Lately, one of my friends that I don't really like (please don't tell him :-P ) said why I must care so much about fairy tales. After all, hey, that's just fairy tales! Those stories aren't real, are they? And so it seems.
Funny, though, I think fairy tales are the most important stories in the world. Why? Because they're just fairy tales, the kind of stories you heard when you're helpless children, trying to understand everything that's going on in the world. And you learn this "everything that's going on in the world" from these stories. How do you know eating children is a bad idea? Because Big Bad Wolf does that, and that can't be good. How do you know holding envy is not good? Because an evil stepmother does that, and that can't be good, either. How do you know you have to be brave, smart and careful when you're walking in the empty forest? Why must you not open a forbidden door, or listen to the wicked forces? Why do you have to be nice? Because that's exactly what the fairy tales heroes and heroines do. It's all simple as that.
This is the world without fairy tales: Stepmothers will mistreat all of their stepchildren, because nobody tells them not to. Fathers will leave their children in a dark forest and let them being eaten by packs of wolves, because nobody tells them the opposite. Children will eat someone else's bowls and holds grudge from one another. Jealousy is common. Envy and wrath is everywhere.
Regardless you believe it or not, fairy tales represent the society. And when fairy tales are no more, then the society represented in it has no moral anymore. There's nothing that separates good from bad. Okay, delete the fairy tales, and the world might as well crumble into pieces.
One quote I quite like is from Terry Pratchett: "Somewhere, all stories are real and all dreams come true." And that's exactly what fairy tales are: they're not real in the way you can see it, but they exist in human's mind. You can't say, "Oh, look! That's Cinderella there, running from A to B!" but these stories exist in the moral and consciousness of society. They construct the way humans are thinking and believing. And when you delete the existence of fairy tales, the society itself must disappear.
