Inspired by this.
I grew up on Disney fairy tales. For a long time they were my only source for magic and wonder, and man, did they do a good job. The Golden Age of Disney (for me, at least, and probably a lot of my peers) consisted of the years when The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and the Lion King came out, and in my opinion there have never been any better animated fairy tales than those.
But every so often I come across the original versions of the tales. One of these days I’ll have to read Grimm’s and be horrified that my happy endings aren’t so happy. You know me, I love my happy endings, so I usually hew to the Disney versions anyway.
(Side note: Beauty and the Beast will always be my favorite favorite of those…because Belle is a bookworm, and she gets that huge library *want*)
My thing about fairy tales is that I want them to wrap up nice and neat and preferably with a happy ending (do you sense a trend here?), and I’m generally happy when they do. But here’s the rub: the stuff I like to read now doesn’t always end on an upbeat note. Carol Berg and Jim Butcher, my favorite authors, are not afraid to leave you hanging.
The ending of the story I’m working on doesn’t really end happily (in my head, at least–it’s not finished, much to Mike’s chagrin) but it does end with hope. That’s the thing, I guess. Maybe I just want the hope that things will turn out right, that there is reason to be hopeful, that there’s the thought that if the story continues, everyone might not start off completely depressed. Maybe that makes me an optimist, but I don’t care. Give me a glimmering of hope, and I might just forgive you for not making the story HEA (happily ever after).