My mother chopped my head off, my father swallowed me. My sister buried all my bones, under the Juniper Tree. Ka-twee! Ka-twee! You'll never find, a prettier bird than me!

(If you're wondering, yes I wrote that title entirely from memory.)
I know these are the Grimm's fairy tales, and violence is to be expected, but even so this set of readings seemed somewhat darker than the previous. Maybe it's because the new readings are stories I'm not familiar with and therefore I haven't become accustomed to their dark nature like I have been with any of the ones that Disney has gotten hold of. If you're wondering what I mean, I'm taking about the traditional ruination of your childhood via internet: "Hey, you used to like Cinderella, did you? Did you know in one of the older versions she doesn't wake up, and the prince rapes her comatose body?" Once you get enough of that from online randos you kinda become numb to it, but NOW I get an all new set of stories to make me say "wow okay that just happened." I do think happy endings where everybody gets along are overrated though, so needless to say I was pretty okay with when the stepmother in The Juniper Tree got her head smashed in with a millstone and when the shoemaker in The Two Traveling Companions got his eyes pecked out, went mad and died lost and alone in the forest. People  back then knew how to write a satisfying ending.

However, if there's one story from the readings that I think is Disneyfiable, it has to be Iron Hans. Kid's born into a rich family, does a noble deed by helping a strange man escape enslavement, henceforth befriending the man and getting taken out of his sheltered life. Then he's exposed to the wild man's magic that turns his hair gold, henceforth marking him as a "special snowflake." He is thrown out into the real world, where he takes on the roll of the mysterious-and-secretly-superior underdog, and he and the princess playfully charm each other and fall in love.Then he uses the very Genie-like powers of the super special friend he made to become a hero, get the girl, and get dem monies yo. Reunites with his family and releases Iron Hans from the spell that was put on him then I guess Hans like, becomes his godfather or something? And everybody lives happily ever after. The only thing it was missing was an identifiable villain, which would obviously have to be the king of the opposing army in the war, who plots to kill the good king, destroy his kingdom, and take his daughter for his bride in the Disney version. There's simply no other way to do it.

Along with the assigned readings, I also read The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs and The Girl with no Hands. I'll give you one guess as to which one has heavy religious connotations, and I'll tell you that it's not the one with "Devil" in the title. Seriously though, I thought I was reading something straight from the bible with all the devil trickery and the praying and the angels. It's a totally feel-good god-loving thing that's saying everything will be alright as long as you belieeeeve, and nobody got killed, maimed, or otherwise beaten down in that one, so it really was not up my ally. Well, except for the main character spoiler: she loses her hands, but her hands grow back, so everyone's happy and not at all maimed la-dee-da. I know it's not a show I payed for but I still want my money back.

It's Very Shakespearean

So this reading assignment has shoved how terrible I am at reading old(er) English so far up in my face that light is no longer able to reach my eyes. The summaries at the beginning of each scene helped a lot with giving me the foundation I needed to work with, but then I had to use the bricks of detail given to me by Shakespeare to build a proper house of story understanding in the neighborhood that is my mind. Normally I'm a pretty good carpenter, but now instead of normal house-pieces it's like I'm working with some sort of weird stone blobs and odd shaped doors that are just really hard to figure out how to put together. Then if you can't figure out how to fit the plot-pieces together and you just start placing them wherever or leave some out because you don't think they're important for the structure, then they don't fit right you get some weird shape but you think "a little mistake is fine, nobody will notice when it's done" and then you keep building, but the mistakes keep piling up and then your house ends up looking really awkward and ugly and nobody wants to live in it.

 I turned Hamlet into an M.C. Escher painting.

Basically the task I set for myself while reading this was to figure out who the heck it is that I'm supposed to be rooting for (joke's on me and it's probably going to turn out that everyone's terrible and anyone who I actually like will die anyway, as per Shakespeare). My current consensus is thus: The king and duke are assholes, the slave kid started out pretty cool but then turned out to be a creepy rapey weirdo, the daughter and the prince are the arbitrary hormonal teenagers that decide they're in love because they are opposite gender and happened to make eye-contact, Ariel is just a perfect wonderful innocent little spirit who can do no wrong, and the wizard guy doesn't seem too bad, except I feel like his grudge about being out-duked is going to go bad places AND HE'D BETTER KEEP HIS PROMISE TO FREE ARIEL OR I SWEAR TO GOD. What I'm saying is, screw the mortals, Ariel is my protagonist.

There's no doubt a lot of details that I missed, since I don't understand half the things these people say and the stuff on the left pages IS NOT VERY HELPFUL. Seriously though, half the time there's a phrase I don't understand and the book refuses to help me, half the time it decides to help me with something that I'm honestly insulted it thought I couldn't figure out on my own ("incharitable: i.e. uncharitable" Really? REALLY!?), and some of the time it actually aids me in figuring out the story. (I may have rounded these values.) Basically all I picked up from the whole first scene was that the ship was sinking, and in retrospect I guess the prince guy was on it? So if anyone picked up on any details that would probably affect my character opinions, please tell me I feel so helpless.

Manifest Mother Issues

At long last, it's the birth of the traditional witch hunt in all it's glory. Fear mongering, emotional knee-jerk reactions to the apparent enemy, and the immediate and forceful putting down with anyone and everyone who disagrees with your opinions that you believe to be 100% factual and correct. So basically just regular politics but with more magic and mass murder.

What really stood out to me in this chapter, though, is how absolutely abysmally these two guys feel about women. They keep going on and on about how women are weak mentally and easily corrupted, and how they're just a necessary evil used to have children but will make your life miserable in the process. According to them, women are only good when they're gentle and subservient, and any other time they are the manifestation of Hell itself. No middle ground, no thinking "Hey, maybe she's just unhappy that I keep her chained to the stove 6 hours a day," just one or the other. Sounds to me like they had super fun home lives as kids that caused them to develop some serious mother issues.

Of course I'm getting ahead of myself, because I must mention that right out of the gate Kramer and Sprenger disable any and all possible debate by basically saying that everyone who disagrees with them is stupid and evil and needs to be punished for not acknowledging the far mentally superior beings who are lords Kramer and Sprenger. This typical type of mentality isn't uncommon in people throughout history, but the difference between modern and olden times is that a figurehead doing that today will get him super far with a small portion of the population who just so happen to have the same ideas, and exactly nowhere with the vast majority that is the rest of the world. Trying to pull that nowadays will only have the influence of getting people to make fun of him over the internet in a manner similar to this:

A large portion of the rest of the text is them trying to figure out what exactly witches are and are not able to do, such as overturning the Canon's declaration that any bodily transportation occurs only in the imagination, because nobody can ever seem to agree on any of this. Seriously though, at this point you'd think that SOMEONE would have at the very least come up with some theorem that at least most learned people could agree upon, but I guess real people don't work like the scientific community and witchcraft doesn't work like physics, so it's probably too much to think that a medieval Einstein would come along and solve the puzzle of the proverbial ether. This is why my best friend is a statistics textbook with a face drawn on the cover.