My daughter has been into the Monster High stuff since day one, so it's only natural that she'd also get into the fairy-tale spin-off Ever After High dealing with the teenage children of famous fables. Netflix started re-editing the webisodes and showing them as 45-minute specials recently, so it's been Raven Queen and Apple White pretty much nonstop in my home for the past several weeks.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. As shows go, it's better than Monster High, with a great voice cast, good animation and in many ways better characters. Madeline Hatter alone is worth tuning in and is probably as close as we're ever going to get to seeing Neil Gaiman's Delirium on screen.
It's also got a much stronger overarching story arc than Monster High, and because of that, I think I've finally puzzled out exactly how the whole thing works.
There are two questions that have to be answered by the show. The first is obvious; why do characters like the Cheshire Cat and the Big Bad Wolf have human children? The second is a little less obvious; why did all these famous legends have children roughly at the same time so they could go to high school together?
My theory? The didn't. No one in Ever After High is actually a child or a parent in the biological sense at all.
It goes like this: There are stories that get told over and over and over again until they become archetypes. In something like Bill Willingham's Fables, they literally take on a life of their own, living out their existence in settings determined by normal people's imaginations. We all sort of vaguely picture Snow White looking a certain way and acting a certain way hard enough that somewhere out in the multi-verse, there is a real Snow White more or less looking and acting that way as a kind of belief depository.
Virtually no main character in the show has both a mom and a dad. They're just mentioned as the offspring of one famous figure. Even a figure like Apple White, who should have been the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, is only referred to as the daughter of Snow White. Charming apparently has his own line of descendants that doesn't include any of his traditional princesses. These characters never reproduced like regular humans; they just exist both in their current form and in a nebulous possible future form simultaneously. "Parent" and "child" are just representations of "now" and "possible."
Stories change over the years in many dramatic ways. The vaguely pedophilic undertones and the inadvertent cannibalism of Red Riding Hood's grandmother by her granddaughter get left out by the Brothers Grimm, and even more aspects of the story get altered as it travels through the centuries until you get Amanda Seyfried having a half-werewolf baby with Shiloh Fernandez in 2011.
In fact, doesn't that sound a lot like Cerise Hood in Ever After High, who is terrified that someone will find out her mom and the Big Bag Wolf got together?
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