NEGATIVE ILLUSTRATIONS AS SEEN IN FAIRY TALES

NEGATIVE ILLUSTRATIONS AS SEEN IN FAIRY TALES

Fairy tales are stories that bring out love and fantasy situations in light. Because of the romanticized and unrealistic ending in most versions of popular fairy tales, audiences fall to recognize the way violence, injustice, or revenge influence the storylines and characters’ development in these long-loved tales.  There are several fairy tales where the romantic scenes and episodes overshadow violence. In this instance, we are going to review how violence and injustice have been brought up in the movie Maleficent and Red Riding hood.

According to research by scholars about other fairy tales, especially those written in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they meant to teach young girls to be submissive to men when in marriage and accord them maximum respect despite injustices that they may be going through in their lives. Girls were taught not to voice their concerns nor complain to anyone but to bottle their problems and act tough for the sake of their marriages. It affects them negatively as they forcefully endure complicated lives as rape, assaults, and other forms of violence would go unreported.

Fairy tales affect the psychological wellbeing and upbringing in children in negative ways because the majority of all versions contain themes and episodes of violence and or revenge. These negatively affect children’s psychological development as they learn to tolerate abuse and see it as normal behavior. As these children grow up to become adults, they might find themselves misbehaving and treating others in negative ways not because they mean to but because it’s how they learned growing up. In the world today, many relationships fail because of things learned way back when these people were young, and to change or alter that discord becomes a challenge, and thus, these indifferences arise. To reduce such occurrences, these negative themes should be replaced with positive vibes or removed altogether.

Violence has taken precedence in the majority of these fairy tales. The authors fail to recognize what effects they produce while they tell their stories about love and fantasy. These authors focus so much on the unrealistic ending without putting thought on what violence events leading to these ending have on the minds of children.

In the fairy tale, maleficent violence occurs in several instances. The first evidence of abuse witnessed is when the king asks for Maleficent, a powerful fairy living in a magical realm, head. The king knights battle with tree people who emerge from the ground as conjured by maleficent. The knights also fight with a dragon with sprays fire everywhere, causing the room they were in to catch fire and injure many of the knights. Maleficent wings are also severed, though not show when it’s done, but she reacts with rage and curses the king’s daughter, Aurora so that when she turns sixteen years of age, she will be pricked by a spinning wheel spindle and fall into a sleep from which only a kiss from her true love would awaken her.

Violence in the red riding hood first encountered is when Red physically slaughters the wolf with a knife and breaks its neck in a very gruesome manner. Though it’s an animated story, these acts of violence create profound and long-lasting effects in its audience more so with young kids.

Violence from academic sources also points out how fairy tales bring adverse effects to them. Physical appearance is especially the core issue. Beauty has been associated with goodness, while ugly reflects the evil side of the stories. The beautiful characters would find themselves in danger. The fairy tale of Cinderella and snow white there is an excellent link between beauty and jealousy. Vision also tends to be associated with being white, wealthy, privileged, and virtuous.

Injustices are also themes that overshadowed in these tales. There are instances of forced marriages of girls with violent and very repulsive men who threaten them harm if they don’t do as directed.

Injustice is witnessed in the fairy tale the Sun, Moon, and Talia when the king’s mother ordered for Sun and moon and asked her chef to cook them for his son the king to eat. Having done so and still not satisfied, she again sent for Talia in the name of the king. Without the knowledge of this deception, Talia received the news with delight not knowing what awaited her and it was only through the king’s timely arrival that saved her from being thrown to the pot with boiling water and instead the king’s mother was the one who ended up in the bowl.

Women treated each other with cruelty. The older woman with a distaff came up to Talia’s room, and as she was drawing a thread, a piece of the stalk in the flax got under her finger, putting her in a long trance. This older woman saw this; she quickly ran. Another evidence of injustice done to women is when the king’s stepmother came to learn of Talia, and instead of being kind to her, she ordered her cooks to kill and cook her for her stepson, the king to eat.

These acts all point out injustices in society. There are several reported cases of unfairness in society today, though not all links with these tales. We will be wrong not to take note of what this impacts our community.

To conclude, fairy tales are an excellent way to teach kids, but there are a lot of negative implications that they cause in their lives. These negative themes need to be removed and replaced with actual incidences, and only in doing so will we bring up children with good morals and a much better world than it is at the moment. Education is fundamental in any civil society; this thus suggests that important consideration needs to be put up in contents that kids consume, and by doing so, many incidences of violence and injustices will subside significantly.