Weekend Lounge ~ The Death of Fairy Tales

Welcome to the weekend!

It's been quite the week, for many varied reasons, but lets put that to the side for today's post. Instead, lets discuss something else.

Today, I wanted to talk about storytelling, fairy tales, and the importance of wonder. Specifically, I wanted to talk about how it's been both deliberately and accidentally malformed over the course of the 20th century to be what it is today. No one is going to deny that things have changed, but there is also no one who will defend it as in a good place, either.

However, it isn't as if we can just discuss this subject without going into hysterics about either who is at fault or who deserves less of the blame. The truth of the matter is that finger pointing won't do much at this stage. Despite that, we also have to discuss uncomfortable truths and the unintended consequences of off-loading creativity and storytelling to out megacorp overlords. How did we get so far down the hill in a mere century?

It wasn't as straightforward a tumble as you might think.

A good place to start on this subject is this series by YouTuber Cartoon Aesthetics entitled "How Disney Stole Your Childhood" covering the beginning of the Disney Corporation's early days and ambitions up to where it is today and how it has affected how millions of people see the world along the way. It is a revelatory series that fills in a lot of gaps into how culture became pop culture before becoming the disposable trash it is today. Despite the potentially controversial title of the series, this is a story of how a simple co-opting of fairy tales to make a fledgling company's movie productions cheaper ended up replacing an entire cultural institution and warping the way generations of children see storytelling, wonder, and the meaning of their own lives. 

Sound heavy? That might be because the stories we tell ourselves has always been more important than you might believe, and the fact that we've spent nearly a century outsourcing creativity to an increasingly culturally detached corporation has done untold damage to the societal fabric. It's also why we can't seem to tell stories anymore.

It's not even to say that was Walt Disney's original goal to end up here. He almost certainly didn't think such a thing as the current Disney Corporation was possible back in the day, but many of his decisions would butterfly effect out to change the entire world of entertainment, destroy reading, feminize storytelling, and also "grow" with the audience into adulthood, eventually leading to the creation of Disney Adults as the punchline they are today.

How did all that happen? That is quite the question. To go into that is a long and convoluted tale, which is why I linked to Cartoon Aesthetics' series throughout this piece. Check out the first video above and you will see the seeds of a lot poison flowers that would spring up in the decades to come. Not that anyone could see them at the time, and perhaps there is no real villain in the story, at least not in the early parts of it, but that is almost beside the point: choices have consequences, seen and unseen, and we are living with the consequences of those choices today.

Why do we have Fairy Tales to begin with? This isn't a question asked much anymore, despite how obvious it once was. Fairy Tales exist to present the world of both the imagination and the concrete intertwined with each other, not only to show children the way the universe is but also to remind adults the full encompassing view of existence we might sometimes forget. In essence, they are the stories of what makes us what we are and point is to what we should become, and what to avoid. They remind us of what being human is.

Fairy stories aren't dumbed down "proper stories", they aren't meant to be infantile, and they aren't supposed to be "time wasters" as is commonly thought to be the purpose of such stories today. No, in many ways Fairy Tales are the basis to all stories, presenting the line where wonder blurs with the mundane to create a full view of reality both seen and unseen. Yes, they might teach lessons, but they also teach reminders, which is why they have a uniting universal aspect to them which makes such creations cultural touchstones and invaluable.

Which is why outsourcing them has turned out to be a disastrous idea that has ended up doing untold damage to the cultural fabric.

The video series covers this, but goes beyond it into much of the insipidness the 20th century did with creativity, including the embarrassing watering down of "Imagination" as some effeminate magical spell that makes you smarter and above the rubes. If you are old enough, you certainly remember how lame it was back in the day. Read a book, and you'll be smart! It just happens! You might remember Gen Y being told just that with the rise of The Kid Who Reads and lame ideas in retrospect like Reading Rainbow leading to the archetype we all know well by now.

Who decided to hand over art and entertainment to the lamest people imaginable and let them rule it with an iron grip? Is it any wonder these people have lead us to where we are today?

This character didn't fall out of the sky

Yes, throughout the 20th century we not only devalued Fairy Tales, but also turned reading itself into a lame hobby purely for anti-social nerds who believed themselves special and above everyone else, two disastrous mistakes that ended up having negative consequences on more than just corporate entertainment but also social dynamics and general maturity. How else can we explain why we not only have Disney Adults but Daily Show snark as the baseline for adult behavior only becoming more and more prominent since the dawn of the 21st century? That didn't come from nowhere.

Not only that, but it became more and more acceptable to be a cruel human being, as long as you were doing it for a "good" cause. Where else this kind of behavior lead if not to total dehumanization and an unearned sense of superiority? Where else does it end anywhere other than today's Current Year misery?

There was a push when I was a kid to never grow up. If you're old enough you certainly remember it. However, the intent was to make you "retain" that childlike wonder inside yourself that was common in youth. Now, while there might be something to that advice, the reason it was even thought of to begin with was because those teaching it to the youth operated in a materialistic dead end world where your monetary gain is what gave you value as a human being and that those who died with the most toys won. Won what? Who knows. The greater point is that the "adult" world was simply not enticing, and the "kid" one was quickly being co-opted by those same forces who knew it. Essentially, none of this came out of nowhere.

This movement created the weird situation we're in now, where even those sneering at Disney Adults talk like 1980s movie bully stereotypes, megachurch pastor parodies (crafted by people who hate them to begin with), or outdated Gen X cool guys (because sarcasm from thirty years ago is still cool, like punk music!). This isn't just a Disney problem, not by a long shot, and it would be good to remember all of this sprung about from a century where those in charge deliberately committed cultural suicide and left their broken offspring to pick up the pieces. The only problem is they don't know how to do this. How could they when this is all they know?

Much of today's emptiness is undoubtedly caused by the lack of cultural cohesion and the rot of the 20th century accelerating everything into the mess it is today.

For instance, as the above video shows, the biggest reason Walt Disney achieved his success was not in aiming at males or even kids, but specifically at mothers, showing them safe, respectable, and cute, stories their children could digest without fuss. Since these mothers were the ones taking the kids to the cinema, they were the ones he aimed his marketing at. And it worked. It worked so well it changed everything.

And it would only work if society were itself structured in a way that allowed someone with this approach that level of control to begin with, not to mention a climate the prioritized safety over adventure. It is no wonder arts and entertainment became so feminized over the 20th century: that's the only direction it could possibly go, and go there it did. It's hard to blame Walt Disney himself for finding this niche, as he did not know where it would end up, but at some point those who followed after him definitely knew, which is how it all became so easily weaponized against its own customer base. Today's culturally irrelevant Disney is a result of this hubris.

Before the fall, however, Disney was unstoppable. Their approach was how the "Disney Version" of everything not only became the default view of those stories, but also morality and wonder itself. Even those destructive groups such as PMRC or ACT were not looking for a definition of wholesome that aligned with Christianity but on Disney Safetyism, itself an ideology a lot of Christians hold to this day without even seeming to realize it. Much of the 1950s stereotypes held up as the ideal (or evil) are not even 1950s ideals: they are the Disney movie version of reality.

Not only that, but the subversive entertainment to become prominent by the end of the 20th century was not reacting to any sort of objective morality or overarching view of goodness: they were reacting to the Disney view as if it were the default. Look how many still portray knights as either savage hypocritical killing machines or ignorant rubes taken up by liars (maybe even both!) which is not an inversion of reality, but a cartoon version they grew up with. You have plenty of swearing and blood in your mature story because the Disney version didn't have it, because your version of mature is effectively just Not Disney. This is not mature, but when Disney is seen as the default, perception is skewed. It is skewed not only for proponents, but also detractors.

In other words, almost all of our modern conception of storytelling, good or bad, is built on a misunderstanding formed by one man's brand that originated from nearly a century ago. This is just one great mess of nonsense, so it's no wonder younger generations find it so confusing to parse how we got to where we are today.

This is the point where one realizes that we are what we consume, and we have not been consuming reality for a long time.

In Part 2 of the series, our host moves from Fairy Tales and how they were (mostly) unintentionally co-opted and into how it affected the younger generations at the time before they were then spread to the younger generations to come. In other words, it is how Disneyfication works and how it's changed since Walt Disney was alive. And make no mistake, it has absolutely changed.

By the 1990s, Disney had grown so fat and profitable that it ended up invading every medium, every space, and every corner of the culture. Any Gen Y kids alive today would surely remember the onslaught of Disney products and noise everywhere they looked back then. It was never actually considered "cool" for guys to be into it, but that didn't mean they weren't exposed to the Disney brand at every opportunity.

This paired with both the subversion obsession of the era (again, based on Disney's wholesomeness, not the real deal), the pussification of reading as seen for girls, geeks, and weirdos, and the ubiquitous presence of the Disney brand itself, you ended out the century with a generation raised on corporate product while detached from the cultural roots it came from, yet also fed a constant diet of anti-social messaging (simultaneously paired with multi-cultural We Are The World weirdness) finally creating a generation that would be a made into a good global citizen. This concentrated unreality pushed as the New Normal would fix everything.

By the time the 2000s rolled around and the 20th century passed, everything that made Disney what it was in the first place had been destroyed, paved over, and co-opted by either Disney themselves or subversives twisting itself on the Disney view. In essence, reality had been completely supplanted by this new unreality.

Even when 9/11 came around to shatter this Disney reality as unrealistic and impossible, we clung to it all the tighter. When the media told us the Bad Guys were doing Bad Things, we snarked at them and obediently believed we could fix it all by Being Good in the acceptable way. What were these definitions of good and bad built on? They were Disney forgeries, not necessarily created by Walt Disney, but formed by a co-opting of his simplistic formula and corniness to create a weird subset of Adults who weren't Adults, but Kids who proudly Never Grew Up. Unreality.

All of this destruction originated from the same place, the same attitude.

The phenomenon of Disney Adults today is frequently focused on in the most blatant and obvious manner. We think of the ones who go to to Disney theme parks and whine about everything while acting like brats or the ones who go online to stalk or obsessively tear down anyone who dares think different from the modern Disney Media Conglomerate. However, the mentality does not stop with those obsessed with Disney (or even Disney adjacent properties like Star Wars or Marvel which are no different) but also consumes the forgery of reality known as Geek Culture.

Geek Culture itself is a mutation, born out of the 2000s where the media companies attempted to sell a Geek image to build itself a sort of Disney-like acolyte out of. All Geeks love all Geeky Products! What are Geeky Products? Why, things you were made fun of by those icky normal types who are now trying to co-opt your hobbies to control for themselves out of the blue for some reason. Forget that all of the product and brands were originally sold to kids by the millions for a quarter of a century before: you're special and unique for liking an IP and defending it against the normals (or let's just stop beating around the bush: "normies") who are invading your hobbies because . . . well, they just decided to one day. How dare they? This space was made for you so you could be cordoned off from the world and live in your own reality away from them.

You are superior and above the normie, after all: it's in their name! They're "normal" and normal is inferior. You are not normal; you're better.

Forget that normal people have no ideological compulsion to invade spaces and change them, and forget that these spaces have always been swarming with normal people (you just either never noticed them or paid attention), but it also gives cover to actual subversives to come in because all they need to do is learn the secret codewords and jargon and they can to anything they want when they get in the door. This is also what did eventually happen to Disney before it happened to anything else. These aren't normal people: they're self-centered obsessives who want control, because they are special and above everyone else.

This happened because at a certain point we became aware at how effective mass media was at altering the way people think and behave. The existence of Disney Adults even being a category at all shows just that. By the time of the "Disney Renaissance" in the late 1980s, the people in the company knew what they had and became more aggressive at pushing out what they wanted using the Disney formula but wrapped in the growing irony and cynicism of the time period. It eventually did bottom out, but by that time Disney had seized so much cultural capital (and other studios like Pixar) that they were able to weather the storm and survive like a cockroach in nuclear fallout.

That is why those who think Disney was "taken over" by weirdos or subversives are kind of missing the point. They have a vision now, one obtained through unreality, and they will work to make it real. They are so blinded by this falsehood at this point that in their quest to finally acquire the male demographic with Star Wars and Marvel they absolutely feminized and gutted them without even the least bit of subtlety, and are now scrambling for a way to get males without them somehow. As if they have already forgotten what they did wrong to begin with. No one could behave this way without having been soaked in Unreality for too long.

In other words, they are now lost and spinning out. Disney's peak has passed and as their own works have finally begun to hit the public domain (ironic, isn't it?) and they are quickly learning that very truth. That era is over, and we now are seeing the mistakes for what they were.

This is what the third and final part of Cartoon Aesthetics' series shows. We can now see the end result of the Disney Corporation's conquest of the modern world and the conquest of Fairy Tales. We see the end result of where it ended up: a soulless and empty husk of safe morality and shiny words which ultimately mean nothing and added up to nothing of value, at the end of the day. We see what a post-Disney world is all about.

Not to say that Disney itself never had value or produced anything of worth, but where its philosophy and direction eventually lead to could never go anywhere else. They weren't even necessarily the source of all of this, but more of a spirit of the times finally reaching its end point. The spirit of the 20th century is what it is, and it's long past expired.

The end result of the all of this is in the atomized dead end world we now inhabit. There is no more Pop Culture, there is no more shared monoculture, and there are no more shared values. Just as third places, local community, and the concept of identity itself has been subverted and hollowed out by modernity, so too is the remainder of old empires like the Disney corporation a vapid husk of what it once was. Old IPs made by much more talented and inspired people being worn as a skinsuit by modern Disney Adults who have no higher aspiration than to be a Good Person dictated by whatever the Good Guys in charge of them tell them is Good. Thus their own works must be constantly subverted and "updated" with modern morality and acceptable verbiage. It never ends.

Go get drunk with your friends in Disney World as you celebrate your 35th birthday. That is clearly what Walt himself intended, right? What higher aspiration can you even imagine with a mentality like that.

Nothing truly eternal can be built on or even built in the first place. All that remains is a race to the bottom of lowering standards, tired tropes and aesthetics, and emptiness disguised with bright colors and loud noises. This is the post-Disney world.

We have since lost sight of the original Fairy Tales and their aim to show us the world as it is in multiple forms. Storytelling itself is meant to present wonder, excitement, fascination, and awe--not to lock it down to trope lists, acceptable corporate language, and a weapon against your very neighbors. We have completely inverted them and in the process, lost ourselves.

Until we work to reclaim it, nothing will improve. As the above series subtly states and ends with, unreality only leads to more unreality. People cannot live in proximity with those who do not share their reality: we have all of history to show what that eventually grows into becoming. One vision will have to prevail in the end: and the one less than a century old that itself has been rotted out from the inside is not going to do much other than lead people to pills, head doctors, and the bottle. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what has happened to us.

The only solution is to go back, to remember where those Fairy Tales came from in the first place, and to build off them once again. Dead end roads and failed experiments must eventually be seen for what they are and be abandoned. Truth is more important than lies, and the best stories cannot lie: they can only tell the truth.

Truth is older than trends, it means more than sentimentality, and it runs deeper than cute images and saccharine catchphrases. It has to be rediscovered and reclaimed before everything falls apart worse than it already has. Thankfully, it is not too late yet.

There is more to everything than what we see. It is about time our stories finally reflected that again, otherwise unreality is all we will ever know. We cannot live without truth, we can only exist, and that will never be enough, not when we were made for more than this.

This is what Fairy Tales are for, after all. Until our stories change, we will not, and they cannot change until our perspective does. Here's hoping we manage before it is too late.

A story of a lost soul and a radio station playing in his head! Read Lightning Jim in Mistcreek Tales out now!