Everyone thinks of them in terms of poisoned apples and glass coffins, and forgets that they represent girls who walked into dark forests and remade them into their own reflections.
Clichés are relatives of the fairy tale, and tropes aren’t bad; they go with the territory.
When you’re late in a fairy tale, people wind up dead. And not true-love’s-kiss, glass-coffin-nap-time dead. Really dead, the kind of dead you don’t recover from.
Sure. If she gets mugged, she can just flute them to death.
