# Andrew Pudewa #2: Fairy Tales and Stories

Nature Deficit Disorder

##### Fairy Tale

- There is more Truth in fairy tales than in history books
- GK Chesterton - “It is far more reasonable for a frog to turn into a prince, than for an egg to turn into a chicken”
- GK Chesterton - “We don’t read children fairy tales so that they know dragons exist; they already know dragons exist! We read to them so they know that dragons can be slain.”
- Facts from Fairy Tales 
    - Properly ordered, King to love his people, and the people love their king. 
        - Kingdom = kin domain (the domain where your kin is)
        - Starts as a family that gets bigger and bigger and the patriarch of the family becomes the king
    - Trolls and Witches and Dragons and Evil should be **slain** (not tolerated)
    - Frogs can turn out to be princes… and princes may turn out to be frogs! Seeing behind the surface of things
    - Forests (i.e. dark alleys) can be dangerous places…
    - Evil disguises itself and innocence is fundamentally beautiful
    - True love is possible
    - You can live happily ever after (i.e. forever) if you do the right things
- Modern renditions twist and warp these things (e.g. Disney)

##### Four Types of Stories

80% of time on Whole Stories. 13% on Healing Stories. 7% on Broken Stories. 0% on Twisted Stories

1. Whole (Complete, Perfect) Stories 
    - Good is good. Evil is evil. Good wins in the end.
    - Our souls crave thee stories because we need reminders that good wins in the end
2. Healing Stories 
    - Good is good. Evil is evil. Good doesn’t win as you expect, but there is redemption
    - The Little Mermaid (original)
    - The Matchseller
3. Broken Stories 
    - Good is good. Evil is evil. Evil wins.
    - Seeing the things we succumb to in a small but gradual way
    - The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde
    - 1984
    - Lord of the Flies
4. Twisted Stories 
    - Evil is good or glorified. Good is evil or dumb or boring.
    - Usually modern stories (i.e. 20th Century and after)
    - Clockwork Orange

##### Twisting of Archetypes

- Landscape with Dragons - Michael D. O’Brien
- Archetypes have representatives
- Dragons 
    - Originally, in all history, dragons represented the devil…
    - All of a sudden, the image of a dragon to be something cute or fun 
        - Potentially “Puff the Magic Dragon” song
        - Eragon
        - How to train your dragon, etc.
    - Deep within you… are you trying to “train the dragon” or slay the dragon with the help of the king?
- Vampires 
    - Twlight
- Magic (Harry Potter) 
    - Disorder of Archetype
    - In Tolkien and Lewis, all the characters that do magic are “supernatural archetypes”; regular people can’t do anything 
        - In Rowling, it’s the normal people (muggles) that can’t do magic and you don’t want to be like them
    - The magic in Tolkien’s world just happens - you have no idea how it happens. It doesn’t say. You, as the reader, can’t know how magic works. 
        - In Rowling, the mechanics of how to do spells - Latin incantation, special herbs and potions, etc.
    - Disordered Acting Out 
        - After Harry Potter, kids would go and search up “how to do magic” - “how to do witchcraft” (International Librarian Report)
        - After Twilight, girls would go to the hospital with flesh bitten out of their neck because “my bf wanted to show me how much he loves me”

##### Moral Imagination