Topic: Why Fairy Tales don't have Mothers
I had a thought today while I was back at work (after a week off), and thought I'd bounce it off of everyone.
There's an aspect to the movie Brave that I have yet to see any comments on. That is, the fact that there is a Mom. A living Mom. A living Mom who, in fact, is the biological mother of our female main character.
Think about that for a moment.
You never see that. The mother is always dead. She's dead, and the story is the daughter beating heads with her father, who being male NATURALLY doesn't understand her, and over the course of the story she finds her way and he accepts her for who she is.
You can't have that if there's a Mom. For one thing, the mother represents success. Especially if you're talking about a princess/queen dynamic. In Brave, the mom is strong. She's smart. She is POWERFUL. We see, in the story, that it is SHE who is the power behind the throne. Such a woman has no problem with a strong, willful daughter. She knows such traits will be needed. The only conflict will be one of control. Of at what point a girl becomes a woman, when mother's orders become just advice.
The end of such a story, of mother and daughter, will be one of compromise.
This is NOT what people want from a fairy tale.
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