Netflix’s Explained Season 3 Episode 14 Recap: Fairy Tales

Explained season 3 episode 14 takes us through the world of fairy tales which are basically stories of survival of the fittest. Vox’s Explained tracks its way down to the birth of fairytale from the oldest tale ever told titled ‘The Smith And The Devil’ to the latest films like ‘Frozen’, ‘Moana’ and ‘Coco’ which shows a revolution in the storytelling world. The episode is narrated by Ad Astra’s Ruth Negga (who is to star beside Daniel Craig in Macbeth soon) and has a runtime of about 25 minutes.

– Netflix’s Explained Season 3 Episode 14 Recap contains spoilers –

Explained Season 3 Episode 14: Immortal Favourites

Fairy tales offer the viewers the unrealistically good story that can never be true in real life but, the one you can always hope for. It is a fact that Walt Disney’s first colour film Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs which was originally called a “folly”, still ranks amongst the highest-grossing films of all time. This became the blueprint that gave rise to innumerable films that weaved their world around fairytales thereafter.

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These tales are nothing but stories based on metamorphosis and transformation, for instance, Cinderella’s rags turning a beautiful gown. However, to understand what truly makes a fairytale beyond the element of mystery and magic, we need to know what isn’t a fairytale. Vox’s Explained touches on how myths, fables and legends are different from fairytales in various aspects be it the ambiguity of the place where the story takes place or the designated happy ending.

In today’s world fairytales are whitewashed in a standardized version that always follows the same trope, the one you can see below:

But that has not always been the case. As a matter of fact, Disney’s famous Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs came from a little darker German folklore. However, the marketing strategy to make such variant, local tales to become global demands them to be turned into the profitable business of making them stories about kids, if not for them. This idea was adopted and utilized widely by the famous Grimm Brothers- Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. During the Napoleonic war, the Grimm brothers sort out to collect the different local lores to preserve the art of storytelling.

With all the evolution in the telling of fairytales, one thing has remained constant: where do these tales originate from? It is a problem similar to evolutionary biologists who want to reconstruct the history of life because only a tiny fraction of things have left a trace of the past. We see expert Tehrani take a look into this issue and talk about his research specific to the tale of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and how the tale originated in the first place.

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Explained Season 3 Episode 14: Final Thoughts

In the end, this final episode of Explained’s Season 3 makes us realize how there is a golden chain of folklore that unites us all people globally. They go beyond cultural divides and linguistic divides and help us think about these problems that are fundamental to human experience.

You can watch Explained Season 3 Episode 14 now on Netflix. To catch the recap for previous episodes of Explained Season 3, click here.

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