I came across an article about Alan Moore’s comic book Lost Girls. Is there a place for comic book pornography in mainstream audiences? In feminist audiences? In male audiences when the characters involved are female and dealing with deep-seated issues in a fairy-tale setting?
11 comments:
Nothing against you, i but i hate the fact that they (feminists and other women) take children fairy tales and turn them into these depressing stories for themselves...
Sleeping beauty is awoke by a prince but he abuses her and she wishes she could be sleeping again, alice has a thing for the queen and other twisted fairy tales....it is just sad thing...
Nothing against you, i but i hate the fact that they (feminists and other women) take children fairy tales and turn them into these depressing stories for themselves...
What?
Anyway, the only reason people even ask these questions is because we're dealing with the maligned medium of comics. No one ever asks "does potentially disturbing sexuality have a place in modern fiction?" or "is theatre really a venue for the discussion of sensitive political issues?"
(please forward this to Ford) It is not that sexuality and politics appear in comic books, the thing i am complaining about is that they take stories such as alice in wonderland or cinderella and rewrite it or write a sequel to it-that is very depressing. Examples: Alice in wonderland was made into a dark video game with nine inch nails, sleeping beauty has a sequel where her husband the prince abuses and controls her, a comic strip shows that alice has become a lesbian and snow white and cinderella have become disillusioned with the castle life and want to run away and they are keep in the castle against their will....or people take these stories and turn them into sexuality exlicit tales....
Like I said, I feel bad when they do this....that is all
to the other anonymous,
Seeing how most of your childhood "fairy tales" originally started out as stories for aristocratic stories for adults, often containing themes of incest, rape, and infedelity. These tales have always been flexible and mutable to whoever the storyteller is. So isn't it a bit silly to try to impose historically inaccurate feelings of personal indignity towards any other take than the one you believe to be "true"?
There was a whole, real, dirty, nasty, little world of human fiction out there before European Christianity and the Walt Disney corporation sterilized it for you
Anonymous-
I see your point but I think the fact that Disney has gotten a hold of many of these fairy tales and turned them into family-friendly fare is part of the problem.The original stories were quite dark themselves.Alice In Wonderland has more drug references than a Snoop Dogg album.I think in the original Cinderella the stepsisters even cut off their toes in an attempt to get the slipper to fit.
Not only did one stepsister cut off her toes and the other her heel to fit into the shoe, on Cinderella´s wedding their eyes are picked out by doves, too.
Or all the tales in which the evil queen has to dance in red hot iron shoes to the death.
Or the wolf in the original red riding hood tale, who tells the girl to UNDRESS before coming into the bed, and who, in the pictures back then, was depicted as standing upright and sometimes in a MAN´s clothes.
Like, the WHOLE Bluebeard tale ?
As far as I know, one of the Grimms ( forgot which one, though ) started to soften the stories, editing some of the gorier things out. That continued until today, after people started to think, that fairy tales HAVE to be always for children.
That´s why I´m fairly unbiased to newer interpretations of older tales. They sometimes return the stories to what they were intended to be.
The handsome prince in the original Sleeping Beauty (
The Sun, The Moon, and Talia) is a rapist/quasi-necrophile, who finds the castle and the unconscious woman in it and screws her and goes on his merry way. She gets pregnant with twins which she magically carries to term in her sleep and gives birth to the children who are cared for by fairies until they accidentally wake her up by nursing on her fingers instead of her nipples, and sucking out the splinter that kept her asleep. When Dad comes back to screw her again he finds her awake with the kids and brings her home to be his wife, happy ever after!
Ford,
Actually, people often ask whether or not disturbing sexuality has a place in modern fiction. They still have banned books lists in schools. Also, I've written and gotten responses from the original anonymous about books like The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. Even though it is erotica, the question can still be asked about what the purpose of the back and forth of domination and submission in a literary text really accomplishes. As for sensitive political issues, no one questions whether or not the theatre is a venue for discussion. However, everyone questions the actors involved who try to discuss politics.
bellatrys,
Thanks for the link! I'm going to have to read through that myself. Although, I can speak from experience that the first anonymous would be distressed to read the original folk story of just about any fairy tale.
Wendy, you're welcome - that's a good site for resources re folk and fairy tales from a more academic angle than we usually get. I've been fascinated by the provenance of stories ever since learning that there was an Egyptian version of Cinderella (falcon - sacred bird - steals a sandal from a slave girl and drops it in the Pharoah's garden) as well as an old Irish one.
Some of the elements that bother me that have gotten edited out in the Disnefication aren't the grim or adult things, but the whole class of stories, many of which seem to derive back from the Myth of Cupid and Psyche, where you have intrepid heroines who do all kinds of heroic feats to save themselves/save the Handsome Prince by their cleverness and courage...Someone should do an animated version of The Mastermaid!
i used to have a book-somewhere which had many versions of cinderella, both the classical versionm many ethnic versions and even the dark version you mentioned and one where cinderella was a witch or something like that...and left the prince.
The story about the prince for sleeping beauty is a little much to take tthough...I think there would be great if you had stories with female heroines and derring-do..maybe you should write some...
Post a Comment