Any story claiming to be a deconstruction of fairy tales but has nothing to offer except new types of violence, more explicit sex, and a general attitude of “lol happy endings aren’t real” is like. such a cultural waste of time tbh
know what actually is a good deconstruction of a fairy tale? Shrek. It fucks up just about everything in a normal fairy tale and still manages to have a happy ending with a good message and never once has to be ‘gritty’ or ‘dark’. It’s actually really well done.
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.”
– Ursula LeGuin, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’
In dark times such as these, it is absolutely revolutionary to be happy.
No it is not. Being happy is mandatory. Anyone who expresses pain is punished, ridiculed, discredited, and ostracized. Bringing something happy into the world rather than inflicting pain could be revolutionary… If you want to stroke your ego for being a bare minimum decent person. But expressing pain despite the thousand ways society tries to embarrass and punish you for it is far more “revolutionary” than expressing happiness. Everyone is required to be happy by social convention.
Sorry for reblogging this from you out of nowhere when we don’t know each other, but thank you so much for having the courage to reply like you did. You put into words exactly what I was thinking, just a lot more firmly and succinctly. The real revolution – and honestly, the core of every resistance movement in history – is having the guts to say, “No, things are not good the way they are. No, we are not happy and this is why.” By all means, write what you want and perceive the world as you wish, but I find an odd sort of comfort in gritty realism. I feel solidarity for these characters who have to go through life’s struggles and may not succeed despite their best efforts. I feel like these are characters and a world I can identify with, that I can finally say, “Look, here’s someone going through what I am.” That way, I struggle together with these people, something I feel less and less in reading literature which focuses on happiness and hope as fundamental, if not mandatory, attributes.
Not everyone derives comfort from this kind of narrative, and that’s okay. But there’s so much more to realism and deconstruction than some inexplicable hipster need to glorify pain and evil. For me, it’s about acknowledgement. It’s about someone telling me, “You’re not going through this alone. You can struggle and ultimately fail, but you’re still the hero of your own story.”
Acting happy might be mandatory. Accepting abuse without complaint might be what’s asked of you. But actually being happy, finding a way towards joy despite the world telling you that you don’t deserve it, that’s rebellion, that’s revolution.
When I was a teen queer, almost all the queer books I had access to were grim. A few had happyish endings, but it came after a lot of abuse and struggle. And it taught little queer baby me that being queer meant pain. That being queer was bleak with a few rays of sunshine if you were lucky. It set such a low bar for my expectations of happiness that I ended up accepting a lot of bad behavior towards me because it wasn’t quite as bad as what happened to the characters in the books I read.
Seeing genuinely happy queer people raised the bar for me. Seeing people genuinely thriving as queer people made it harder to accept anyone preventing me from thriving too. Seeing happy queer people gave me energy to work towards being happy too, and energy to work towards helping other queer people. It gave me hope, and that hope was revolutionary. When you’ve got the world trying to crush your ego, getting to stroke it is rebellion, it’s revolution.
It is absolutely vital for people to be able to express their pain, but honestly, some groups are only allowed to express pain. Our culture loves us some torture porn, loves seeing queers and poc and disabled and poor people and women struggle. We call that Oscar Bait. “Look how much they can endure and survive,” the audience can say. “Why, they’re even stronger for it. Really we helped them by hurting them.” And heck, just being a working artist I am told that my art will die if I don’t have constant pain, and that idea is used to justify stealing my work, not paying me, working to remove the social structures that support my ability to be freelance. “It’s good for you,” I’m told. “Think of how good your art will be because of this pain.” And sometimes, you look at all your friends in similar positions, and you see them struggle too, and you start to believe that struggle is inherent to your position.
To be able to show others in your position what actual happiness looks like is revolution. To show others that happiness is possible is revolution. To be happy is a giant middle finger to everyone trying to drag me into the pit of despair where they think I belong and it is revolution.
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