Inspired by some of our excellent bloggers here who continue to work out groups and essays about writing. Thanks, y'all!
1. People are living in some kind of okay ordinary life.
2. Disturbances occur. There are entities who are perceived as evil.
3. Children have to suffer. That has to be in strange ways. That's really important. Really good fairy tales aren't really about child abuse. They are about fantasy, and about fear, and redemption.
4. Okay. Now we get to the part where the kids have to go into the woods. That's rough. There are bears, wolves, sentient trees, whatever. Some of these may turn out to be mythical helpers, some may turn out to be evil forces that must be overcome.
5. Okay. At this point in a good fairy tale, there is fairy confirmation of some sort. The ranger comes in with his axe and cuts out Grandma from the wolf's body, or somebody gets transformed one way, or the other, into the Princess or the Prince, and then we all get on with it, all up in the castle & stuff.
Sometimes there are voyages, previous to all of that. Sometimes the fairy or magician confirmations arrive sooner in the story.
Bottom line though, is that fairy tales are really powerful stuff. That shit about how it's about gay men is kind of foolish.
I generically love gay men. Fairy tales are a much larger and somewhat different subject, if you get my drift, peoples?