem like a small thing, a fairy story for children, but I believe these things are among the most important things in the world.
You started off with fairy tales. Now we're into fantasy/sci fi and other genres?
You've included a case of radical biological engineering (Firefly) and Buffy (a figure with supernatural powers) as credible suggestions that normal women can outfight men?
There are literally hundreds of movies out there. You cite a few (including several where the character has supernatural powers) as evidence that this is now "the standard"? If you cite enough one sided evidence, you can "prove" anything.
It seems to me that the false myth you're really concerned with has nothing to do with love, and everything to do with the false idea that it's possible for a woman (not all woman - we're talking about heroines, who are anything but predominant in movies and some of whom have supernatural powers normal women don't have) to fight as well as a man?
There's plenty of PC lunacy out there. I'm not ready to get all upset about fantasy (the entire point of which is that it's *different* from real life).
Fantasy isn't SUPPOSED to be plausible, Grim. That's why it's fantasy. I didn't take the Hercules series seriously either, especially when he grabbed the fingertip of a giant who was 20 times his height and flipped him :p
The current PC practice is to challenge stereotypes for princess characters, but there's still this obsessive focus on making her out-compete the boys. It would be nice if the chick could just be doing something interesting for its own sake, the way a male character would, that didn't necessarily pertain to nabbing a prince as a husband to set her up for life. If you removed the marrying-well theme from most fairy tales, or the theme of waiting around to be rescued, the female protagonists would be sadly puzzled how to spend their time.
Cass,
You seem to want to fight over something different from what I want to fight about. I find the obsessive focus on making female characters equal or better in the martial arts to be more of an annoying tick than an outrage. Nevertheless, it is a trope that infuses all the genres that grow out of fairy tales: fantasy, sci-fi, modern fairy tales themselves, and even the more fantastic action/adventure movies (e.g., "Kill Bill," a marital-arts adventure in which all the most dangerous assassins are female). I saw a trailer for the new rendition of "The Three Musketeers" that involves Milla Jovovich doing some sort of "Matrix" style martial arts manuevers wholly foreign to the story as I recall having read it; but it just infuses what comes out of Hollywood today.
That aspect is, as I said, an annoying tick. It is not the real question, but a mask for the real question. If it goes on for the next hundred years, it will get more and more annoying through repetition; but it won't undermine civilization.
Now, the moral argument infusing the fairy tale really can undermine civilization. We have seen many examples of powerful myths that destroyed peoples, most obviously the myth that infused the Nazi movement, the Communist movements in the Soviet Union and (separately) in China, and the myth that underlay the French Revolution. These things really do matter.
It is one thing for a person to say, "I have the right to be wrong." No one really disputes that in today's America. What is still worth fighting for is the idea of what it means to be right or wrong. That's what is really at issue here, and it really does matter.
To put it another way, fairy tales and fantasy may include fantastic elements, but they do so only to avoid including fantastic morality. The point of every fantastic element in these stories is to throw true moral questions into their clearest light. Here is one such question that matters, and we ought to fight for it.
T99:
In the context of the current movie, the weakness of the model you cite is that she isn't really 'out competing the boys.' The boys are no competition at all. This is bad even from a feminist perspective, in two ways:
1) It makes the argument for her excellence weaker, since she never really faced any competition.
2) It leaves open the question: what if the boy had shown up who really could out-shoot her? Is her claim to her freedom really limited to her ability to succeed in a competition, or is -- as I have always understood -- a right that she need do nothing to prove or establish?
Grim:
With respect (and I mean that) I really think you're making more of this than it warrants.
I watch movies all the time. In the vast majority of them, women stand by helplessly while men fight off the bad guys.
You are noticing what interests and affects you and not noticing the majority of stories, which are just as they have always been.
T99 nailed it here:
It would be nice if the chick could just be doing something interesting for its own sake, the way a male character would, that didn't necessarily pertain to nabbing a prince as a husband to set her up for life. If you removed the marrying-well theme from most fairy tales, or the theme of waiting around to be rescued, the female protagonists would be sadly puzzled how to spend their time.
Try - for just one second - imagining what it feels like to be female and have this kind of vapid crap as your role model 24/7/365. I'll bet you can't do it.
Now imagine that for the first time in your life, every now and then there's a story where the woman isn't just window dressing! And it really, really bugs men because we all know women aren't like that.
*sigh*
I watched Firefly. The entire point of the character you mention is that her basic nature was twisted to make her something she would never be normally.
This is fantasy. Like Hercules/Zena, we understand that it's fantasy. Fantasy posits things that don't exist in our world.
God help us if this is dangerous.
God help us indeed. Myths certainly are dangerous: they are not light matters at all.
You're continuing to focus on the thing that I said was a mask for the real issue. It's never been a problem that there be a character in a story who was both (a) female and (b) powerful. I mentioned Athena, in her role as Mentor, just above. These characters have always existed -- it's not new that 'once in a while, for the first time' they exist.
These characters have always existed in both myth and history: everyone knew the story of Cleopatra from the ancient world onward. What I find to be an annoying tick isn't the existence of such characters, but their wild proliferation even into places where they serve no function in the story (as in The Three Musketeers, where they're simply inventing a place to stick such a character even though there's nothing in the plot to support it). It's certainly not true that they represent some sort of modern innovation or improvement.
Now, I ask respectfully that you put aside your focus on the gender issue, and consider the moral issue. If it helps, pretend the story was about a man. Is it proper to write a story in which the prince -- having been given every gift his society knows how to bestow, including leisure time to develop his archery skills to the uttermost -- refuses all women as unworthy of him, and decides to pursue his own bliss at the expense of his family and society? Is that the kind of hero we really want?
It seems to be the kind we've decided we all want to become. One of the fellows I grew up with, his father decided (after having seven kids with his mother) that his real heart lay in being gay, and so he left her and the kids and moved down to Atlanta to pursue his dream. He rejected whatever duty his family ties represented, and followed his bliss. How brave! On just these terms.
We could have had a story about a hero whose duty requires him to do something unpalatable, but who discovers that the plain and simple girl he marries turns out to be wonderful once he comes to know her and care about her, and be less focused on his own sense of personal excellence. Or we could have had a story about a hero who defies custom and tradition, because true love commands. Either of those stories has the power to be wholesome. Instead, we get a story about a hero who defies custom and tradition out of pure self-love, and is merely asked to be brave enough to live with the consequences.
Now, as I said, nobody is going to say he doesn't have the right to be wrong. Fairy tales aren't about individuals, though: they're paradigms, models for everyone. That's what makes them powerful, and dangerous: we're not now talking about an individual's choice, but about our models for what right and wrong look like.
Is it proper to write a story in which the prince -- having been given every gift his society knows how to bestow, including leisure time to develop his archery skills to the uttermost -- refuses all women as unworthy of him, and decides to pursue his own bliss at the expense of his family and society? Is that the kind of hero we really want?
Personally, since we no longer tell our children whom they should marry, I think a story about a girl whose parents want to choose her husband isn't particularly dangerous, especially since (as I've already pointed out) the plot revolves around the chaos she brings on everyone around her by resisting.
Gender doesn't really come into it except that I really can't imagine a fairy tale about how a young man didn't want to marry.
I can imagine one, just because I've begun to see the outlines of it in some conservative media circles. The "Men Going Their Own Way" (MGTOW) movement is built around men refusing marriage because they think it's exploitative of men.
You can imagine the kind of fairy tale that would make. The prince would not be a hero by any standard I'd recognize.
Like Grim, I've noticed a superabundance of fantasy movies in which the women have preternatural martial arts ability. From the point of view of fostering healthy role models, I'd rather see female characters take realistic account of their relative physical weakness and arm themselves appropriately or take other measures to keep themselves out of situations where sheer size and strength are the primary advantages. I hope young women aren't absorbing the subliminal message that they can duke it out with larger opponents and not be seriously injured.
On the other hand, I applaud fiction in which women instinctively fight to protect themselves, even if that means they knowingly risk injury. The alternative is to cower.
I don't mind tropes like the superwarrior chick in Firefly; she's supposed to have pseudo-mystical abilities, which would be more commonplace in a big, strong man. The dramatic point is the surprise that a slight young woman has these powers, including the comeuppance of the bad guys who assume that brawn always will beat brains and spunk. It's kind of like Reepicheep.
I'm with Cass: "you couldn't make this kind of movie with a male hero because the idea that a male hero should give up all his hopes and dreams to get married is absurd on its face. That's not what happens in traditional fairy tales." In fact, if a male character smelled anything like that, the reader would assume it was not a fairy tale about a hero at all, but some kind of cautionary tale about what happens to wimpy idiots. This business of giving up your identity and dreams in order to marry -- It's not quite like denying your homosexual nature in order to fulfill your obligations to the wife and children you saddled yourself with before you came out in middle age. It's more like a man who decided not to bother about curing polio or discovering the New World because it was more important that the local rich, powerful Queen thought he was the most gorgeous thing she'd ever seen, and she'd like to keep him as a pet or a trophy.
I can see that the gender issue is more interesting than the moral issue. OK; I'm reasonably flexible. If that's what interests you, let's talk about that.
What do you make of the proposed MGTOW fairy tale in which the prince refuses to marry any of the pack of women in order to 'go his own way,' wherein all of whom are portrayed as variations of negative female stereotypes?
E.g., instead of negative stereotypes about boys -- the three options being an idiotic oaf, a vainglorious emotional jerk, and an incompetent child-man -- we have all the girls portrayed as archetypes of the negative qualities that these movements tend to portray as emblematic of women.
That seems like the kind of thing that would annoy.
I don't think I ever grasped your moral point. Self-love vs. true love? That's not something I get from these stories. The lesson that people should care about important rather than trivial qualities? Those are lessons I find in Jane Austen, but the fairy tale hero mostly gets the girl as a reward, not as a person with profound qualities.
A traditional fairy tale about a prince rejecting a passel of women who were being foisted on him as potential wives would almost certainly involve his preference for a poor but strikingly beautiful young woman over the hideously ugly rich creatures his evil mother had chosen for him. You could search the fairy tale canon for a lifetime and not find one where the hero was presented with a bunch of women who were useless losers. How would their useless loser status even be established in the story? The women there aren't supposed to be able to do anything. The very best a young girl reading them could hope for would be a story in which the prince belatedly realized that he should prefer the (strikingly beautiful) young woman who was kind and truthful, rather than the (ugly) one who's trying to poison him or something.
Imagine "Beauty and the Beast" with the gender roles reversed. Doesn't work. The traditional male folk hero doesn't exist who can look past his true love's plainness. That's the Jane Eyre story; it requires a modern female author.
So it shouldn't be too surprising that, in the first generation or so in which feminism became popular, people would experiment with ironic twists on these themes. As I said above, I just wish they'd do it with more imagination than to make every single female hero a martial arts expert.
True love was itself an innovation at one point: it was the fairy tale that taught us that it was all right to violate social conventions and duties for true love. The queen could raise a low-born man in order to be her consort, if she loved him (this is the story of Mary Tudor, in fact; but it was a fairy tale first, in Marie de France's Lanval).
Think of how this works in societies that never had the story: say, in Afghanistan today. True love means nothing; or it means an honor killing if it is acted upon.
Self-love, on the other hand, is a plausible candidate for the root of all evil. In fact, Immanuel Kant makes it explicitly that: what he calls "radical evil" is any occasion in which self-love is put over duty. You may be inclined to say, 'So what do I care what Kant thinks?' It's a good question, but I can tell you that Cassandra in particular ought to care, because most of the positions she's fought for over the years are his: I suspect that many of her teachers were deeply influenced by Kant.
I'm not a Kantian myself, but the argument against self-love is one of his more plausible moments. It's his distillation of Christian morality: greed, envy, pride, 'coveting' of various kinds, the love of money, gluttony, these all have the common root of self-love. It's all about setting aside your duty to do what is right or what is just, in favor of doing what pleases yourself.
The myth that true love justifies breaking social standards is thus qualitatively different from the myth that self-love justifies breaking them. I do not jest when I say that Lucifer is the most obvious mythic model for the one who takes great gifts for an entitlement, and defies the order that brought them those gifts because they feel entitled to more yet. We might feel that God would have forgiven Lucifer if he had done it for love; but Lucifer did it only for himself.
Now, if you'll forgive me, I'm going to take a couple of minutes to answer some of your objections by citation to relevant fairy tales.
"The lesson that people should care about important rather than trivial qualities?"
The Frog Prince.
The traditional male folk hero doesn't exist who can look past his true love's plainness.
Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell (where his true love is not plain, but hideously ugly -- until it proves that his willingness to love and trust her transforms her).
You could search the fairy tale canon for a lifetime and not find one where the hero was presented with a bunch of women who were useless losers. How would their useless loser status even be established in the story? The women there aren't supposed to be able to do anything.
If I may say so, this criticism -- common though it is -- is not quite right. It might apply to "Snow White" or "Cinderella" (although both of them are in fact distinguished by a high degree of practical utility), but it doesn't apply in general. Almost all fairy tale heroines have at least one particular virtue for which they are famous.
In "Rumplestiltskin," the woman was supposed to be able to spin straw into gold. The Lily Maid of Astolat was a healer, virtous, and "well taught" according to Malory. In the Lanval, which I mentioned a moment ago, the heroine is a sorceress and a fairy queen; the heroine of "The Fairy Queene" is the moral exemplar who saves the knight on several occasions when he goes astray (literally, in a wilderness; but because it is an allegory, morally).
"Rapunzel," perhaps the classic example of a tale in which the heroine waits around to be rescued, wins the knight's heart not through physical beauty but because of her ability to sing. Penelope outwits the bothersome suitors for years by clever ruses, and is characterized by perfect loyalty to her vows. Perceval's sister gives her life, with her blood, as an exemplar of what it means to be Christian: she dies to save the life of a wicked lady. And of course there is Scheherazade...
I understand the point: but much more of it has been made than is fair. These are not empty stand-ins, void of character or virtue or excellence. Some of them are remarkable and powerful figures.
Penelope and Scheherazade I'll grant you. They have some specific personal characteristics, even if they are defined almost entirely by the shape of their orbits about powerful, prominent men. But they manage to come across as human beings.
The Frog Prince is another version of Beauty and the Beast -- another example that wouldn't work with the gender roles reversed.
Your post raised the issue of playing against gender types in re-imaginations of folk tales, and how silly or damaging the practice was. Cassandra and I were only making the point that the originals were equally silly and damaging, for people making an attempt to identify with a female protagonist. The attempted solution may not be successful, but I'm not mourning the originals very passionately.
And I agree with you about duty vs. self-love or, for that matter, romantic love of another. True love doesn't excuse all, even if it's an obvious improvement over coldness or self-absorption.
I don't agree that the originals are either silly or damaging; I do think they have been misrepresented by people who haven't spent a lot of time with them, and who failed to understand them because they couldn't see beyond their own moment in time. The more I read the old stories, and the history of the times that bore them, the more worth I see in them. I think they are the wellspring of much that is good in the West, much of what makes it better: and true love is one of those things that became important to us first because of our stories.
It's not important to me that gender roles be reversible -- sex cannot be reversed, so there's no reason we should think that gender always should be able to be. However, I think that the Dame Ragnell story is much closer to the Frog Prince than you may know. It certainly doesn't hinge on a heroic male lead: Gawain starts the story from a position of wickedness, and is redeemed by his willingness to love someone who isn't (at first) beautiful to him.
Grim, like T99 I didn't understand your points (or couldn't get there from what you posted). For me, the impediment was partly that you talked a lot about the usual negative male stereotyping and the PC remake of the female in the male's image, but mostly because I'm a literal soul and the story here wasn't (I don't think) that the girl was rejecting marriage per se, but rather than she was rejecting her parents' efforts to marry her off to some guy she didn't know.
I didn't connect that with MGTOW because they seem to be rejecting marriage and all women. But I'll be happy to respond to the question now that I understand it.
No, the stories aren't silly and damaging in every way. I've been reading fairy tales all my life and love them. But the roles of girls in them were very often silly and damaging, leaving a girl with any spirit with not much choice but to identify with the male characters instead. So if someone tries to re-imagine those parts, I think it's unlikely they'll make things much worse.
We're in an age of People Going Their Own Way, which means a modern re-imagining is likely to err in the direction of "I've got to find myself, no matter how morally vacuous that makes me." That part won't appeal to me, but the problem has little to do with aggrandizing the girls for a change. That's just about using literary devices to exalt the underdog. It happens with all kinds of underdogs.
Let me jump in the fray for a moment, if I may. First, I understand Grim's point, and while I'm not SOLD on it I at least appreciate where he's going re: self-love vs true love. And I think the key partly hinges on the following statement:
"Gender doesn't really come into it except that I really can't imagine a fairy tale about how a young man didn't want to marry."
And that's kind of the problem. It IS near impossible to imagine. Because any such tale is ridiculous on it's face, especially considering that we'd never see the "hero" of such a tale as much of a hero at all. Which is Grim's exact point. Why is it ok to have a Princess act like a self-absorbed cad? Because we can imagine her being forced to do so by her parents/society/tradition. But again, swap the genders. It's now a tale of a handsome young prince more concerned about his freedom than doing what his parents/society/tradition want. And at the same time, presenting his potential brides as ugly, vapid, and incompetent. And you're going to tell me that movie could get made?
Again, I'm not sold that there's a great evil afoot here (evil is always afoot, because it's a terrible driver). But I can understand the point. Let me try this one:
Have you seen The Incredibles? It was on TV last night and I watched it. It's actually quite a good telling of the superhero story with a twist. But there's one part that kind of bothers me. It's the presentation of wives. Mr. Incredible's wife (Elastigirl) is terribly mistrusting of him, but not offensively so. The real problem is Frozone's wife. He's desperately trying to find his supersuit because the city's under attack, and she's telling him he can't save people. In fact, when he says "It's for the greater good!" She replies, "Greater good? I'm your WIFE, I'm the greatest good you'll ever have!"
It's funny. Sort of. Until you analyze it. 'Oh, but that's just a kid's movie! They'd never pick up on that!' However, that assumption would be wrong. One of my coworker's (precocious) children, upon watching that scene turned to his dad and said "See? THAT'S why I'm never getting married."
Which makes an adorable story. Again, until you THINK about it. Is this the kind of portrayal of married life we want to give our kids? Now again, I'm overstating the harm. But does that mean that the argument is invalid?
Mildly OT, but I was looking at the screen still from the movie a little more closely. Speaking from painful personal experience, if the young archer does not tie back her hair, she's going to be missing at least one section of it very shortly, and her shot will foul. (In fact, if you change the eye color and reduce the chest size a little, that could have been me about 20 years ago, in my first college days.)
LittleRed1
MikeD, I don't find it that difficult to imagine the drama you're describing. Fairy tales don't traditionally address the problem of the young wastrel who refuses to marry and settle down, preferring to sow his wild oats and extend his adolescence, but modern literature goes in for this theme in a big way -- "An Ideal Husband," Jane Austen, Bertie Wooster, "Arthur," "Four Weddings and a Funeral." They're generally comedies, spoofing the stuffy morals of the age and treating marriage with some derision, though it's not uncommon for our hero to grow up when he meets the Right Girl. It's also not uncommon for his powerful relatives to try to stick him with a horror of a girl early in the plot: a shallow, mean-spirited, profligate social climber, say, who is deaf and blind to the dreams that inspire his better nature and wants him to come work for her daddy in some soulless business, after he gets rid of his dog.
Female protagonists often don't fare much better in this trope: "Kiss Me Kate," "Woman of the Year" -- even assuming they aren't simply treated as pitiful old maids or sluts. One of my favorites is "Far from the Madding Crowd," where the unexpected heiress Bathsheba makes a hash of her marriage options, but figures things out at the end and chooses the steady man she should have accepted at the beginning. On the other side, there's the real story of Queen Elizabeth I, who presumably acquired a distaste for the institution after her mother was beheaded. The very modern version is "Juno," where our heroine bravely decides never to marry, and simply to raise her baby alone. I've got no patience with that fantasy, either.
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