How Passive and Active Character Traits affect Fairy Tales

The Development of characters having a passive characteristic and active meaning being active can affect the story,and can directly shape the themes of Fairy Tales. Like how in Rapunzel she switches from passive to active traits and it heavily influences the Fairy Tales progression and storyline. This can affect the character motivations which can lead to plot twists and the audience and reader engagement in the Fairy Tale and can also highly impact the way how readers and audience portray this reading in the fairytale including the storyline and characters.

Fairy Tales are known for having a message to convey and for certain popular events that are known and their uniqueness like Rapunzel for her very long blonde hair, blue beard for his big blue beard and other things. But what most makes up the way how these characters are, are their characteristics and personality traits. It’s the characters and how they are and act that makes up what the Fairy Tale is about. That’s why there are different versions of Fairy Tales. Some characters can act differently and that’s what causes the change of events in the storyline, it can 

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heavily depend on whether they are passive and submissive vs if they are active and doing things they wouldn’t have done before. This can have an effect on the readers and audience and can heavily affect how they portray it, especially the characters, and have a different point of view and new meaning behind what they thought and take in when reading the fairy tale. It can impact in a way where they don’t like the fairy tale and characters no more or they would like it more and things like that. 

In the article “Echoes of Our Favourite Childhood Figures: Examining the Role of Disney in Lifelong Character Development Through Its Generational Fairy Tales Development Through Its Generational Fairy Tales”.  The authors for this article are Griszbacher Norbert, Kemeny fciko, and Varga, Akos. These authors are all researchers that have been to university and they study and research on societal perspectives in society and behaviors so they decided to use their knowledge all together to create this article. 

Transformation in Fairy Tales shows character traits and behaviors that can be changed in a way how they act and do things which leads to it not following a role anymore.“Character development is a complex, lifelong journey.  In this regard, the lack of experience, which solidifies the value of maintaining certain character traits, makes youth more vulnerable due to susceptibility to outer influence  while exploring new ideas  and novel challenges For which they 

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might not yet be ready”.(Griszbacher et al. 52) This promotes a change of understanding and emotion in readers having a different deeper engagement with the challenges and transformations in fairy tales and their characters that they experience. A change of personal characteristic traits can actually affect the narrative and story lines of Fairy Tales whether they turn from passive to active. They try to promote a better understanding of the Media’s influence on character formation.

Character development has a heavy influence on the youth and Juvenile audience. Disney’s modern reinterpretations of classic Fairy Tales change character traits. Which reshapes narrative and influences youth indemnity. By turning traditionally passive characters into active, emotionally complex individuals Disney showcases character development throughout the fairy tale. In the Article “Fairy Tales Reinterpreted: Passive Protagonist Transformed Into Active Heroines”. It states  “Perhaps one of the primary reasons that critics have found significant problems with fairy tales is that there is often a perception that a woman who is rescued by the 4 bonds of marriage, like the protagonist in “Cinderella,” is automatically passive or weak, and this interpretation has been applied to the majority of other tales’ protagonists; contributing fodder to this theory is the problematic misappropriation of “heroine” as a term that is interchangeable with “protagonist”(Price and Ashley 3) classic Fairy Tale heroines shows strength and suggest that these characters journeys always are passive and never active. Fairy Tales heroines challenge the interpretations by seeing the protagonist  in female fairy tales like Cinderella and to show how they are always the same. 

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In the Article  “Sleeping beauty or rebellious antagonist: passive and active stereotypes in fantasy and fairytales”. When it comes to specific characters like females in Fairy Tales, they are often predicted and portrayed to act a specific way. But sometimes it can change. Female characters in fairy tales are often stereotyped as passive and submissive but that passivity cna change and turn into negativity and being more active can change the audience point of view… 

“In response to the passive princesses of fairytales and many fantasy novels, some authors have created female protagonists that are the complete opposite, something that in fandom has been dubbed the “rebellious princess syndrome”(Norlin and Emma 23). Passive traits that are categorized by how female stereotypes are, can be active or passive roles that can be concluded and changed into a more power and rebellion theme then safe and closed.

In the article “The uses of Enchantments” “3 little pigs”, In The Three Little Pigs, the writer talks about the tension between the pleasure principle (immediate gratification) and the reality principle (delayed gratification). “ The younger pigs seek immediate gratification, without a thought for the future and the dangers of reality, although the middle pig shows some growth in trying to build a somewhat more substantial house than the youngest. Only the third and oldest pig has learned to behave in accordance with the reality principle: he is able to postpone his desire to play, and instead acts in line with his ability to foresee what may happen in the future”.  (Bettelheim 42) this represents the challenges and dangers in life and the achievement of what hard work and dedication can lead to. It shows how the roles of their characteristic heavily affects on how they build the house which can save them against the wolf. 

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In “Brothers Grimm #26, “Little Red Cap” She gets eaten by a wolf and falls for his trap to go to her grandma’s house. Then she ends up surviving and killing the wolf. Then later on learns from her experience and doesn’t end up doing the same mistake she did last time. “Little 

Red Cap kept carrying the water until she had filled the big, big trough. Then the smell of sausages reached the nose of the wolf. He sniffed and looked down. Finally, he stretched his neck 

so far that he could no longer keep his balance on the roof. He began to slip from the roof and fell right into the big trough and drowned. Then Little Red Cap went happily and safely to her home.” (Grimm 88) This shows how she became from passive to more aggressive and active and changed her ways and made a trap for the new wolf since she learned her lesson from last time and ended up happily living ever after. 

In the article “Why Fairy Tales Matter: The Performative and the Transformative”, The way how characters are portrayed really affects the audience and kids in these fairy tales,“the child reading fairy tales enters Elsewhere to learn language and master the linguistic conventions that allow adults to do things with words, to produce effects that are achieved by saying something. For children, do all adults possess wizardry in their control over symbolic forms of expression? They can create illusions, effect changes, and take on agency through word”(Maria and Folklore 63). This shows how fairy tales can have a big impact on people and it can teach kids the good or bad so it really affects how the narrative of characters in these fairy tales are passive and active. Kids learn from what they read and see and they follow everything that’s in 

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in front of them so that it can really play a factor on their life and affect them in ways that people can imagine. 

The shift between passive and active traits in characters plays an effective role in shaping the themes and narratives of fairy tales. Character transformations from a passive to active character plays a big role in the plot and  engagement of the audience and readers. This impacts character motivations, leading to crazy plot twists and a change of narrative and story. So the way characters have passive and active characteristics in fairy tales shows the importance of how the outcome of a story will come about.

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Work Cited

Griszbacher, Norbert ; Kemény, Ildikó ; Varga, Ákos GILE journal of skills development Echoes of Our Favourite Childhood Figures: Examining the Role of Disney in Lifelong Character Development Through Its Generational Fairy Tales Development Through Its Generational Fairy Tales 2022-10, Vol.2 (2), p.51-72 https://cuny-cc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay

Price, Lauren Ashley Fairy Tales Reinterpreted: Passive Protagonist Transformed Into Active Heroines Middle Tennessee State University 2014-06-3 https://jewlscholar.mtsu.edu/items/26d1a285-7890-4ea0-8d89-7d1e34d27732

Norlin, Emma, Sleeping beauty or rebellious antagonist: passive and active stereotypes in fantasy and fairytales. 2009 https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1030873&dswid=-6346

Maria Tater, Western Folklore Why Fairy Tales Matter: The Performative and the Transformative Vol. 69, No. 1 (Winter 2010), pp. 55-64 (10 pages) https://www.jstor.org/stable/25735284

Bettelheim Three Little Pigs

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https://learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet02-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com/61aab133e7df2/64571733

Brothers Grimm #26 Little Red Cap Vol. 1 pp 85-88

https://learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet02-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com/61aab133e7df2/ 4571733