I decided to do two blog posts today because both of them are on books that didn't do much in the name of providing good blog material, plus I'm behind on blogs and this is the only day of the week I don't have plans to go somewhere where I can't do this easily.
Anyway, this book was an easy read, it was a regular fantasy novel, the same kind I normally would read. It was also part of a series which I suspect has several more books in it, so it took a while to piece together what was going on.
The story was original and entertaining, but after reading it all I was forced to ask my mom why she had put it on the list, there was literally nothing that I could think of to blog on. Her idea for this post was to explore why "The Sisters Grimm" is so much more marketable than "The Brothers Grimm" was when it was released. It may seem like I'm cheating by just taking the idea of another for my work here, but I've put this post off and done several other posts and read even more other books while I tried to think of a different thing to blog about, now I only have one blog post left (not counting any books I finish this week) and nothing is coming to mind, so I'm just gonna go with it.
There are a lot of things that could account for the difference in marketability between the brothers and sisters Grimm. One is that "The Sisters Grimm" has been released into a different time and people may be more accepting of such things. In this era the fairy tales have become increasingly less dark and increasingly more stereotypical happy and simply stories. We've seen countless renditions of stories like Cinderella, and none of them come even close to an unhappy ending, the story has been watered down and aimed at little kids, the psychological effects of which are a whole other topic consisting of more articles, scientific studies, and theories than I care to go into here.
Perhaps a better example of this can be found with the "genie in a lamp" story, even in "The Sisters Grimm" the genie is depicted as a terrifying ancient being of awesome power. However, when most of us think of the genie in the lamp we think of the comical blue shape-shifting genie from Disney's "Aladdin." There's a BIG difference between "terrifying" and "comical" and how each image is received by people.
Another thing that may explain the difference is that after years and years of these mellow remakes of the classic stories a book that comes closer to the original stories and is a little bit darker is a nice change of pace. In the past "The Brothers Grimm" was a compilation of all the dark and scary stories passed down orally in families. There were no "fairy tales" as we know them today, just "tales." I don't know exactly when "The Brothers Grimm" was written, but it was a long time ago in a time where people were a lot less well off than we are today. Today the whole world is light and filled with opportunity and comfort and all that stuff that comes with technology. Back then a bad storm meant you were going to starve that winter, you had to work all day to make sure you survived to the next day, and the chances of you ever leaving the position you were in were about as close to zero as you can get. All things considered, it isn't exactly surprising that people wouldn't want to take time out of their daily fight for survival to read fantasy stories about how other people did poorly in their fights for survival.
Today darker stories are enjoyable because they are frighting and add a bit of excitement and fear into our comfortable safe lives. We can read these kinds of things and enjoy them because we know that when we wake up the next day there is still going to be food in our pantry, we'll be warm enough to not freeze to death, we can go to a doctor if we get sick, and nothing short of a natural disaster is going to change any of that.
I suppose both of those ideas are kind of similar, but they both deserved going into. That pretty much sums up my theory on the topic, maybe it's right, maybe not, I'm not a psychiatrist who can perform a detailed analysis of people's minds and confirm or disprove it, but this is what strikes me as the most likely explanation.
And with that another blog post ends, and now I'm almost done with this blog altogether, I believe there are 5 books left to read, one of which I am partially through already, and 6 blog posts to type. It won't be long before that's done, so the end of this blog is near... but it's not quite here yet, so until next time, farewell!
No comments:
Post a Comment