plot devices in retelling fairy tales

[marycatelli]

Nothing is more difficult to deal with in retelling a fairy tale than its plot devices.  Because they have the dreadful tendency to drop them like hot potatoes the instant their usefulness is used up, and without a breath of explanation.

The king marries the miller's daughter because she can spin straw into gold, but her only problem after that is that Rumpelstiltskin wants the baby.  The king must have gotten her pregnant, but does he want no more gold?  Maid Maleen is imprisoned in her tower with a servant; they escape together and look for jobs together, and the instant they are hired, the servant is heard of no more.  The Girl Without Hands marries the king, and then a war erupts to take him away.

Wars are particularly bad.  They exist for soldiers to fight in before the story or the opening paragraphs.  They exist to separate the king from his bride so the story can go on.  They exist to ravage the kingdom where Maid Maleen comes from, or the realms on the way from the Water of Life so the prince can rescue them from famine with a never-ending loaf of bread, and sometimes to drive a queen or princess or prince from a kingdom.  

The most war-like war you will run across is one where the hero is secretly living in the princess's kingdom, and rescues the kingdom three times from an invading army.  The fun thing is that very plot works just the same if the king holds tournaments, and he shows up to fight three times and win.  It's not its being a war that's important.

There are some world-building tricks to help.  Perhaps you can base your society on Renaissance Italy where the armies mostly maneuvered and negotiated so that there were few deaths.

And of course it's useful when you want to do other points of view, but you don't always want to.

Comments

[jbellinger]

Maybe going after bandits is excuse enough to get people elsewhere without the existential worries a war would bring.

[marycatelli]

Useful. Indeed, the effects would be less heavy, though perhaps non-trivial enough to pass by in a retelling.

[nodrog]

Not directly related to your post, but put here:

Here’s a twist on things:  You mentioned a while back, how often the hero lives happily ever after with a bland cipher, a non-entity.  Not always!  I can think of two examples, one fictional, where Boy Meets Girl - boy loses girl, and embarks on the Epic Hero’s Journey to recover her…  But as the saying goes, “The boy seeks - the man finds,” and by the end of the third book (or whatever), the toughened travelled older campaigner looks at the face that launched a callow youth - and is not impressed.  After all he has seen and done and gone through, he has simply outgrown her.

So, now what?

[marycatelli]

Ever read A Fighting Man of Mars?

[nodrog]

No, I hadn’t, and it’s another good example. I was thinking of PJ Farmer’s World of Tiers, where the main character meets and is smitten by a lovely creature whom an earlier day would call “dizzy” and TV Tropes calls a Brainless Beauty.  Still, all would have been well - and a short book - but she gets kidnapped by Bad People and he pursues them a long way, physically and personally.  When he finally rescues her he finds the game is not worth the candle, and he adventures onward.

_________

In 1957 Paul Anka wrote and recorded “Diana,” about a high school classmate.  Much like the movie That Thing You Do! he went on a tour, and when he came back the ‘Welcome Home’ parade was led by Diana herself… but now she was yesterday’s news, and he really wasn’t enthused.

[nodrog]

Exactly a century before, Sir Walter Scott averred that Tan Hadron should have glumly shackled himself to Sanoma Tora regardless because virtue is its own reward and indeed the only reward:


The character of the fair Jewess found so much favour in the eyes of some fair readers, that the writer was censured, because, when arranging the fates of the characters of the drama, he had not assigned the hand of Wilfred to Rebecca, rather than the less interesting Rowena. But, not to mention that the prejudices of the age rendered such an union almost impossible, the author may, in passing, observe, that he thinks a character of a highly virtuous and lofty stamp, is degraded rather than exalted by an attempt to reward virtue with temporal prosperity. Such is not the recompense which Providence has deemed worthy of suffering merit, and it is a dangerous and fatal doctrine to teach young persons, the most common readers of romance, that rectitude of conduct and of principle are either naturally allied with, or adequately rewarded by, the gratification of our passions, or attainment of our wishes. In a word, if a virtuous and self-denied character is dismissed with temporal wealth, greatness, rank, or the indulgence of such a rashly formed or ill assorted passion as that of Rebecca for Ivanhoe, the reader will be apt to say, verily Virtue has had its reward. But a glance on the great picture of life will show, that the duties of self-denial, and the sacrifice of passion to principle, are seldom thus remunerated; and that the internal consciousness of their high-minded discharge of duty, produces on their own reflections a more adequate recompense, in the form of that peace which the world cannot give or take away.

Abbotsford, 1st September, 1830.

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fair readers - women were saying this, not men!  Too bad.