First posted May 2023.

Spoilers follow for the entirety of Dimension 20: Neverafter.

A fairytale princess is a loaded image. The phrase evokes a vast range of different concepts, each associated with strong emotions on wildly varied points of the spectrum. To some, she’s a frothy, frilly, delicate pink dream, an emblem of light and joy and fulfilled dreams. To others, she’s a rigid nightmare, a stagnant pool of shallow platitudes and weightless, meaningless existence. She can be understood as a symbol, a faceless force of innocent hope used to drive a story forwards — or a narrative ghost, representing an outlook deemed impossible by modern listeners.

Ages ago, I did a blog post series talking about, in particular, the Disney princesses, their folkloric origins, and what purposes their stories have served in human history. It was long enough ago that if I wanted to revisit it, I could do a better job, but that’s not something that’s currently on my docket; suffice to say, what I hoped to accomplish in that series was to encourage people to look at fairytales, and in particular, princesses, from more than one angle. There’s a reason these stories persist and continue to be retold over and over — something in these stories that resonates with people across time and place, something important that’s worth understanding and revisiting.

There are no barriers to retelling stories from the folklore tradition. Anyone is allowed, at any time, to take what they will from them and create something new out of them. That’s part of what I love about them: that no one owns them. Disney sure is trying, but there’s simply nothing they can do about it. These stories belong to humanity, to all of us, in all times, in all communities, in all countries. We divide them into a Chinese Cinderella and a German Cinderella and a Zimbabwean Cinderella, but really, there’s only ever Cinderella. The divisions between them are as fake as the borders we draw between ourselves on maps.

So I want to be very clear about not holding the gate shut on retellings and who tells them. I want retellings I don’t like to exist. I want retellings that aren’t for me to be there for the people who want and need them. I cannot impose even this mildest of instructions which I’m about to discuss on anyone, and I don’t really want to. All I can talk about is retellings that sing to me, and the ethos that creates retellings that matter to me.

This instruction to which I just referred is merely that I believe if you want to retell a folkloric story, you need to understand the story you’re retelling. You don’t need to like it, and you don’t need to hate it. A retelling is inherently in conversation with its source, and if you don’t understand the statement to which you’re responding, your answer is going to be unintelligible, meaningless, and perhaps embarrassing.

Recently, I talked about Cinderella at length, so let’s tackle some other princesses here. Snow White, due I’d say solely to Disney’s influence, is often dismissed as a boring, passive princess — “Someday My Prince Will Come” understood to be the whole of her story and characterisation. But Snow White’s story, like many of the other princesses, is a way of understanding situations to which the listeners would immediately relate. Sometimes people do just hate you through no fault of your own: because of your beauty, because your parent loves you more than they love their second spouse, because you just irritate them. And people will hurt you because of this irrational hatred. But there will also be people who love you, who love you for exactly who you are without your actions having any bearing on it, and who would risk their own lives to keep you safe and help you. Snow White’s is a story of learning not to focus on the people who will hate you no matter what, of taking care of those we love, of loving those who bring light and comfort and joy into the world. Snow White endures, and pushes onwards through the forest, and doesn’t give up. She doesn’t change her nature or go out of her way to try to change the Queen’s mind. She leaves that negativity behind her and makes a new life, caring for people who, in turn, care for her.

To say that she does nothing in her story is to devalue everything she does. Snow White’s strength, persistence, resilience, kindness, and care for others around her are not merely traits, but things she actively works for, things she has to actively do. I think we have a tendency to think of these as things people are, not things people do, and I fear it’s led us to an acceptance of not pursuing them. People pride themselves on being ‘brutally honest’ without acknowledging that it is a choice to be cruel when you could instead be kind. To persist when it would be easier to give up, to remain true to your values when pressure comes from every side to give in to despair is no small feat. It is hard to look at all the tragedy in our lives and not think of how much less work it would be to stop trying for things to get better. To choose to try anyway is admirable.

Sleeping Beauty is even more widely derided than Snow White. Certainly, sleeping through a portion of her story is a feature and not a bug of her narrative, but in many variants of the folktale, the heroine’s quick thinking and sense of humour factor into the ending she receives. Sittukhan of “The Ninth Captain’s Tale” is patient (even beyond what I’d be able to bear, honestly) and clever, and her beautifully orchestrated lesson to her intended wins her the admiration and respect she desires. Talia of “Sun, Moon, and Talia” extends her execution long enough to buy herself time to be saved. Sleeping Beauties from cultures across the world speak of women working within the restrictions of their societies and their positions to achieve the endings they want. It may not be the action-packed narrative you want, but to say these girls do nothing in their stories simply isn’t true, especially if you read more than the Grimms and Perrault.

While I do stand by my defence of Sleeping Beauty as a person, I should mention that I think Sleeping Beauty is actually more an allegory for generational trauma than a story about a princess. I think knowing when the story you’re working with is more than the simple facts of its plot is part of doing a good retelling. As Neverafter often repeated that Sleeping Beauty makes no choices in her own story, so too they repeated that Little Red Riding Hood’s story is “about listening to figures of authority.” Ylfa isn’t a princess (“Wolf it is, then”) and as such I’m not really talking about her in this essay, but this is relevant to my point about stories being more than the plot points. Sure, that interpretation is valid for Perrault’s version of the story, but that’s sincerely not the point of the story as recorded before he got his misogynist little hands on it. I don’t even have academic analysis of it; the story’s just fun. It’s meant to be fun. Versions recorded before Perrault are vehicles for sex, shit, and cannibalism jokes. There were no morals; it’s a story for entertainment. I take less issue with Ylfa as a whole, because her story was the most well-developed and interesting arc of the player characters, but it speaks to a wider culture in the foundational knowledge supporting this campaign.

Which is to say, plainly, I don’t think Neverafter understood the point of the fairytales it adapted. I don’t think an understanding of what drives Cinderella or Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or any of the princesses was a consideration in the development of the characters or the story. I don’t think you tell a story about Cinderella wanting to destroy the world if you understand that Cinderella’s story is inherently about the difficulty of choosing kindness when the world around you makes it hard to do so. I don’t think you tell a story about Sleeping Beauty not being able to make choices in her life if you understand that her story is about making choices in the ways available to her and using the limited tools at her disposal to achieve an ending she wants.

That said, this is hardly unique to Neverafter; fairytale retellings in recent years have almost all taken this ethos or something resembling it. I started to wonder why, and I think I’ve figured it out.

Fairytale variants exist, and thus later retellings exist, because different audiences and different storytellers need and want different things out of familiar stories. It’s most telling, I think, to look at variants of Beauty and the Beast authored by women against variants written by men; the focus of the stories told by women is completely different, even when they’re telling the same story, because women were thinking about this story in a completely different societal and emotional context.

Because I’ve spent so much of my life studying fairytales, I tend to look at it from a historical perspective that reflects my research. I was taught to evaluate a particular telling of a story and place it in the context of who was telling the story, when they were writing, where they were writing, what was going on in the world around them, and what their personal history was. There’s also a level of literary interpretation and artistic appreciation, evaluating what the story is and why it works or doesn’t work, what within the story resonates with me, what I love about it or what I don’t. All of this put together means I think a lot about fairytales and folkloric stories in general. A lot. Too much, some might say.

And what I think is going on in recent years is that we’re divorcing fairytales from the context in which academics and enthusiasts look at them. People are reading fairytales and seeing precisely what is on the page and nothing more. That’s an absolutely valid way to read them; after all, their primary purpose is to entertain, not to be studied. With a busier and more globalised world, with increasing demands on our time and energy, we have to decide where we put our efforts and where we seek our rest. Art in general can be, for different people, an area of study or an area of rest. Folklore isn’t exempt from those options.

When you come to a story like Cinderella to relax your mind, to be transported and enchanted, to not think about your worries for a while, I can see where it might frustrate rather than relieve a burden. From a modern sensibility, it’s difficult to look on social norms of the past without contempt and horror. Where once we saw encouragement, reassurance, and hope, we now see our failed attempts, our false platitudes, and our disappointed dreams. Where some see an inspiration not to let tragedy destroy us, others see a mocking echo of their former selves, back when they too had optimism and faith.

We live now in a world more or less constantly on both literal and metaphorical fire. Politics, the environment, discrimination, the job market, bigotry, traffic and pollution, global health, the economy, the media landscape: everything we had such big dreams for, such fervent hopes, has beaten us down into despair over and over and over again. Some people simply don’t want to see someone be hopeful again. Hope no longer reassures us; knowing we are not alone in our despair does.

What people need from fairytales now is companionship. Rather than striving to be the characters of fairytales, we want them to meet us down on our level. We want to see them reflect our experiences. We want to see them broken and dejected and destructive, like we are.

Neverafter takes place in a world that finds the princesses (Rosamund/Sleeping Beauty excepted) after their happily ever afters. They have been their hopeful, kind, strong, caring selves. And now they are not. Now they are so tired, so done with the world, so dejected and beaten and angry and sad and hopeless, that their goal is to destroy everything and everyone in their world. While that’s not the ending our player characters (or we as the audience) want, we can sympathise. How much easier would it be to go full-tilt and destroy our world, rather than put in the work to fix it? How often have we said that any small measure to make it the tiniest bit better would be so useless in the grand scheme of things that it’s best not to even expend the effort? Modern fairytale retellings hear this, and hold our hands and say they understand. That we are not alone in that despair. I can see where that’s of value to modern audiences.

It isn’t for me; in the end, Neverafter was not for me, and that was really disappointing. I believe there are still audiences like me, who value fairytales as images of the selves we want to be, rather than the selves we are. I do not believe I’m so special as to be alone in that. But I can see where there’s value for other people in retellings that aren’t for me. Not everything needs to be for me! We need a range, so everyone sees themselves in some version of it.

In fact, it’s a satisfying summation of folklore’s history, extending in both directions beyond the scope of what we can know. There must be stories that don’t speak to some of us, so that there can be stories that speak to all of us. Humanity encompasses hope and hopelessness, victory and failure, love and hatred, light and dark. Our stories do, too.