Old Fairy Tale Style

>So before the age of Disney, fairy tales used to be more whimsical, and had a more different art style. These sorts of animated fairy tales were usually more close to the source material.

Which cartoons from the 1910s are you talking about, OP?

I got a big book of Grimm's Fairy Tales as a kid, and one thing I'm sort of surprised about is that there's no real sense of causation or morals as I had come to expect. again that might come from having watched the disnified versions when I was younger.

Basically shit gets mad arbitrary.

Example that springs to mind is Snow White and Rose Red.

Two sisters who lived with their mom, live the happiest life they ever could for 5 pages straight, in rediculous detail. A bear comes in, and instead of eating them, the mom invites him inside and the two girls make a new friend.

Seems like a set up for "Don't Judge a Book By It's Cover" kind of story right? It keeps going.

The girls meet a dwarf, who had his beard stuck in some bushes. He's a mean ornery bastard, and screams for help. They snip his beard a little to get him out, tells them to slag off, and then runs off. This happens again with his fishing line, and again with some boulder.

Each time he's a little shit, tells them to piss off. Is this meant to be "Help people out even if they're dicks?"

No. The bear shows up at the end, the dwarf is cleaved in half, and the bear turns out to be a prince covered in gold. And he and his equally handsome prince brother show up and marry the two girls. And they live happily ever after.

Again, weird arbitrary endings.

Theres other stories that get equally wierd. Such as the story about the man who wins magic "make people dance themselves to death" powers from a dwarf and torments a Jew, a Tavern, and eventually an entire court of law. And said guy, lives happily ever after.

Golden Sky Stories is comfy as fuck. Reminds me of that manga about the cute little spirits who live at a Shinto shrine and spend the summer playing with human children.

Also, take a look at this, this is a work by two scholars who attempted to analyze fairly tales down to indvidual, frequently used motifs and grouped and catalogized these by type, so it ca ne use as a sort of make-your-own-fairy-tale kit for a game. Also, it is very interesting reading by itself, I think. catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001276245

Jews, drunks, and oppressive courts denying a man with magic powers his right to make drunks and Jews kill themselves all get btfo by the hero
He got the good end he deserved.

>And we don't see that anymore. I'm not asking for those to come back (this would be on /co/ in that case). However, would such styles of stories work for RPGs?
Yes.

You do however need to prepare your players for "ROLL NOW OR DIE HORRIBLY!" endings, because that's something that's quite common in fairy tales.

Older fairytales have a morality built into the shit gets mad arbitrary.

This is typically preceded by the main character failing to do a certain duty which is expected from society.

The morality is based on the world punishing you for stepping out of line more or less.

It's on Amazon bro. I found it in both English and French.

I'm probably "that guy" in this regard, or a grognar or whatever, but as a kid I figured out that a lot of fairytales were very twisted (I remember one where a smart guy convinced a dumb guy to kill his own mother and go around town with her corpse yelling "old broad for sale!" in hopes of getting rich) and it kind of disgusted me. As I got older I could appreciate the brutality of those old fairy tales. They were cautionary tales, showing (usually younger) audiences what to or what not to do and what to be careful of, lest something horrible happens to you. Disney ruined quite a few of those fairytales by overshadowing with a sterile, 'family friendly' product.

The best example of this may be the Little Mermaid. In the Disney version a dumb teenage mermaid falls in love with a guy she doesn't even know and "true love" conquers all. In the Hans Christian Anderson version the mermaid gets the same deal as in the Disney version (you can walk on land to meet the man you love, but you lose your voice), she ends up saving the prince from certain death, can't speak up to tell him the truth and he falls in love with another woman. They get married and the heartbroken mermaid, now trapped away from the world she knew and in a foreign world without the one person she sacrificed everything for, killed herself.

What does the Disney version teach children: a blatant lie about how 'twue wuv' conquers all.
What does Anderson's version teach us? Don't blindly chase after a man (or a woman) you find attractive, lest you make a fatal mistake.

Which do you think is the more valuable lesson to teach a child?
>B-But children can't be confronted with the fact that people kill themselves!
How sheltered do we want to raise our children? We shouldn't be raising them on porn, South Park and gore videos, but let's not shelter them into a fantasy world where everything is alright. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and that's something we must accept.

*grognard
It's late.