Wherein I Talk about Snow White, Sleep to Dream, and Receive a HowDo from the Universe Stating that I Am an Utter Failure...

I have decided that, for one in my life, I will be complacent and act in a way such that my musings may seem normal and even perhaps a bit mundane. I shall therefore, as a result, present the most controversial views that such a perspective can: the blatantly obvious or inaccurate. I will start with the obvious and move on from there.

1) Pretty things are pretty.
2) Snow White is pretty all the time because she is pretty.
3) The step-mother is only pretty when she is pretty.
4) Pretty things are often prettier than things that are less pretty.
5) The holocaust was not good.

I'm bored.

Perhaps instead of stating trite observations and incosequentialities I should discus something slightly more fruitful—but still entirely profane and mundane in the spirit of complacency. I will analyze, then, the change of a character diachronically, but who and why and how… It must be something obvious, of course, that is not really worth discussing for the reason alone of its being so obvious or clearly analyzed previously such that nothing contributed here is of any value. I know… I will discus the evil queen. Be amazed at my talent for banality!

1) The queen is originally the mother (not step-mother) of the girl Snow White in the Grimms' version, which was a bad moral representation of the mother and was therefore altered to accommodate the laws of civility and propriety in Germany at the time.
2) The queen became a step-mother in order to appease the better judgment of the public in the Grimms' later publications.
3) The queen was then split into a witch and queen in order to abstract out the blame and evil aspects and focus them on an external avatar for the 1916 silent film version.
4) Then the queen becomes a complete magical witch for Disney since it is focused on the child audience and use of fantastical effects to shock the audience. Also, this simplifies her character into a much more easily recognized archetype and further polarizes her so that it is both clearer that she is evil and more allowable for her to perish… Damn it! I think I just said more than I should have in order to respect my oath… Oh well… Screw it… The true transformation of the witch into an old hag is the most intriguing aspect of this entire version, however. Whereas in the other versions the transformations tend to be much more superficial—with the notable exception of the silent film wherein her beauty is not even her own, so the abstraction of her disguises being similarly procured is not surprising. Her transformation into the old hag is a form of irony that Disney purposefully plays but simultaneously plays on himself because the hag, ugly and decrepit, gleefully declares "Now I am the fairest" when Snow White eats the apple even though she is clearly not fair at all. Unfortunately, Disney misses the greater irony which he plays upon himself by clearly telling the audience that the evil thing cannot actually be beautiful and that only an ugly thing can be worthy of death, undermining the nature of the step-mother as beautiful BUT evil, one of the few truly interesting and unique elements of the Grimms' Snow White.