Rewriting fairy tales:

[Anonymous No.22155153]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueKW1ThrOYQ&ab_channel=CACEWheatonIL

This guy tries to argue against retellings of fairy tales, using pretty weak essentialist arguments, but is called out by his students. Student claims that
>no definite authorship can be assigned to fairy tales
>Grimm Brothers, Andersern, merely compiled them
>it can't be proved that they didnt't insert their own idiossyncracies into them
>modern retellings are basically doing the same thing
>notion of an "original" doesn't apply here
>therefore it's okay to rewrite fairy tales
Guy is reduced to saying: Well, I just like the old ones were better, okay?
What are some non-naive, non-essentialist and non-subjective arguments against rewriting fairy tales to suit modern audiences?

[Anonymous No.22155282]

>>22155153
If I recast and make a Star Wars movie but every character is replaced by a chimp then Disney can’t sue me because it’s a different interpretation and they didn’t make up the story.

[Anonymous No.22155310]

>>22155282
I suppose, if you owned the rights to Star Wars you could. But fairy tales don’t have copy rights.

[Anonymous No.22155322]

The picture you posted makes me think that you just want to argue against the black Little Mermaid. This movie is basically just a more modern reinterpretation of an already modern interpretation of a fairy tail. If that's your only aim, then I think it's gonna be difficult to argue against the new one but not the original Disney movie since they really aren't that different.
As for the student's argument, the last conclusion doesn't follow because he never established that it was wrong to rewrite fairy tales. He only argued that they were rewritten (lack of proof of something is also not affirmative proof of its existence so this doesn't follow either), not that it was wrong for them to be rewritten. The professor should have just said that even if Grimm and others inserted their own idiosyncrasies, they shouldn't have.

I don't get why people are so upset about this movie anyways. Yes, it's obviously pandering. So what? This isn't anything new.

[Anonymous No.22155390]

>>22155322
>>22155322
The little mermaid is just an example that is fresh in everyone’s minds right now. We don’t need to necessarily dwell on this particular example.
The trend of rewriting old children’s stories and songs for political correctness has been going on for a while. I used to entertain the notion that something of value was lost every time, but now I’m beginning to doubt it.
>not that it was wrong that they were rewritten
I don’t get it. I don’t think the student was arguing that it was wrong to rewrite them. On the contrary.
As for Disney movies being already a retelling, he talks about this on a different video, but he falls squarely on another essentialist fallacy: it was okay when old Disney did it, because they got the “essence” of the story right.
What is the essence? Is there one? Am I becoming a postmodernist?

[Anonymous No.22155406]

Fairy tales are living things, much like languages, and to want to trap them in tomes and never change is completely asinine in regards to academics.

[Anonymous No.22155427]

>>22155406
Probably the dumbest post I have ever read on /lit/ holy fuck

[Anonymous No.22155452]

>>22155406
This professor’s argument seems to be heavily reliant on notions of morality, and children’s stories being a means to convey the right morality, but if contemporaries don’t believe in hard moral truths, then it’s a hard sell for them.

[Anonymous No.22155467]

>>22155153
I don't think there are any arguments, as long as the originals are mostly preserved. We shouldn't be looking at Disneys original Little Mermaid was the original version of the fable.

Pic related is a good example of a myth redone.

[Anonymous No.22155521]

>>22155390
>I don’t think the student was arguing that it was wrong to rewrite them. On the contrary.
You're right, I misspoke. The professor would have to establish that rewriting is wrong first which is an entirely separate argument. So ignore that part because I was wrong.
He still can't say that something is true just because we can't prove it isn't though. So if the professor can prove that rewriting is bad, then the student is still wrong.

Many old fairy tales had themes that were pretty clearly stated and generally aimed at the young audience the tales were intended for. Especially Grimm's. I think you could easily call that the "essence" of it because that's the entire purpose of the story. When you remove that, then you totally change the story. I don't think you could say that these kinds of changes are "wrong" per se. I would just say that they've been adapted to suit modern problems as opposed to the ones children encountered in the 1800's. But you maybe could argue that they're of inferior literary quality or value just because they're derivatives instead of the originals. Like West Side Story as compared to Romeo and Juliet.

[Anonymous No.22155554]

Quints get

[Anonymous No.22155562]

>>22155153
There's nothing little about this mermaid, and that's the main problem here.

[Anonymous No.22155656]

>>22155153
>What are some non-naive, non-essentialist and non-subjective arguments against rewriting fairy tales to suit modern audiences?
There’s nothing.
You can claim the contemporary retelling is inadequate, that’s fine. The more popular will win out.
Take Disney’s Robin Hood for furries. How many people prefer this shitty watered down version and all its 1960s music? It will be forgotten in time.

[Anonymous No.22155728]

>>22155310
Unless Disney buys it.
No, he can and will be sued

[Anonymous No.22155819]

>>22155322
"YO BITCH"

Oh shit! It was Nigger Crab!

Ariel screamed as she saw the giant grinning monster edging towards her, its solid gold teeth glistening like rusted submarines.

"Ho ho ho bitch, Imma pinch your ASS!" it oozed, and half-laughing half-snarling it made ready with its massive claws to pinch Ariel.

[Anonymous No.22155837]

>>22155452
>>22155406
>>22155153
>>22155322
If the retelling is true to the actual 'moral' or lesson, then it's fine.

[Anonymous No.22155848]

>>22155153
Even if there can be no 'true original', there can be 'closest original'. Retellings are fine but they should still be compared to older forms.

[Anonymous No.22157093]

Bump

[Anonymous No.22157161]

>>22155153
>Op wants objective arguments for a inherently subjective subject
>Is practically pretending one can make a scientific empirical argument about fucking fairy tales

Are you actually retarded?

[Anonymous No.22157277]

The real answer is that niggers are ugly and dumb and I don’t want to see them in fairytales.
That’s really it. All stories are just the stories that came before them told in the a different way. The complaint rises when it is inferior.
And the problem is it is clearly inferior, but not politically correct to say so, so you end up with all the circular logic present in this thread.
This isn’t to say change is bad. But the lazy replacement of characters is simply a sign of inferiority. Same thing with the most recent Matrix replacing Morpheus. I didn’t have to know anything else about the movie to know it was shit.

[Anonymous No.22157393]

>>22157277
rent free

[Anonymous No.22157416]

>>22157393
He's not wrong, I have to see them ruining everything in real life why would I want to see them in movies?

[Anonymous No.22157429]

>>22157393
>puts something as the face of a movie with a 6 figure marketing combat
>rent free

that space was purchased at a premium.

[Anonymous No.22157437]

>>22155322
It's not a reinterpretation: it's a raceswap.

[Anonymous No.22157495]

>>22155153
>>22155322
They only do this for one reason.
It has nothing to do with a genuine reinterpretation or whatever BS argument they use.

[Anonymous No.22158230]

>>22155554

[Anonymous No.22158511]

>>22155521
this is why I dislike disney movies. The originals.

[Anonymous No.22158541]

>>22155521
>>22158511
I accidently clicked post.

This is why I hate the disney originals. There is something more compelling about the little mermaid tragedy where her good deed was never observed and him believing to be rescued by the same qoman who he is arranged to marry is compelling. The story doesn't need an evil witch. A pretender who uses a voice to deceive him.

I have no idea why Disney was so set on taking Anderson's fairy tales and changing them so much. Frozen has almost no resemblence to the original.

[Anonymous No.22158629]

You cannot argue against cynical demoralization in a liberal framework of logic.

[Anonymous No.22158633]

>>22155819
lol'd nice one

[Anonymous No.22158674]

>>22155153
I guess you could go back to Socrates's way of thinking, if you view Grim fairytales as our modern equivalent of mythology. You could then argue that the point of fairytales is to teach children. Because of this, the State should be in charge of what art is allowed to be consumed by the general public. You could take out or keep whatever parts of the Little Mermaid that you want. You probably wouldn't want to go back to the Grimm tale version though, because it is too scary to be appropriate for children.

As a poet myself, I am very against this. Personally, I am against intellectual property in general. Things like breakcore, vaporwave, and pluderphonics(literally stolen sound) often ignore copyright. Sometimes these works are not "transformative" and they don't gain much traction as a result. No real harm comes of it though. If you look at something like Dj Shadow's Endtroducing, then you can see what art that isn't hindered by trademarking the color blue sounds like.

[Anonymous No.22158686]

>>22158629
I mean it's framed deceptively from the onset with a total strawman argument.
No one at all was claiming that retelling a old fairy tale was even remotely the problem anyone had with modern Disney remakes.
Mostly it's been people pointing out that Disney' modern retellings are worse then what they already did, done for basically all the wrong reasons, and changed in dumb ways due to very bad faith argumentation from destructive ideologs.

Basically if you are going to tell the same story but worse don't expect to be praised for it.

Hell, Disney will never see a red cent of mine for totally unrelated reasons to them making shitty versions of stuff they did before.
Stuff that if Walt was still alive he would have never allowed.
Like praising and pandering to the genocidal communist government of China and personality thanking the man in charge of the biggest concentration camp currently in existence.
Or getting caught over and over again using slave labor, usually from China.
Or the constant editing of content to make the ultra bigoted Chinese government happy.

Makes all their virtue signaling look fake as fuck when put in that context. I am not going to support a company that supports the CCP.
But me not liking their dumb ugly cash grab somehow makes me the racist, lol.

[Anonymous No.22158691]

>>22155153
Fairy tales are indicative of a specific culture and a specific time. Little Red Riding Hood has been rewritten many times, but always within a certain geographical boundary of Europe. You don't see Nordic versions of Little Red Riding hood, or African versions, or Chinese versions.

There may be no single authorship to Little Red Riding Hood but I would argue that there is a singular cultural ownership of that story. If someone in Japan takes the story of King Arthur, and reimagines him as a tiny Japanese girl who eats rice for breakfast and wants to be a perfect waifu, are we supposed to accept this new version of Arthurian legend? And if you think I'm being facetious with my example, it exists, and it's called Fate/Stay. Fate/Stay has been wildly successful in Japan and this retelling/bastardization of King Arthur makes billions of dollars every year. But there are two problems with this.

First, the problem of cultural preservation. We can argue that the oldest versions of Arthurian legends are superior, and that they will be remembered better than Fate/Stay, but we can't be sure of that. Libraries burn. Museums destroy artifacts. A thousand years from now maybe there will be no more copies of The Once and Future King, but there may be hundreds of Fate/Stay trading cards telling the story of King Arthur. And it's this that future generations will draw upon for knowledge.

The second problem is that of cultural divide. Carl Jung argued that westerners should stick to western religions, and easterners should stick to eastern religions, rather than cross pollinate and adopt each other's religions. This is because we understand our own culture better than that of foreign cultures. When religions mix we end up with new dogmas, new interpretations, misinterpretations of symbols. The religion loses its purity, in a sense. In time you end up with the sutra of Jethro and the Unification Church of Japan. Same thing happens when stories are retold by different cultures. Take Little Red Riding Hood and give it to an American named Tex Avery and he turns it into a story about a strip club and a horny wolf who wants to bang her. Hilarious. But how many people who've seen that animation have ever read the earliest French recording of the story? Who even knows the name Charles Perrault? Another example would be the film Jin-Roh, a Japanese retelling of Little Red Riding Hood as a political thriller. They completely change the meaning of the original tale so it aligns with their theme of terrorism. What does terrorism have to do with Little Red Riding Hood? Absolutely nothing.

At least, that's my thoughts. Other people would, or should, more succinctly be against retelling of fairy tales for the simple fact that it's "cultural appropriation." In the current political climate, white people can't wear dreadlocks, but it's ok for the African American community to snatch up The Little Mermaid?

[Anonymous No.22158742]

>>22158691
>We can argue that the oldest versions of Arthurian legends are superior, and that they will be remembered better than Fate/Stay, but we can't be sure of that.

The original Fate visual novel is unironically a more faithful and respectful adaptation of the arthurian legend once you get past the cultural shock factor than most adaptations coming out of the west in the past half century. Arturia isn't black, nor is Fate a heavy-handed story about feminism like the Mists of Avalon is, or an excuse for the writer to vent his frustrations like the Once and Future King is.

>Carl Jung argued that westerners should stick to western religions, and easterners should stick to eastern religions, rather than cross pollinate and adopt each other's religions. This is because we understand our own culture better than that of foreign cultures.

Christianity isn't a western religion, just like judaism or islam isn't western either. There have been no western religions ever since the indo-european-derived pagan religions of europe have been destroyed by the christian church.

[Anonymous No.22158794]

>>22158691
>Little Red Riding Hood has been rewritten many times, but always within a certain geographical boundary of Europe. You don't see Nordic versions of Little Red Riding hood, or African versions, or Chinese versions.
I have seen plenty of American versions, a few English versions, Japanese versions (including my main from darkstalkers), a Russian version, and a Mexican version despite it's German roots.

Good stories are retold and spread, changing a little or a lot with each retelling.
The real question is if the retellings is good and does it have the core essence of the original. The superficial stuff taken away, changed, or added don't really matter. It's the core of the story, the underlying truth, virtue, wisdom and/or idea contained within the story that matters. The rest is a display of the storyteller's art in conveying that core in a interesting way.
At least until you get to deconstructions and parody but let's not muddy the water.

[Anonymous No.22160086]

>>22155322
Because it's not one case in a vacuum. It's part of an obvious, systemic, ubiquitous attempot to complete appropriate, undermine, rewrite and destroy European cultures, history and art. The problem isn't that one classic European fairytale gets blackwashed. The problem is that it happens to every single classical European story now. Notice something in the "modern" Mulan movie. Literally everyone is still asian. Why do you think that is?

[Anonymous No.22160099]

>>22155554

[Anonymous No.22160465]

>>22155554
Sometimes one gets so close to greatness that it hurts.

[Anonymous No.22160947]

>>22158691
>cultural appropriation
I can already see them counter arguing that cultural appropriation, much like racism, only works if it’s the dominant group doing it against the oppressed group, so it’s fine if black people do it, since they are oppressed (just like black people can’t be racist). Which argument is a free get out of jail card to do whatever one wants and never applied consistently anyway. Then arguments go out of the window and it comes down to I’ll do it because I can and you can do nothing about it, which is the state of modern politics. To be sure, it’s not black people doing it but the liberal establishment. Black people however are fine with it since they are being pandered to.

[Anonymous No.22161937]

>>22155153
i'm not watching your literally who video
>it's good because it's le grimdark evil blood and gore xD rawr
cringe
>it's good because nigger
also cringe

[Anonymous No.22162006]

>>22160465
You won't survive another night.