As a child I loved fairytales, not just the limited offering proffered by Disney, but the concept of fairytales as a whole. I have a copy of the complete illustrated stories of the Brothers Grimm almost a thousand pages long it's quite an undertaking to try and read - so much so that I've never managed to do it. Instead I choose to dip in and out of it reading a story or two at a time.
One thing that always annoyed me about the general concept of a fairytale is the phrase "And they lived happily ever after" - thankfully most of the Grimm Brothers stories don't actually end with that or anything akin to it - a few do. I think even as a kid though, the reason that phrase annoyed me was because it suggested the events of the story were the only significant thing to happen to the characters in their lifetime, but that always seemed too simplistic, a lifetime unsurprisingly is a long time, and to suggest nothing interesting ever happened again is trite; granted as a child I didn't possess the vocabulary or the level of critical thinking necessary to articulate those thoughts, but in hindsight I recognise that was the problem.
