February 28 - Fairytales

When I first think of fairy tales, I think of the genre that is made-up of old paper-back books like Rumpelstiltskin or Rapunzel. Although I love this genre today and really enjoyed it back when I was a child (in fact, those two fairy tales were my favorites because they were so bazaar), I do not find it to have a huge affect on my childhood. But when you think of fairy tales like the Disney versions that became movies, it is a different case. Disney's Mulan was one of my favorites and made me think automatically that I could sing, just like Mulan and the rest of the princesses. I would sing and sing all day long, just like the princesses did as they narrated their daily duties. Luckily, I realized that my singing abilities were not great early enough, and I stopped the habit. Other ways that fairy tales affected me would be that they caused me to look for a moral in stories -- when I was really young we did a unit of Alsop's Fables and I learned lessons in the end of each story. Fairy tales like Aladdin and Little Mermaid made me think that all women dressed in tight-fitting and scandalous costumes, and so I was pretty shocked to realize that not all women looked like Jasmine in real life. I remember wrapping myself in my bed sheet really tight around my legs so that my make-shift dress-up costume would look more like the 'real deal' when I was pretending to be Jasmine -- now I realize that Disney was just putting an image in my head and succeeded in making me think that beautiful was skin-deep and that displaying your body was the way to get a man.