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Thought 3 - Fractured Fairy Tales, A Modern Approach

I have been reading "The Brothers Grimm" lately. Whilst reading it, I noticed that many tales are compilations of other tales or borrow things from another tale. This can of course be attributed to oral tradition of passing a story down from generation to generation, remembering parts, forgetting others, adding in new parts, mistranslation, etc. It is almost as if the stories themselves are/were living beings that evolved into elaborate tales, pollinating from tales that survived the last generation. Either being adventurous enough, or full of the right lesson to be learned. Eventually the tales are written down and preserved like a specimen in a museum. Yet, they have continued to evolve even within a modern society where the oral tradition is no longer a method of propagation for the stories. Instead of a retelling of a story, it is called an adaptation, retelling, revisioning, or even an edit. Take for example "Snow White" as the common motifs of princess, witch, good and evil, all show. Yet, a story which takes less than 5 minutes to read, has been translated into a modern movie of 83 minutes. Even more, people will recast the players, make a more modern version. But why? The story is written, yet not immune the the effects of transmission. Could knowledge itself be a living being that grows and breeds through us? Even today as a new formats are created in movies, television, and even comics, each modern format can been seen to cross-pollinate into another form, a good TV show dies and becomes a comic, a comic grows in length to the graphic novel, then graphic novel turned into a movie, a good movie is adapted into a television series. And in each case no conversion maintains perfect consistency with original. One merely has to look a the various incarnations of Batman, Superman, and Spider man to see the evolution of the characters, the stories are similar and the players the same, yet everything is different with time, despite that we as humans no longer need to rely on the inaccuracies of oral transmission.

Just a curious observation.

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