#can you tell the holdovers is a new hyperfixation

[initialchains]

NEED TO WRITE AN ANGUS TULLY FIC 😵‍💫😵‍💫 NEED TO WRITE AN ANGUS TULLY FIC 😵‍💫😵‍💫 NEED TO WRITE AN ANGUS TULLY FIC ….

[chikkou]

Talk more abt your interests or we're selling you to 1 direction(jk I just like listening to you ramble about things cause you have a lot of cool and indepth opinions)

OH GOD OH FUCK PLEASE DONT SELL ME MOM AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

honestly its SO sweet to ask this and im rly glad u guys dont mind when i ramble about shit no one knows or cares about LMAO... i honestly struggle to reel it in sometimes bc i can just go tf off kdfgd

one hyperfixation i rarely have the opportunity to talk about on here is my lifelong OBSESSION with fairy tales and folklore.. ever since i was a kid ive been in love with all kinds of fairy tales!! im very partial to the brothers grimm because they just collected so many of these stories, but i have a very special love for lesser known ones, and ESPECIALLY the original versions of popular ones bc they tend to be so much more different than people know

for example did u know that in snow white, the apple was the evil queens THIRD attempt to kill snow white? the first two attempts were a corset tied too tightly and a poisoned comb, both of which were thwarted by the dwarves coming home from work like 5 minutes later dgkfjgndf

and did u ALSO know that that story ends with the evil queen being invited to the wedding of snow white and the prince, only for them to force her to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she died?? they really didnt play in those stories LMAO

what i find really fascinating about these kinds of folklore (and this applies to general mythology too) is that a lot of times you can easily tell which stories were originally the same story that got either repurposed or retold with different details, as almost every fairy tale was originally shared orally, and therefore details were changed and/or were forgotten between tellings.

for example, there was a fairy tale i read years ago about a character named buh nansi who was caught stealing from a king and was captured. as the king decided what to do with him, buh nansi begged not to be thrown into the ocean as he could not swim and would surely die. the king decided to throw him into the sea, and buh nansi swam away freely as he told the king that the ocean was his home and hed just set him free.

there was ANOTHER one i read abt a selfish rabbit who refused to help the other animals dig a well, and so was banned from using it. however the rabbit ended up drinking from it anyway, and as punishment, the animals created a wolf out of tar to keep it away. the rabbit first reacts accordingly, but when it tries to talk to the wolf and the wolf doesnt answer, it gets angry at the disrespect and swings at the wolf, causing it to get stuck in the tar. the animals find the rabbit the next day and try to decide what to do with it, so the rabbit begs them not to throw it into the thicket, which they of course do. the thicket catches the tar and sets the rabbit free, and it brags that the thicket is its home before it runs off. sound familiar?

if not, let me spoil it for you - both of these stories are more modernly associated with the uncle remus br’er rabbit fairy tales (these were some of my favorites as a kid). the br’er rabbit story is that br’er fox, who is br’er rabbits enemy, wants to capture him, so he sets up a tar doll (or tar baby; incidentally, this is a VERY racist term now LMAO) in the road to trap him. br’er rabbit comes upon the doll and bids it good morning, but the doll (obviously) doesnt answer. br’er rabbit gets angry at the disrespect and eventually tries to smack the doll, which of course gets him stuck fast to the tar. br’er fox comes along and grabs br’er rabbit as he decides what to do with him. br’er rabbit begs the fox to do whatever he wants, as long as he does not throw him into the briar-patch (its just thorny brambles basically), which he is deathly afraid of. this of course prompts the fox to throw the rabbit into the brambles, which sets the rabbit free and he escapes while bragging that the briar-patch is his home

all three of these stories are essentially the same tale retold very differently - and, fun fact, “buh nansi” is actually anansi, a trickster god seen in a LOT of west african and caribbean folklore. also, both “br’er” and “buh” mean “brother” (which becomes obvious if u say them out loud LMAO), and are used as terms of respect. br’er rabbit is a little more new than buh nansi and the rabbit story - the uncle remus collection was published originally in the late 1800s, while the other stories have likely persisted for centuries. transparently, br’er rabbit is an amalgamation of these two stories (and probably many others), and was repurposed to fit the environment that the storytellers were in; in this case, they would have been slaves living on southern plantations, thus why the story had to be retold to cut out anansi (a non-christian god). almost every br’er rabbit story i can think of is actually a retelling of a traditional west african fairy tale, updated to suit their circumstances.

its honestly pretty fucking fascinating, and there are quite a few stories that share a lot of commonalities like this if you look! not just the southern folklore either, but pretty much any folklore you can think of dates back much, much farther than you might know. as a quick thing, if youve ever heard of the “firmament” in the bible, that is referring to a layer of water surrounding the earth which was believed to cause rain and, if too much water fell onto the earth, floods. but, if you can believe it, this did NOT originate with the bible - the idea of the firmament is actually a holdover from babylonian mythology, which makes perfect sense as the writers of the bible would have been IN babylon at the time of the firmaments inclusion, and therefore would have been influenced by its own folklore!

ok i can talk about this forever so im gonna stop myself here but like. yeah fairytales and shit are fucking cool LMAO