Bluebeard

Everyone knows the story of Bluebeard. Perhaps the most infamous pirate who ever lived, Bluebeard's real name was Edward Teach and... Wait, no, that's Blackbeard. Bluebeard was a wealthy recluse with an unusually colored beard, and also a pattern serial killer who murdered his wives and hung their bodies in a special murder room. So, just a few minor differences.

The original Bluebeard story tells the tale of a woman who marries the titular character and later discovers the bodies of all his former wives. Frightened for her life, she manages to buy time for her brothers to arrive and kill the murderer. The same basic story is told in tales like Fitcher's Bird, the The Robber Bridegroom, and Mr. Fox. These stories are all similar, but my favorite is Mr. Fox.

The other stories lost the popularity contest for various reasons. Bluebeard had a decent chance thanks to the sway of being the best-known version, to the point the story archetype is named after it, but Perrault's hamfisted and sexist moral at the end robbed it of its chances. Besides that, the main character lacked any real initiative. While she did discover the fate of the previous brides, she depended on her brothers to save her without any real action on her part besides sending someone for help. The Robber Bridegroom was better, but the main character also ignored several major hints that there was something wrong with her husband, including outright verbal warnings from wildlife. Fitcher's Bird came the closest, as it involved cunning on the part of the protagonist in multiple parts, but Mr. Fox won out for me because of its presentation.

A common part of all these stories is the death of the Bluebeard character. In Bluebeard this occurs when the protagonist's brothers arrive and kill him, in Fitcher's Bird it's when he's trapped and burned in what he thought to be a wedding reception, and in The Robber Bridegroom it's when he's captured and executed by authorities. In Mr. Fox, it comes as a culmination of a buildup created by the protagonist. Before the wedding, she's witnessed her fiancé, Mr. Fox, carrying a dead body to his home. She'd collected a severed hand and ring from the body and prepared for the wedding the next day. There she recounted a peculiar dream she'd had, one that bore a peculiar resemblance to the scene she'd witnessed the night before. But it was only a dead, she repeated, even as she repeated "Be bold, be bold," the inscription from the archway to Mr. Fox's castle where's she'd seen it. At the climax of the tale she revealed the hand and ring, and Mr. Fox was cut down by her brothers and friends.

The heroine of this story was brave, cunning, and had a taste for theatrics. She was brave enough to uncover her husband's misdeeds, as with all the protagonists of these stories. She was cunning enough to avoid being found out and set a trap, as with the protagonists of all but Bluebeard. But only the protagonist of The Robber Bridegroom has the same type of theatrics as her, and between the two, Mr. Fox's heroine pulled it off better. She gives Mr. Fox chances to interject, where he says "It is not so, nor it was not so. And God forbid it should be so." He continues to dig his own hole of denials as she builds up to the reveal, a reveal she could have made easily at any time but decided to drive in. She wanted him to know that she knew, letting the dread build before the final reveal. It's not often that our protagonists get to pull off such smug gloating, and it's satisfying in both a narrative and a schadenfreude sense to read.

Rags to Riches

The rags to riches trope is a popular one, driven by everyone desire to be able to become wildly successful no matter where they are in life now. Two examples of this motif are Disney's Cinderella and the film Pretty Woman.

Cinderella is a classic story that most people know, and the Disney version is the most common version you'll see referenced in the present day. In it, Cinderella lives with her stepmother and stepsisters who abuse and neglect her. Eventually she manages to escape with the help of her fairy godmother and the grace of a prince, and goes on to live happily. Pretty Woman is a notably more risqué version of the trope, as the female lead Vivian Ward is a hooker on the streets of Los Angeles. Eventually she manages to rise above her current station when she's hired by wealthy businessman Edward Lewis, who falls for her.

Both of these stories focus heavily on the idea of someone rising above their less than favorable station through the aid of a romantic beneficiary. Of the two, Pretty Woman focuses much more on the characters involved, with Edward Lewis serving as a deuteragonist rather than a plot device wrapped up as a character. Though both feature love as the primary factor through which the female lead rises up, but this is a substantially more significant role in Cinderella where the prince falls in love over a single night, abiding by fairy tale-esque rules.

The rags-to-riches motif is, at its core, wish fulfillment. Everyone wants to become wealthy and successful beyond their wildest dreams, and often wish to do so with little effort on their part. The lottery is a perfect example of this, where people seek to gain great wealth purely through luck, and this mindset is reflected in tales like Cinderella where the prince falls in love after a single meeting and then goes out of his way to help her.

This is not impossible in real life, and Wikipedia even has a page dedicated solely to tracking instances of this. However, this is far less common than it once was. Economic and social factors in modern day America make it very difficult for someone to rise out of the economic segment they were born into, much less become rich. That is not to say it is impossible, but such cases are usually dependent on factors that cannot simply be overcome through hard work alone.

Sonne

Snow White is a story that has been adapted in many different ways by many different people, often in outright contradictory ways. One of the more out-there interpretations is the music video of the song Sonne by Rammstein.

It combines a number of details from the more common interpretations we read with some rather unique ideas. The most notable is the interpretation of dwarves as modern miners, making use of hydraulic picks and drills to mine their gold. But there are parts it keeps consistent, like the traditional description of her appearance in clothes that near perfectly mimic those of Disney's version of Snow White. The apples appear as a motif, but the gold is given more prevalence as the cause for her "death."

The characters are the most distinguishable. In most tales the dwarves are secondary characters, but in Sonne they are the focus. They are presented in a much grimier, down-to-earth manner than miners typically would be in this story, living in a rather utilitarian place and covered in the dust of the mine. Snow White is only a secondary character, and actually seems more like an antagonist. She forces herself into their home and makes them serve her, punishing them on a whim. Despite this, the traditional dynamic of the relationship between Snow White and the dwarves seems to remain, as they don't seem antagonistic towards her and genuinely seem to mourn her death. Instead, she serves more like a cruel tyrant or mother who they obey even as they fear her.

Of our readings, the story this version most resembled was Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman. In both Snow White is a monstrous figure, a vampire in SGA and a cruel sort of dominatrix in Sonne. Rather than being her friends or allies the dwarves are her subjects and serve her out of fear or deference to her power. However, Sonne is a much more self contained version. Done away with are the stepmother and the hunter, leaving Snow White's temporary death in her own hands. In SGA these things are actually given even more focus, with the stepmother serving as the viewpoint character, protagonist, and hero. Also in both Snow White still gets her "happy ending" even as it's not-so-happy for the other characters.

Of all the versions we read, my favorite was the Brother's Grimm's Snow White. Due to its use or interesting structure like the sevenfold repetition with the mirror and the rule of three with the stepmothers attempts on Snow White's life, it was quite good in form. As for function, the characters were rather well done and I enjoyed the manner in which the story progressed in an understandable way.