When you’re a child, you watch the Disney movies and think, “I wish I could live like that.” You wish you could be a prince or princess, live in a castle, find your one true love, beat the bad guys and have a happily ever after. But have you ever wondered where these stories come from? Or why we don’t see the true meanings and horrors of those stories when we’re children? For instance, the story “Cinderella” comes from the Austrian version, “Aschenputtel”.

A story of a girl whose father died when she was very young, leaving her in the care of her evil stepmother, who puts her to work in the house to pay for shelter, food and clothing. She has to wait on the evil stepsisters, does any of this sound familiar yet? Well, it should if you’ve been a diligent reader/ watcher. But what differs from the much-loved Disney Princess Cinderella is that at the end, when the prince comes to collect his princess by showing the slipper around the country and seeing if it fits, in order to fit into the slippers, the stepsisters each cut off something from their feet.

The prince, not noticing anything because of the dresses and his eccentricity at having found his one true love, rides away with each sister, only to be stopped minutes later by the friendly birds we see in the Disney Cinderella, only in the real version, they’re ravens. They cry out to the prince, “Look! Look at her feet! Blood flows from them, she is not the one!” The prince takes the girl back and, as punishment for her foolishness and deceit, the ravens pluck out her eyes, leaving her blind and ugly.

You see the horrors that our beloved Disney movies once were? It’s all well and good to change a story around so that it can be rated G for young children, but the horrors of the real stories seep into the child-friendly versions and children grow up to believe that all bad guys are defeated in the end.

Only, how are we supposed to know who the bad guy is and who the good guy is? There aren’t any princes and princesses anymore (unless you really count the Queen’s family in England as ruling the whole world…) and there are no more dragons to slay. The classic fairytale story has evolved into a twisted, complex story that no one person can understand. Do the alleged “bad” guys we hear about in the news really do what they do because they think they’re being bad? Or do they have their own ideas about their actions, somehow justifying it in their eyes, making what we see as horrible and sinful beautiful and good?