Tropes from fairy tales?

[lambenttyto]

So I've been brainstorming all the fairy tale tropes I can think of from my reading, and I came up with a list over the past few days. I might have a few of them multiple times in there, but whatever. I'm not going to use all of these, clearly, but I do want to keep compiling a list so I have enough of them to pick and choose when I want.

This is making me want to play Blood and Wine.

All right, here's my list:

High prison towers
Fairies
Talking animals
Flying chariots
Glass slippers
Toads and frogs
Magic
Magic traveling boots (boots of seven leagues)
Handsome princes, knights, kings
Beautiful princesses
Evil stepmother
Cannibalism
Giants
Quests
Magical items, cloaks, swords, keys
The room that shall not be entered
Thimbles, spinning wheels,
Spells and curses
Cursed to be a beast
Things in threes
Picking things out of the hearth ashes
Witches, dwarves, gnomes, hags
Sleeping beauties
Horse drawn carriages
Sugar plumbs
Balls and parties
Kingdoms and castles
Wolves, ware wolves, trolls
Dancing and music
Marriages between princesses and princes
Commoners become royalty
Lies, tests, truths
"Once upon a time"
"Happily ever after"
Royalty, nobility, commoners
Competitions for wealth, rule, love
Dismemberment, impairment
Regrowing of limbs and organs
Beautiful gowns and jewels
Ell (archaic unit of measurement approximately six hand breadths, or forty-five inches)
Salutations
Jealousies
Tournaments
Swooning
Wooden slippers
Titles as names
Dumb characters who are actually smart and successful
The ugly become beautiful
Always happy endings
Tests, where the hard but good choice brings about happiness in the end
Shape shifting as a means of punishment or concealment
Death and rebirth (animal asks to have it's head cut off, turns into a prince/princess)
Forced marriage/Arranged marriage
Evil gets it's comeuppance
Beauty contrasted with ugliness
The ugly step sister tries the same thing, fails miserably and is punished

You know what I haven't seen? Vampires. I want vampires.

 

[Deleted member 57675]

Tropes or elements?

Beautiful means good, ugly means evil.

• See many princesses in fairy tales. Their defining trait is that they are pretty and they are kind. Mostly.
• Look at all the villains the protagonists in fairy tales have to defeat or escape from. Unless they are doing an enchantment to make them look prettier (which just hides their ugliness underneath), they are all ugly/old/withered/evil.

Damsel in distress.

• Princess or maiden must always get saved by someone. Unless rare where the princess does the saving or the turnaround like 7 swans and lift the curse of her siblings herself.

A bit dark how fairy tales used to be...

• The Little Mermaid turns to seafoam, Sleeping Beauty gets assaulted by a king while in a coma and gives birth, Cinderella's stepsisters cut off a piece of their foot and still can't bloody fit their feet into the slipper, and Red Riding Hood...I don't really imagine the fairy tales were happily ever after after reading the more older versions of it.

 

[ArcadiaBlade]

Hmn....I just felt like the princess troupe is kinda....

Like, instead of the usual troupe of being rescued, how about the prince charming thinking that he should rescue his princess, the princess instead beats up her captors, rules it with an iron fist and then acts cute in front of her prince charming....

Welp....

 

[ThrillingHuman]

The only fairytale I've ever consciously familiarised myself with was Sondheim's Into the woods, which, in my opinion, is the only fairytale worth familiarising oneself with.

 

[RavenRunes]

what about if the prince, being all manly and stuff, goes to rescue princess from dragon only to find princess IS dragon and gets eaten. That'll larn 'im, the presumptuous white-knighty GIT. 'I say, Esmeralda, could you stop eating them; you're never going to get that curse broken if you keep eating them!'
And Red Riding Hood and Wolfie were running a bandit racket which worked pretty well until she owed Wolfie money and he got chompy. How else does he know where Granny's house is and so far HASN'T EATEN HER. Because that's where the loot is hidden! That basket of baked goods...wink wink...Also how come there's a woodsman on hand at a moment's notice yet Big Bad hasn't been dealt with yet. IN ON IT.

 

[lambenttyto]

what about if the prince, being all manly and stuff, goes to rescue princess from dragon only to find princess IS dragon and gets eaten. That'll larn 'im, the presumptuous white-knighty GIT. 'I say, Esmeralda, could you stop eating them; you're never going to get that curse broken if you keep eating them!'
And Red Riding Hood and Wolfie were running a bandit racket which worked pretty well until she owed Wolfie money and he got chompy. How else does he know where Granny's house is and so far HASN'T EATEN HER. Because that's where the loot is hidden! That basket of baked goods...wink wink...Also how come there's a woodsman on hand at a moment's notice yet Big Bad hasn't been dealt with yet. IN ON IT.

I like your ideas. Would go well in a comedy for sure. But I'm not intending to rehash any characters from past stories, actually. Completely original story, and it is going to be an ensemble cast epic.

Hmn....I just felt like the princess troupe is kinda....

Personally, I like the princess trope far more than the inverted trope. Everything nowadays is the "inverted trope." It's no longer fresh and interesting like it used to be. I would argue this is when the tropes that have lasted for hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of years, win out, because they speak to us more. Anyway, different conversation. It's going to be an ensemble cast with a lot of characters, so there's definitely room for some inverted tropes and other interesting turns.

The Little Mermaid turns to seafoam, Sleeping Beauty gets assaulted by a king while in a coma and gives birth, Cinderella's stepsisters cut off a piece of their foot and still can't bloody fit their feet into the slipper, and Red Riding Hood...I don't really imagine the fairy tales were happily ever after after reading the more older versions of it.

Except for the Little Mermaid, I've read all these recently. The Grimms definitely have a few more harsher fairy tails. Some of them are straight up horror throat slitting cannibalism, etc, etc. I don't like those. I read a version of Cinderella from the Red Fairy Book where her mother is eaten by a witch and the daughter berries her bones, and that's how we got the magic tree that helps her. Pretty horrifying actually. It's a slavic version of the story. I don't like that one, lol.

 

[CarburetorThompson]

This is folklore, not fairy tales, but it's the only close thing I know about vampires.

In some cultures, there are two types of vampires, the undead (standard) and living vampires. A living vampire being created by being born as the illegitimate child of two illegitimate persons or the bastard of two bastards, in simpler terms. I don't think any cultures have really followed this since the renaissance though.