While looking around to find a subject for this week’s blog post, I came across countless weddings, dresses, and houses (and A LOT more Disney adults than I would’ve expected). I have, of course, heard of this term before, a “fairy tale wedding”. But I had never expected to see pages and pages of inspiration and an entire culture built upon this idea. I fell down this niche rabbit hole of fairy tale and Disney themed weddings. There were websites, and articles dedicated to planning a picture perfect fairytale inspired wedding. Disney has an entire 2 season long show called “Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings” that documents different couples’ magical night and the process leading up to it.

Plan Your Snow Fairy-Tale Wedding! Dreaming of Planning the Perfect Winter Wedding? Why Wait for Spring or Summer, When You Can Take Advantage of Chilly Climates to Plan Your Big Day!” Asiana TV, https://asiana.tv/wedding/planning/plan-your-snow-fairy-tale-wedding/

I have never understood this idealization of big expensive weddings. It seems like just another thing that is pushed upon young girls to dream and look forward to. Countless times over family dinners, I’ve been told “one day you’re going to get married to a good man and have kids”! It always comes from a place of love, but it only made me conscious of all the things I could do wrong. Not only that, but it ultimately made me hate the idea of having a big wedding. It’s supposed to be the best day of your life, but shouldn’t every day with that person make you feel that way? I think instilling the idea that the only way to make your marriage special is to have a fairy tale wedding is harmful to more kids than people realize. Has anyone else had similar experiences to this? Did it have a positive or negative impact on your ideas about marriage?

This is a very similar image to the Little Mermaid from my favorite card game Magic the gathering, and the artist who created her is named Livia Prima (which we can find on the card). From the drawing and background narrative (she yearned to walk on dry), we can find that she faces the same dilemma as the Little Mermaid.

But the difference is that she has a purpose other than romance – vengeance, a manifestation of the awakening of female consciousness that “we can do something great or heavy without the help of male power”.

Unfortunately, the image still has overtones of objectifying women. But considering that the author is a female artist, we can understand it as a personal aesthetic pursuit of hers, rather than an attempt to please men.

I chose this piece of art because this is one of the first pieces of art that I could find that depicted Little Red Riding Hood as a child that, when compared to the interpretations and recreations of Little Red Riding Hood in today’s society, the majority, if not all, of these depictions present Little Red Riding Hood as a woman in her teens. In the original text of The Story of Grandmother, Little Red Riding Hood is described as a little girl not a woman in her teens. This shows that Little Red Riding Hood is still being sexualized today and in a way that would be considered socially acceptable because no one wants to see a young child be sexualized for the enjoyment of perverted people but instead it has become socially acceptable to sexualize a teenage woman, hence why Little Red Riding Hood has continued to be depicted as such in modern adaptations. This leads me to wonder this: What other fairytales have been sexualized in this way and how did these adaptations become accepted by society?