Fairy Tales: A True-crime Genre

I came across a paper presented at the 11^th International Conference of ISSEI, Language and the Scientific Imagination, held in Helsinki, 2008, titled Crimes, Offences and Misfeasance in Popular Fairy Tales, written by Tsitlakidou Evanthia and Kalaitzopoulos Constantinos.

The key messages and themes in this paper included;

Fairy tales are a form of narrative venerating themes presented, including those that would be considered criminal actions in contemporary society.
Fairy tales represent cultural reality embedding versions of ideological and cultural domains. This cultural knowledge is usually cumulative and centred on the concept of vicissitudes.
Fairy tales present various violent, and unlawful acts when interpreted within contemporary jurisprudential culture.
Most fairy tales present a didactic character with the intent to deliver a moral narrative and culminate a social balance.

This got me thinking about Fairy Tales as a True-crime genre.

Red Riding Hood by Marilen Adrover (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

The true-crime genre and its audience

The true-crime genre has a large contemporary audience (Burger 2016) and it has a long literacy history and you can read more on this at Pamela Burger’s website The Bloody History of the True Crime Genre.

The question I asked then, was why is true-crime so popular amongst contemporary readers? McPherson (n.d.) identified traits of true-crime narrative consumers;

Curiosity: Taking on the role of an investigator to solve a crime attracts the analytical mind (four of 16 personality types according to Myers-Briggs).
Fear: The adrenaline hype that comes with being frightened is part of what compels true-crime readers. Engaging it from the safety of your couch makes it a safe petrification. This adrenaline boost can also be linked to the four explorer personality types described by Myer-Briggs (Myers & Briggs Foundation 2018).
Empathy: With enough detail the reader can superimpose their own personal details over that of a victim. The reader can place themselves in the victim’s position and envisage their own vulnerability.
Morals: A true-crime narrative will humanise the victim(s) but not the offender so that the reader forms a good-bad dichotomy and seek justice.

The consumption of true-crime genres is also cross-demographic. The more cynical Gen X need to be considered as over-consumption of true-crime can lead to paranoia (Marsden, in Smith 2018) and can increase cynicism and skew moral sense (Fuller, in Green 2017). Less cynical Boomers would be ideal consumers of the true-crime genre and design emotive elements used to develop the narrative would target the quirkier Gen Y demographic.

Fairy Tales – Fact or Fiction?

Some fairy tales are possibly watered down versions of historical events and/or people (Aquilina 2015, Davis 2014) that are often far darker stories than the contemporary versions circulated. Often fairy tales read like a crime thriller, but their evolution emphasises the moral(s) of the narrative rather than the actual events.

If we consider familiar fairy tales, we can identify, a bit like detectives gathering clues, crimes and the culprits. If we do an Internet search along this line results will produce various sites describing these elements. As we understand that fairy tales are often based on true accounts, our efforts are actually aligned with the true-crime narrative genre.

Reinterpreting the original text referred to above, I can see that producing a narrative that depicts fairy tales as a true-crime genre is both appropriate and aligned with contemporary narrative consumerism.

My creativity kicks in here though and I start pondering how I would translate all of this into an actual project delivering a Web site themed in this way. Personally I would get more enjoyment taking a whimsical approach to the product and play with the story-lines translating some traditional folklore into more contemporary versions of crime events. I am not required to be factual in reporting the circumstances of the narratives I choose to use, and see potential to create unconventional versions of true-crime narratives. Why did Red Riding Hood kill her grandmother? (Tweet me your opinion)