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Once upon a time, there was a beautiful Damsel In Distress, a handsome hero on an epic quest, his magical sidekick, and a spell they needed to break before the stroke of midnight.
But wait! The damsel's not so distressed after all! The hero's a buffoon! The heroine falls for the homely sidekick instead of the Knight In Shining Armor! And just about everyone's ridiculously Genre Savvy!
What you have here is an example of a Fractured Fairy Tale, a tale with all the basic elements of a classic fairy tale, but all of them subverted or spoofed, and with modern-day sensibilities and morals. May also be a parody of fairy tales.
Virtually every Fractured Fairy Tale features one of perhaps a dozen fairy tales that are considered common knowledge in the culture. This is because they don't work without the audience recognizing the original and so being able to appreciate the divergences. When the Fractured Fairy Tale sticks to, and warps, one specific tale, it is a form of the Twice Told Tale.
May contain elements of Grimmification. Mother Goose elements frequently also appear.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- One of the Full Metal Panic short stories is a complete parody of Cinderella.
- In Fruits Basket, when they realize how woeful miscast the characters are in a Cinderella play, they rewrite the play. An Elegant Gothic Lolita Cinderella is impervious to her Wicked Stepmother's demands; but she loves her sweet and innocent stepsister, who suffers at the mother's hands because she wishes to marry her off. While the Fairy Godmother succeeds in getting them to the ball, and the not very charming prince does find her, in the end Cinderella and her sister open a shop. They title it "Sorta Cinderella"
- Yu Yu Hakusho's Dark Tournament arc had a combat team named Fractured Fairy Tales. All of their members were based off of Japanese folk legends.
- Ludwig Kakumei written by Kaori Yuki, deconstructs, spoofs and Grimmificates all at the same time. appropriately enough all the tales portayed are based on the Brothers Grimm Version, in which the 2 main characters get their names from.
- MÄR takes the "character as a Fractured Fairy Tale" idea to its logical extreme. Nearly every minor to important character is a parody of at least one fairy tale. Ginta always takes the time to make note of this, because he's obsessed with the stories. Justified by the fact that Mär Heaven is the world of Märchen, or fairy tales. Just on Ginta's team, we have:
- Princess Snow. From her name, we have a play on Snow White (she even fights a character who has a magic sword ask her "who is the fairest one of all"), Her introduction is more Snow White stuff combined with a bit of Sleeping Beauty (Distressed Damsel is in a death-like state, awakened with a kiss... sort of), and she runs away from her wicked stepmother, like Cinderella.
- Jack, who is a young farmer who lives in semi-poverty with his mother. His dream is to one day grow a beanstalk so tall he can see the world from it.
- Alviss, who is followed about by a jealous fairy named Bell, and who goes on to defeat a Chess Piece named Mr. Hook.
- Dorothy, who is a huge Wizard Of Oz reference: she is a "good witch" named Doroty, and her guardians include a scarecrow, a metal knight, alion, and a dog named Toto.
- And the team itself was formed by a fortune teller prophesying that Snow would have to gather "the Seven Dwarves" to defend Mär Heaven. The Chess Pieces have even more, considering how many of them there are.
- A lot of Princess Tutu revolves around playing around with fairytale tropes (and Swan Lake in particular) and subverting them, while also staying within the Magical Girl genre. The knight's armor isn't exactly shiny, the Prince ends up marrying the Dark Magical Girl, and several fairytales are mentioned and commented on. For example...
- The main character and the prince end up trapped in a woman's resturant while she keeps bringing them more and more food, and Ahiru thinks it's Hansel and Gretel and they're being fattened up for her to eat. In reality, the woman is just very lonely and trying to make them stay.
- The opening narration at one point questions whether Sleeping Beauty really wanted to wake up, or if she wanted to keep dreaming.
- In an episode titled "Cinderella", the main character loses the pendant that allows her to become the Magical Girl, and it's found by one of the male characters. He spends the rest of the episode trying to find her...because he considers Princess Tutu and enemy and wants to attack her.
Film
- The Princess Bride is mostly a fairy tale played straight, with a few notable subversions thrown in. Most fairy tales end with a beautiful girl getting married to a handsome prince. Buttercup's meeting and engagement to the handsome prince is completely skipped over, and he's the villain. The real hero is technically an infamous pirate who kidnaps her. Lastly, a climactic swordfight between the hero and villain is notably averted.
- The film version of Ella Enchanted. The book is borderline; for there the fairy tale setting really only exists to provide a fairy godmother. Other than that the plot could almost take place in any setting.
- Cosmetically, maybe, but the story itself relies on quite a few fantastical elements.
- Shrek, which makes the ogre the main character, the damsel anything but in distress, and the Prince Charming the villain, even coming with a subversion of True Loves Kiss.
- Enchanted occasionally borders on this.
- Hoodwinked. Mixed with troperiffic Affectionate Parody to some other genres, but still based on fairy tale.
- Happily N'ever After
- The Fall. Although a lot of fairy tale elements are played entirely straight.
Literature
- Simon Hawke's Reluctant Sorcerer trilogy is so directly inspired and informed by the original Fractured Fairy Tales that you can hear Edward Everett Horton playing the role of the Omniscient Narrator.
- The Discworld novel Witches Abroad, where the witches are a disrupting influence in the Theory Of Narrative Causality, trying to stop a Happily Ever After that is nothing of the kind.
- The short novel The Glass-shoe Slip-up is set after the events of Cinderella, where we find out why the not-so-wicked stepmother kept her hidden away: Cinderella is a complete social disgrace with bad table manners, a love of raunchy jokes, a fancy for certain... odd practices in the royal bedroom, and many other disastrous details that make Prince Charming very determined to track down the Fairy Godmother so she can correct her mistake.
- Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes turns up on banned book lists for the Family Unfriendly Aesops it steers classic fairy tales into.
- Stardust
- Neil Gaiman's short story Snow Glass Apples is a retelling of Snow White with the stepmother as the good guy.
- This is the basic concept of Mercedes Lackey's Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series. Playfully subverted in that the ambient magic in the land tries to make a fairy tale play out straight (no matter how the characters might feel about it), and the only way to get out of it is to shift the situation to that it fits another tale better.
- One of Bruce Coville's Book of... short story collections (specifically, one of the two Book of Magic collections-I forget which specifically) features a story by Patricia C Wrede which sets up fairy godmothers and bad fairies and the like as part of the same organization, and is told from the point of view of a fairy godmother explaining why she wants a transfer to the curses department; namely, her last case, which was the straw that broke the unicorn's back. It sounds like a pretty standard Cinderella story; girl wants to go to ball, stepmother said no, fairy godmother is thus determined to see that she does, in fact, go. The problems start from square one: Cindy is tall, gangly, big-footed and not the prettiest thing ever. Her stepsister is the gorgeous waif the godmother has come to expect her clients to be, and is helpful, sympathetic, and wants nothing more than for Cindy to be happy. Then it turns out "Cinders" was the client's idea in the first place, and it's a stage name. She's not interested in the prince, she wants to play the fiddle as a musician at the ball. The godmother makes the best of things (she manages to save Cindy from getting roped into a "standard 10-percent contract" with a talent agent who looks like an encroaching mushroom and, when he's too drunk to lie, shamelessly admits that it means she forks over all but 10 percent of whatever she earns), but she's pretty despondent by the time the night's out (not least because the not-remotely-ugly stepsister does end up in the prince's arms) and after a case like that, her superiors will probably understand if she wants to transfer.
- The children's book The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales. Enough said.
- The "politically correct" fairy tales by James Finn Garner
- Howl's Moving Castle, for the most part. While not necessarily a "fairy tale" overall, it does subvert, lampshade, and otherwise mess with many-a-fairy tale trope.
Live Action TV
- Monty Python's Fairy Tale sketch, featured in one of their German TV specials and on an album. Ya de buckety, rum ting fadoo...
- This was pretty much the point of the British television series Wolves, Witches and Giants.
- The miniseries The Tenth Kingdom places a couple of contemporary New Yorkers into a world where all the fairy tales took place centuries before, and plays fast and loose with fairy tale tropes.
- Kermit's Sesame Street News Flashes tended to be these.
Music
- The first part of Cole Porter's song "Two Little Babes in the Wood" is Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale played straight. The second part, "for the tired businessman," has the orphaned girls go from Rags To Riches and move to New York.
Theatre
- Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical Into the Woods combines several well-known fairy tales, initially playing them straight but then gradually deconstructing them.
- The musical Once Upon a Mattress is a cheeky retelling of "The Princess And The Pea" with a mother-henpecked prince, a song based around the princess (originally Carol Burnett!) wryly commenting on "Happily, Happily Happily Ever After", and much more.
Video Games
- Chivalry is not dead
- While Okami plays it a little more straight than the examples above, and is based on Japanese folk tales rather than European ones, it does feature quite a few fractured fairytale elements.
- In American McGee's Grimm, you play an ugly little dwarf who goes around messing up "cutesy" fairy tales, making them dark and violent again.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Named for the "Fractured Fairy Tales" segments in Rocky And Bullwinkle, which would take classic fairy tales and hilariously parody them.
- Looney Tunes shorts did this a lot, to the point that a whole disc in one of the DVD box sets focuses on them. "Little Red Riding Hood", "The Three Little Pigs", "Jack and the Beanstalk" and "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" were particularly popular targets, with different versions to fit various characters and their shticks (Bugs Bunny, Sylvester and Tweety, etc.).
- Same with the early Hanna-Barbera comedy shorts through 1965 or so.
- Arguably, Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood
- The Jim Henson Company's Unstable Fables
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