Blog Reflections

Before I started contributing to this blog, I thought very little about the everyday effect that fairy tales have on our lives today. As a child, I know that fairy tales affected me greatly, given that I loved watching Disney movies constantly and enjoyed reading a fairy tale whenever I could. However, as a senior in college, I didn't often think about everything that was influenced by fairy tales that I encountered in everyday life.

After being urged by Professor Busl to pay attention to these influences, I was shocked to discover how often I noticed a nod to a fairy tale everywhere I went. Most of these I found in advertising, whether it be a commercial or an ad in a magazine, but there were also many interesting fairy tale aspects to the television shows I watched or the conversations I had with friends. In addition to noticing the effect that fairy tales have on our society, I am now more critical of this influence. The idea of a little girl needing a princess castle bed or a woman needing the fairy tale wedding was something that I had never really thought about before, and something that I look at now with a more critical eye. The role of the fairy tale in our world today is a negative one, in my opinion, because it leaves people with certain expectations for life that are unrealistic and impossible to fulfill. The things that we experience in life are constantly being compared to the way they are "supposed to be" in a fairy tale world that does not exist, and therefore, we are blinded to life's realities. Although I still think that there is no harm in indulging yourself in a fairy tale or a Disney movie for fun once in a while, I think that there is harm in taking everything that happens in these tales to heart. There are a strict set of expectations that surface when a person is confronted with a fairy tale-like situation, and to abide by these expectations is to be disappointed. Life is great enough even when it's not the embodiment of a fairy tale, and would very plausibly be worse if it did resemble a fairy tale too closely. Fairy tales are everywhere in our world, and we ought to be careful in how much we take them to heart.