Fractured Fairy Tale

The Papa Bear went to the second little piglet who lived in... a house of cards?!

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful Damsel in Distress, a handsome hero on an epic quest, his magical sidekick, and a spell they needed to break before the stroke of midnight.

But wait! The damsel's not so distressed after all! The hero's a buffoon! The heroine falls for the homely comic relief sidekick instead of the Knight in Shining Armor! The Wicked Stepmother is an angel with a bratty stepdaughter! The sweet little girl in the red cloak is a Heroic Comedic Sociopath! And just about everyone's ridiculously Genre Savvy! And that's before you get to the ending, which may be pointedly different from the familiar version.

What you have here is an example of a Fractured Fairy Tale, a story with all the basic elements of a classic fairy tale, but all of them subverted or spoofed, and with modern-day sensibilities and morals. May also be a parody of fairy tales.

Virtually every Fractured Fairy Tale features (at least) one of perhaps a dozen fairy tales that are considered common knowledge in the culture. This is because they don't work without the audience recognizing the original and so being able to appreciate the divergences. When the Fractured Fairy Tale sticks to, and warps, one specific tale, it is a form of the Twice-Told Tale. Massive Multiplayer Crossover is also possible, though it, too, sticks mostly to the best known tales—perhaps even more so, since the characters have shorter periods to make their character known.

These are a lot more common than the naive observer would be led to believe. In fact, just about any myth or folktale presented to anyone over the age of 12 is bound to contain subversions of some sort, to the point that a completely non-ironic fairy tale itself feels like an irony.

May contain elements of Grimmification. Nursery Rhyme elements and characters frequently also appear. Aesop's Fables are somewhat rarer but not unknown. Not to be confused with Derailed Fairy Tale, when the chaos comes from outside the setting of the story.

The Trope Namer comes from a Rocky and Bullwinkle segment of the same title and overall premise.

Compare and contrast Ironic Nursery Tune and Derailed Fairy Tale (when the listener or the teller takes the story Off the Rails). Subtrope of External Retcon.

Examples of Fractured Fairy Tale include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Hayate the Combat Butler! Season 2, there is a part in an episode where Alice In Wonderland Hinagiku version is shown. You can guess it wasn't very close to the original.
  • One of the Full Metal Panic! short stories is a complete parody of Cinderella. Cinderella (played by Kaname) learns the moral that "depend on your own hard work and initiative rather than relying on fairy godmothers", sells the glass shoe for ludicrous profit to a wannabe princess, and goes into the wandering merchant business with the fairy (played by Sousuke).
  • In Fruits Basket, when they realize how woefully miscast the characters are in a "Cinderella" play, they rewrite it. An Elegant Gothic Lolita Cinderella is impervious to her Wicked Stepmother's demands, but she loves her sweet and innocent stepsister, who suffers at her mother's hands because she wishes to marry her off. While the Fairy Godparent succeeds in getting them to the ball (after Cinderella asked him to burn the palace down), and the not very charming prince does find her (though Cinderella can tell he's more interested in the stepsister), in the end Cinderella and her sister open a yakiniku shop. The play is renamed "Sorta Cinderella".
  • Yu Yu Hakusho's Dark Tournament arc had a combat team named Fractured Fairy Tales. All of their members were based off of Japanese folk legends, and Reverse Urashima claims that they are fighting to get better endings for themselves, but he himself thinks that the stories are educational, and is thus willing to lose to Kurama. It turns out that he's not only lying about throwing the match, but the fairy tale origins of the team members may also be false.
  • Ludwig Kakumei written by Kaori Yuki, deconstructs, spoofs and Grimmificates all at the same time. appropriately enough all the tales portrayed are based on the Brothers Grimm Version, in which the 2 main characters get their names from.
  • MAR takes the "character as a Fractured Fairy Tale" idea to its logical extreme. Nearly every minor to important character is a parody of at least one fairy tale. Ginta always takes the time to make note of this, because he's obsessed with the stories. Justified by the fact that Mär Heaven is the world of Märchen, or fairy tales. Just on Ginta's team, we have:
    • Princess Snow. From her name, we have a play on Snow White (she even fights a character who has a magic sword ask her "who is the fairest one of all"), Her introduction is more Snow White stuff combined with a bit of Sleeping Beauty (Damsel in Distress is in a death-like state, awakened with a kiss... sort of), and she runs away from her wicked stepmother, like Cinderella.
    • Jack, who is a young farmer who lives in semi-poverty with his mother. His dream is to one day grow a beanstalk so tall he can see the world from it.
    • Alviss, who is followed about by a jealous fairy named Bell, and who goes on to defeat a Chess Piece named Mr. Hook.
    • Dorothy, who is a huge The Wonderful Wizard of Oz reference: she is a "good witch" named Dorothy, and her guardians include a scarecrow, a metal knight, a lion, and a dog named Toto.
    • And the team itself was formed by a fortune teller prophesying that Snow would have to gather "the Seven Dwarves" to defend Mär Heaven. The Chess Pieces have even more, considering how many of them there are.
  • A lot of Princess Tutu revolves around playing around with fairytale tropes (and Swan Lake in particular) and subverting them, while also staying within the Magical Girl genre. The knight's armor isn't exactly shiny, the Prince ends up marrying the Dark Magical Girl, and several fairytales are mentioned and commented on. For example...
    • The main character and the prince end up trapped in a woman's restaurant while she keeps bringing them more and more food, and Ahiru thinks it's Hansel and Gretel and they're being fattened up for her to eat. In reality, the woman is just very lonely and trying to make them stay.
    • The opening narration at one point questions whether Sleeping Beauty really wanted to wake up, or if she wanted to keep dreaming.
    • In an episode titled "Cinderella", the main character loses the pendant that allows her to become the Magical Girl, and it's found by one of the male characters. He spends the rest of the episode trying to find her...because he considers Princess Tutu an enemy and wants to attack her.
    • And it still works as a straight fairy tale.
  • Used in Monster, where elements of fairy tales are brought together to inspire Mind Rape and nightmares.
  • In Ugly Duckling's Love Revolution, Hitomi and Souta are trying to pick out a fairy tale play to perform for the kindergarten class, and Souta latches onto "Hansel and Gretel". He even writes his own script, which involves Hansel and Gretel being found by The Sweets Fairy, who is actually a princess under the witch's spell. A prince falls in love with her and by eating sweets together, she returns to her true form.
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena is this trope + Grimmification incarnate.
  • Fairy Tail managed to slip one into their play. It begins with a knight setting out to rescue the princess from an evil villain, but aside from said knight's stage fright, he doesn't even find that villain. The man he does find summons an evil dragon... that he then teams up with the knight to defeat for no apparent reason, and they both happily flee when the princess somehow unties herself and claims she'll hold the dragon off. It makes less sense if you see it.


Comic Books

  • The Franco-belgian comic Garulfo.
  • Fables does this. For starters, Prince Charming is actually a scoundrel who's been married and divorced three times, has had numerous affairs, and is a total womanizer. The Big Bad Wolf is still frightening but proves to be a sweet and loving husband to Snow White and father to their "cubs". Cinderella is a secret agent, Snow White splits Goldilocks' head open with an axe, the three little pigs start a rebellion and Goldilocks is a gun-toting revolutionary who's sleeping with Baby Bear.
  • Nightmares & Fairy Tales loves this. Virtually every story is some sort of fairy tale variation, with twists. For example, Little Red Riding Hood has a love of wolves and later turns out to be a werewolf herself. Cinderella's prince is a cruel man who she has no desire to marry and the stepmother summons demons. Snow White becomes a zombie after her stepmother rips her heart out and uses it to be beautiful. And Belle is a lesbian who is beaten and locked in the basement (and presumably raped) on her religious father's orders before he finally hands her over to the Beast, who just so happens to be her lesbian-lover under a curse.
  • Played with in Calvin and Hobbes—Hobbes is a predatory animal and Calvin often sees things from his point of view, so inverting the ending makes it happier than they would have found the original version.
  • In Issue #54 of Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose, Raven finds herself skipping from fairy tale to fairy tale - in order, "Snow White", "The Little Mermaid", "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Cinderella". She proceeds to screw with the usual order of events and deliver feminine empowerment speeches... while stripping the girls naked and Gothing them up. Because to be a confident woman you have to show your tits and/or dress like a stripper. On the plus side, she inadvertently turns Red into B. B. Hood.
  • Nodwick runs through a whole series of these [dead link] , all of which go Off the Rails very quickly. Partially, this is because Yeagar, Artax and Nodwick are forced into the roles of the tales' main characters and begin breaking character as they start building a resistance to the mind-affecting spell affecting them.


Film

  • The Princess Bride is mostly a fairy tale played straight, with a few notable subversions thrown in. Most fairy tales end with a beautiful girl getting married to a handsome prince. Buttercup's meeting and engagement to the handsome prince is completely skipped over, and he's the villain. The real hero is technically an infamous pirate who kidnaps her. Lastly, a climactic swordfight between the hero and villain is notably averted.
    • They still manage to fit the climactic swordfight in (and it was properly researched, too), but it's done by two members of the supporting cast.
  • The film version of Ella Enchanted. The book is borderline; for there the fairy tale setting really only exists to provide a fairy godmother. Other than that the plot could almost take place in any setting.
    • Cosmetically, maybe, but the story itself relies on quite a few fantastical elements.
  • Shrek, which makes the ogre the main character, the damsel anything but in distress, and the Prince Charming the villain, even coming with a subversion of True Love's Kiss. The beginning says it all, really, starting with a generic fairytale storybook that almost immediately gets used as toilet paper.
  • Enchanted occasionally borders on this.
  • Hoodwinked. Mixed with Troperiffic Affectionate Parody to some other genres, but still based on fairy tale.
  • Happily N'Ever After
  • The Fall. Although a lot of fairy tale elements are played entirely straight.
  • Despite most folks thinking of it as a return to form for Disney, The Princess and the Frog has some elements of this.


Literature

  • Gregory Maguire has made an entire career of this:
    • In Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, the stepsisters aren't wicked in the slightest. Ruth is slow-witted and Iris is quite practical and is the main character. The Cinderella character, Clara, is initially bratty but the three become good friends. While the stepmother is prone to greed (as is Clara's father), she is not evil so much as concerned about the well-being of her daughters and certain that Clara will ruin their chances to financially secure themselves. There are no magic elements.
    • Wicked and its sequels tackle the Land of Oz.
    • Mirror, Mirror retells "Snow White".
  • Simon Hawke's Reluctant Sorcerer trilogy is so directly inspired and informed by the original Fractured Fairy Tales that you can hear Edward Everett Horton playing the role of the Omniscient Narrator.
  • The Discworld novel Witches Abroad, where the witches are a disrupting influence in the Theory of Narrative Causality, trying to stop a Happily Ever After that is nothing of the kind. The scene where we see what it takes to make a "Big Bad Wolf" and what Granny Weatherwax does about it is a total Tear Jerker.
  • The short novel The Glass-shoe Slip-up is set after the events of "Cinderella", where we find out why the not-so-wicked stepmother kept her hidden away: Cinderella is a complete social disgrace with bad table manners, a love of raunchy jokes, a fancy for certain... odd practices in the royal bedroom, and many other disastrous details that make Prince Charming very determined to track down the Fairy Godmother so she can correct her mistake.
  • Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes turns up on banned book lists for the Family Unfriendly Aesops it steers classic fairy tales into.
  • Stardust - both straight-up and fractured; the hero is successful on his quest, but instead of winning the girl he went questing for, by the time his quest is over he's fallen for someone else.
  • Neil Gaiman's short story Snow Glass Apples is a retelling of Snow White with the stepmother as the main heroine who realizes her stepdaughter is not quite human.
  • The book Caperucita Roja y Otras Historias Perversas (Red Riding Hood and other Vicious Stories) of Triunfo Arciniegas, is all about this.
  • This is the basic concept of Mercedes Lackey's Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series, in which the ambient magic in the land tries to make all fairy tales play out straight (no matter how the characters might feel about it), and the only way to get out of it is to shift the situation so that it fits another tale better.
  • One of Bruce Coville's Book of... short story collections (specifically, one of the two Book of Magic collections-I forget which specifically) features a story by Patricia C. Wrede which sets up fairy godmothers and bad fairies and the like as part of the same organization, and is told from the point of view of a fairy godmother explaining why she wants a transfer to the curses department; namely, her last case, which was the straw that broke the unicorn's back. It sounds like a pretty standard Cinderella story; girl wants to go to ball, stepmother said no, fairy godmother is thus determined to see that she does, in fact, go. The problems start from square one: Cindy is tall, gangly, big-footed and not the prettiest thing ever. Her stepsister is the gorgeous waif the godmother has come to expect her clients to be, and is helpful, sympathetic, and wants nothing more than for Cindy to be happy. Then it turns out "Cinders" was the client's idea in the first place, and it's a stage name. She's not interested in the prince, she wants to play the fiddle as a musician at the ball. The godmother makes the best of things (she manages to save Cindy from getting roped into a "standard 10-percent contract" with a talent agent who looks like an encroaching mushroom and, when he's too drunk to lie, shamelessly admits that it means she forks over all but 10 percent of whatever she earns), but she's pretty despondent by the time the night's out (not least because the not-remotely-ugly stepsister does end up in the prince's arms) and after a case like that, her superiors will probably understand if she wants to transfer.
    • Speaking of Wrede, her Enchanted Forest Chronicles series takes place in a fantasy setting and has many fairy tale elements which are lovingly subverted or parodied, spearheaded by protagonist Cimorene, a princess who's so non-traditional that she volunteered to be a dragon's princess because it meant getting away from her boring life.
  • The children's book The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales. Enough said.
  • The "politically correct" fairy tales by James Finn Garner.
  • Howl's Moving Castle, for the most part. While not necessarily a "fairy tale" overall, it does subvert, lampshade, and otherwise mess with many a fairy-tale trope.
  • The short stories in Andrzej Sapkowski's earlier The Witcher books are all or almost all this pushed up to eleven. The Beauty and the Beast? The Beast likes his transformation, whereas the Beauty is so much more monstrous than he is. Don't even ask about what he did to Snow White.
  • In Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper, based on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, Beauty tricks her half sister into being pricked by the magical spindle. Once escaping the sleeping curse, Beauty travels through different eras in history and unwittingly causes other fairy tales to happen.
  • In The Storyteller by Saki, a man on a train is being annoyed by some little children whose aunt can't keep them quiet by telling them boring normal stories, so he tells them one with a Family Unfriendly Space Whale Aesop (don't be too well-behaved, or you'll be awarded medals that will clink against each other at an inopportune time, leading you to be eaten by a hungry wolf).
  • The Enchanted Forest Chronicles is full of these. The first book, for example, starts with a princess running away from home in order to work for a dragon.
  • The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig, where the wolves are the ones constructing houses, and the pig the one knocking them down. It's a case of Sequel Escalation as the first house is made of bricks, the second of concrete, and the third of barbed wire, steel plates, and heavy metal padlocks.
  • Tanith Lee's Red as Blood: Tales from the Sisters Grimmer is a collection of fairy tale retellings, most of them much darker, one with a science fiction twist. What Snow White's Seven Dwarfs turn out to be really creeped me out when I read it.
  • In Jim C. Hines' The Stepsister Scheme Cinderella's stepsisters kidnap her Prince and she, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White (who are nothing like one would expect) have to go save him.
  • In John C. Wright's The Golden Age, Phaethon explains the "true" myth of Phaethon: obviously the claim that he burned the earth while riding the chariot of the sun, so that Jupiter had to strike him down with a thunderbolt, was false, because the earth had not been burned up, and so the likely story was that Jupiter had struck him down to ensure that mortals would not succeed at it, and the moral is that beings who think they are gods should not be allowed near thunderbolts.
    • In The Golden Transcedence, Pandora explains her own name: it's not because of her spate of questions or her being a plague, but because what Pandora really received was foresight, which allowed women to foresee all the plagues that would harm their children, but also to avert them, which gave them hope.
  • Beastly is pretty much a modern-day adaptation of Beauty and the Beast told from the Beast's perspective. The Beast is a Jerk Jock with an emotionally distant media mogul father, the Beauty is a Hollywood Homely bookworm with a drug-dealing father, and the setting is modern New York. It still ends Happily Ever After, though.
  • In Aaron Allston's Galatea in 2-D, the characters Red and Penny are a painting of Achilles and Pentheselia, but they do not match the myth and are indeed a Battle Couple. Which means that he didn't kill her and (for in-universe Squick) didn't rape her corpse.
  • The Ice Dragon, a short story by George R. R. Martin is an odd example in that it isn't a retelling of an existing fairy tale, nor do the events of it much resemble a fairy tale. Nevertheless it has the feel of one, in a way that is quite difficult to explain.
  • Since it's by the author of Ella Enchanted, Fairest also falls under this. The Snow White character is actually ugly (or at least Hollywood Homely), and her singing, while popular at first, eventually forces her to flee the kingdom because the townspeople think it makes her an inhuman seductress. She does wind up living with dwarves (or rather, gnomes), and it turns out she's probably descended from gnomes herself. The Wicked Queen is still a bit of a Yandere, but she and Snow White are friends first, and it turns out she was mostly being manipulated by the Complete Monster inside the magic mirror all along. And the story is actually set in a country where people sing most of the time.
  • Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber is a collection of short fantasy stories for adults based on reinterpreting and subverting common fairytale themes - often based on the moral and adult subtext of the original itself, in order to pick apart their gender stereotypes and social ideas. Enter a Little Red Riding Hood who ends up "knowing" the wolf after he's killed her grandmother; a Snow White who is created as a product of the father's desires, dies at the prick of a rose's thorn and is subsequently deflowered by him; a Beauty who finds that she is far more comfortable becoming a Beast rather than for her Beast to become a human... fascinating, if slightly disturbing, reading. For the intrigued, it can be found online here: though the experience is undoubtedly better when it is read in physical form.
  • "Melisande: or, Long and Short Division" is a highly inventive and somewhat tongue-in-cheek retelling of "Rapunzel". Just to start, the king is Genre Savvy and knows better than to throw a christening party that will inevitably leave one fairy out and piss her off, but it doesn't stop the princess from being cursed to be bald. Fortunately, the king has a spare wish from his fairy godmother, but the princess's careless wish for Hair of Gold that will grow faster the more it's cut leads to predictable problems, and it takes several attempts and the logic of a wise prince to make her hair stop growing without making her grow into a giant (long story; read the online tale for the full story!).
  • Twice Upon a Time re-tells "Rumpelstiltskin" from the point-of view of the girl's father, who gets into tax-trouble, and all the "Prince Charming gets the girl" stories from the point of view of the prince. He eventually turns into the Beast, jaded and nearly insane, and ends up with Beauty because her pets don't sing (She's only got the horse, silent as the grave, by the way), she doesn't do fancy fixtures (Cinderella, who drained the treasury), have a blood/ sharp stuff fetish (Sleeping Beauty, whose "thing" got way out of hand), or like groupsex (Snow White, whom he executed for cheating-with all seven dwarves). Hansel and Gretel have a different ending, they get adopted by Rumpelstiltskin and his wife.
  • James Thurber's Fables for Our Time.
  • The Rumpelstiltskin Problem is a collection of short stories that aim to correct the Fridge Logic and Plot Holes of the original fairy tale (why did the king believe so readily that a poor miller's daughter can make gold out of straw at will? Why did Rumpelstiltskin agree to spin straw into gold for a ridiculously small payment for the first two days? Wouldn't marriage to a king who threatened to kill you if you didn't make enough gold for him actually be problematic? etc). The twists vary with each retelling: one of them has Rumpelstiltskin as the true hero who the miller's daughter falls in love with and eventually runs away from her unhappy marriage to be with him, for example.
  • In Kate DiCamillo's The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, a character tells a story where the princess, as an animal, ends up killed and stewed because she was unloving.
  • The anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me is a book filled with stories based on screwed-up fairy tales. It includes short stories by Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, and a brilliant retelling of "Donkeyskin" by Aimee Bender.
  • The novel Snow White by Daniel Barthelme is an all but unrecognizable Setting Update of the fairy tale written in a stream-of-consciousness sort of style designed to irritate the reader.
  • Cinder by Marissa Meyer is a retelling of Cinderella in the Crap Saccharine World of the distant future. In it, Linh Cinder is a cyborg and Prince Kai (Prince Charming) is the prince of the Eastern Commonwealth (aka east Asia). In this retelling, Prince Kai is actually charming as opposed to being Prince Charmless like in many others.


Live Action TV

  • Monty Python's Fairy Tale sketch, featured in one of their German TV specials and on an album. Ya de buckety, rum ting fadoo...
  • A famous episode of The Monkees, "Fairy Tale" plays with this trope with many a humorous twist, including Michael Nesmith in drag, playing a hilariously obnoxious princess.
  • The miniseries The Tenth Kingdom places a couple of contemporary New Yorkers into a world where all the fairy tales took place centuries before, and plays fast and loose with fairy tale tropes.
    • An interesting variation in that the New Yorkers are familiar with the modern versions, but it's the darker Grimm versions that actually happened in this universe. This leads to natives having to explain the differences to them and the audience.
  • Kermit's Sesame Street News Flashes tended to be these.
  • Jim Henson's Frog Prince contains traces of this. Hey, Cinderella! very cleanly fits the bill, between the ridiculously over-the-top hamminess of the stepmother, the dippiness of the Prince, the running gag of how bad the fairy godmother is at magic, and Kermit's Genre Savvy nature being ignored. Oh, and there's the ball itself, which features a large number of Muppet monsters (and Santa Claus) and basically serves as a precursor to the ballroom dancing sketches from The Muppet Show.
  • Another Jim Henson example: The educational special The Muppets on Puppets includes a skit where Rowlf attempts to narrate a fairy tale for the other Muppets to act out, but the story keeps getting changed on him. Cinderella's stepmother sends her to take a basket of goodies to her granny, and in the middle of the wood she meets Hansel, who is taking Gretel the cow to market...
  • The final episode of Tales from the Crypt retold "The Three Little Pigs" as a bloody tale where the wolf messily eats the first two pigs, then frames the third for the murder, resulting in a trial in a Kangaroo Court.
  • The Goodies and the Beanstalk: "Based on the traditional fairy tale ... 'Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs'."
  • The fairy tales in Once Upon a Time are quite fractured. For example, Snow White was a forest bandit who met Prince Charming by robbing his carriage, Jiminy Cricket was a man turned into a cricket to serve as Geppetto's guide, Cinderella made a Deal with the Devil to go to her ball, and Little Red Riding Hood is unknowingly a werewolf that terrorizes her village on full moons. The chief point of fracture seems to be Rumpelstiltskin, who in this continuity is basically Satan and who has so far appeared in nearly every fairy tale portrayed to change either its backstory or its ending.


Music

  • The first part of Cole Porter's song "Two Little Babes in the Wood" is Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale played straight. The second part, "for the tired businessman," has the orphaned girls go from Rags to Riches and move to New York.
  • The music video of Kanon Wakeshima's "Lolitawork Libretto Storytelling by solita" features the J-Pop singer running around as in a storybook populated by living cut-outs from old illustration and basically messing around with various fairytales, such as cutting down Rapunzel's tower with a pair of giant scissors, turning the wolf chasing after pigs into a domesticated cat, shrinking Cinderella's glass slipper and waking up Sleeping Beauty/Snow White with an alarm clock. Also features other random shenanigans often associated with fairy tales like playing cards, giant fauna, wild animals willing to listen to a cello performance, gothic lolita clothing (which is a standard for Kanon, anyway) and ticking clocks.
  • Paramore's song Brick by Boring Brick is about a naive little girl who lives in a fairy tale-and the narrator's trying to pull her out into the real world.
  • There's a song by Green Jelly called "Three Little Pigs", a twisted, modern version of the story about the pigs taking safety in shelters while trying to protect themselves from The Big Bad Wolf... and then they call Rambo near the end of the song. Also, the music video for the song is a claymation video, with a scene of the band with puppets for a few seconds.
  • Speaking of "Three Little Pigs", Insane Clown Posse completely fracture the story in the rap song "Piggie Pie", about hunting down "piggies" (crooked/evil/racist cops whose houses are made of wood, bricks, and gold, rather than straw, sticks and bricks) in order to make a "piggie pie".
  • Red as Blood by Cecilia Eng is a filk song retelling Red as Blood by Tanith Lee, in turn retelling a Perspective Flip variant of Snow White.

Newspaper Comics

  • Often in Frank and Ernest, like the Hood family feud: Little Red Riding can't believe that Robin robbed Granma and gave it to the poor.
  • In Peanuts, Lucy retells "Snow White": she was having a horrible time sleeping until she got this apple from a witch to help, and then, just as she was settling down to a good night's sleep, this prince came and woke her up.


Theatre


Video Games

  • While Okami plays it a little more straight than the examples above, and is based on Japanese folk tales rather than European ones, it does feature quite a few fractured fairytale elements.
  • In American Mcgees Grimm, you play an ugly little dwarf who goes around messing up "cutesy" fairy tales, making them dark and violent again.
  • The game Fairytale Fights has four Fairytale protagonists (Jack, Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the Emperor of The Emperor's New Clothes) attempt to regain their former glory via killing everything in their way in as violent a way as possible.
  • Flash RPG game Dragon Fable has elements of this trope, including some major Deconstructions. It's all for the Rule of Funny of course.
  • Although technically Alice's Adventures In Wonderland isn't a fairytale, American McGee's Alice shows Wonderland as twisted and violent after Alice's parents die in a fire and she's sent to a mental institution.
  • It's hard to tell in King's Quest if the writers are going to play their fairy tale tropes straight or veer into one of these.
  • Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ. That's all.
  • Emily Short's Interactive Fiction game Alabaster bills itself as a "fractured fairy tale" of Snow White. Not only does Alabaster follow in Neil Gaiman's footsteps of heavily implying Snow White to be a vampire or something else not quite human, but it has a Perspective Flip of the huntsman being the PC and having more than one dark secret of his own.
    • There are also two earlier works from Emily Short, Bronze and Glass, that are fractured retellings of "Beauty and The Beast" and "Cinderella", respectively. Bronze makes the Beast more morally ambiguous, fills his castle with numerous secrets that the PC of Beauty/Belle has to uncover herself, and even gives her the option to kill the Beast if she wishes to do so; Glass gives Cinderella a secret that causes the Prince to have her executed in one ending, and even the happy ending is quite atypical in its treatment of the Prince and Cinderella's relationship.
  • My Sims Kingdom has elements of this, especially on Capital Island and Cutopia.
    • The Sims Medieval has the quest "Legend of the Talking Frog," a fractured Frog Prince that, depending on your approach, involves either kissing the frog or finding out the frog was an evil prince in his human life and serving his legs to the King.
  • Conker's Bad Fur Day, to some extent, starts off fairly lighthearted, but the second half of the game begins to turn into a nightmare.


Web Original

Webcomics

Western Animation

  • Named for the "Fractured Fairy Tales" segments in Rocky and Bullwinkle, which would take classic fairy tales and hilariously parody them.
  • Looney Tunes shorts did this a lot, to the point that a whole disc in one of the DVD box sets focuses on them. "Little Red Riding Hood", "The Three Little Pigs", "Jack and the Beanstalk" and "Goldilocks and The Three Bears" were particularly popular targets, with different versions to fit various characters and their shticks (Bugs Bunny, Sylvester and Tweety, etc.).
    • One of Chuck Jones' last WB cartoons, "I Was a Teenage Thumb", a blithely absurdist telling of "Tom Thumb", was light-years apart from one of his first, the maudlin, Disney-esque "Tom Thumb in Trouble".
  • Same with the early Hanna-Barbera comedy shorts through 1965 or so.
  • Arguably, Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood
    • Also Little Rural Riding Hood and Swing Shift Cinderella.
    • Then there's his Droopy cartoon The Three Little Pups, featuring a Wolf even more deadpan than Droopy himself.
  • The Jim Henson Company's Unstable Fables
  • Martha Speaks: "Martha Spins A Tale"
  • The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh episode "Three Little Piglets" has Pooh try to narrate the story of the Three Little,[1] only for the story to keep on going Off the Rails due to Pooh's tendency to constantly think of honey and Tigger's tendency to butt in and make changes to the story like turning the Big Bad Wolf into the Big Bad Bunny and conjuring up the house of cards that can be seen in the above page image. And then somehow Rabbit ends up doused in honey at the end of it.
  • Rugrats has a few examples. An episode revolving around Angelica telling Chuckie his Step-Mother must be evil resulting in him imagining himself as "Finster-Ella" and a DTV with a number of these comes to mind.
  • Rocko's Modern Life had an episode where Rocko and Heffer attempt to tell Filburt the story of Hansel and Debbie, in which they get captured by a witch and then a giant, have their genders switched around, and then the witch feeds Cinderheffer a mint that turns him into a wooden puppet. Don't worry, Rocko revives him/her by putting the witch's shoes on him.
  • This was pretty much the point of the British television series Wolves, Witches and Giants.
  • In Daria, she and Jane tell these to a pair of kids they're babysitting. For example, in their version Cinderella has the Fairy Godmother make her the first female president, while the Prince realizes that the monarchy is obsolete and opens a video store.

Jane: And the dish ran away with the spoon, but Hawaii was the only state that would recognize the marriage as legal.

    • More a case of Grimmification, but in another episode Daria's family is camping and telling scary stories, and Daria picks "Hansel and Gretel", delivering it in her usual monotone:

Daria: So the witch tore Hansel's arm off, popped it in her mouth, said, "Hey, pretty good," and within minutes had devoured the rest of his body, leaving only the lower intestine for fear of bacteria. Gretel she decided she wanted to hold onto for a while, so she crammed her into the freezer the best she could.

  • Tales from the Cryptkeeper had two episodes, "The Sleeping Beauty" and "Chuck (and Melvin) and the Beanstalk", both starring a set of twins, one an idiotic Miles Gloriosus and the other his more practical nerd brother.
  • Muppet Babies examples include "Slipping Beauty", "Snow White and the Seven Muppets", and "By the Book".
  • An episode of Pinky Elmyra and The Brain has Brain, against his will, telling Elmyra the "real" story of Cinderella, in which the actual protagonist is an intelligent mouse (played by Brain and named Cranky Mouseykin by Elmyra) who invents leather shoes for the people in the kingdom of Fairyland and has "Cinderelmyra" wear them to the prince's birthday party.
  • There once was an ugly barnacle. He was so ugly that everyone died. The End.
  • The series finale of The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, "Sonically Ever After", involves Robotnik turning expies of some more famous Grimm's Fairy Tales into this trope. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Two episodes of Tales from the Cryptkeeper had handsome but self-absorbed Heroic Wannabe Chuck and his nerdy sidekick/fraternal twin brother Melvin getting caught in a fractured fairy-tale, "The Sleeping Beauty" (where what they think is a typical Girl in the Tower is actually a vampire trying to make them her prey) and "Chuck (and Melvin) and the Beanstalker".
  • There was a short-lived mid-90s cartoon series that was similar to Freaky Stories, but based around this trope. One episode, for example, was a retelling of Jack And the Beanstalk that depicted Jack as a poor boy in a grimy miner's town and replaced the giant with a millionaire who owned assorted magical money sources. It went for a very Family-Unfriendly Aesop by having Jack's efforts to bring money to his poor widowed mother be foiled by her honesty, up until the millionaire offers her a check so that Jack will stop knicking stuff (he didn't care that the boy pinched a few things, but bringing them back all the time is ruining his reputation)... and then ending with Jack watching in disdain as his mother weeps in the kitchen because they've used up the check money and are now as poor as ever. Cue the narrator declaring that being honest does not keep you from starving to death and principles are a poor substitute for money.
  1. ↑ Pigs
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