ONCE UPON A Time, in a magic kingdom (oops!) in the hills of a benevolent land, lived a powerful lord who had vaults of treasured art. The people of the land loved the kingdom and adored the treasures, and they worked hard to make money to access them. The lord collected the hard-earned coins from the people of the realm, and made more treasured art, which then caused the people of the kingdom to pay even more to see them, and so on.

And everyone lived happily ever after … until the lord of the magic kingdom (oops!) and his latest nobility decided that the treasured art was now Problematic and Misguided and possibly Misogynistic and Quite Stalky. The lord and his new nobles of passing celebrity instructed the people that these treasures no longer had value, and that the people who had adored them were either Problematic etc themselves or simply too stupid to realize that the treasured art was in fact worthless, no matter what the lord had told them all these years.

So now the lord and nobles expected the people of the magic kingdom (oops!) to line up to pay for the new treasured art that the lord and his nobles prepared to replace the treasures the people had adored. If they didn’t, or if they expressed any public sentiment  supporting the original and adored treasured art, they would be labeled Problematic, Misguided, Misogynistic, and Quite Stalky themselves.

And thus it was that the lord and his nobles proceeded to twist even the very nature of the lessons in the original treasured art into something as unrecognizable as … well, this (via Sarah Hoyt, near the end):

Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Zegler also revealed that the film is also changing the definition of “fair” for the film. The original animated film made it clear the term referred to beauty and was providing a lesson vanity.

This will no longer be the definition for Zegler’s live-action movie.

She explained, “The reality is that the cartoon was made 85 years ago and therefore it’s extremely dated when it comes to the ideas of women being in roles of power and what a woman is fit for in the world. And so when we came to reimagining the actual role of Snow White it became about the fairest of them all meaning who is the most just. And who can become a fantastic leader.”

Zegler continued, “And the reality is, you know, Snow White has to learn a lot of lessons about coming into her own power before she can come into power over a kingdom.”

Er … wut? In the original Snow White fairy tale and film, the moral of the story is about the destructive ends of vanity. “Fairest” in the German folktale sense means prettiest, which is why the evil Queen has a magic mirror in the first place. Her obsessive narcissism is what creates her downfall. It is not a tale of power or even privilege, since nearly everyone in the story is “privileged” in the class sense. Nor is a story about fairness in the modern sense either, because the evil Queen is the reigning monarch, and Snow White and the Prince would have been usurpers if they tried to push her off the throne.

And that’s what makes this new twisted meaning of “fairness” utterly laughable. Other than the Seven Dwarves and the Huntsman (maybe), everyone in the Snow White fairy tale comes from hereditary nobility. The Brothers Grimm published it in 1812, at a time when Europe had barely moved out of the feudal system. These aren’t elected officials standing for a constituency, but entitled feudal lords. The Queen is regnant, Snow White is her stepmother’s heir to the throne, and Prince Charming is a neighboring royal looking for a suitable marriage to a fellow noble.

Needless to say, hereditary nobility did not decide to put the crown on the most woke head in the kingdom. If we are to believe this concept, then we must believe that the Queen in this story had been previously chosen to rule because she was the absolute fairest, wokest, most just person in the kingdom. Then, when she discovered (through a magic mirror!) that she was in fact only the second-most woke, fair, and just person in the kingdom … she turned into a psychotic murderous villain so that she could restore her previous status as the most “fair” in the land.

Jeez. Imagine if she was only the third most “fair,” woke, just person!

This incoherent reconstruction manages to out-do George Lucas’ attempt to democratize “Princess” Leia in the Star Wars prequels. Lucas also tried to strip his fairy-tale trope into a convoluted explanation of elected princesses after he decided to make the Sith Lord into an intergalactic Dick Nixon who undermined stellar democracy. That was hardly the worst thing about the prequels, though, so few bothered to object.

The clear point in this new iteration of Snow White is to beat its audiences over the head with lectures about wokeness and their version of “fairness,” even though the point of the original tale wasn’t Snow White’s fairness but the evil Queen’s vanity. Disney wants to rob its treasured art to transform it into a identity-politics-obsessed morality tale rather than, y’know, writing an original story in a fairy-tale framework to deliver their preferred message. And all the while, they want to denigrate the original, classic animated feature that Disney created nearly 90 years ago while sticking to the original Brothers Grimm story.

So how will the people of the magic kingdom react to being lectured about their problematic attachment to the beloved treasured art of yore? It might explain why the peasants aren’t showing up at the Magic Kingdom like they used to do in years gone by. One fan site blamed “climate change,” but it’s not the weather that’s changed so much as the political climate. The flops of wokeified Disney films at the box office is likely adding to the problem, since the films normally act to create demand for park attendance — the cost of which is so ridiculously high now that you practically need to be a member of the hereditary nobility to afford it.

What is the conclusion of our fairy tale? The lord and his collection of very photogenic nobles put on a ball to celebrate the New Fair Woke Just treasured art, and invite the whole kingdom to join them. The lord and his nobles continue to dance at the ball in the magic kingdom (oops!), oblivious to the fact that they’re only entertaining themselves.

The rest of us lived happily ever after.