After a season of flops, the film Wicked: For Good pulled in $150 million during its opening weekend in the United States. Fairy Tales are having a moment, so I had to check in with my favorite Fairy Tale historian.
Liz Gotauco and I have known each other since high school. We met in the Drama Club and Liz just ... never stopped performing. Although I live across the country now, social media allowed me to watch Liz bring her incredible crafting, make-up, and cosplay talents to her job as a children's librarian. All Children's Librarians are cool (duh), but Liz may be the coolest of all.
The height of my TikTok addiction was in the deep, dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Imagine my surprise when my old friend, ("Hey, I know her!"), started going viral for her original series F*cked Up Fairy Tales.
Nancy & Liz circa 1998, Newport, RI
Like most kids growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Liz was obsessed with the Disney movie The Little Mermaid. Soon, her mom guided her to Hans Christian Andersen and Grimm's tales. Thirty-five-ish years later, Liz is the author of F*cked Up Fairy Tales: Sinful Cinderellas, Prince Alarmings, and Other Timeless Classics with rave reviews from both James Lapine and Margaret Cho (!!).
Liz specializes in folklore that has been lost or buried "due to patriarchal and colonial perspectives that continue to exclude super important narratives from the mainstream." At this point, she's read dozens and dozens of stories featuring Indigenous and working-class people pushing back against their oppressors.
"It was a difficult thing to learn: that we have been fighting these same battles for generations, and that these stories keep getting buried. But in another sense, it is heartening to learn how intimately we know our ancestors."
Fairy Tales are largely understood to be frightening lessons to keep children compliant, but with Liz's insight, I began to wonder: are these cautionary tales really instruction manuals for rebellion?
What if fairy tales aren't cautionary tales for children at all, but instruction manuals for surviving systems designed to exploit you?
Nancy Martira
Clew Strategy
We've been told that fairy tales teach children moral lessons: don't talk to strangers; don't be greedy; beauty and kindness will be rewarded. But what if we've had it backwards this entire time?
What if fairy tales aren't warnings about wolves in the forest — they're training modules for recognizing wolves at the conference table, the family dinner, the job interview? What if these stories weren't meant to scare children into compliance, but to teach the powerless how to read the room, manipulate the system, and survive structures explicitly designed to keep them in their place?
Author, Librarian, Performer, Costumer, and All-Around Sweetheart Liz Gotauco
In F*cked Up Fairy Tales, Liz strips away the Disney gloss to reveal what folklorists have known for centuries: these stories emerged from communities with no institutional power, passed down by people who couldn't afford to be naive about how the world actually works. They're not bedtime stories. They're survival guides.
And once you see them this way, you can't unsee the patterns everywhere.
Fairy tales don't teach children to be good. They teach the powerless to be strategic.
Rules to Break
1. Fairy tales don’t reward virtue — they reward strategy
We've been told that Cinderella wins because she's kind and patient. But look closer at how she saves herself: she creates time scarcity (leaving at midnight); she facilitates strategic partnerships (the fairy godmother, the mice); she develops a memorable brand touchpoint (the glass slipper), and she leverages the prince's obsession with a manufactured mystery.
According to Liz, Cinderella stories from around the world "offer a great mix of independently successful women and people lifting each other up: Fairy godmothers, 'wise women' in the community, and/or small and seemingly weak animal allies organize with one another to survive, such as Korea’s Kongjwi and Patwi, whose helpers are a bull, a frog, a fairy, and a poor old woman."
These aren't stories about being good. They're case studies in asymmetric warfare — how to survive when you're smaller, weaker, and have fewer resources than your opponent. Every successful fairy tale protagonist is essentially running a con, using misdirection, timing, and strategic alliances to overcome systematic disadvantages.
In real life, the person who “succeeds” isn't always the most competent, it's the one who understands the invisible rules, builds the right alliances, and knows exactly when to reveal information and when to withhold it.
2. The "happy ending" is escaping the system, not fixing it
Here's what we miss when we focus on the wedding or the treasure: fairy tale protagonists rarely reform the corrupt system. They escape it. Jack doesn't overthrow the Giant's economic stranglehold on his village; he steals enough to buy his way out. Hansel and Gretel don't report the witch to the authorities; they kill her and take her jewels. [shrug]
I asked Liz for some notable happy endings that subvert traditional power structures. Liz told me about the beloved Chilean story Florinda, which features a genderfluid hero. "The title character is transgender: she literally transforms into a man to escape her systematic oppression." This ending is particularly happy. When a king encounters handsome, young Florinda in masculine disguise, he arranges for Florinda to marry his daughter. On the wedding night, Florinda confesses to his bride-to-be that he was born a woman. "All the better,” says the princess. “We’ll simply share our life like two doves.”
Liz also told me about a Mayan tale that shares similarities with the Beauty and The Beast story we know. However, in this version, "a woman’s lazy husband trades places with a vulture, and the vulture provides the woman with the partnership she was lacking in her prior marriage." Move over, "hot rodent boyfriend," it's time for Companionable Vulture Husband to have his moment.
The fairy tale logic is clear: toxic systems that perpetuate the status quo are not fixable. Your job isn't to make it fair; your job is to extract what you need and get out before it destroys you.
This is the opposite of what we're taught in corporate and political environments, where we're encouraged to "be the change we want to see" and "lead change from within the system." Those platitudes sound like just another story designed to keep us complicit. Instead, take a lesson from fairy tales: when a system is fundamentally exploitative, it's almost always beyond reform.
Fairy tale protagonists rarely reform the corrupt system. They escape it.
3. Magic doesn’t need a wand or fairy dust — magic only requires recognizing leverage points
Every fairy tale "magic" moment follows a pattern: the protagonist identifies what the powerful entity wants, then uses that knowledge as leverage. Rumpelstiltskin wants the queen's baby. The Beast wants companionship. The Sea Witch wants Ariel's voice.
Magic doesn’t come from a spell. It comes from understanding that even people with structural power have specific vulnerabilities. Your boss might have institutional authority, but they need you to meet a deadline. Your client might have the budget, but they need your expertise. The system might be rigged, but it still depends on your participation.
Before she became a Fairy Tale historian, Liz viewed the genre as aspirational dreams for the downtrodden. "Since diving into the rabbit hole of folklore, I’ve learned that fairytales exist to help us process our actual lives ... The characters in fairytales don’t believe that they can manipulate "magic" until they have no choice but to do so. In that way, we are all living a fairytale and have the capacity to orchestrate our own survival."
Fairy godmothers and magic beans are just narrative devices for the real magic: recognizing that you have something someone else needs, and learning to negotiate from that position even when the power differential seems insurmountable. 💪
Here are two small experiments to try:
Map The Power Structure
Think about a situation where you feel powerless, like a job, a relationship, or a family dynamic. Now diagram it like a fairy tale: Who holds institutional power? What do they need or want? Where are the hidden leverage points? Who are potential allies? What resources do you have that the "powerful" figure doesn't have? Stop thinking about fairness and start thinking about strategy. You're not trying to fix the system; you're trying to map it accurately enough to navigate it.
Plan Your Escape Route
Fairy tale protagonists rarely announce their departure. They don't give two weeks' notice to the evil stepmother or have an exit interview with the Giant. They gather what they need, recognize the right moment, and disappear before anyone realizes what's happening.
This week, choose one situation where you've been trying to "make it work" — a job that's extracting more than it's giving, a relationship that requires constant damage control, a commitment that's draining you. You're not quitting (yet). You're just mapping out an extraction plan like you're the protagonist of your own fairy tale.
Write down three questions:
What do I need to extract before I go? (Skills, connections, resources, references, confidence, savings, etc.)
What's my timeline trigger? (Cinderella had midnight. What's the specific condition that signals to you "time to run.")
Who cannot know I'm planning this? (Not everyone gets to be in on the escape plan. The stepsisters don't get advance warning. Who in your life would sabotage your exit if they knew it was coming?)
Sometimes just knowing you could leave transforms your relationship with a situation entirely. That's its own kind of magic.
The Wonder of The Reading Room
What makes this reframing so powerful is how it validates what most people already know but feel guilty admitting: being good doesn't protect you in unjust systems. Playing by the rules only works when the rules are fair. Sometimes the most ethical choice is to outsmart the system rather than reform it.
Liz Gotauco's work reminds us that fairy tales emerged from communities who understood this viscerally. These weren't privileged people who could afford to believe in meritocracy. They were peasants, servants, women with no legal rights, children with no protection. They needed stories that taught real survival skills, not moral platitudes.
The original tales are dark, violent, and pragmatic because the people who told them lived in dark, violent, pragmatic circumstances. They understood that sometimes you need to push the witch into the oven. Sometimes you need to steal the Giant's treasure. Sometimes you need to lie to the Wolf, manipulate the Prince, or make a deal with something dangerous.
Ethical behavior often requires different strategies depending on whether you're operating in a fair system or an exploitative one. Fairy tales teach discernment: how to recognize which world you're in and how to survive accordingly.
If you know someone who could use an enjoyable reminder of these lessons, Liz's book makes an excellent holiday gift! Buy it wherever books are sold; I bought my copy on Bookshop.org.
The Question
What system in your life have you been trying to fix through virtue and hard work, when the real lesson might be to recognize it's fundamentally exploitative and extract what you need before it extracts you?
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You did it! You've made it all the way to the end of this essay. Today, we have two stories about fairy tale hoaxes — really! One of these stories is so fascinating to me that I plan to write a future edition of Wonder Work on this topic. So, which will you choose: Door Number One or Door Number Two?
(or buy me a coffee.) Meet Nancy Martira. I'm a brand strategist and communications consultant who brings endless curiosity to every project. If you've got a challenge that needs a fresh, unexpected perspective, let's talk!
Communications consultant, brand strategist, & Wonder Work creator. Curious about everything from terrible orchestras to happiness algorithms. Feed your curiosity; starve the doom — one small idea at a time. Let's wonder!