MISC/HCC: The Queen's Roast, a fairy-tale

[Tom Russell]

On Tuesday, June 6, 2017 at 4:24:07 PM UTC-4, Drew Perron wrote:
> On 6/4/2017 10:38 AM, Tom Russell wrote:

> > There was once a good king. He was wise and temperate; he was a
> > skilled diplomat and also an able campaigner; he was without guile,
> > but was not overly trusting; he was just and he was kind. He was
> > excellent in all ways, and excelled in all things, save for one fault,
> > one blind-spot: his queen.
> >     The queen was vain, and wicked, and selfish, and cruel. If the king
> > had a thousand virtues and one fault, then the queen had a thousand
> > faults and one virtue - and that virtue was that she made him happy.
> 
> Fascinating. This framing is very, *very* traditional. I was wondering if you 
> were ultimately going to pull the rug out from under that.

I kept the whole thing very much along traditional lines, even though the "good king, bad queen" thing is, at least implicitly, a tad misogynistic. But at the same time, the "bad mother" trope is so much more wrong and transgressive than the "bad dad" trope. "Bad dad" (by which I mean "evil dad", not "weak or ineffectual dad") powers only a couple of fairy tales - Donkey Skin* is the only one I can think of off the top of my head - while "bad mom" (or step-mom) features in pretty much all the major fairy tales (Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, etc) and many of the minor ones (Juniper Tree is probably peak "bad mom").

[* - BTW, the Demy film of Donkey Skin is lovely.]