Starting with snow white

Stitching Snow
(2014), also under the Disney imprint, provides 
young adult readers with a further adapted vision of the 
Snow White 
tale. Here, however, 
is a deeper interrogation into the character of the heroine, a fierce young woman 
renowned in her sphere not so much for her beauty as for her physical strength and 
intellect. The use of an otherworldly, sci-fi setting and language draws the realm of Essie 
(Princess Snow) closer to the fantastic in a sense, yet in its positioning of this central 
figure, the tale departs from the conventional naiveté traditionally associated with the 
Snow White
 
heroine of the “classic” tales. In this revised portrayal—imagining Snow 
White as a disguised (and very successful) cage fighter, still witty and intelligent enough 
to “stitch” code into computers, shuttles, or mining drones—the novel’s characterization 
of Essie (Princess Snow) subverts readers’ expectations right from the start. This young 
woman is not pressed into and out of roles; instead, she creates them for herself. While 
one might find something akin to Disney’s seven dwarfs, or in this case, individually 
named and characterized mining drones, these companions of Essie’s run according to 
her programming; they cannot function without her care. Moreover, although a prince of 
sorts emerges early in the narrative, guiding one to recall the traditional American 
romance, Essie (Princess Snow), a self-sufficient Princess, decides when and how this 

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romance will progress. From the start when Dane’s ship crashes and 
he 
is in need of 
rescuing, Essie is positioned as both the heroine of her 
Snow White
, as well as the white 
knight or savior. The romance as well as the tale are hers first and foremost. Even where 
hints of the Disney version bleed through then, the stronger emphasis in the adaptation of 
this young adult novel is on recuperating and empowering the heroine. 
Each of these representations re-activate the characterization of the two central 
female roles in the 
Snow White 
tale. While both admittedly recall Disney’s imprint on 
the tale on some level, the revisionary work of each, in its gendered staging, depicts a 
cultural necessity to engage some of those self-same ideologies or formulas for creating a 
contested space that had been utilized in postmodern adaptations. Ironically then, those 
same strategies that had been employed to unmake the Disney form would be redeployed, 
in more contemporary versions under the Disney label, when the traditional depiction no 
longer matched the needs or values of the surrounding culture.
Beyond the contemporary usage of postmodern representations, this pattern of 
infusion has continued, wherein still more recent experiments with the 
Snow White 
tale 
have been re-invoked in subsequent inversions, displacing the “classics” still further. In 
2002, Bill Willingham created a fairy tale comic series, entitled 
Fables
, about a host of 
fairy tale characters that have been pushed from their “Homelands” to New York City, 
where they form a community called “Fabletown.”
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In its utilization not only of the 
Snow White 
tale, but a host of fairy tale motifs, heroes, heroines, and villains, a kind of 
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Jack Zipes has earlier gestured toward a line of influence between the series, which ran from 2002-2015, 
and 
Once Upon a Time 
(“Americanization”)
.

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“fractured fairy tale” was formed.
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Nearly ten years later, in 2011, as Willingham’s 
series continued on,
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a similar “fractured fairy tale” television series, ABC’s (or 
Disney’s)