The Mary Sue

hiddeninplainsightranch:

For the rest of the day today, we’re playing Tumblr Tag with the accounts we follow. If you find you’ve been tagged in this post, reply with an answer to the following question:

What is your favorite fairy tale?

Susana is answering this because she has an answer that she thinks is actually interesting. 

My favorite fairy tale is East of the Sun, West of the Moon. There are many ways the story is told, but as a kid, I had an edition that was illustrated by Mercer Mayer with 

these

fucking

beautiful

pictures

look

at

this

shit.

Sadly, no one in my family can find our copy of it now, and it’s out of print. 

This version of East of the Son, West of the Moon is a bit of an amalgam of several fairy tales. It starts out exactly like The Frog Prince. Beautiful princess who refuses all suitors drops her gold ball in a well, and a talking frog offers to return it in exchange for a promise that she’ll marry him. Naturally, she promises in order to get her ball back, and then refuses to make good on it, because, duh, marrying a frog. The moment she reveals her intentions, the frog turns into a handsome prince and is whisked away by devils to a castle “east of the sun, west of the moon.” Turns out he was cursed by his his wicked stepmother, an ogre queen, and now he has to go live with her and marry one of her ogre daughters. 

The princess immediately realizes that she’s in the wrong here and she’s got to do something about it. So she abandons her pampered lifestyle and embarks on an epic, globe trotting quest where she confronts and is helped by all manner of terrifying, epic elemental beasts: salamanders, great white bears, giant fish, unicorns, asking each one if they know how to get “east of the sun, and west of the moon.” Each one of them points her to another creature that takes her a little farther on her journey and/or offers her aid in the form of items like one of the fish’s silvery scales. 

When she arrives at the castle, she is forced into bondage by the prince’s hideous stepmother and stepsisters, while she seeks to find a way to free him from an enchanted sleep within a glass prison. Eventually she winds up shooting one of the ogres in the heart, turning some of them to stone, etc., and she and her prince live happily ever after. 

At least, that’s how it goes to the best of my recollection. Like I said, nobody in my family can find our copy of it. Needless to say, between the male character who takes on characteristics of both Cinderella and Snow White; the female character who takes on the Hero’s Quest of personal growth, adventure, and restitution; and those illustrations; it really stuck in my head as a kid. 

~

Quasi unrelated, but one of my favorite lady comic artists, Marjane Satrapi, did a slightly more grown up version of this story framework called The Sigh, if you’d be interested in that sort of thing. 

And if you’re interested in another beautifully illustrated out of print fairy tale that has gender role subverting themes (and the additional, you’d-never-notice-it-as-a-kid-but-hey-wow-now-that-I’m-an-adult-yeah theme that worshiping women for their purity and damning them otherwise is bullshit), see if your library has Jane Yolen’s Dove Isabeau. 

megmastersdemon asked: Hi! So I was wondering: how do you decide what shows should be recapped on The Mary Sue, or what shows to pay attention to?

Well, it’s kind of a mix of things. Here are some of them that I can toss off while being distracted by The Colbert Report playing in my parents’ living room. (I’m just home for the weekend ok gosh)

1. We’re a small staff of three editors and a smattering of contributors, most irregular. So part of this is what are our most regular writers already going to be watching, so none of us gets burned out having to spend too much of our nominal leisure time working. (For reference, I’m not sure how it goes with Jill and Rebecca, but I habitually spend at least three hours actually writing my recap on top of spending an hour watching the show.) 

2. Then there’s what’s going to actually interest our readers. To a certain extent, yeah, I enjoy posting things that I feel strongly about but that may not get a lot of attention, but if I’m spending at least four hours of my weekend working on a post, it sure as heck better get us some clicks, sheesh be something people are going to look at and be interested in. 

3. Scheduling. This year, Game of Thrones and Doctor Who premiered on the weekend of The Walking Dead finale. This actually turned out okay: Jill had been recapping TWD, so she took the finale, Rebecca volunteered to do the whole season of GoT, and I took the only one of those shows that I actually watch: Doctor Who. 

PS: It’s funny that you should ask this, because we’ve been pretty happy with the interest our recaps have been generating this spring, and have been talking about what other shows we can do. Priority number one is that it’s something you guys are interested in. So what would you guys want us to recap? Drop a note in our ask box. 

(But you should know that the next season of Teen Wolf is already, like, double covered.)