10: Sleeping Beauty
Sleeping Beauty - a princess, a curse, good fairies, bad fairies, a prince who actually gets to do something.
Stick to the rules of hospitality. Especially when the fair folk are involved or they’ll spite you. Then hope the pure evil members don’t want to come to the party anyway.
As classic fairytale princesses go Sleeping Beauty is the most helpless damsel, spending most of the story in magical suspended animation, more a McGuffin than a character, which is an issue for an aspirational figure as well as a viewpoint title character. Since somebody needs to end up in a cursed coma for the story to happen there’s only so much you can do in this case.
(When heroes are revived like this it’s a call to action and the start of a story instead.)
As a result the often dull romantic foil hero prince guy gets more to do in the later parts of the story than usual. In the Disney version he even gets to fight a dragon.
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| Hell Yes |
This also names the wicked fairy Maleficent and makes her a full-on demonic villain, Mistress Of All Evil.
Leading to a live-action deconstruction where she’s... not.
The cursed castle sitting silent for somewhere between a few days and a hundred years depending on retelling makes this more like a later fantasy quest than most fairytales, with a clear villain and dungeon-bashy obstacles. Other adventurers have tried their luck against it in versions where the curse lasted longer.
The Silent Palace
They say the palace is under a curse. No-one has left it for twenty years or more. Many have braved the way in but few have returned and none have broken the spell...
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