31 Days Of Halloween - Fairy Tales
Illustrations of the horrifying original versions of fairy tales, one new illustration to come each day of the month of October.
Day 1: The Robber Bridegroom:
A father decides that his daughter should be married off, so he promises her to the first dude that shows up inquiring about needing a woman. You know like you do. She decides to visit her future husband to maybe see him or I don't know to talk to him before marrying him?
When she arrives at his home an old woman working for the groom warns her to hide as he and his band of cannibal robbers are returning from a day of murdering, raping, and general nightmare making. The bride-to-be hides behind a barrel, the men enter carrying the lifeless body of a young woman who they begin to chop up and eat. A finger of the dead girl adorned with a gold ring flys through the air and lands in the lap of the terrified woman who now realizes she engaged to a Hannibal Lecter wanna-be lunatic.
The old woman drugs the robbers wine to make them fall asleep and the two women sneak out of the house and back to town. They say nothing of what they have seen and follow through with the wedding as planned. On the day of the wedding, the groom and his band of merry maniacs start telling stories and urge the bride to tell one. She tells of traveling to a house of murder in the woods and of watching a gang of men eat the body of a young girl. Then she pulls the dead girl's finger still wearing the gold ring out of her pocket and presents it as proof of their terrible crime. The men are immediately sentenced to death, I hope she at least got the marriage annulled afterward.
Day 2: The Myrtle Tree
The Myrtle Tree, A couple wants to have children but sadly they can not, the woman wishes so hard she gives birth to a myrtle tree stick. Instead of freaking out that she gave birth to a stick she decides to sell it to the highest bidder and make some cash. A prince who apparently has a thing for collecting medical oddities purchases the stick and takes it home. Each night a mysterious beautiful woman enters his bedroom and makes love to him then disappears, on the seventh night he ties her hair to his arm so she can't sneak away.
When the sun rises she admits that she is a magical fairy that lives inside the myrtle stick. The prince has to leave to do...prince business and asks the fairy to turn back into a stick while he is gone. Because he doesn't want his woman talking to anyone or you know existing while he is gone. The fairy says screw that and sleeps in the prince's bed in her human form.
The prince neglected to mention to the fairy that he had seven prostitutes that he used to spend lots of time with before she showed up. These now unemployed women of the night hated the fairy for taking their client away. So they crept into the prince's bedroom in the night and ripped the fairy apart. A servant entered the room in the morning to find a pile of blood, bones, and teeth, cleaned up the remains and buried them under a myrtle tree.
Magically the fairy is reborn from a bloom on the myrtle tree and tells the Prince that his seven angry prostitutes killed her. Finding a new way to screw them, he buries all seven alive in a public sewer.
Day 3: Biancabella and the Snake
Day 3: Biancabella and the Snake,
A woman falls asleep in a garden, while she rests a snake slithers up her dress and impregnates her, so in the first sentence, we have snake rape, great start! She gives birth to a girl and names her Biancabella and the baby is born with a snake wrapped around her neck. When Biancabella is 10 the snake returns it tells her she is actually her snake sister and blesses her with great beauty, because...snake magic!
Biancabella now an insanely gorgeous 10-year old is married off to a king who is apparently the king of perverts! The creepy king's evil step-mother hates the young girl for some reason and pays a group of men to take her into the woods and kill her. The men don't have the heart to go through with it so instead they chop off her hands and scoop out her eyes (THANKS GUYS!) and take them back as proof of her death. The evil step-mother puts her own hideously deformed daughter in the king's bed and tells him Biancabella has miscarried a child and has become ugly with grief.
The king who apparently has never seen his half-sister before and can't recognize his own wife believes the lie. Meanwhile, Biancabella who somehow has not bled to death in the woods decides to kill herself, but before she can her snake sister appears and heals all her wounds. She returns to the castle and exposes the fake Biancabella and the evil step-mother, the king sentences the step-mother and her daughter to be burned alive in a furnace. I feel like the super ugly daughter probably didn't deserve the fiery death but that's how it goes in fairy tales.
Day 4: Little Mermaid
Day 4: Little Mermaid, The little mermaid lived under the sea with her family, on her 15th birthday she is allowed to swim to the surface to see life above water. When she does there is a violent storm that wrecks a ship, a handsome prince is thrown into the sea and the little mermaid saves his life. She falls in love with the prince instantly, she can't stop thinking about him. Her obsession grows so much that she decides to visit the sea witch to get a set of legs so she can be with him on land. The witch gives her a pair of legs but each step feels like she's walking on razorblades, her feet bleed constantly and she will be mute for the rest of her life. The little mermaid decides that all of this is worth it for the attention of a man she has met once, oh to be 15 again.
She finds the prince, they become close friends, she falls more and more in love with him, he can't stop thinking of the woman who saved him in the sea. He apparently has face blindness and can't figure out she's the same woman and starts believing another woman is the one who saved him. The prince marries the other woman and invites the little mermaid to his wedding at sea which seems a little insensitive and her heart is broken.
The little mermaid's sisters swim up to the ship and present her with a knife. The sea witch gave it to them and said if the little mermaid kills the prince with the knife she will be restored to her mermaid form. The little mermaid sneaks into the prince's bedroom to murder him so she can get her voice back, and live with her family under the sea as a mermaid. But upon looking at his handsome face she can't bring herself to kill him and instead throws herself off the ship to die in the sea. As she hits the water she turns into sea foam and dissolves into the sea, the spray from the ocean is believed to be the little mermaid's tears.
Day 5: The Rose Tree
Day 5: The Rose Tree. A man had two children, each with two different women. The daughter with his first wife and his son with his second. Shocker the step-mother hated the daughter because fairy tales make all step-mothers monsters. She complains to the girl that she can't brush her hair with a comb so asks her to bring her an ax and a piece of wood...to brush her hair. The poor, trusting, not big on critical thinking girl does as she is told.
The step-mother promptly chops the girls head off, she cooked her heart and her liver up into a stew and served it to her husband and son. The father ate the stew, the son did not as he knew deep down what the secret ingredient was. The brother buried his soup under a rose tree and cried over the death of his sister.
One day a rose opened up on the tree and a white bird flew out, it collected some random shit like red shoes, a pocket watch, and a millstone. The bird flew to the house and rang the doorbell three times, the first time the brother came out and the bird dropped the shoes, second ring of the bell the father came out and it dropped the watch. The third ring of the bell the step-mother came outside and the bird dropped the millstone on her and crushed her to death. How a bird can carry and drop a millstone large enough to crush an adult woman to death is beyond me.
Day 6: Sleeping Beauty
Day 6: Sleeping Beauty, this classic starts out how you remember, a king and queen have a daughter. She has fairy godmothers that take care of her and give her gifts of beauty and blah, blah, blah. An old woman curses the baby to die at the prick of a spindle, but the last fairy counters that saying she will not die, just sleep for 100 years. The King tries to destroy all the spindle and thus destroys the entire textiles' industry in his kingdom to protect his daughter. Shocker, she still finds one touches it and gets a splinter of wood stuck in her finger, and she falls into a deep sleep.
Years later a random King (not a prince) finds the abandoned castle, then sees the unconscious princes and direct quote "Crying aloud, he beheld her charms and felt his blood course hotly through his veins. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to a bed, where he gathered the first fruits of love. Leaving her on the bed, he returned to his own kingdom, where, in the pressing business of his realm, he for a time thought no more about this incident." Translation, the pervert saw an unconscious woman, raped her and headed back to his super important job and never thought twice about the woman he raped. Thank god this is only a fairy tale and this isn't a thing that real people do....oh wait...let me grab a beer.
OK, I went outside and screamed for a few minutes and I'm back. So the sleeping beauty is now pregnant, she gives birth to twins while still sleeping which might be the only good thing that happens to her in this story. Her fairy godmothers take care of the babies and try to breastfeed them, they accidentally put the babies on her fingers instead of her nipples because apparently, these fairies didn't have a good sex ed program in school. One of the babies, desperate for milk sucks the enchanted wood splinter from her finger, and she wakes up. Being a good fairy tale princess she doesn't wake up screaming or freaking out that her boobs are out, two babies are sucking on her fingers or that she has terrible muscle atrophy.
The King hears of his rape produced children and goes to the Princess and says hey lady want to be my mistress because oh yeah I'm married. She with some kind of brain fog from the world's longest nap agrees and moves to the King's land. His wife Medea, (Medea is a name from Greek mythology who murdered her own children after being left by her husband look it up!) finds out about the mistress and the rape babies and becomes understandably pissed off. She orders the cook to murder the babies and cook them into dinner, the cook not being a maniac hides the innocent children and instead cooks lamb. Medea then goes to kill the sleeping beauty but is stalled by the young woman who asks if she can slowly undress her self so no blood gets on her beautify clothes. Media agrees since apparently a woman rage can be slowed down by treat fashion, the King walks into the room where he finds Medea holding a knife and his mistress half naked and yells "You renegade bitch, what evil deed is this which you have done? " Which personally is my favorite line in the original story.
The King then throws his wife into the furnace and murders her. And the sleeping beauty who has NO ownership of her own body at any point this is horrible story lives the rest of her terrifying life with his rapist, wife murdering jerk....happily ever after.
Day 7: The Pied Piper
Day 7: Pied Piper, a town overrun by rats hires the pied piper to play his flute to lure all the rats into the sea. The Piper plays his mesmerizing song and leads the rats to their death. He then returns to the town for payment, the townspeople refuse to pay and tell him to scram.
The Piper doesn’t handle this turn of events well and starts playing his song again, but this time it’s the town's children that follow him. He leads all the children of the town to the water and drowns them all. Moral of the story? Pay your bills.
Day 8: Bluebeard
Day 8: Bluebeard. Bluebeard was a horribly ugly nobleman who went through wives like kleenex. HIs wives seemed to always vanish without explanation when he was fresh out of spouses he attended a banquet to find a new one. He picked a young woman and took her as his bride against her will and brought her home with him.
Bluebeard soon had important business to attend to and had to leave town and gave the young bride a key to his home. He told her that it could open any door in the house except one in the basement, he told her to stay away from that door. Of course, the second he left she went straight to that door because...screw that guy!
She put the key in the lock and heard it click, she pushed the door open and was horrified by what she saw. All six of Bluebeards previous wives, dead, hanging on meat hooks the floor covered in pools of blood. The girl dropped the key in all the shock right into a puddle of blood, she picked up the key but couldn't get the blood to come off. It's as if the blood had instantly stained the metal key.
Bluebeard returned and asked for the key, instantly he saw the blood on the key and knew where she had been. He flys into a rage and is about to add her to his collection when her brothers show up and kill Bluebeard. The wife inherited all of Bluebeards riches, has the ex-wives buried and marries a man that she loves and lives happily ever after. This one has a happy ending....as long as you weren't one of the first six wives.
Day 9: Rapunzel
Day 9: Rapunzel:
A husband and wife long for a child for years, finally, the wife becomes pregnant but refuses to eat anything other than Rampion which grows in a witches yard. Because witches always have the best gardens the husband sneaks in to collect food for his wife and unborn child. The witch catches him and agrees to let him live in exchange for the child once it's born. They hand the baby over with out argument for some reason, but the witch hates the beautiful girl and locks her in a tower. Why an independent talented witch would take on the duties of parenthood for a child she hates for no reason is beyond me.
Rapunzel's hair grows for years, she braids it and this is what the witch uses to climb up into the tower to check on her. How did she check on her while the hair was growing out?! Did the witch just toss food and water up to the top of a super tall tower? Can't the witch fly on a broomstick? I have a lot of questions!
A prince comes along see's Rapunzel in the tower and climbs up her hair, they fall in love and she becomes pregnant. The two plan to run away together, two cheers for a non-rape pregnancy in a fairy tale! The witch notices Repunzel's growing stomach, flies into a rage and chops off all her hair and throws her out the window to live in the woods. Slut shamed Rapunzel runs away to give birth alone in the woods. The prince returns and climbs up the braided hair but at the top he finds the witch holding the hair, not his beautiful bride to be.
The witch throws the prince out the window into a giant thorn patch and his eyes are gouged out of his head. In the process of tossing people out the window, the witch lets go of the hair braid which unravels and she's trapped in the tower forever. The blind prince finds Rapunzel in the woods by following the sound of her voice, she has just given birth to twins, they kiss and his eyes grow back.
Day 10: Snow White
Day 10: Snow White
Snow White has skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as black as onyx. Translation the girl has got it going on and shocker her evil stepmother is super jealous of her beauty. Step parents really get the shaft in fairy tales, but this mom is a total B and orders the huntsman to take Snow White into the woods and murder her. The Huntsman took the young girl into the woods but couldn't bring himself to kill her, so he told her that her stepmom was a psycho and set her free. He returned to the castle with an animals heart as fake proof of Snow Whites death.
Snow White then breaks into the home of seven dwarf miners but they let her stay since she does all the housework for them. The evil stepmother finds out that Snow White is still alive via her magic beauty mirror and tries to kill her with an enchanted comb, super tight corset and finally than evil apple. An apple a day did NOT keep the doctor away for this troubled beauty. She takes a bite of the apple and it gets stuck in her throat she then falls into a death-like sleep, the seven dwarfs heartbroken over the death of their maid build her a glass coffin.
A prince comes by and see's the beautiful corpse and instantly falls in love and prince necrophilia helps carry the glass coffin to her burial site. The processes of moving the coffin dislodge the apple from Snow Whites throat and she wakes up and instantly falls in love with the creepy Prince because he's cute I guess. The Prince is told of the evil stepmother and her attempt to kill Snow White so he comes up with a totally normal punishment. He has iron shoes made, puts them in hot coals till they are red hot and places them on the stepmother's feet and forces her to dance on the hot shoes until she dies.
Day 11: Cinderella
Day 11: Cinderella: Cinderella's mom dies, her dad marries a horrible woman with two horrible daughters because in the fairy tale world all step-parents and step-siblings are evil. The sisters turn the girl into their maid, make her wear rags and do all the housework, her dad being an asshole apparently doesn't care that his new wife and her brat kids treat his only child like garbage and does nothing to stop it. The local king throws a party for his son the prince and invites all the ladies in the land so he can pick out a wife because the prince is lazy, has no social skills and needs his daddy to help him swipe right. Cinderella goes to her mothers grave, cries and prays that she could have a beautiful dress and shoes to go to the ball and magically a silver and gold dress and shoes fall from heaven, she threw the clothes on and attended the ball. The Prince falls in love with the beautiful and hardworking Cinderella and they spend the night dancing, the original version goes ON AND ON about how there are three nights like this where she runs away at the end of the night and the Prince can't figure out who she is. Why she is running away from him each night is never explained, but it's a girls job to run away from boys and a boys job to hunter down right? Awww romance!
Finally, on the third night, he covers the stairs in sticky goop to try and trap her which is the best way to get a wife, but only her shoe gets stuck. He then travels the land to find the woman whose foot fits into the shoe because he has face blindness and only the shoe will prove her identity. The evil step-sisters in an attempt to fit into the small shoe chop their freaking toes off because self-mutilation is totally worth it to marry money! The prince falls for the trick twice but a magic talking bird tells him they tricked him and finally prince dum dum figures out Cinderella is his dream girl and they get married. That magic bird then plucks the evil step-sisters eyes out of their heads at the wedding because for some reason Cinderella has them as bridesmaids. Cinderella obviously has issues with self-worth and lets people treat her like shit, let's hope she works on this.
Day 12: Dead Mother
Day 12: Dead Mother, a beautiful young woman gives birth to her first born child but quickly dies from blood loss. Her heartbroken husband is now left with a new born and a broken heart, he hires a nanny to come and take care of the child. The baby refuses to eat and cries all the time, but the nanny notices that the baby is silent at night. Somehow the child lives for weeks like this, not eating and crying all day but restful at night.
One night husband wakes up after hearing the door to the babies room open and shut, he creeps to the door and pulls it open. There he sees the shape of a woman standing in the dark nursing the small child. He steps into the room and as his eyes adjust he realizes it's his dead wife, wearing the clothes she was buried in, breastfeeding their baby. She looks up at him, lets out a sigh and puts the baby down in the crib. His wife slowly walks past him, crying, saying nothing and leaves the room. He runs to the crib and finds the baby is dead. This one is just sad as shit and I have no sassy commentary. Happy Friday?
Day 13: Suck a Thumb
Day 13: Suck a thumb, this is classified as a fairy tale by old-timey German kid haters. The story goes that if a child won’t stop sucking their thumb their thumbs come to a horrible end. The scissor man would break into your home with giant scissors and...you guessed it chop your freaking thumbs off. Kids today have it so easy, back then parents tormented their children with stories of finger chopping lunatics, now they just get their Netflix password changed.
Day 14: Hansel and Gretel
Day 14: Hansel and Gretel. Hansel and Gretel, an insane mother of a poor family decides she doesn't have enough money to feed her two children. She talks her husband into walking the kids into the woods and leaving them to die. Best parents ever award goes to these to fantastic folks! The terrified children come upon a house made of gingerbread and candy, an old woman lives inside and welcomes them to eat all the candy and sweets they can eat.
The woman turns out to be a witch who is fattening them up so she can eat them because a witch has got to eat! Gretel is made into a kitchens assistant and taught how to bake and cook which are some solid life skills, Hansel gets to sit in a cage all day and eat sweets which seems like a reasonable way to spend a Sunday afternoon. But the kids don't want to be taught new skills or gain weight or oh yeah, be eaten. So they shove the witch into her giant stove and bake her alive. They steal her gold and jewels, return home where their horrible mom has randomly died of some mystery disease that no one cares about and they live happily ever after with their dad. I count this as a horror story because witches are people too!
Day 15: The girl with no hands
Day 15: The girl without hands. A farmer looking for wealth makes a deal with the devil, all the devil wants in return is what's behind the farmer's barn. The farmer glances over and sees an apple tree and agrees. But shockingly the devil isn't obsessed with apples, but the farmer's daughter who is standing behind the barn. The devil goes to take the girl by the hand but she is so pure and innocent he could not take touch her so he demanded she put her hands in the dirt. The girl covers her hands in dirt but still, she is so pure the devil cannot touch her, the devil demands her father chop off her hands or he will take the father instead.
The selfish, stupid father chops his daughters hands off so he can become wealthy because he's the worst dad EVER. The girl begins to cry over the stumps where her hands once were and her tears wash away the blood, again making them too clean for the devil. The devil says screw this I have hellfires to stoke and stomps off, the daughter runs away. She meets a prince they fall in love, get married. The King goes away to battle, the Queen gives birth to a child and sends the King a letter telling him the good news. The devil gets a hold of the letter and edits it to say she gave birth to a changeling which is some kind of fairy child that has been swapped out for your real child. The King being a stand-up guy writes back that he doesn't care and will raise the fake fairy child as his own.
The devil gets a hold of the King's letter because apparently the devil hangs out at the post office a lot and changes his letter to tell a servant to kill the Queen and the baby. Luckily the servant says "Screw that" and tells the Queen to take her child and run, seven years later the King finds her and tells her it was all a big mix up and her hands magically grow back. Moral of the story? The devil can't keep this badass chick down!
Day 16:
Day 16: How Some Children Played at Slaughtering. Two boys decide to play butcher and pig, one boy got on all fours and started making pig noises, the other grabbed a knife. The butcher boy slits the throat of his young friend and celebrates at what a good butcher he is, the townspeople find the grizzly scene and is horrified. The town as a whole meet to decide what to do with the boy, is he evil or just a stupid kid who doesn't understand death? So they come up with a simple test to find out, they place an apple and a piece of gold in front of the butcher boy. If he chooses the apple that means he has an innocent heart, if he takes the gold it means he is greedy, evil and should be killed. Feeling peckish after a long afternoon of boy slaughtering the butcher boy picks the apple, he is set free and they all live emotionally traumatized ever after.
Day 17: The Three Army Surgeons.
Day 17: The Three Army Surgeons. Three surgeons perform surgery on themselves to impress an innkeeper. One cuts off his hand, one cuts out his eye and the third not to be outdone removes his own heart. They place the body parts in jars and put them in a cupboard to be put back in place in the morning. The surgeons spend the night magically not dying and talking about how great they are. In the middle of the night, a girl's boyfriend shows up and she opens the cupboard to get him some food. A cat creeps into the cupboard and snatches up the showoff Dr. body parts and makes a run for it.
The girl's boyfriend runs to the gallows and chops off a dead criminals hand, goes to a butcher and gets a pigs heart and plucks an eye from the very cat that stole the body parts in the first place. They put the replacement parts in the jars and pretend that nothing happened. The surgeons woke up and put the body parts back on their bodies, apparently not paying close attention to the what these body parts looked like! The Dr. with the new hand found himself unable to stop stealing, the Dr. with the pig heart kept shoving his nose in the dirt and eating non-stop. The cat eye Dr. just got blindness which seems like a bum deal. Moral of the story? Don't be a cocky show off or you'll end up with a pigs heart.
Day 18: The Flea
Day 18: The Flea, a King finds and feeds a flea until it's the size of a goat, he then has it skinned and declares that the first man who can guess what animal the skin belongs to will marry his daughter. Now let's stop, where was he getting all this blood! A flea eats 15 times its own body weight in blood every day, an adult lamb can weigh over 300 pounds. So we are talking over 4,500 pounds of blood a day, the average cow has 23lb of blood, that's over 36 cows worth of blood a DAY to feed this giant nasty ass flea. Seems like a poor use of resources.
Shocker the first guy to guess correctly is a horrible ugly ogre who takes the daughter away and marries her. He eats men and decorates the house with dead dude parts, the girl is understandably not having it. She cries and complains to a neighbor woman who has seven half-giant sons which brings up a lot of questions about how a normal-sized woman mates with a giant but that's a whole other situation. The giant sons save the girl and murder the ogre, she goes home and marries a new guy and lives happily ever after. I'm mostly concerned with the blood factory one would need to feed a giant flea and the mechanics of giant/human baby making. The devil truly is in the details on this one.
Day 19: Donkey Skin
Day 19: Donkey Skin. A King and his beautiful Queen live in a castle with their gorgeous daughter. The Queen dies and makes the King promise that he will only remarry if he finds a woman who is as beautiful as she was. A good wife on her deathbed only worries about her husband getting a hot new wife obviously. The King searched for women but not very hard because he decides the only woman as beautiful as his dead wife is their daughter and demands that she marry him. The horrified, nauseated, heartbroken, creeped out daughter decides to make crazy demands of her incestual father to slow the process down. Not being a strong strategist she asks for three dresses, one as bright as the sun, the second the color of the moon, and a third the color of a sunset. Being a King finding a yellow, blue and pink dress wasn't a hard task to complete and he gives them to her almost immediately.
The girl in desperation runs to the royal farm, slaughters a donkey and wears its skin as a cloak to make herself as ugly as possible, and runs away with her three beautiful dresses in hand because that's important at a time like this! She travels to the next town over, gets a job at a bakery which brings up food safety questions if you have a woman wearing rotting donkey skin preparing food. One day the girl is alone in her room trying on one of her creepy dad dresses and a handsome man peeps in her window and watches her getting dressed without her consent and falls in love with her instantly. This poor peeping Tom is lovesick and demands that the only thing that will cure his illness is a cake baked by the super ugly, smelly donkey skin baker.
While baking the cake for the man one of her rings falls into the batter and she bakes it into the cake, again food safety standards! The man finds the ring and declares that he will marry the woman the ring fits on. He has many ladies try the ring on and finally asks donkey skin to try it on which should have been the first step since she is the one who baked the stupid cake! The ring fits, they get married and she invites her dad to the wedding and he's like, oh yeah! Sorry about that trying to molest your thing. HAHA! This story teaches women that if your to pretty your father will molest you, the only way to protect yourself is to be ugly but make sure you're still pretty enough for another man to fall in love with you based off your looks so he can save you.
Day 20:
Day 20: Binnorie. There once were two sisters who lived near the mill-dams of Binnorie. The eldest sister fell in love with a handsome boy but his eyes were set on her younger sister. The man and the youngest sister fell in love and the eldest sister became angry, bitter and vengeful. She then took her sister for a walk down to the river and shoved her head under the water until she died.
The poor young girl's body drifted down the river until it was spotted by a miller who fished her body out of the water and laid her to rest. A random musician finds her remains in what must have been a very shallow grave and decides to make a harp out of her body using her hair for strings, and bones for the frame. Ed Gein would have been proud.
The musician is hired to play at the eldest sisters wedding to the very man her young sister had been dating, this guy just takes what he can get I guess. The musician takes a break from his playing and walks away from the harp, the harp then begins to sing. In front of the whole family, the voice of the dead sister rings out fo the harp exposing the murderous sister's terrible deeds. "That brat murdered me, she also totally stole my favorite skirt" or some shit like that. Siblings be rough on each other sometimes to be nice to your siblings or they might murder or haunt you.
Day 21: Vasilisa the Beautiful. Per usual a husband and wife have a beautiful daughter named Vasilisa, the mom kicks the bucket. The mom leaves Vasilisa a doll and tells her to feed her and give her water and the doll with help Vasilisa throughout her life. The girl feeds the doll which comes to life and she carries her with her at all times which is horrifying. The dad marries a bitch with two horrible ugly daughters. The step-mother and sisters are super mean to Vasilisa, one day the dad leaves to go hunting and the stepmother pack's the kids up and moves them into an old shack in the woods.
The stupid mean sisters blow all the candles out at the end of the night leaving the shack without fire to cook, stay warm or light the room. They cast Vasilisa out into the woods to get fire from an old witch named Baba Yaga, Baba agrees to give her fire IF she can complete certain tasks before sunrise or else she will kill Vasilisa. She has to clean the witches house, cook food, pick poppy seeds out of dirt, and other annoying chores. The living doll in Vasilisa's pocket helps her do all these tasks quickly and Baba Yaga is impressed. She hands Vasilisa a lantern made from a human skull, filled with embers.
When Vasilisa returns to the shack she finds her step-mother and sisters shivering in the dark. She holds the skull lantern up to show them that she has returned with fire and ask the light hits their skin all three go up in flames. Vasilisa sweeps up the ashes of her horrible step-mom and sisters and buries them with the skull lantern. She then runs away like, "la, la, la, nothing to see here" and lives happily ever after.
Day 22: The Tin Man
Day 22: The Tin Man. The original story of the tin man or Nick Chopper from the first Wizard of Oz book was much darker than the MGM version. Nick was a normal man who worked as a woodsman cutting down trees in Oz for a living, the wicked witch of the west enchanted his ax so that it would constantly cut him. Slowly he chopped off parts of his body while working, a toe, a finger, a hand, an arm, after each accident the tinsmith would replace the missing part with a metal prosthetic. Over time Nick was made completely of metal but the tinsmith forgot one part...a heart. As Dorothy and the gang travel through Oz to the emerald city he uses the ax to chop the heads off of animals that get in there way, so yeah the Judy Garland version is much more kid-friendly.
Day 23: Clever Hans
Day 23: Clever Hans, Hans is engaged to Gretel who gives him a gift each day. First, she gives him a needle which he hides in a haystack for no apparent reason, then a knife that he puts through his sleeve instead of his pocket. This goes on and on, Gretel should be seeing some red flags at this point like wow, the man I'm going to spend the rest of my life with is really dumb...maybe I should slow my roll.
But Gretel, like most young women, thinks she can change him and gives him a calf which immediately runs away and he is told he should have tied it up. The last git she gives to Hans is herself, but after just losing the calf he decides she must be tied to a poll so she won't run away. Hans tells his mother what he has done and she scolds him and yells "you shouldn't have done that, you should have cast your adoring eyes at her". Hans jumped up, ran to the stables, scooped the eyes out of all the livestock and ran to Gretel. One handful at a time he threw eyeballs at her because Hans was very dumb. Gretel said that's it, I can do better than this, I'm leaving your simple ass. And to her, we say "Yes Queen
Day 24: The Old Woman Who Was Skinned Alive. A King hears two sisters talking on the other side of a wall, the women sound beautiful and he asks them to stick a finger through the gate of the wall so he can kiss it. Little does he know the two sisters are very old, wrinkly, smelly and toothless. King pervy-pants kisses one of the women's fingers and becomes so worked up he begs her to spend the night with him, (that is one sexy finger). The woman agrees but only if all the lights are off because she's "too modest to expose herself to him in the light".
The King runs back to his room and waits for his mystery lover, the old woman is worried the king will be able to tell her age by touching her skin so she pulls her skin behind her back and ties it with string. Does she think he won't touch her back? What would a giant flesh ponytail feel like in the dark! Why is her skin so stretchy? So many horrifying questions. They do the deed and while she is sleeping the King lights a candle to look at his lovers face, but when he realizes she's an old hag he freaks out and throws her out the window.
The old woman's flappy back skin saves her from certain death as it gets caught on a tree branch and she just hangs there, naked, saggy and sad. Fairies see her laugh at for a while then bless her with the beauty and apparently the relationship skills of a 15-year-old. The King wakes up in the morning to see a beautiful, naked 15 year old in his tree and marries her on the spot. Why the now hot old lady gives the man who threw her out a window the time of day is beyond me. Now Queen the hot sister doesn't want to tell her still old and ugly sister the secret to her magical makeover so she says he was skinned alive. The still old and ugly sister marches to the nearest barber and demands that she be skinned alive as well, shocker she bleeds to death. Lessons? Lie to people to get them to sleep with you and you will be blessed with eternal youth, don't be vain or you will be skinned alive.
Day 25: Little Red Riding Hood
Day 25: Little Red Riding Hood. You know the story, Little Red Riding Hood goes to visit her grandmother in the woods, little does she know that a wolf has snuck into her grandmother's house and swallowed her whole. That hungry wolf pulled some of grandmas clothes out of the closet, put them on and laid in her bed to trick Little Red. She enters the bedroom, she sees a wolf wearing a muumuu and thinks it's her grandmother, seems like another case of face-blindness if you ask me. They do their whole what big eyes you have, what big ears, what big teeth routine and the wolf swallows her whole.
A woodsman is walking through the woods and decides to go visit the old woman's house since she is very old and lives alone. Upon entering the room he sees a wolf, fast asleep, belly ingorged and no old woman in site. The woodsman acts quickly and slices the wolfs stomach open on the spot, Little Red and her grandmother are both still alive, stand up and high five the woodsman. Moral of the story? Chew your food.
Day 26: The Rose Elf. A young woman is madly in love with her handsome boyfriend, but her creepy brother is not having it. He lures the boyfriend into the woods, chops his head off and buries him in a shallow grave. But the murder was witnessed by a tiny elf who was on a leaf that had fallen on the brothers head during the murder.
The brother returns home to his sister and "leans over her in bed as she sleeps" which seems like he may have raped his sister in her sleep which is nasty on like 10 levels. The elf fell onto the young woman's bed and whispers into her ear that her perverted, raping brother murdered her hot boyfriend and buried him in the woods.
She runs to the woods, digs up his grave, picks up his head, kisses it and carries it home. These kids have some issues, and their parents aren't mentioned in the story at all so I don't know what kind of upbringing they have had. She buries the head in a flowerpot and plants a rose so she can...i don't know...watch her dead lovers head be miracle grow. She then dies of a broken heart as young maidens do, then the ghost of the dead boyfriend shoots out of the rose blooms and stabs the brother to death in his sleep.
Day 27: Rumpelstiltskin. A miller brags that his daughter can spin straw into gold because he's a prideful little shit, the King hears of the girl and demands she comes to the castle to spin gold. The King locks the girl in a room with straw and tells her to spin it into gold by dawn or he will chop off her head. She sits in a pile of straw, crying and cursing her stupid father's name when a small man shows up and offers to spin the gold in trade for her necklace. She gladly trades with him and he spins all the straw into gold. This goes on for three nights, each night the King threatens to kill the girl, puts her in a larger room with more and more straw and each night the strange man shows up and does the work for trade.
On the third and last night, she has nothing left to trade with the man so he says he will spin the gold, thus saving her life if she gives him her firstborn child. She agrees since you know...she will be killed in a few hours otherwise. The next morning the King sees all the gold and says the woman's reward is that he will marry her and she will become Queen. What woman doesn't want to marry a greedy King who has held her hostage and threatening to murder her for a week straight? Dreams really do come true!
They get married, she gets knocked up, has the baby and the little man comes back to collect his baby. I don't know what he wants to do with the baby lets just hope he wants to be a good father and state won't let small magical men adopt. But since he loves games and deals he offers to let her keep the baby if she can guess his name. He gives her three nights to figure it out, each night he visits, she guesses, he laughs at her for being wrong and he leaves.
After one of his visits, she goes for a walk in the woods to clear her mind and sees a small fire in the distance, approaches quietly and sees the small man dancing in front of the fire. Jumping and singing "tonight, tonight, my plans I make, tomorrow, tomorrow, the baby I take. The queen will never win the game, for Rumpelstiltskin is my name'" She waits for him the next night and proudly yells "Your name is Rumpelstiltskin!" He gets so mad he stomps his foot through the floor, grabs his leg and rips his body in half. Leaving her with one hell of a mess to clean up, but she's a Queen so she can get a servant to do it I guess.
Day 28: Three Snake Leaves
Day 28: Three Snake Leaves. A young man wins the king's daughter but if either of them should die, the other will be buried alive with the dead spouse. Seems like a bad prenup to me.
Shocker the princess falls sick and dies, and the prince is buried alive in her crypt. While waiting to die, the prince is attacked by a snake, which he kills by chopping into three pieces. Another snake revives the dead snake with three leaves, giving the prince the idea to use the leaves on the princess, successfully reviving her. Zombie wife for the win!
The prince and princess then take a sea voyage to visit his father. The princess falls in love with the ship captain, and the pair throws the prince into the sea and drowns him. No good deed goes unpunished I guess. A servant rows after the prince's body, and he revives him using the snake leaves. The prince and the servant return to the kingdom and report the murder, for which the princess and the captain are executed. So...do not sign prenups or go on cruises.
Day 29: Peter Pan
Day 29: Peter Pan. Long story short, apparently Peter Pan killed the lost boys when he thought they were getting too old. So don’t grow up or a flying child will murder you.
Day 30: The Enchanted Tsarevich
Day 30: The Enchanted Tsarevich. A merchant trespasses on the land of a horrifying monster while trying to pick flowers for his daughter. The monster rushes out to yell or hiss at the merchant, the monster is a three-headed winged beast, he threatens to kill the merchant. Since he is a fairy tale father his solution is to give the monster his daughter in trade for his own life. The daughter moves in with the beast and lives in lonely solitude, to make matters worse the snake beast moves his bed closer to her bed inch by inch each night.
So to recap her father gave her to a monster because he can't read "No Trespassing" sign, she's living alone in a cold castle with a three-headed snake who clearly wants to sleep with her. Shit is not going well for this unnamed young lady. Finally, the snake slithers into her bed and I guess they have sex? How? Where? What!
The next day the snake says she can go back home to visit her family since she finally gave it up to him I guess? But he told her that if she didn't return by sunset he would kill himself. Now I don't know if you have ever been in an abusive relationship but this is a huge red flag! If someone is threatening to kill themselves to get you to not break up with them here is a tip that person is an emotionally abusive and manipulative asshole.
She visits her family, stays too late, returns to the castle and finds the snake dead. He had indeed thrown himself off the top of the castle because his girlfriend went on a day trip! She kisses one of his three snake faces and he magically comes back to life and turns into a handsome man. So her dad sucks, she has Stockholm syndrome, had sex with a snake monster, and is in an emotionally abusive relationship with a man who will kill himself if she ever goes into town.
Day 31: Mother Holle. A widow with one daughter and one step-daughter is shockingly a horrible person who hates her step-child. She lets her own child lay around getting chubby and learn zero life skills while making her dead husband's daughter work her little fingers to the bone doing all the cooking and cleaning.
One day the step-daughter pricked her finger on a spindle and ran to the well to wash the blood off her finger and dropped the spindle into the well. She leaped into the well to retrieve the spindle fearing her step-mother would beat the hell out of her for losing the spindle. Instead of hitting the water she found herself in another world and stumbled upon a house with an old woman (Holle) living inside. Holle asks her to help clean the house, cook her food, rub her feet and do her taxes. The girl is used to working all the time and gladly helps. Holle is so impressed by this girl's hard work that she magically sends her back to the real world (which doesn't sound like much of a reward).
When she returns home she runs to tell her step-mom where she had been but as she opens her mouth diamonds and gold come pouring out of her mouth (Yay! Rich! But terrible indigestion I would assume). The mother instantly throws her own daughter into the well so she can come back with an ATM mouth, but her child is a spoiled brat and won't do ANY of the work for Holle.
Holle eventually gets tired of this useless girl and sends her back to her mother, but when she opens her mouth no diamonds, no gold. Slowly a black ooze comes flowing out followed by snakes and frogs. One of the frogs jumps out and bites her mother's nose and NEVER let's go. Don't be lazy, work hard and the world will reward you.
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