#The Tale of the Seven

[csb-writing-uncertainty]

Chapter 4 of Tale of the Seven Knights

https://archiveofourown.org/works/49520992/chapters/135069151

[fictionadventurer]

One major mistake people make when looking at Snow White is assuming that they were trying to create a Disney Princess role model for little girls to emulate, when actually they were just trying their darndest to create an animated character that audiences would care about.

When we see pure and innocent Snow White being mistreated by her stepmother and later driven into exile, it's supposed to activate parental instincts that make us want to protect her. It shouldn't matter if she doesn't do anything to save herself, because she shouldn't have to. We're supposed to feel the injustice of it, feel sad and angry that she's treated this way, fear that she's going to come to harm. We're not supposed to want to be her, we're supposed to love her, and want to see her get the love she deserves, so we remain invested for the entire runtime of this 80-minute cartoon that they're afraid audiences won't sit through. That's what mattered to the story while they were making it, so applying Disney Princess expectations is ridiculous.

[essektheylyss]

I'm also still laughing that he really showed up, introduced himself as an Archivist of the Cobalt Soul, and then insinuated that they were going to go extrajudicially hunt down, capture, and "interrogate" a Cerberus Assembly Archmage. Sir, archivists do not do that kind of thing, least of all on their own, LEAST OF ALL with a bunch of random hooligans they were just sent to collect for an unrelated excursion. Quite honestly, that was the thing I kept going back to in evidence of, there is absolutely no way this is a legit archivist.

[artist-issues]

I'm so tired of people saying that the Prince from Snow White is a creep for kissing Snow White when he thought she was dead.

People act as if he put his tongue down her throat while she looks like a regular corpse.

Maybe I'm just more comfortable with death because of my upbringing.

There's a European tradition that you would kiss dead people goodbye. You would also wait with a dying person because dying alone was one of the most horrible ways to die.

In Poland, you would spend three days with the dead body of your relative in the house so family and friends have time to say goodbyes. We even have pictures of family members in coffins, so we could remember them.

Yeah, it's a very post-modern, historically, culturally-small-minded way to look at it.

Specifically in this movie (which is a fairy tale's fairy tale) people just...totally ignore the scene where The Prince is introduced.

Seriously and truthfully, BECAUSE the Prince only takes action in three scenes of the movie, you HAVE to take all three of them very very seriously. Because thats all there is to know about him. That's how fairy tales work: lots of information hiding under very brief, simple snippets of information. It's called nuance.

Anyway.

The Prince kisses Snow White as a culmination of their promised love for each other.

First scene he's in, he falls in love with her because of her obvious purity and he overhears her longing for someone to love her. Then she runs away because she's not sure of him, and doesn't know him. But he sings his part of the song, which is all about how he has just one heart to give, one devotion to spend, and he's choosing to give it and spend it on her if she'll have him.

And she will have him. How do we know? She sends a kiss to him on the dove. That's how the exchange ends; that's how she responds, and that's why he leaves satisfied. It's their engagement scene. They're promising their hearts to each other.

Fast-forward, the Queen messes up what might have been the natural follow-through of that engagement which is marriage by trying to kill Snow White, she's living in the woods, but she won't forget the Prince and wholeheartedly believes he'll come find her.

And the very next thing we hear about him is that he keeps his promise. He's got one heart, one love, one devotion, and it's promised to Snow White, and he will not stop searching for her. When he finds her, he's returning her kiss from their engagement scene. He thinks she's dead, but he has to finish his quest anyway. This is him, trying to keep his promise even if she's dead; he's trying to fulfill the exchange they had when they saw each other last.

It's ridiculous to assume that she needed to be awake and alive to give permission for him to kiss her; it's ignorant of the whole relationship, symbolic and literal, between these two fairy tale characters. She already sent him her kiss and her heart; he already promised to claim it; he's fulfilling the promise in that scene.

Crazy postmodern people, don't know how to take in a story. Not everything gets to have your socio-cultural lens imposed upon it.

[dommnics]

2021 - 2024

Some more Snow White's (with birbs) I've done over the years!

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[kazz-brekker]

even though he only appears in 1 dunk and egg novella, daeron the drunken IS a genuinely interesting character to me. a lot of asoiaf is about exploring the more realistic outcomes of very traditional fantasy ideas (what if the vows the loyal knight swore required him to stand by while his king horribly abused people? what if the beloved prince eloping with a young lady caused a massive civil war? what if the warrior who overthrew the evil tyrant had absolutely no interest in the actual job of ruling?) and daeron is an exploration of what it would actually be like to have prophetic visions. would you find them fascinating and try to understand what they meant and what would happen in the future? or would they be frightening and overwhelming and not actually provide any guidance, only a horrible sense of dread that something is going to happen that you don't understand and can't prevent? would you embrace being able to know what was going to happen, or is it something you would try to forget at all costs if there's nothing you can do to change it?

[theflorasdiary]

keep this man away from all the asoiaf things out there!

[afraidofbee]

Do you have any simeon drawings laying around? >-<

*spoiler(?) hard lesson 50*

I wish draw this interaction weeks agos but I forgot Ꮚ ֊ .̫ ֊ Ꮚ

[wormwoodandhoney]

genre swap: snow white as a gothic horror, requested by anon

the snow is cold, the blood is warm, and snow lives in the crypt with seven ghosts.

[hustledimension]

I was made aware of this through a reddit post: we can nominate movies to be preserved in the National Film Registry, and we should nominate some Dreamworks movies. Shrek is already in it. The criteria is that the nominations must be at least 10 years old and an American film. With this in mind, I think we should nominate the following movies to be preserved in the registry:

The Prince of Egypt

Chicken Run

Kung Fu Panda

How to Train Your Dragon

You can nominate up to 50 movies at this submission form. Deadline is August 15. The Library of Congress also has a list of notable movies that haven't been preserved in the registry yet, which includes other Dreamworks movies you could nominate:

The Road to El Dorado

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas

Shrek 2

Shark Tale

Madagascar

Over the Hedge

Bee Movie

Monsters vs. Aliens

Shrek Forever After

Kung Fu Panda 2

Puss in Boots 1

Rise of the Guardians

The Croods

How to Train Your Dragon 2

Penguins of Madagascar

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Vincent Price as Gerald Pyncheon -

Twice-Told Tales; House of the Seven Gables (1963) dir. Sydney Salkow

[csb-writing-uncertainty]

Chapter 3 of the Tale of the Seven Knights

https://archiveofourown.org/works/49520992/chapters/131118775

[disneydreamdaze]

Disney Cottages

[fictionadventurer]

Figured if I was going to go on the Snow White rant, I needed to actually rewatch the Disney movie.

The opening credits are much more interesting when you know some of the names. The only women who got on the list were Dorothy and Hazel, but it was nice to see their names at least and know who they were.

That book is gorgeous. All the details of the calligraphy and illustrations and binding.

Wow, the Queen is so much creepier than I remember. The fact that using the magic mirror involves summoning a "slave" trapped in the mirror? Don't like that.

That peacock behind her throne, though? Stunning, fantastic, no notes.

I kind of love how the Queen forces Snow White to be a maid, and Snow White just...doesn't care at all. She's just scrubbing a floor and totally fine. Queen's obsessed with Snow White every minute of the day and Snow White doesn't think about her at all.

Sorry, I don't buy the romance at all. I know it's a fairy tale, but one song does not a life-changing romance make. (There was a version of the scene where the prince was going to rejoice over the fact that she loved him, which might have been too much, but it at least would have helped sell it.)

The scene of Snow running through the forest and then collapsing in tears did make me feel for her.

It seems like Snow White and the Queen are from a completely different movie from the dwarfs. They've got this whole high fantasy feud going on, meanwhile these guys are living in a sitcom.

The dwarfs were the best part. Forgot how cute those guys could be.

There was not enough story here. 75% of the running time is them trying to stretch this paper-thin story to feature length. There's a big long cleaning sequence. A big long sequence of the dwarfs figuring out who invaded their cottage. A big long introduction sequence. A big long washing-up sequence. Multiple extended gags involving a fly. All fun to animate, I'm sure, but not at all up to modern pacing standards.

(I'd kind of like to compare this to other escapist '30s musicals--is this kind of structure common for movies where the point is just to show up and escape the Depression for 90 minutes?)

As a kid, I had one of those sing-a-long videos with a bunch of Disney songs, and I did not realize that I had a deep emotional connection to it until "Heigh-Ho" made me instantly happy and the Silly Song unearthed memories I didn't even know I had.

A lot of the other songs kind of stink, ngl. There's a reason the washing-up song is not in the public consciousness.

Kind of out-of-line for Snow White to just show up at their house and treat them like misbehaving children.

The skeleton in the dungeon reaching for the water pitcher? Can't believe the movie went there.

(Then they drew too much attention to it and kind of wrecked it. But wow.)

I like that they give a valid reason that the Queen thought True Love's Kiss wasn't going to be a problem.

But the queen cackling over the fact that Snow White's going to be buried alive? When it comes to showing this movie to children, I'm not hesitating about Snow White as a female role model, I'm hesitating because it's dark.

(But also--why not just poison her? I get that living death/buried alive is a worse fate than just plain death, but if she's not actually dead, how does the Queen count as fairest in the land? Especially since she magically made herself as ugly as possible?)

They carved her name in the coffin! Just like the bed! They finally get to make her a bed and it's to lay her to rest! It's almost enough to make me tear up.

The castle in the clouds makes me think of heaven/resurrection imagery, which ties in interestingly to my take on it.

There is so much potential to flesh out this story in a live-action version. Since you can't fill up the runtime with comedy dwarf antics, there's so much space to flesh out the relationship between the prince and Snow White, and give texture to the feud between the Queen and Snow White, and to dig deep into Snow's sweet character and how it affects the dwarfs, which is why it stinks that they're going for just another Not Like Other Girls update.

[disneyboot]

[dommnics]

I love doing character designs for fairy tales and folktales, so here's my interpretation of Snow White for fun. I imagined her look on the left to be as she's taken by the huntsman into the woods, and then her look on the right after she's braved the woods and made it to the dwarfs' cottage.

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