As Catherine Roach explains in her novel The Romance Story in Popular Culture, “This romance story is endlessly taught and replayed in a multiplicity of cultural sites: Disney princess movies, the wedding industry, fairytales, Hollywood movies, pop music lyrics, advertising, the diamond jewelry industry, and more.” Romance surrounds us, and our ideals of it may be taught to us through film, but our exposure to promotion of the romantic myth follows us out of the theatre and into the real world. In Fairy Tales explored through blah blah blah, Mejene writes about how Disney films, some based on the gruesome fairy tales of the Grimm brothers, leave out the more gory scenes in the film in order to send a happier message about love than the original story does. In the original Little Mermaid story, the prince never falls in love with Arielle, and marries another princess instead. Ariel, heartbroken, decides to kill the prince and his new wife in their sleep, but once she finds herself unable to, decides to kill herself instead. Things do not end well at all in the original story, and so Meneje writes about how “obtaining innocent immortal soul is considered more important than happiness in romantic relationships” at that period, due to religious reasons. Romance interpreted through film is interesting to consider from a religious perspective, especially with the transformation of how religious values are presented through media, and how most the romance myth is learned at a very early age, with Adam and Eve. Biblical values and their interpretations and understandings have changed over the centuries to fit our current society, and biblical references like Adam and Eve have now been reappropriated and repeatedly used as an anti-gay slogan.
Roach, Catherine M. Happily Ever After : The Romance Story in Popular Culture. Indiana University Press, 2016.
Menise, Tatjana. “Fairy Tales between Transformation and Repetition: How Audiences Rethink the Big Romantic Myth through Disney Princess Stories.” Sign Systems Studies, vol. 47, no. 3/4, July 2019, pp. 526–551. EBSCOhost, doi:10.12697/SSS.2019.47.3-4.08.
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