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punkwalrus's old entry about the Earthsea miniseries to add a belated comment onto, so this link is for him.
At some point in my childhood, I formulated the notion that fairy-tale heroines tended to be sweet, passive, and rather stupid, functioning more as semi-ambulatory quest objects[*] than doing much of anything that seemed, well, heroic. To be comprehensive about this in retrospect, I'm not necessarily certain why I decided this. The 70s didn't have much cultural saturation from Disney per se; except for "Donald in Mathmagic Land" at school and a short film reel (monochrome and silent) we had at home of Prince Wossname battling the Malifidragon from Sleeping Beauty, I don't have any specific recall of any Disney animation until The Little Mermaid. I do recall puzzling out the meaning of the word "indeed" from the Disney storybook of The Sword in the Stone, but that was part of a wider pool of Arthuriana, retellings of "Robin Hood", Greek mythology, and Andrew Lang's international compendia of [Color] Fairy Books. Of course, as with the Grimms' original collections, all of these stories would've been filtered through various layers of selection and editing by the time they got to me.
[*: like the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, inanimate ordinary materials sanctified by the sacred objects that were put into them, rather than a living goddess in her own right like, say, the one in the second Indiana Jones movie. Maybe a bit like the Iliad's Aphrodite, though.]
Wicked witches and stepmothers, however, were allowed to think up cunning plans and try them out with the countries or families that they ruled. Okay, so they were usually also evil and ugly and ended up dead, but that just ended up getting factored into the cost/benefit analysis. I didn't want to sit around being useless and helpless, like the heroines; it seemed like more fun to run around being feckless, like the heroes. Unfortunately, as a girl, I couldn't be a hero. All I could do was be evil. "Ugly" might be a later step in career development, but then so might be "ominously seductive", and it's not as I could look like a heroine anyway, since even the ones that weren't blondes or redheads had blue or grey eyes. (I was so incredibly gobstruck the first time I read Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Rising and saw that the evil sorceress was a blue-eyed blonde; I'd probably have been more impressed by the dark hair of the virtuous (grey-eyed) prince if I hadn't already read Tolkien.) "Dead" was inevitable at some point anyway, no matter what; I hadn't been born an immortal goddess in my own right, and the only way to get inducted into immortality seemed to be sleeping with a god, most of whom were gits who'd probably rape or at least deeply finagle you in the first place and then let their (evil!) jealous kinsgoddesses turn you into random critters afterward.
And then there's the subtle(?) racism of the Color Me Beautiful seasonal palettes, which essentially consign all non-Caucasian women into looking alike, but I think that's an entire 'nother nitpicnic for later on.
punkwalrus's old entry about the Earthsea miniseries to add a belated comment onto, so this link is for him.At some point in my childhood, I formulated the notion that fairy-tale heroines tended to be sweet, passive, and rather stupid, functioning more as semi-ambulatory quest objects[*] than doing much of anything that seemed, well, heroic. To be comprehensive about this in retrospect, I'm not necessarily certain why I decided this. The 70s didn't have much cultural saturation from Disney per se; except for "Donald in Mathmagic Land" at school and a short film reel (monochrome and silent) we had at home of Prince Wossname battling the Malifidragon from Sleeping Beauty, I don't have any specific recall of any Disney animation until The Little Mermaid. I do recall puzzling out the meaning of the word "indeed" from the Disney storybook of The Sword in the Stone, but that was part of a wider pool of Arthuriana, retellings of "Robin Hood", Greek mythology, and Andrew Lang's international compendia of [Color] Fairy Books. Of course, as with the Grimms' original collections, all of these stories would've been filtered through various layers of selection and editing by the time they got to me.
[*: like the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, inanimate ordinary materials sanctified by the sacred objects that were put into them, rather than a living goddess in her own right like, say, the one in the second Indiana Jones movie. Maybe a bit like the Iliad's Aphrodite, though.]
Wicked witches and stepmothers, however, were allowed to think up cunning plans and try them out with the countries or families that they ruled. Okay, so they were usually also evil and ugly and ended up dead, but that just ended up getting factored into the cost/benefit analysis. I didn't want to sit around being useless and helpless, like the heroines; it seemed like more fun to run around being feckless, like the heroes. Unfortunately, as a girl, I couldn't be a hero. All I could do was be evil. "Ugly" might be a later step in career development, but then so might be "ominously seductive", and it's not as I could look like a heroine anyway, since even the ones that weren't blondes or redheads had blue or grey eyes. (I was so incredibly gobstruck the first time I read Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Rising and saw that the evil sorceress was a blue-eyed blonde; I'd probably have been more impressed by the dark hair of the virtuous (grey-eyed) prince if I hadn't already read Tolkien.) "Dead" was inevitable at some point anyway, no matter what; I hadn't been born an immortal goddess in my own right, and the only way to get inducted into immortality seemed to be sleeping with a god, most of whom were gits who'd probably rape or at least deeply finagle you in the first place and then let their (evil!) jealous kinsgoddesses turn you into random critters afterward.
And then there's the subtle(?) racism of the Color Me Beautiful seasonal palettes, which essentially consign all non-Caucasian women into looking alike, but I think that's an entire 'nother nitpicnic for later on.