So, Monday Feb. 26 was National Tell a Fairy Tale Day. Honestly, who comes up with this stuff? My local classical music station was having a great time with it, since fairy tales, myths, and folk tales have always been a rich source of musical inspiration. Operas, ballets, symphonic works like Scheherazade, song cycles, and, since the mid-20th century, Disney animated films. These last have gotten better over the years, I quite enjoy them now.
Sometimes I go down rabbit holes. Never yet found a hookah smoking caterpillar…
After watching Moana , I looked up some of the translated lyrics to the Voyager song, and encountered some of the fuss over how well or badly Disney had represented the culture. I wondered about Maui and his myths. My Encyclopedia of Gods gave some info, and there are multiple websites…
A few hours later, I was richer in Polynesian lore but also had some sympathy for the Disney writers who had taken these myths and made a PG movie with an adorable heroine made up out of whole cloth. [And I learned that Moana means ocean, which is cool because she is almost an avatar of the ocean in the story.]
Pulled islands from the sea? Check. Pulled up the sky? Check. Lassoed the sun and got him to lengthen the day? Check. Stole the heart of TeFiti? Ummmmm.
TeFiti just means a faraway, ideal place. The mythological Maui did try to steal the heart -- of the goddess of death and the underworld. The idea was to kill her so everyone would live forever. His approach to reaching the heart would not have been discussed in a PG movie. And she killed him for it; that story is the end of his myth cycle. So, yeah, probably a very good thing Disney bowdlerized that bit. I was actually kind of impressed with their homemade myth and the way it encapsulated the two faces of volcanism, the creative and the destructive.
But the interesting point was one that was changed very subtly. The Samoan variants say Maui's mother did throw him in the sea (despite what one website commenter claimed). What changed was the motive, and the emotional impact on Maui.
The myth says his mother thought he was stillborn. Grieving, she cut off her hair knot (tiki-tiki) and wrapped him in it and cast him in the sea, where he floated, and was rescued and raised by "an ancestor". [The term "god" is a little slippery in a belief system that deifies dead ancestors]. As an adult, he returned to his human family, and many of his exploits were done to help or please his mother.
Disney's Maui was discarded by his parents, and helps humans with his exploits in search of love and acceptance, which are “never enough”. And this is in line with a trend in modern fiction to humanize our heroes. A traditional culture hero is not subject to heartache. He isn’t vulnerable in any psychological sense. A hero’s faults are macho faults even if the hero is female: pride, temper, impulsiveness, and such.
Today, though, we seek to understand and empathize even with superheroes and maybe even with villains. Anyone can feel Loki’s pain at hearing his own true history in Thor. That he then turned so bitterly evil is less incomprehensible for that glimpse. Good writers can take a familiar story and turn the whole thing inside out by getting inside an unexpected character’s head. See, for instance, Mercedes Lackey’s The Black Swan, which retells Swan Lake from Odile’s perspective.
Tonight’s challenge:
Take an old stock character and humanize them. Show a fault, a pain, a love, some kind of backstory.
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