Around the Web: How to Fight a Fairy Tale by Jenny Hamilton

How to Fight a Fairy Tale: Retellings in the Age of Romantasy by Jenny Hamilton (PUBLISHED ON MAY 15, 2024) on Reactor.

The trouble with structuring a book around a fairy tale is that fairy tales make no sense—but books have to.

Excerpts to whet your interest--lots of authors and titles are included in the article, too:

Fairy tales haunt us. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen an author speak about the fairy tale that kept them up at night, I’d have enough dollars to buy enough fairy tale collections that I would never sleep again. Fantasy with its magics and monarchies, and romance with its mandatory happily-ever-afters are particularly unable to let sleeping fairy tales lie, so it’s perhaps not surprising that smushing the two genres together has produced a truly awe-inspiring level of fairy tale poisoning.

... What if books can also just depend on the imagery, rules, and structures of fairy tales to avoid the challenge of worldbuilding? What if a fairy tale world, but completely different characters and situations? (I say this without judgment. Worldbuilding is famously hard, and fairy tale worlds are rad. Slash terrifying.)

... Then you have the books that are asking what for? What’s everyone acting like this for? How should we be understanding it? I grew up on these.