Fairy tales still have a great deal of resonance, but modern life involves less battle on horseback and more passive-aggressive Facebooking. With that in mind, Tumblr Fairy Tales for Twenty-Somethings has rewritten classic fables and fairy tales for the generation that engages in epic couch-surfing quests, has traded magic mirrors for Siri, and only encounters wolves in bars.
Fairy Tales for Twenty-Somethings puts clever modern spins on fairy tales, using tales of princesses and talking animals to poke at relationship problems, career goals, social media, and disconnection with the world. The stories are sometimes biting, but more often they're a bit sad. Here are a few examples:
The crazy thing is that eventually even Alice began to doubt whether what she'd seen down the rabbit hole had ever really existed. And it didn't make her sad, there was nothing overly dramatic about it, it was just that now she understood how the world actually worked.
But then she was tagged in a photo by an old friend, by the White Rabbit. It was a faded picture of her and the Cheshire Cat, and, wow, it just brought her right back.
After pulling the sword from the stone but before becoming king, Arthur went on a cross-country road trip / vision quest. He crashed on friends' couches or, on a few nights, the back seat of his car. He went to Burning Man, stayed in the mountains of Montana for a few weeks, and learned to build a cigar-box guitar from some guy on the street in New Orleans.
When he finally arrived home, a wiser man, he thought, "That shit was awesome. I gotta find a way to do that all the time."
The hare got a high-powered job in the tech industry straight out of college, whlie the tortoise traveled the country by train just writing in his journal and thinking. Finally the tortoise got a big book deal for a memoir he wrote and when he posted about it on Facebook he thought, I knew I'd outshine that fucker in the end.
More recently, they've started adding original artwork, such as the piece up top, which illustrates this short, short story:
Thumbelina never got much bigger but she did get her own reality TV show, so that's cool.
Fairy Tales for Twenty-Somethings [via reddit]