Family-Unfriendly Aesop/Fairy Tales

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Examples of Family-Unfriendly Aesops in Fairy Tales include:

  • In many old fairy tales and folk tales, the moral is "You have to lie, cheat, and steal to save either yourself or your family. The more you do it, the better you are." Modern versions often Bowdlerise this, eliminating the original moral.
  • "Puss in Boots" is an outstanding example. American McGee's Grimm seems to suggest that the lesson in "Puss in Boots" is that "Cats are sneaky little bastards, and humans can exploit this for their own ends." Although in certain Bowdlerized versions where the cat is led purely by his own motivations and the ogre sometimes isn't murderous is that "Cats are sneaky little bastards and that's awesome."
  • In the original version of Hop-o'-My-Thumb, the kids are saved from certain death by the Ogre's wife. The youngest exploits her for all she's worth, and arranges for the ogre to murder his own children... but he's still the hero of the story, because it saves his family. Obviously, there's also a bit of What Measure Is a Non-Human? in there, even if the ogre is an evil non-human.
  • In the Russian fairy tale Prince Ivan and the Firebird, Ivan saves the kingdom by breaking every promise he makes.
  • "Rumpelstiltskin":
    • Not like any of the characters are particularly heroic, but the "happy ending" goes like this: The heroine got to marry the evil King and keep her child, while the fairy who had used his powers to save her life doesn't get paid for his kindness at all. There's no hint that he'd have done the kid harm... it appears that he deserved to get cheated out of his payment because he's a stranger, and strangers don't deserve to have their bargains honored. In some versions, Rumpelstiltskin has song which includes the lines "To-morrow I brew, to-day I bake/And then the child away I'll take," which implies that he planned to cannibalize the child.
      • This is also an example of cultural/audience change. In the time when these stories originated, it would have been pretty much taken for granted that Rumpelstiltskin had bad intentions for the child. Almost all the stories about interaction with the Fae are cautionary, they were generally seen as evil or at best dangerously amoral and alien. So seeing keeping the child from R wouldn't have been any more questionable than a modern version would at keeping a child out of the hands of a convicted pedophile or child killer.
  • The Tinderbox: Basically, the plot boils down to this: Hero encounters a poor, desperate witch who begs him for his help in retrieving her precious possession, a tinderbox. Witch tells hero how to safely retrieve the box, and offers him vast wealth in return. Hero retrieves box, after gathering as much gold as he can, and returns to witch. Witch thanks him and politely asks for her box, but hero decides to decapitate her instead. Later, he uses the box to kidnap a princess and murder her family/court. He and said princess are married and live happily ever after.
    • However some versions also strongly imply that the witch plans to leave him down there to die after he gets her the box, somewhat justifying her murder.
    • A somewhat more sophisticated justification applies if the soldier was good at thinking on his feet: what exactly was so great about that shabby old tinderbox that the witch valued it more than all the other treasures in the place? She openly disdains taking anything else for herself and refuses to explain her valuation. In retrospect, once we find out what the tinderbox can do, imagining what the witch might have done with it if he'd given it to her also tends to improve our opinion of the soldier.
    • Still another version has it so that the witch was giving the soldier a Secret Test of Character, and gave him the tinderbox as a gift for passing
  • Russian fairy tales, in general, tend to be rather cynical. One story in a collection by 19th century folklorist Alexander Afanasyev has the moral "Old favors are soon forgotten."
  • In another story, The Hero's father, the king, is about to die, so the prince must find magical apples and water to rescue him. He learns that a powerful warrior princess has them, but for some reason (usually involving beheading any man who comes close to her palace), can't just ask. The resolution is to steal them. The hero accomplishes it, but also goes to the princess's bedroom (despite the warning not to) and seeing how beautiful she is can't help but "kiss" her while she's asleep. While first she and her guard chase him intending to kill, later she gives birth to two kids, finds the hero and marries him.
    • Actually, in some versions the princess is quite sympathetic, being imprisoned by a troll who forces her to kill any man who comes to her palace. Said troll kicks her out when she's pregnant, and she's then forced to seek out the hero. The Victim Falls For Rapist morals are still quite creepy, though.
  • Jack and the Beanstalk features a boy who, after foolishly selling a cow for a handful of beans, proceeds to manipulate a sympathetic woman to gain food while also robbing her and her husband of their most prized possessions. When discovered, rather than admitting wrong-doing Jack proceeds to kill the husband before living happily after ever with the goods acquired by theft and murder.
    • Deconstructed in the Sondheim musical Into the Woods: after Jack robs from and kills the giant at the top of the beanstalk, the giant's widow comes to seek revenge for her husband. The show's Aesop is the more family-friendly "Actions have consequences, and if you selfishly back stab people, it'll come around to bite you in the ass."
    • Modern versions usually try to soften the ending by mentioning that the giant stole the gold, hen and harp from Jack's family to begin with. This, in itself, offers another Aesop: Murder is a viable solution if the victim is a bad guy.
  • Into the Woods also added "It's probably not a good idea to marry someone you just met" Aesops to the Cinderella and Rapunzel stories. Cinderella's prince is a philanderer, whereas Rapunzel is somewhat crazy. The only original story Aesop it leaves intact is Little Red Riding Hood's Aesop of "Don't talk to strangers," who become a good deal creepier. At the end, we get an Aesop of "Listen to people who know what they're talking about, even if they're witches."
  • Many fairy tales center around a hero who is poor in some way (an idiot third son, a tailor, a musician, etc.) who wins a princess's hand in a perfectly legitimate way (guessing the number of hairs on her head, offering the best gift for her birthday, guessing her riddle, etc.). And instead of honoring her promise, the princess (or her royal father) adds more conditions to the tests just so that she won't have to marry a peasant. These include sending him to find the Apple of Life, get a ring out of a lake, sort various types of grain, spend the night in a stable with a wild bear, and almost always the tests are on pain of death. And inevitably the prince will overcome these additional conditions and go ahead and marry the princess anyway!
    • This plot which probably is some sort of trope in its own right gets subverted rather brutally in Friedrich Schiller's ballad The Diver. A King throws a golden cup into some rough water and declares that whoever can retrieve it can keep it. After the hero manages this the king ups the ante by throwing a ring into the water and telling the hero that he will get the princess if he can do it again. The hero tries and drowns. The new moral here might be "she is probably not worth it" or simply "quit while you are ahead."
      • Schiller also offers the "Idiotic challenges will win you the heart of a woman" subverting The glove in which a lady throws her glove into an arena full of lions and tigers and challenges (mockingly) her suitor to get it. He retrieves the glove, the lady immediately falls for him - and he throws the glove in her face, saying "Den Dank, Dame, begeher ich nicht" ("Such Gratitude, madame, is not desired by me") - the Aesop is probably not to mock your suitor or he'll run away. Plus that a woman demanding such ridiculous things is not worth it.
  • The original version of "The Frog Prince". The princess drops her golden ball into a pond and the frog agrees to retrieve it for her if she in turn promises to let him live in the castle as her friend. She agrees, but when he brings her the ball, she takes it and runs to the castle, leaving the frog behind. The frog makes its way to the castle and tells the king about the princess's promise; she is forced to go through with it, letting the frog sit by her at meals and follow her everywhere. The entire time, she is obviously disgusted by it. When she goes to bed, the frog asks to be allowed to sleep in her bed and the princess is so disgusted that she throws it against the wall, whereupon it turns into a handsome prince and the two were married. This gets even more creepy when you realize that the princess probably isn't older than twelve, given that she was playing with a ball and cried when she lost it.
    • Besides the childhood marriage, what's family unfriendly about the aesop? The princess learns to keep her promises. Yes, she's disgusted, but that's no reason for her to shirk responsibility. She knew what she was agreeing to when she asked the frog for her ball back, and if she was that unhappy with the consequences, she shouldn't've made the deal with him in the first place.
  • Welsh fairy tales often have this. For example, Siôn A'r Pastwn Hud involves a man who, after going to seek his fortune, marrying the girl of his dreams and getting rich, comes home to find his mother has starved to death because she couldn't go out of the house when he was gone. This, sadly, is actually one of the stories with a happy ending. It seems to give the moral of 'If you go to find happiness, the ones you love will suffer'.
  • One fairy tale involves a man who, in order to win a princess's hand, must find a ring of fantastic magical power. A sorcerer tells him that the owner of the ring is a powerful and beautiful witch and tells the man where she bathes regularly. When the witch catches the man spying on her while bathing, despite being pissed, she believes the story he feeds her about how he was just lost in the woods and entranced by her beauty and kindly lets him live with her for awhile. During this time, she is perfectly lovely to him and does all sorts of nice things for him. Eventually, she asks the man to marry her and before answering, he asks if he can see the powerful ring of hers that he's heard so much about. She willingly shows it to him and lets him try it himself. As soon as he has it, he promptly uses it to fly away, while she pleads for him to return. The prince is married to the princess and, when the witch goes after him for revenge, he's rescued by the soldiers. The story does justify things a little by saying that he'd lose his soul if he married the witch and ends with the sentence "Wouldn't you have rather married the witch?" but he still got a pretty good deal for being a dick.
    • Witches are traditionally pagan - that is, "anyone who isn't Christian loses their souls."
      • That's a Broken Aesop as well, because the whole point of the journey was to steal a magic ring. According to Christianity, ALL "Magic" is powered by a deal with The Devil, and is thus a rejection of God. Aesop: commit the sins of theft and witchcraft and then you still get to go to heaven if you don't marry a witch - who by the way was particularly helpful and friendly to you.
  • One story involved a cat and a mouse living together and deciding to store a pot of cream for winter. They hide it in a church until they really need it. Over some time however, the cat is gradually tempted three times into drinking the cream, until it's all gone. When the mouse finds out, she starts yelling at the cat for eating their food supply for the winter. The cat responds by eating the mouse, and the story justifies this by saying that that's just how the world works (that cats and mice just can't co-exist). Never mind the fact that the two got along just fine before the cat was a jerk and the mouse was rightfully annoyed. No, apparently some people are just natural enemies and there is no way for them to get along.
    • This story has a twist. The cat excuses herself the three times saying that she's the godmother of a new baby, which is why she has to go to the church (where the cream is, we remember). When asked for the name of the kids, she answers (last two cases) something to the effect of "half gone" / "all gone." The mouse comments that these names are pretty unusual, but doesn't make the connection until it's too late.
  • There was a fable where the protagonist was built up as a good man, honest and honorable to a failing, and not all that familiar with the value of money; to the point where the man to whom he's indentured manages to squeeze extra years of service out of him, and the pay he receives at the end is a pittance even compared to what he should have gotten for the year his contract stipulated (that it was three times the pittance he would have gotten for the one year is cold comfort to the reader, if not the man himself). Later on the same qualities that got him exploited earn him a blowgun and a magic fiddle that makes anyone who hears its music jump and dance about. So he comes upon a Jew who is trying to get an apple down from a tree. He offers to help, shooting the apple down with the blowgun, but it falls into a field of briers. When the Jew crawls in after it, the man decides he can't help but cause a little mischief, and plays the fiddle, forcing the Jew to dance in the briers and get cut all over; he refuses to stop until the Jew agrees to give him all the money he has, which the Jew reluctantly does. Later, the man comes upon a town and is recognized by the Jew, who tries to bring him to task for his crime. But the magistrate wants to see this fiddle in action, so the man plays again, and everyone jumps up and starts dancing. The Jew, eventually fearing being forced to dance to exhaustion, drops the charges and admits that he stole the money himself, for which he is promptly punished, and the man gets to keep the twice-stolen money. So, "Nothing you do to a Jewish man counts against you, because he's a dirty Jew who wouldn't know honesty if it bit his dick off"?
  • The Scorpion and the Frog fable:
    • Taken by itself with no metaphor, the lesson is that a predatory animal (such as the titular scorpion) with enough sapience to communicate with a creature it naturally preys on (the frog) should not attempt to fight its natural instincts and pursue cooperative ventures; Mother Nature made the scorpion to kill prey and trying to be something other than that to the frog will only result in one's predatory instincts rising to the surface at the worst possible time, dooming both to a watery grave. It is better to stick with the natural order of things than to try to evolve past one's Darwinian trappings.
    • As a metaphor for evil, it suggests evil is an overriding character trait that outweighs self-interest and survival and one should not trust in an evil person trying to pull a Heel Face Turn.
    • It's also saying that some people are just plain rotten, and shouldn't be trusted, because of who and what they are.
  • Another well know fable: "The cicada and the ant". The moral is quite simple: if you only have fun and don't work, you'll have consequences, but a deeper analysis turns the fable into an anti-art tale. It seems to be that artists, represented by the cicada dedicated to play beautiful music all day, aren't productive members of society and thus, deserve to die of starvation.
  • "East of the Sun and West of the Moon": Apparently if you're not a Christian, you can't get the prince. To be fair, the false bride was his stepsister.
  • While we're at it, "Cinderella" itself. The moral is supposed to be, "If you're a good person, good things will happen to you," but instead it can easily come off as "Don't bother being proactive; eventually you'll get your big break."
    • Most versions have Cinderella take some active role. In the Grimms' version, she directly goes to the doves for help, and it is implied in the Perrault version that she intentionally loses her slipper so that the prince will find her. Many retellings also note that trying to stick up for herself would have only gotten her in more trouble.
  • The only obvious moral of the tale of Hansel and Gretel is: it's perfectly acceptable to break into someone's home and take their stuff (or eat it, if it happens to be made of gingerbread), and when the owner of the house is justifiably angry, she deserves to get murdered. Really, why is the witch the bad guy in this story again? Some tellings of this story make it so that the witch actually states that she deliberately built her house of gingerbread in order to lure children to be eaten, and some imply that the witch and the stepmother are in fact the same person.
    • It is perfectly fine for the witch to get angry but not for her to express that anger by trying to eat the children.
  • The Ugly Duckling has many of these. One seems to be that, if people bully you for being different don't worry. Deep down you are superior to all of them. In addition, it's wrong to bully people for being ugly—not because it's cruel, but because they may actually be Beautiful All Along.
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