Does Being Good Always Mean a Good Thing?

Note: A number of my fairy-tale class students chose writing a blog entry as their final projects for the semester. I offered this option for the first time, and was truly thrilled with the results. I always enjoy teaching, and this was especially true with this group of students.

We begin with an entry from a student named Dragan. He always brought enthusiasm and intriguing ideas to the classroom, and I think these qualities show in this post as well. Stay tuned for more entries over the next days and weeks!

What is a marvelous sight in a fairy tale? When good beats the evil. But that’s not always the case. We have seen many different stories, where an evil character is actually considered a good one. Jack from Jack in the Beanstalk is not so pure of a character if you ask me, but he still prevails. It even makes us happy to see that. This has always been a main topic of every fairy tale. Good vs. Evil. We don’t see it all the time, but Evil will prevail for about ninety percent of the way.

I was set to ask, what happens to those evil characters when they grow up. Well, a writer named Bill Willingham took those characters to another level. Most of the characters from our fairies world are there. The biggest surprise for me personally was The Big Bad Wolf. We all know who that is. He’s the one stalking the Little Red Riding Hood, and not only in one way, but that is the story for some other time. Big Bad Wolf aka. Bigsby (what he’s calling himself), now has a power to shape shift. He can turn into a human form, and to top it all off, he is a sheriff. Protecting and serving the community of Fabletown.

Note from Kate: Fabletown and Willingham's work are for grown-up people, not kids under 18.

Interesting, isn’t it! We are all so proud of our heroines winning over their protagonist, but are they always so pure? They are all so beautiful and somehow at the end, I get the feeling that they are not as pure at heart as we want them to be. Most of them kill their protagonist in the end of the story. The question arises, if they were so pure would they be able to kill? This puts a different thought in your mind, doesn’t it! But, we all know that nobody can die in the fairy tale. They all move on to be someone else in some different story and to live on.

For some reason I have became so intrigued by works of Willingham, because it actually opens up a completely new idea of fairytale characters. As you might have noticed so far, he also calls them Fables, what actually gives them a meaning of legends. On the interesting note, he flips good and bad side here. Most of the evil characters are good and a lot of the good characters are either confused or on the bad side.

We all remember the best puppet maker in the world, Geppetto. He is the most caring person in the world, right? Well, when he grows up from his fairy tale world, he is the biggest protagonist. He simply wants to rule the whole world.

So, do we want to keep on saying that our fairy tales are so pure? If you ask me, every pure idea gives equal crazy and dark idea. As much as we don’t want to recognize this, there is so much darkness in all of our fairy tales and a lot of us don’t want to give any recognition to it because we don’t want to lose our long loved past-time, our perfect ideals.