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I'm definitely not a blog type of person. A friend of mine tried to get me to do a collaborative blog with her a few years ago and she has posted on it very consistently...but I only posted once and that was only because I was stuck here for the summer taking orgo and bored out of my mind. Ooops. But now that I had deadlines for posting blogs it has actually grown on me a little bit, although I still enjoy reading others posts more than writing my own.

Coming up with a topic every week was certainly a struggle at times, but it was very interesting to see all the different places that I could find fairy tale references. I knew before that fairy tales were a big part of our lives, providing us with moral guidelines when we are young. What I hadn't really thought about before was how much it influences the basic script we have in our heads for how life is supposed to work and how people should interact with each other. This definitely became very clear when I was actively looking for fairy tale references in daily life, and I frequently noticed friends saying simple things that they don't even think twice about like "My boyfriend treats me like a princess." Something else that I thought was interesting was seeing how some modern retellings of fairy tales reflected how the values in our society have changed. For example, the short film I wrote about in my first blog gave voice to a segment of society that is marginalized in traditional fairy tales; the elderly. Although our society still idolizes youth and beauty, I think that people are becoming more sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of the elderly. Disney's "The Princess and the Frog" also reflects how cultural diversity and acceptance of these different cultures is becoming more important in our society, providing the first African American princess and a prince who is racially ambiguous, coming from the fictional country of Maldonia.

Going off of cultures and fairy tales, a lot of what I got out of this blog actually came from discussing potential topics for the blog with Ga Young. While discussing things we were thinking about using as topics, we would frequently go off on random tangents and I would learn a lot about how fairy tales differ or are the same in Korean culture. In particular, I was shocked when Ga Young was easily able to identify a character in a Korean tv show as Snow White solely based on their outfit, which was the same outfit worn by Disney's Snow White. I wouldn't think this was surprising for an American that was raised on Disney. I think this really shows just how influential Disney is in terms of shaping people's general idea of fairy tales and their characters. Overall, I think that writing this blog definitely helped me to realize that fairy tales are so prevalent in daily life because they are something that everyone, no matter what place and time, can understand and relate to on some level.