“They always held each other by the hand” ‘They always
The Love Between Sisters
held each other by the hand’:
by sara cleto & brittany warman
As you know, the theme for this first year of the reborn Fairy Tale Magazine is love. And, when people talk about love in fairy tales, romantic love is what almost always bubbles up first. The words “fairy tale” and “wedding” pair so consistently together in pop culture, and the wedding industry, that the concept is pretty much unavoidable. (If Sara had a nickel for every time someone asked her if she was going to have a fairy-tale wedding, she could have bought the Beast’s library herself.) Tropes like true love’s kiss and the quest for the lost husband are staples of many of our most famous fairy tales, especially in how they tend to appear in films, theater, and novels (we can probably thank Disney for that!). And while we will talk about romantic love in this column in a future issue (there’s a lot to say!), we want to begin by acknowledging the fact that fairy tales contain different kinds of love stories, love stories that are too often overlooked in favor of heteronormative romance. Chance, 1901
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