March 5, 2024 • 38 mins
NYT bestselling author Marissa Meyer talks sci-fi and fairy tales.
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It's so interesting to me that I will read a
source material and I will decide on the things that
I think are absolutely necessary. But then I'll go and
I'll read someone else's retelling about rumpelstilt skin and be like,
they like totally took out the whole baby thing. There's
no newborn child, there's no bargaining for it. And to me,
that just like blows my mind, Like it didn't even
(00:32):
cross my mind to just not include it. I struggled
for months trying to figure out what I was going
to do with that, you know, like, what that was
an option you could just like.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
No, I'm Miranda Hawkins. Welcome to the Deep Dark Woods.
The last few episodes have taken us down paths of
forgotten slippers, breadcrumb trails, and mischievous helpers. We're starting to
understand where Brothers grim Tales come from and why each
(01:07):
of these stories continue to live on throughout centuries. But
before we get to more stories, I thought it would
be important to speak to some celebrated authors who have
taken beloved fairy tales and put their own spin on them.
Like I said before, fairy tales and their adaptations are
snapshots of society and our values of what's going on
(01:29):
in that moment in history. By speaking with authors from
our era, we can see how their fairy tale adaptations
reflect this moment in time. Today, I am speaking with
none other than author Marissa Meyer. Marissa is a New
York Times bestselling author of The Lunar Chronicles, The Renegadees Trilogy, Heartless,
(01:50):
The Gilded Duology, and Instant Karma. She is also a
fellow podcaster with her show The Happy Writer, where she
interviews other writers about their books.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
And like so many of us, she.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
First got introduced to fairy tales through Disney.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I can trace back to first seeing The Little Mermaid
in theaters Disney's The Little Mermaid, and I was like five,
I think when it came out, and I just like
was obsessed. And of course then we got the movie
and I watched it NonStop, and you know, I had
it all memorized, blah blah blah. And then my grandma,
who I was also really close to before she passed,
(02:33):
she heard that I was so obsessed with this movie,
and so she got me a little book of fairy
tales and the first story in that book was the
Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson, and I don't think
she knew how different.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
It actually is from the Disney movie.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
So I read it as you know, five six year old,
little starry eyed child, and.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Was just devastated about this story.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
And I was angry and I was upset, and I
fell like Disney had lied to me, and it was
kind of traumatical, I guess. But it also then like
led to all this curiosity and I thought, well, okay,
but what about Cinderella?
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Did Disney lie to me about Cinderella?
Speaker 2 (03:19):
And so now I have to go off and read
the old Cinderella, and you know what they did. There
was things in this that I wasn't expecting and that
that just continued on for pretty much my whole life.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Now, yeah, that's devastating for like a five or six year.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Old stopping it's not just story at.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
All, No, No, I mean eventually we all have to
learn like these things. But like, yeah, whatever, it's it's hard,
especially when it's the fairy Tales, but it's so funny.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
You bring up Cinderella.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Was that the first Brother's grim story that you ran across?
Speaker 2 (03:53):
I honestly don't know. I know that after that book
of fairy tales that my grandma gave me, I started reading.
I mean, I became voracious reading Brothers Graham, reading folk
tales from around the world. So I don't have a
clear memory of what the first grim fairy tale was
that I read, but I became pretty obsessed, pretty.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Hard when I was also doing I guess my unlearning
of Disney Cinderella was the first Brother's Grim that I
ran across. That was the non disneyfied version, And I
was like, what, But that's kind That's actually why I
started this podcast because I love the darker tales. They
really speak to me more so than the more light
(04:33):
hearted versions. But that's just that's a personal preference. But
you know, you're saying having this book, like you just
wanted to know more and everything, But do you have
anything specific about like what drew you do these tales?
Was it the different endings or just I don't know something?
And then that spoke to you.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, I mean I think, like you, it was the
darkness a lot of it. I love Disney. I still
love Disney. I'm definitely a Disney girl at heart, but
but there's such a difference between you know what Disney
is giving us, and you know that element pop culture
versus these old tales that have been around for hundreds
of years. And I think in our modern society now
(05:13):
that we're all used to Disney and we kind of
all have this expectation of like, well, this is for kids,
and then you read these old dark stories and you
start to get people thinking, oh, that's too dark for children,
that's too scary, and I'm like.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
No, children love this stuff.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
They eat it up, they're fascinated by it, and we
forget that, like a lot of kids have to deal
with really difficult dark things in their lives, and in
a lot of ways, I think, here we go psychoanalyzing already.
But it's healthy for kids to be able to see
some of these darker things happening in this fairly safe
(05:49):
environment of reading it in a story, in a magical
story where generally there's a happy ending at the end.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
So I don't know.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
I mean, I think for me as a kid, I
liked the dark things. I liked the creepy things. I
liked the blood and gore. And I don't know if
at that age I felt like I was maybe pushing
back against the culture that was telling me I was
too young for it.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
I wasn't ready for it. If it was maybe a
little bit of rebellion.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
In there, but yeah, I just thought they were really
cool and interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
No, So I've been speaking with a lot of folkloreists
because that's evidently a job you can have, and I
definitely know that.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Yeah, I know, I was, like I messed up, But so.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
That seems to be a very common theme, is like,
you know, there's this idea that we have to protect children,
but actually that's not what. You know, children are a
lot stronger than we give them credit for, and these
stories are a way of introducing them to these really
hard things and these hard ideas.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
That's a safe way to do it, you know.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Speaking though, of the original Cinderella with the stepsisters cutting
off parts of their feet to like fit into the shoe,
you mentioned that the idea for Cinder came to you
in a dream where she like lost her leg, and
I was wondering if that original Grim's Tale was any
inspiration Forcender.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
I mean, who knows how our subconscious works, but yeah,
I definitely by that point had read the Grim version,
had read Charles Barrow had read a translation of Yashen,
the Chinese version of Cinderella, from like way before the
Grim Brothers.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
So yeah, I mean I had a lot of source.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Material floating around in my brain by the time I
had that dream, and I had been thinking about fairy tales,
and I had had the idea for a few months
that I wanted to write a series of science fiction
fairy tale retellings, and so that was just kind of
in my brain and something I'd been you know, brainstorming
(08:01):
and considering what fairy tales would I do and what
would that look like in this kind of you know,
high tech futuristic setting, but things hadn't really started to
come together into a cohesive story yet. And then, yeah,
I had that dream about Cinderella. And the dream, as
I remember, it was very traditional, very Disney Cinderella, like
(08:23):
big ball gown and she's running away from the castle
and all of this, and then she tripped on the
steps and her foot fell off, And when I woke up,
my first thought was that she was a cyborg and
it was this like robotic foot that hadn't been properly attached,
and that's that's how it fell off, and that became Cinder.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
And what's great.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
And I love brain science, and I wish I knew,
like really understood how brains work, because I'm just fascinated
by them. But clearly I can almost like see how
all of these ideas had been jumbling around in my
brain and just like waiting for that one one thing
to start bringing them all together. Because as soon as
I had that idea about doing Cinderella as a cyborg,
(09:08):
all of these other ideas that I'd been brainstorming and
working on for months just started to fall into place,
and I could start to see Cinder and her character
in her world and how over the course of multiple
books she was going to gather around this like ragtag
group of fairy tale characters and they were gonna have
to go off and save the world and start a
(09:30):
revolution and it would it really just like grew from
that seed very quickly.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
So yeah, that's that's how it happened.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
So I want to talk about this series a little bit,
but for our listeners who don't know, the Lunar Chronicles
is a series of predominantly four books, I know you
have a few others in there now that follow a
journey of revolution and mystery and romance through the retellings
of Cinderella, Little Red, Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and snow White.
So I know you mentioned, you know about how this
(10:05):
drag tag group of fairy tale creatures get together and
everyone's like helping sender and figure things out. But how
did you decide that those were the retellings that you
wanted to do, Like do they hold any meaning to
you specifically?
Speaker 2 (10:20):
So the first thing when I decided I wanted to
try to do a series of futuristic fairy tales, my
first step was to make a list of my personal
favorite fairy tales.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And I don't know, there.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Was maybe fifteen stories on that list, I'm not entirely sure,
and just start throwing ideas at it. Like I remember
rumpel Stiltskin was on the list, and I remember thinking, well,
maybe he could be an android, or maybe he could
be an alien from outer space, or you know, just
like what do you do if it was Sleeping Beauty.
(10:52):
Maybe she's asleep because she's like a cryogenic freezing chamber,
and just trying to get ideas for it. The four
fairy tales that I ended up going with were the
ones that, like.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
For starters.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
I just felt like I had the best ideas for them,
and I could more or less begin to see how
they would fit into this science fiction genre. But then
also once I had the idea for Cinder and Cinderella
as a cyborg, then her story very quickly got tied
up with this evil queen. And I knew the evil
(11:27):
queen was going to be the evil queen from snow White,
So of course snow White's going to be one of
my fairy tales. And in those early planning stages, I
could begin to see how this evil queen character had
been meddling with the lives of these other characters, and
I could see how she'd been messing with Little Red
Riding Hood's life, how she'd been messing with Rapunzel's life,
(11:49):
of course her stepdaughter snow White. And so from very
early on, I could start to see how these four
stories were going to connect, not so much with Cinder,
but really a lot of it revolved around that evil
queen and what she was doing, and why were these
character is going to hate her to the degree where
they would actually put their lives on the line to
(12:11):
try to fight against her.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
So you drew inspiration from lunar chronicles, from fairy tales
of course, right, But you also mention like Star Wars
and Firefly, which I love Firefly. But you also did research,
like you did some heavy research, reading like scientific magazines
and all of that. Because while these books are like
fairy tale retellings, they're very much sci fi. What elements
(12:36):
do you think align the genres of fairy tale and
sci fi? Because initially they seem like very opposite.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Ends right of the spectrum.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
But yet you were able to take these two genres
and I mean it worked wonderfully, right.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
I mean, the proof is in the pudding, so they.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Say, so, I think the biggest thing is good versus evil,
which you see in Cinderella versus the Wicked Witch, and
you see in Little Ren versus the big bad Wolf,
and you.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
See in Luke versus you know.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
The Emperor, and you know, so that's that's I think
the biggest thing that kind of ties the two together
and ties lots of genres together. Of course, it's it's
certainly not just these two, but those are pretty universal
themes and things that we can all get on board with, Like,
of course we want good to fight evil, but it's also,
I mean, you've seen it in fairy tales and you
see it in sci fi, where, even though that is
(13:30):
so often the overarching theme, we also get to dig
in and explore those gray areas what is good and
what is evil and what happens when those two things
are not clear cut, and so I love playing with
those as a as a writer.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
So, so, what do you think it says mixing fairy
tales with science fiction?
Speaker 1 (13:55):
It says that I'm a nerd.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Fair. Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm curious about a lot
of things, and you know, in the writing world, we're
always here to write what you know, and I hate
that advice.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
My go to is to write what I'm curious about.
And I think this is stuff is cool.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
I think the idea that we could colonize the Moon
and like to know that there are scientists trying to
figure out how we might do that, that that's an
actual thing people are working on. I think that's fascinating.
Cybernetics and artificial intelligence and all of this.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
I just find it engrossing. So, yeah, I being.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
A fan of Star Wars and Firefly, having that in
my background, I wanted to give my own twist to
the sci fi genre or the space opera genre, and
this is what it came to.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Do you think that part of that is because that's
maybe where like you see us going, Because a lot
of times fairy tales and our adaptations are reflections of
you know, ourselves or society, and that is kind of
the main reason why I'm doing this show, because as
time has gone on and all the different adaptations are
(15:10):
basically snapshots of where society is. So you're not writing
what you know, but the things that you're curious about.
Do you think maybe down the road, these are places
we're headed.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
It's funny, yes in some ways, and know in others,
it's hilarious now that Cinder came out. Gosh, it's been
twelve years since Cinder came out, and a lot of
the technology that I was writing in the book that
I thought, oh, i'm researching, you know, is where is
science and technology going to be in one hundred years
(15:41):
from now? And I'm trying to make it really authentic
and believable and we've already surpassed him. It's like, wait, no,
slow down, world. There's things like that that I tried
hard not to like ever specify this is how far
into the future it is because we just don't know
(16:01):
the way that technology is surpassing certainly my expects on
a very very speedy manner.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
At the same time, there are things that I hope for.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
I mean, one of the biggest I don't know fantasies
I guess in the series is that even though there's
this evil queen who lives on the Moon and is likery,
is doing bad stuff and is trying to take over
Planet Earth, planet Earth itself is in a pretty good
place in this series, like it has seen world peace
(16:32):
for more than a century.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
And I love this.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Idea and I am hopelessly optimistic, and I know that
people call it naivete, but I like to think that
we could come to a place where we actually find
peace on this planet and find a way to not
have wars and you know, remove prejudice and all of
(16:56):
these things that plague society today.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
So I like to think that maybe we are hitting
in that direction.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
We'll be right back with Marissa Meyer. So author Marissa
Meyer and I were talking about her Center series, where
she combined four fairy tales and science fiction to make
(17:24):
a whole new universe. I'm curious when it comes to
the character development and some of the tension everything the conflicts,
do those stem from like personal experience or like, how
much of that might stem from personal experience? Right, Oh,
got much of yourself as in these characters or in
these conflicts?
Speaker 1 (17:44):
It varies.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
There's some characters that I relate to really strongly and
I put a lot of myself into, and then there's
characters that I don't see myself in so much, but
that I really admire. A lot of times I'll write
a character, a protagonist in particular, who has characteristics that
I wish that I had Maura, or I think are
(18:07):
just really cool and impressive, or they have skills that.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
I really admire, and so there's a lot of that.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
It's kind of a little bit of wish fulfillment when
I'm writing and creating these characters. And then as far
as the conflicts, I've lived a fairly low conflict life,
and like there's no big revolutions, no big wars, but
a lot of the internal conflicts you're still facing. And
(18:34):
so a lot of times we can take things that
we feel on a small level and then you put
them into these characters who are experiencing really big, life changing,
world changing events, and they're experiencing the same emotions just
in a bigger way. So an example of that might
be something like periods of my life where I've faced
(18:56):
imposter syndrome and felt like, you know, you question yourself,
you doubt yourself. I think I'm a good person, but
there was that one time I said that really mean thing,
So maybe I'm not as good as I think. Like
we've all had those moments. And then you have a
character like Cinder who's trying to you know, lead this
revolution and take down this evil queen and she's facing
(19:18):
really big things, but she still has these internal conflicts
with herself where she's wondering like, I think I'm a
good person and I think I'm doing the right thing,
but also I know that I there's moments where I've
felt a little power hungry, and there's moments where I've
done things I wasn't thrilled that I did, and so
maybe I'm not a good person after all. And so
(19:39):
you can, you know, use the personal experiences to then
inspire what the character is going through and hopefully write
those emotions in a way that readers can really relate
to even though readers are like, well, I don't know
what I would do in that situation either.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
No, that's the thing is like being human, we all
have these similar experiences, right, It's just like, but to
like what degree or to what I extent or any
of that. But I also think that's why I like,
you know, people love reading and characters.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
They always see some parts of themselves within them. So
I'm going to like just give her listeners quick heads up.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
There is a little bit of a spoiler for the
end of the Lunar Chronicles here, because I accidentally did
a spoiler the other day and someone was not very
happy with me. One of the folklores I spoke with.
Her name is doctor Gina Jorgensen, as she's another guest
on the show. But we are discussing about how in
these original fairy tales, the end goal essentially was for
(20:38):
these women to get married, and that was their happy ending, right,
that was They've made it, They're successful, that's it. However,
and the Lunar Chronicles, Sinder decides to say on Luna
to help the country get back on its feet. First,
then she tells Prince Kai, who is the Prince of
the book that you know she'd be happy to come
(20:59):
and meet him later. I'm curious, what was your reasoning
behind that ending? It's not the atypical for Cinderella.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
So, of course, if we think why in historically in
fairy tales, why was the ending get married, find a prince,
get married, live happily ever after. And of course, through
most of human history women had so little power, and
one of the few ways a woman could be cared
(21:30):
for and know that she didn't have to worry about
am I going to eat? And am I going to
have shelter and like these basic human needs was to
find a husband and fingers crossed, he's a nice guy.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
And so it makes a lot.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Of sense that for so much of history that was
the focus for a lot of these fairy tales. Well,
nowadays this is not, you know, the be all end all.
We can have a career, we can make our own money,
we can buy our own homes and run our own businesses,
and finding a husband is not the thing that means
(22:04):
we're going to survive and we're going to be okay.
So on like a thematic level, it just didn't make
sense that had to be the thing that Cinder was
working toward this whole series, like, Okay.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
She beat the queen and she won the war, but
does she get the prince?
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Like, that's not the important thing that we're looking at here,
And so so I definitely wanted to end it in
a place where she is in a position of power,
but also in a place where she gets to make
her own decisions, because for much of the series, especially
in the first book, she was seen as a lesser
citizen and there was a lot of prejudice against her,
(22:44):
and she.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
At one point her body is like literally sold to.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Science, And so I really wanted to show that Cinder
was independent and on her own and she didn't need
Prince Kai, she didn't need marriage. That said, I am
certainly a romantic, and so we imply, of course that
sometime after the end of the series she and Kai
will get married, after Luna's been taken care of and
(23:10):
her responsibilities are fulfilled, not because she means him, but
because she loves him and he loves her.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
You've pretty much already spoken to this, But why do
you think that, especially with fairy tale retellings, why do
you think that the endings are changing Fairy tales.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
In general change.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
They change because society changes and what we are craving
in our stories changes, and that's honestly, I think that's
my favorite thing about fairy tales is to look at
them across history and to see what are the things
that have not changed in hundreds of years and in
some cases in thousands of years, Like we still have
(23:52):
the Lost Slipper, we still have the going to a
ball or a festival. We still have these things, and
yet what is different, what has changed?
Speaker 1 (24:02):
And I just think that's so interesting.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
They're like little snap and I think you kind of
called it this earlier. They're like little snapshots of society
and where where we are at the time that that
story was written.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
I spoke with Marissa about her Guilded duology books. We
talked about it in the last episode about Rumpel, but
it's a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin where the mischievous helper is
actually the good guy, a prince no less, and he
and his kingdom have been put under a curse by
a demon king that the miller's daughter helps him break.
(24:38):
I asked Marissa what inspired her to write Guilded.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
With Guilded, I had, I think I'm going to guess that,
young Marissa. The first fairy tale I ever wanted to
retell was Rumpelstiltskin. That's before I even like could have
comprehended writing an entire novel. I'm thinking like when I
was eight, nine, ten years old and like writing short
(25:04):
stories and then the very beginning of my artistic journey.
I loved and hated rumpelstilt Skin. It was one of
my favorite stories, but also one of the most frustrating
stories because I felt.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Like it had so many plot holes.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
I felt like it left me with so many unanswered
questions and pretty much my whole.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Life for at least the last you know, thirty years.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
It was just in the back of my head as like,
I need to do something with that story.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Yeah, and so I finally did and yielded.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Okay, that's so funny, because I feel like Rumpelstiltskin isn't
typically people's like go to stories. I know, I kind
of obscure a little bit. I feel like, yeah, I
feel like it's a bit on the back burner. So
I really love to hear this. Other than having plot
holes or any in everything, is there something else up
(25:59):
to you to this particular tale.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Uh, I mean, it's weirdness. It's a weird little story.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
And as we talked before, you and I we like
the weird ones, the dark ones.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
But no, I mean a lot of it was the
unanswered questions. I wanted to know more about rumpel Stiltskin.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I wanted to know how he got this gift of
being able to spin straw to gold that's never really explained.
I wanted to know what he was gonna do with
the baby, Like, in the end, he really wants this
child and bargains with the young Queen to get her
firstborn child.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
But we have no idea why. It's like, is he
gonna eat the child?
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Does he want it for some sort of black magic?
And then there's like that little optimistic part of me that's.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Like, maybe he's just lonely, he just wants to be
a dad, And so I really wanted to know about that.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
And I think, honestly, I think the thing that bothered
me the most about it was it when you read
rumpel Stiltskin. Clearly the intention is for the reader to
see rumpel Stiltskin as the villain of the story, and
in the end, she's married to this king and Rumbell's
Stiltskin is defeated and she gets to keep her child
(27:09):
and she's now married happily ever after.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
And I was like, no, this king, this king is
a bad dude.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
He took her from her family, he locked her in
this dungeon, he ordered her to do this impossible thing.
He threatened to kill her multiple times. And now we're
supposed to be like.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Oh, yay, they're so happy.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
I just did not buy it, and that really really
bothered me. And again, I love this story, like this
was one of my favorite stories that I think in
part part of the reason that I loved it so
much was because even as a kid, my little writer
brain was like thinking of the other options.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
And so.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
When I decided I was going to retell rumbel Stiltskin,
that's probably the first thing that I knew I was
going to change. I knew that I was going to
have the king be the villain and rumbel Stiltstigen was
going to be the hero slash love interest. And so
that was kind of the twist that grabbed me from
the beginning and then ended up turning into this story.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
I agree with you.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
So, with all of your retellings, how do you decide
what you keep and what you create? And why are
those the elements that you choose to keep important to you.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, that's such a good question because it's interesting to
me reading other fairy tale retellings, because for me, that's
step one.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
I'm going to do retelling of this story.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
The first thing I do is I go and I
read the source material, and a lot of times I'll
go and read multiple versions of a fairy tale and decide, Okay,
if I'm doing Rumpelstiltskin, what to me are the most
important iconic elements.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Of this story.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
I want to include the necklace in the ring that
get bargained away. I know at some point we're going
to have a newborn baby, or at least a bargain
for a newborn baby. There has to be a question
about the name that to me, that's a huge part
of the Rumpelstiltskin's story is why does he keep his
name hidden? What does it mean? Why is that important?
There's gonna be spinning straw into gold. So I figure out, like,
(29:13):
what to me are the really iconic things about this
story that make it this fairy tale, and to me,
cannot be taken away. And if you take them away,
they're no longer this fairy tale. Now you're writing something
totally different.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
And then I start kind of building off of that.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Once I know what things I want to keep, then
I figure out how am I going to change them.
I know that I want the maiden in question to
have a necklace that she's going to bargain with Rumpelstiltskin
for where did that necklace come from, why is it important?
What's its significance? And it kind of starts to build
its own story off of that, and eventually you hope
(29:50):
that all of those threads tie together into something that
makes sense.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
And that's kind of my process.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
But as I was gonna say before, it's so interesting
to me that I will read the source material and
I will decide on the things that I think are
absolutely ne But then I'll go and I'll read someone
else's retelling about rumbelstilt Skin and be.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Like, they like totally took out the whole baby thing.
There's no newborn child, there's no bargaining for it.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
And to me, that just like blows my mind, like
it didn't even cross my mind, it just not include it.
I struggled for months trying to figure out what I
was going to do with that, you know, like what
that was an option you could just like no include it.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
One of the things.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
That I've noticed with a lot of the modern adaptations
is that these retellings, as we've said a couple times already,
really choose to explore the gray. It's no longer just
like Stark, this is right, this is wrong, or these
characters that were portrayed as wrong were like but.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Were they really you know, I'm kind of curious what
your thoughts and like, why do you think that is?
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Like what is causing that shift in these stories to happen?
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Yeah, I think when we're doing retellings, we just have
a lot more space to explore than someone writing a three.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Page fairy tale has to explore.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
And then I don't I can't speak for everyone, of course,
but for me personally, I think the gray areas are
really interesting and that's what makes us human.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
You Know.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
We can say we try to be good people, we
try to do the right thing, but there's not a
person among us who doesn't have something that we regret
or some time that we, you know, recognize, oh, I
could have behaved better there. So that's such a universal thing.
And also when you start looking at at other people,
(31:43):
it's really really easy to cast judgments and to look
at someone else's actions and label them as good or bad.
But I think by and large, we're very rarely right
about that. I think it's much more true to life
if we recognize, like, well, I don't like what that
(32:05):
person did, but wouldn't it be interesting to know their
reasons for it?
Speaker 1 (32:09):
And when you start.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Digging into the reasons and then what is motivating a
person to do things, suddenly there's a story there, and
suddenly it kind of forces us to question, well, that
might change my opinion, or now I have to question, Okay,
if I was in that situation, how would I have
handled it? I mean, things are just so rarely black
and white, and that's just true about humanity. And so
(32:33):
that's to me far more interesting than writing characters who
are entirely good or entirely evil.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
We'll be right back with my interview with author Marissa Meyer.
Author Marissa Meyer has been a fan of fairy tales
since she was a kid, so I asked her why
does she think the Brothers Grim stories specifically stand out.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
I think because there are themes and ideas in them
that people can relate to, no matter what year they're born,
no matter where on this planet they were born. There
are things that are just universal to the human experience,
and these stories boil them down to things that we
(33:26):
can all understand.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
And why do you think storytellers like yourself revisit these
tales time and time again?
Speaker 2 (33:34):
For me, because I love the familiarity of these stories,
and I love that they do have these kind of
built in themes and these universal themes. But at the
same time, you can take them and they're like little
frameworks that as a creator, you've got this kind of
built in skeleton of a story, but then you can
(33:56):
expand it beyond that to be anything. And so it's
this great creative challenge for me to take what's already
there and write something that readers will feel is both
familiar and yet unlike anything.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Else they've ever read before.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
Okay, And I feel like stories are reflections of ourselves, right,
Like we write or we read so we can learn
about ourselves, like in safer ways, like we were talking
about like the kids earlier, right, like learn about like
the heartships of the world. So what do you think
these tales tell us about who we are?
Speaker 2 (34:35):
I think that fiction in general puts us into the
shoes of other people and puts us in these experiences
that we may never actually experience in real life. But
it forces us to ask the question what would I do?
And I think that sometimes we're surprised by those answers,
(34:58):
and sometimes reading a story changes us and who we
were before we read the story, and what we would
have answered to that question might be different after reading it.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
And finally, why do you think the Brother's Grim fairy
Tales will live on?
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Well, we've lasted this long. No, they're not going away.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
I think they'll continue to change, and I think that
there will be whole generations that know them as the
Disney movies or maybe even.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
As the mrsa. Meyer fairy Tales.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
I don't know, but there are going to people be
people like you and me who are so curious about
the older versions and want to dig a little deeper.
And for me, like I'm currently reading the complete collection
of the Brothers Grim to my nine year old daughters
and because that to me, that's important, Like I want
them to know the Disney movies are great, that's wonderful,
but I also want to show them the other versions.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
I really love that.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
I absolutely love that so also great because they're so lucky,
all of them. There's like two hundred and fifty and
I've never sat down and read all of them, and
so there's in reading over it. It's been fascinating to
me and how there's some stories that you're like, Okay,
I can totally see why nobody cares about this one
and nobody's ever heard of it.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
But then there's other.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
Stories that are so good, and I'm like, how how
has this one not been as popular as like Jack
and the Beanstock.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Honestly, like that's like us, that's an undertaking. I forget
about Jack and the bean Stock. It's not my favorite.
It's not my favorite.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
Yeah it's okay, but yeah, because like someone gifted me.
It was I think a family member years and years ago,
like the Collected works, right, and I remember like I
was like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna read all
of these and I remember getting into it and I
was like this is not gonna happen. Yeah, Granted, I
was like I think in my teen so I was like,
this is boring.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
This is boring, you know, like kind of one of those.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
But yeah, So honestly, like I give you mad prouts
for doing that. I think that's great. And that also,
like your daughter, your daughter's right that they also get
to experience that too. So that's it's been really really fun.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
We're I remember maybe like a third of the way
through the book now, but it's it's hilarious because of
course there's patterns, and they have now picked up on
some of the patterns. And at one point one of
my daughters, I don't remember what story we'd finished, but
she goes, Mom, why are these stories always about death?
Speaker 1 (37:35):
I don't know, but it is. It is amazing reading
all of them back to back.
Speaker 4 (37:40):
You're like, yeah, there's like a lot of death, a
lot of blood, and a lot of gore. It's they're
very very violent, they're gruesome, they're they're pretty rough.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
They're they're very rough. Well, thank you so much for
joining me. I super appreciate it. This has been absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
So it's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
You learn more about Marissa Meyer and her books on
her website. Marissameyer dot com. That's m A R I
S S A M E y e r dot com.
Next time, My what.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Big eyes you have? Grandmother?
Speaker 3 (38:22):
The Deep Dark Woods is a production of School of
Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It was created, written, and hosted
by me Miranda Hawkins. Senior producer is Gabby Watts. Executive
producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon barr Els Crowley, and Maya Howard.
Theme song was composed by Jesse Niswanger, who also sound
(38:42):
designed and mixed this episode.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
You can follow the
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Show on Instagram at School of Humans and don't forget
to subscribe and leave a review.
School of Humans.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It's so interesting to me that I will read a
source material and I will decide on the things that
I think are absolutely necessary. But then I'll go and
I'll read someone else's retelling about rumpelstilt skin and be like,
they like totally took out the whole baby thing. There's
no newborn child, there's no bargaining for it. And to me,
that just like blows my mind, Like it didn't even
(00:32):
cross my mind to just not include it. I struggled
for months trying to figure out what I was going
to do with that, you know, like, what that was
an option you could just like.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
No, I'm Miranda Hawkins. Welcome to the Deep Dark Woods.
The last few episodes have taken us down paths of
forgotten slippers, breadcrumb trails, and mischievous helpers. We're starting to
understand where Brothers grim Tales come from and why each
(01:07):
of these stories continue to live on throughout centuries. But
before we get to more stories, I thought it would
be important to speak to some celebrated authors who have
taken beloved fairy tales and put their own spin on them.
Like I said before, fairy tales and their adaptations are
snapshots of society and our values of what's going on
(01:29):
in that moment in history. By speaking with authors from
our era, we can see how their fairy tale adaptations
reflect this moment in time. Today, I am speaking with
none other than author Marissa Meyer. Marissa is a New
York Times bestselling author of The Lunar Chronicles, The Renegadees Trilogy, Heartless,
(01:50):
The Gilded Duology, and Instant Karma. She is also a
fellow podcaster with her show The Happy Writer, where she
interviews other writers about their books.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
And like so many of us, she.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
First got introduced to fairy tales through Disney.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
I can trace back to first seeing The Little Mermaid
in theaters Disney's The Little Mermaid, and I was like five,
I think when it came out, and I just like
was obsessed. And of course then we got the movie
and I watched it NonStop, and you know, I had
it all memorized, blah blah blah. And then my grandma,
who I was also really close to before she passed,
(02:33):
she heard that I was so obsessed with this movie,
and so she got me a little book of fairy
tales and the first story in that book was the
Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson, and I don't think
she knew how different.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
It actually is from the Disney movie.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
So I read it as you know, five six year old,
little starry eyed child, and.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Was just devastated about this story.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
And I was angry and I was upset, and I
fell like Disney had lied to me, and it was
kind of traumatical, I guess. But it also then like
led to all this curiosity and I thought, well, okay,
but what about Cinderella?
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Did Disney lie to me about Cinderella?
Speaker 2 (03:19):
And so now I have to go off and read
the old Cinderella, and you know what they did. There
was things in this that I wasn't expecting and that
that just continued on for pretty much my whole life.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Now, yeah, that's devastating for like a five or six year.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Old stopping it's not just story at.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
All, No, No, I mean eventually we all have to
learn like these things. But like, yeah, whatever, it's it's hard,
especially when it's the fairy Tales, but it's so funny.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
You bring up Cinderella.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Was that the first Brother's grim story that you ran across?
Speaker 2 (03:53):
I honestly don't know. I know that after that book
of fairy tales that my grandma gave me, I started reading.
I mean, I became voracious reading Brothers Graham, reading folk
tales from around the world. So I don't have a
clear memory of what the first grim fairy tale was
that I read, but I became pretty obsessed, pretty.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
Hard when I was also doing I guess my unlearning
of Disney Cinderella was the first Brother's Grim that I
ran across. That was the non disneyfied version, And I
was like, what, But that's kind That's actually why I
started this podcast because I love the darker tales. They
really speak to me more so than the more light
(04:33):
hearted versions. But that's just that's a personal preference. But
you know, you're saying having this book, like you just
wanted to know more and everything, But do you have
anything specific about like what drew you do these tales?
Was it the different endings or just I don't know something?
And then that spoke to you.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Yeah, I mean I think, like you, it was the
darkness a lot of it. I love Disney. I still
love Disney. I'm definitely a Disney girl at heart, but
but there's such a difference between you know what Disney
is giving us, and you know that element pop culture
versus these old tales that have been around for hundreds
of years. And I think in our modern society now
(05:13):
that we're all used to Disney and we kind of
all have this expectation of like, well, this is for kids,
and then you read these old dark stories and you
start to get people thinking, oh, that's too dark for children,
that's too scary, and I'm like.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
No, children love this stuff.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
They eat it up, they're fascinated by it, and we
forget that, like a lot of kids have to deal
with really difficult dark things in their lives, and in
a lot of ways, I think, here we go psychoanalyzing already.
But it's healthy for kids to be able to see
some of these darker things happening in this fairly safe
(05:49):
environment of reading it in a story, in a magical
story where generally there's a happy ending at the end.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
So I don't know.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
I mean, I think for me as a kid, I
liked the dark things. I liked the creepy things. I
liked the blood and gore. And I don't know if
at that age I felt like I was maybe pushing
back against the culture that was telling me I was
too young for it.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
I wasn't ready for it. If it was maybe a
little bit of rebellion.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
In there, but yeah, I just thought they were really
cool and interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
No, So I've been speaking with a lot of folkloreists
because that's evidently a job you can have, and I
definitely know that.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Yeah, I know, I was, like I messed up, But so.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
That seems to be a very common theme, is like,
you know, there's this idea that we have to protect children,
but actually that's not what. You know, children are a
lot stronger than we give them credit for, and these
stories are a way of introducing them to these really
hard things and these hard ideas.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
That's a safe way to do it, you know.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Speaking though, of the original Cinderella with the stepsisters cutting
off parts of their feet to like fit into the shoe,
you mentioned that the idea for Cinder came to you
in a dream where she like lost her leg, and
I was wondering if that original Grim's Tale was any
inspiration Forcender.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
I mean, who knows how our subconscious works, but yeah,
I definitely by that point had read the Grim version,
had read Charles Barrow had read a translation of Yashen,
the Chinese version of Cinderella, from like way before the
Grim Brothers.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
So yeah, I mean I had a lot of source.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Material floating around in my brain by the time I
had that dream, and I had been thinking about fairy tales,
and I had had the idea for a few months
that I wanted to write a series of science fiction
fairy tale retellings, and so that was just kind of
in my brain and something I'd been you know, brainstorming
(08:01):
and considering what fairy tales would I do and what
would that look like in this kind of you know,
high tech futuristic setting, but things hadn't really started to
come together into a cohesive story yet. And then, yeah,
I had that dream about Cinderella. And the dream, as
I remember, it was very traditional, very Disney Cinderella, like
(08:23):
big ball gown and she's running away from the castle
and all of this, and then she tripped on the
steps and her foot fell off, And when I woke up,
my first thought was that she was a cyborg and
it was this like robotic foot that hadn't been properly attached,
and that's that's how it fell off, and that became Cinder.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
And what's great.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
And I love brain science, and I wish I knew,
like really understood how brains work, because I'm just fascinated
by them. But clearly I can almost like see how
all of these ideas had been jumbling around in my
brain and just like waiting for that one one thing
to start bringing them all together. Because as soon as
I had that idea about doing Cinderella as a cyborg,
(09:08):
all of these other ideas that I'd been brainstorming and
working on for months just started to fall into place,
and I could start to see Cinder and her character
in her world and how over the course of multiple
books she was going to gather around this like ragtag
group of fairy tale characters and they were gonna have
to go off and save the world and start a
(09:30):
revolution and it would it really just like grew from
that seed very quickly.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
So yeah, that's that's how it happened.
Speaker 3 (09:41):
So I want to talk about this series a little bit,
but for our listeners who don't know, the Lunar Chronicles
is a series of predominantly four books, I know you
have a few others in there now that follow a
journey of revolution and mystery and romance through the retellings
of Cinderella, Little Red, Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and snow White.
So I know you mentioned, you know about how this
(10:05):
drag tag group of fairy tale creatures get together and
everyone's like helping sender and figure things out. But how
did you decide that those were the retellings that you
wanted to do, Like do they hold any meaning to
you specifically?
Speaker 2 (10:20):
So the first thing when I decided I wanted to
try to do a series of futuristic fairy tales, my
first step was to make a list of my personal
favorite fairy tales.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And I don't know, there.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Was maybe fifteen stories on that list, I'm not entirely sure,
and just start throwing ideas at it. Like I remember
rumpel Stiltskin was on the list, and I remember thinking, well,
maybe he could be an android, or maybe he could
be an alien from outer space, or you know, just
like what do you do if it was Sleeping Beauty.
(10:52):
Maybe she's asleep because she's like a cryogenic freezing chamber,
and just trying to get ideas for it. The four
fairy tales that I ended up going with were the
ones that, like.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
For starters.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
I just felt like I had the best ideas for them,
and I could more or less begin to see how
they would fit into this science fiction genre. But then
also once I had the idea for Cinder and Cinderella
as a cyborg, then her story very quickly got tied
up with this evil queen. And I knew the evil
(11:27):
queen was going to be the evil queen from snow White,
So of course snow White's going to be one of
my fairy tales. And in those early planning stages, I
could begin to see how this evil queen character had
been meddling with the lives of these other characters, and
I could see how she'd been messing with Little Red
Riding Hood's life, how she'd been messing with Rapunzel's life,
(11:49):
of course her stepdaughter snow White. And so from very
early on, I could start to see how these four
stories were going to connect, not so much with Cinder,
but really a lot of it revolved around that evil
queen and what she was doing, and why were these
character is going to hate her to the degree where
they would actually put their lives on the line to
(12:11):
try to fight against her.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
So you drew inspiration from lunar chronicles, from fairy tales
of course, right, But you also mention like Star Wars
and Firefly, which I love Firefly. But you also did research,
like you did some heavy research, reading like scientific magazines
and all of that. Because while these books are like
fairy tale retellings, they're very much sci fi. What elements
(12:36):
do you think align the genres of fairy tale and
sci fi? Because initially they seem like very opposite.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Ends right of the spectrum.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
But yet you were able to take these two genres
and I mean it worked wonderfully, right.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
I mean, the proof is in the pudding, so they.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Say, so, I think the biggest thing is good versus evil,
which you see in Cinderella versus the Wicked Witch, and
you see in Little Ren versus the big bad Wolf,
and you.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
See in Luke versus you know.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
The Emperor, and you know, so that's that's I think
the biggest thing that kind of ties the two together
and ties lots of genres together. Of course, it's it's
certainly not just these two, but those are pretty universal
themes and things that we can all get on board with, Like,
of course we want good to fight evil, but it's also,
I mean, you've seen it in fairy tales and you
see it in sci fi, where, even though that is
(13:30):
so often the overarching theme, we also get to dig
in and explore those gray areas what is good and
what is evil and what happens when those two things
are not clear cut, and so I love playing with
those as a as a writer.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
So, so, what do you think it says mixing fairy
tales with science fiction?
Speaker 1 (13:55):
It says that I'm a nerd.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Fair. Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm curious about a lot
of things, and you know, in the writing world, we're
always here to write what you know, and I hate
that advice.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
My go to is to write what I'm curious about.
And I think this is stuff is cool.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
I think the idea that we could colonize the Moon
and like to know that there are scientists trying to
figure out how we might do that, that that's an
actual thing people are working on. I think that's fascinating.
Cybernetics and artificial intelligence and all of this.
Speaker 1 (14:32):
I just find it engrossing. So, yeah, I being.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
A fan of Star Wars and Firefly, having that in
my background, I wanted to give my own twist to
the sci fi genre or the space opera genre, and
this is what it came to.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Do you think that part of that is because that's
maybe where like you see us going, Because a lot
of times fairy tales and our adaptations are reflections of
you know, ourselves or society, and that is kind of
the main reason why I'm doing this show, because as
time has gone on and all the different adaptations are
(15:10):
basically snapshots of where society is. So you're not writing
what you know, but the things that you're curious about.
Do you think maybe down the road, these are places
we're headed.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
It's funny, yes in some ways, and know in others,
it's hilarious now that Cinder came out. Gosh, it's been
twelve years since Cinder came out, and a lot of
the technology that I was writing in the book that
I thought, oh, i'm researching, you know, is where is
science and technology going to be in one hundred years
(15:41):
from now? And I'm trying to make it really authentic
and believable and we've already surpassed him. It's like, wait, no,
slow down, world. There's things like that that I tried
hard not to like ever specify this is how far
into the future it is because we just don't know
(16:01):
the way that technology is surpassing certainly my expects on
a very very speedy manner.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
At the same time, there are things that I hope for.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
I mean, one of the biggest I don't know fantasies
I guess in the series is that even though there's
this evil queen who lives on the Moon and is likery,
is doing bad stuff and is trying to take over
Planet Earth, planet Earth itself is in a pretty good
place in this series, like it has seen world peace
(16:32):
for more than a century.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
And I love this.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Idea and I am hopelessly optimistic, and I know that
people call it naivete, but I like to think that
we could come to a place where we actually find
peace on this planet and find a way to not
have wars and you know, remove prejudice and all of
(16:56):
these things that plague society today.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
So I like to think that maybe we are hitting
in that direction.
Speaker 3 (17:03):
We'll be right back with Marissa Meyer. So author Marissa
Meyer and I were talking about her Center series, where
she combined four fairy tales and science fiction to make
(17:24):
a whole new universe. I'm curious when it comes to
the character development and some of the tension everything the conflicts,
do those stem from like personal experience or like, how
much of that might stem from personal experience? Right, Oh,
got much of yourself as in these characters or in
these conflicts?
Speaker 1 (17:44):
It varies.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
There's some characters that I relate to really strongly and
I put a lot of myself into, and then there's
characters that I don't see myself in so much, but
that I really admire. A lot of times I'll write
a character, a protagonist in particular, who has characteristics that
I wish that I had Maura, or I think are
(18:07):
just really cool and impressive, or they have skills that.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
I really admire, and so there's a lot of that.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
It's kind of a little bit of wish fulfillment when
I'm writing and creating these characters. And then as far
as the conflicts, I've lived a fairly low conflict life,
and like there's no big revolutions, no big wars, but
a lot of the internal conflicts you're still facing. And
(18:34):
so a lot of times we can take things that
we feel on a small level and then you put
them into these characters who are experiencing really big, life changing,
world changing events, and they're experiencing the same emotions just
in a bigger way. So an example of that might
be something like periods of my life where I've faced
(18:56):
imposter syndrome and felt like, you know, you question yourself,
you doubt yourself. I think I'm a good person, but
there was that one time I said that really mean thing,
So maybe I'm not as good as I think. Like
we've all had those moments. And then you have a
character like Cinder who's trying to you know, lead this
revolution and take down this evil queen and she's facing
(19:18):
really big things, but she still has these internal conflicts
with herself where she's wondering like, I think I'm a
good person and I think I'm doing the right thing,
but also I know that I there's moments where I've
felt a little power hungry, and there's moments where I've
done things I wasn't thrilled that I did, and so
maybe I'm not a good person after all. And so
(19:39):
you can, you know, use the personal experiences to then
inspire what the character is going through and hopefully write
those emotions in a way that readers can really relate
to even though readers are like, well, I don't know
what I would do in that situation either.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
No, that's the thing is like being human, we all
have these similar experiences, right, It's just like, but to
like what degree or to what I extent or any
of that. But I also think that's why I like,
you know, people love reading and characters.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
They always see some parts of themselves within them. So
I'm going to like just give her listeners quick heads up.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
There is a little bit of a spoiler for the
end of the Lunar Chronicles here, because I accidentally did
a spoiler the other day and someone was not very
happy with me. One of the folklores I spoke with.
Her name is doctor Gina Jorgensen, as she's another guest
on the show. But we are discussing about how in
these original fairy tales, the end goal essentially was for
(20:38):
these women to get married, and that was their happy ending, right,
that was They've made it, They're successful, that's it. However,
and the Lunar Chronicles, Sinder decides to say on Luna
to help the country get back on its feet. First,
then she tells Prince Kai, who is the Prince of
the book that you know she'd be happy to come
(20:59):
and meet him later. I'm curious, what was your reasoning
behind that ending? It's not the atypical for Cinderella.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
So, of course, if we think why in historically in
fairy tales, why was the ending get married, find a prince,
get married, live happily ever after. And of course, through
most of human history women had so little power, and
one of the few ways a woman could be cared
(21:30):
for and know that she didn't have to worry about
am I going to eat? And am I going to
have shelter and like these basic human needs was to
find a husband and fingers crossed, he's a nice guy.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
And so it makes a lot.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Of sense that for so much of history that was
the focus for a lot of these fairy tales. Well,
nowadays this is not, you know, the be all end all.
We can have a career, we can make our own money,
we can buy our own homes and run our own businesses,
and finding a husband is not the thing that means
(22:04):
we're going to survive and we're going to be okay.
So on like a thematic level, it just didn't make
sense that had to be the thing that Cinder was
working toward this whole series, like, Okay.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
She beat the queen and she won the war, but
does she get the prince?
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Like, that's not the important thing that we're looking at here,
And so so I definitely wanted to end it in
a place where she is in a position of power,
but also in a place where she gets to make
her own decisions, because for much of the series, especially
in the first book, she was seen as a lesser
citizen and there was a lot of prejudice against her,
(22:44):
and she.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
At one point her body is like literally sold to.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Science, And so I really wanted to show that Cinder
was independent and on her own and she didn't need
Prince Kai, she didn't need marriage. That said, I am
certainly a romantic, and so we imply, of course that
sometime after the end of the series she and Kai
will get married, after Luna's been taken care of and
(23:10):
her responsibilities are fulfilled, not because she means him, but
because she loves him and he loves her.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
You've pretty much already spoken to this, But why do
you think that, especially with fairy tale retellings, why do
you think that the endings are changing Fairy tales.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
In general change.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
They change because society changes and what we are craving
in our stories changes, and that's honestly, I think that's
my favorite thing about fairy tales is to look at
them across history and to see what are the things
that have not changed in hundreds of years and in
some cases in thousands of years, Like we still have
(23:52):
the Lost Slipper, we still have the going to a
ball or a festival. We still have these things, and
yet what is different, what has changed?
Speaker 1 (24:02):
And I just think that's so interesting.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
They're like little snap and I think you kind of
called it this earlier. They're like little snapshots of society
and where where we are at the time that that
story was written.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
I spoke with Marissa about her Guilded duology books. We
talked about it in the last episode about Rumpel, but
it's a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin where the mischievous helper is
actually the good guy, a prince no less, and he
and his kingdom have been put under a curse by
a demon king that the miller's daughter helps him break.
(24:38):
I asked Marissa what inspired her to write Guilded.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
With Guilded, I had, I think I'm going to guess that,
young Marissa. The first fairy tale I ever wanted to
retell was Rumpelstiltskin. That's before I even like could have
comprehended writing an entire novel. I'm thinking like when I
was eight, nine, ten years old and like writing short
(25:04):
stories and then the very beginning of my artistic journey.
I loved and hated rumpelstilt Skin. It was one of
my favorite stories, but also one of the most frustrating
stories because I felt.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Like it had so many plot holes.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
I felt like it left me with so many unanswered
questions and pretty much my whole.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Life for at least the last you know, thirty years.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
It was just in the back of my head as like,
I need to do something with that story.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Yeah, and so I finally did and yielded.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Okay, that's so funny, because I feel like Rumpelstiltskin isn't
typically people's like go to stories. I know, I kind
of obscure a little bit. I feel like, yeah, I
feel like it's a bit on the back burner. So
I really love to hear this. Other than having plot
holes or any in everything, is there something else up
(25:59):
to you to this particular tale.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Uh, I mean, it's weirdness. It's a weird little story.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
And as we talked before, you and I we like
the weird ones, the dark ones.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
But no, I mean a lot of it was the
unanswered questions. I wanted to know more about rumpel Stiltskin.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I wanted to know how he got this gift of
being able to spin straw to gold that's never really explained.
I wanted to know what he was gonna do with
the baby, Like, in the end, he really wants this
child and bargains with the young Queen to get her
firstborn child.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
But we have no idea why. It's like, is he
gonna eat the child?
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Does he want it for some sort of black magic?
And then there's like that little optimistic part of me that's.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Like, maybe he's just lonely, he just wants to be
a dad, And so I really wanted to know about that.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
And I think, honestly, I think the thing that bothered
me the most about it was it when you read
rumpel Stiltskin. Clearly the intention is for the reader to
see rumpel Stiltskin as the villain of the story, and
in the end, she's married to this king and Rumbell's
Stiltskin is defeated and she gets to keep her child
(27:09):
and she's now married happily ever after.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
And I was like, no, this king, this king is
a bad dude.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
He took her from her family, he locked her in
this dungeon, he ordered her to do this impossible thing.
He threatened to kill her multiple times. And now we're
supposed to be like.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
Oh, yay, they're so happy.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
I just did not buy it, and that really really
bothered me. And again, I love this story, like this
was one of my favorite stories that I think in
part part of the reason that I loved it so
much was because even as a kid, my little writer
brain was like thinking of the other options.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
And so.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
When I decided I was going to retell rumbel Stiltskin,
that's probably the first thing that I knew I was
going to change. I knew that I was going to
have the king be the villain and rumbel Stiltstigen was
going to be the hero slash love interest. And so
that was kind of the twist that grabbed me from
the beginning and then ended up turning into this story.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
I agree with you.
Speaker 3 (28:13):
So, with all of your retellings, how do you decide
what you keep and what you create? And why are
those the elements that you choose to keep important to you.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, that's such a good question because it's interesting to
me reading other fairy tale retellings, because for me, that's
step one.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
I'm going to do retelling of this story.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
The first thing I do is I go and I
read the source material, and a lot of times I'll
go and read multiple versions of a fairy tale and decide, Okay,
if I'm doing Rumpelstiltskin, what to me are the most
important iconic elements.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
Of this story.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
I want to include the necklace in the ring that
get bargained away. I know at some point we're going
to have a newborn baby, or at least a bargain
for a newborn baby. There has to be a question
about the name that to me, that's a huge part
of the Rumpelstiltskin's story is why does he keep his
name hidden? What does it mean? Why is that important?
There's gonna be spinning straw into gold. So I figure out, like,
(29:13):
what to me are the really iconic things about this
story that make it this fairy tale, and to me,
cannot be taken away. And if you take them away,
they're no longer this fairy tale. Now you're writing something
totally different.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
And then I start kind of building off of that.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Once I know what things I want to keep, then
I figure out how am I going to change them.
I know that I want the maiden in question to
have a necklace that she's going to bargain with Rumpelstiltskin
for where did that necklace come from, why is it important?
What's its significance? And it kind of starts to build
its own story off of that, and eventually you hope
(29:50):
that all of those threads tie together into something that
makes sense.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
And that's kind of my process.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
But as I was gonna say before, it's so interesting
to me that I will read the source material and
I will decide on the things that I think are
absolutely ne But then I'll go and I'll read someone
else's retelling about rumbelstilt Skin and be.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Like, they like totally took out the whole baby thing.
There's no newborn child, there's no bargaining for it.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
And to me, that just like blows my mind, like
it didn't even cross my mind, it just not include it.
I struggled for months trying to figure out what I
was going to do with that, you know, like what
that was an option you could just like no include it.
Speaker 1 (30:35):
One of the things.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
That I've noticed with a lot of the modern adaptations
is that these retellings, as we've said a couple times already,
really choose to explore the gray. It's no longer just
like Stark, this is right, this is wrong, or these
characters that were portrayed as wrong were like but.
Speaker 1 (30:53):
Were they really you know, I'm kind of curious what
your thoughts and like, why do you think that is?
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Like what is causing that shift in these stories to happen?
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Yeah, I think when we're doing retellings, we just have
a lot more space to explore than someone writing a three.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Page fairy tale has to explore.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
And then I don't I can't speak for everyone, of course,
but for me personally, I think the gray areas are
really interesting and that's what makes us human.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
You Know.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
We can say we try to be good people, we
try to do the right thing, but there's not a
person among us who doesn't have something that we regret
or some time that we, you know, recognize, oh, I
could have behaved better there. So that's such a universal thing.
And also when you start looking at at other people,
(31:43):
it's really really easy to cast judgments and to look
at someone else's actions and label them as good or bad.
But I think by and large, we're very rarely right
about that. I think it's much more true to life
if we recognize, like, well, I don't like what that
(32:05):
person did, but wouldn't it be interesting to know their
reasons for it?
Speaker 1 (32:09):
And when you start.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Digging into the reasons and then what is motivating a
person to do things, suddenly there's a story there, and
suddenly it kind of forces us to question, well, that
might change my opinion, or now I have to question, Okay,
if I was in that situation, how would I have
handled it? I mean, things are just so rarely black
and white, and that's just true about humanity. And so
(32:33):
that's to me far more interesting than writing characters who
are entirely good or entirely evil.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
We'll be right back with my interview with author Marissa Meyer.
Author Marissa Meyer has been a fan of fairy tales
since she was a kid, so I asked her why
does she think the Brothers Grim stories specifically stand out.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
I think because there are themes and ideas in them
that people can relate to, no matter what year they're born,
no matter where on this planet they were born. There
are things that are just universal to the human experience,
and these stories boil them down to things that we
(33:26):
can all understand.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
And why do you think storytellers like yourself revisit these
tales time and time again?
Speaker 2 (33:34):
For me, because I love the familiarity of these stories,
and I love that they do have these kind of
built in themes and these universal themes. But at the
same time, you can take them and they're like little
frameworks that as a creator, you've got this kind of
built in skeleton of a story, but then you can
(33:56):
expand it beyond that to be anything. And so it's
this great creative challenge for me to take what's already
there and write something that readers will feel is both
familiar and yet unlike anything.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Else they've ever read before.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
Okay, And I feel like stories are reflections of ourselves, right,
Like we write or we read so we can learn
about ourselves, like in safer ways, like we were talking
about like the kids earlier, right, like learn about like
the heartships of the world. So what do you think
these tales tell us about who we are?
Speaker 2 (34:35):
I think that fiction in general puts us into the
shoes of other people and puts us in these experiences
that we may never actually experience in real life. But
it forces us to ask the question what would I do?
And I think that sometimes we're surprised by those answers,
(34:58):
and sometimes reading a story changes us and who we
were before we read the story, and what we would
have answered to that question might be different after reading it.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
And finally, why do you think the Brother's Grim fairy
Tales will live on?
Speaker 1 (35:17):
Well, we've lasted this long. No, they're not going away.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
I think they'll continue to change, and I think that
there will be whole generations that know them as the
Disney movies or maybe even.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
As the mrsa. Meyer fairy Tales.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
I don't know, but there are going to people be
people like you and me who are so curious about
the older versions and want to dig a little deeper.
And for me, like I'm currently reading the complete collection
of the Brothers Grim to my nine year old daughters
and because that to me, that's important, Like I want
them to know the Disney movies are great, that's wonderful,
but I also want to show them the other versions.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
I really love that.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
I absolutely love that so also great because they're so lucky,
all of them. There's like two hundred and fifty and
I've never sat down and read all of them, and
so there's in reading over it. It's been fascinating to
me and how there's some stories that you're like, Okay,
I can totally see why nobody cares about this one
and nobody's ever heard of it.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
But then there's other.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
Stories that are so good, and I'm like, how how
has this one not been as popular as like Jack
and the Beanstock.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Honestly, like that's like us, that's an undertaking. I forget
about Jack and the bean Stock. It's not my favorite.
It's not my favorite.
Speaker 3 (36:40):
Yeah it's okay, but yeah, because like someone gifted me.
It was I think a family member years and years ago,
like the Collected works, right, and I remember like I
was like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna read all
of these and I remember getting into it and I
was like this is not gonna happen. Yeah, Granted, I
was like I think in my teen so I was like,
this is boring.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
This is boring, you know, like kind of one of those.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
But yeah, So honestly, like I give you mad prouts
for doing that. I think that's great. And that also,
like your daughter, your daughter's right that they also get
to experience that too. So that's it's been really really fun.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
We're I remember maybe like a third of the way
through the book now, but it's it's hilarious because of
course there's patterns, and they have now picked up on
some of the patterns. And at one point one of
my daughters, I don't remember what story we'd finished, but
she goes, Mom, why are these stories always about death?
Speaker 1 (37:35):
I don't know, but it is. It is amazing reading
all of them back to back.
Speaker 4 (37:40):
You're like, yeah, there's like a lot of death, a
lot of blood, and a lot of gore. It's they're
very very violent, they're gruesome, they're they're pretty rough.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
They're they're very rough. Well, thank you so much for
joining me. I super appreciate it. This has been absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
So it's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
You learn more about Marissa Meyer and her books on
her website. Marissameyer dot com. That's m A R I
S S A M E y e r dot com.
Next time, My what.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Big eyes you have? Grandmother?
Speaker 3 (38:22):
The Deep Dark Woods is a production of School of
Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It was created, written, and hosted
by me Miranda Hawkins. Senior producer is Gabby Watts. Executive
producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon barr Els Crowley, and Maya Howard.
Theme song was composed by Jesse Niswanger, who also sound
(38:42):
designed and mixed this episode.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
You can follow the
Speaker 3 (38:45):
Show on Instagram at School of Humans and don't forget
to subscribe and leave a review.
Host
Miranda Hawkins
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