The Fairy Tellers

Support the Nepal Youth Foundation by visiting www.nepalyouthfoundation.org/donate/

Katrina and Geoff discover the REAL Tiger King! Katrina retells the story of The King Who Rides a Tiger, an epic Nepali fairy tale about a humble farmer who saves a talking cobra from a mongoose, finds himself living in a golden palace, and has to face a series of challenges from the king to keep his wife. If you thought Netflix's Tiger King was wild, you are not gonna believe what happens in this story!

Support the Nepal Youth Foundation by visiting www.nepalyouthfoundation.org/donate/

Katrina and Geoff go to Nepal! In support of the Nepal Youth Foundation we spent some time getting familiar with Nepali fairy tales. Geoff retells the story of Soonimaya, a young girl who endures the unfair treatment of an evil stemother, enlists the help of talking animals, and ends up marrying into the royal family, with lots of fun twists and turns along the way. We discuss ant anatomy and physiology, the difficulty of retrieving tiger's milk in a monsoon, and how storytelling is a uniting pastime across cultures.

Katrina and Geoff discuss shape-shifting animal brides! Katrina starts us off with a retelling of Hasan of Basra from One Thousand and One Nights. In this story a young goldsmith gets tricked by an alchemist, saved by God, and falls in love with the swan-princess daughter of an all powerful jinn. Afterwards, Geoff retells The Frog Princess, a Russian fairy tale, with a cameo from the Baba Yaga herself. In this tale, pessimistic grump, Prince Ivan, is forced to marry a frog, falls in love with her, and faces off against Kushchey the Deathless by getting to the center of the most complex Russian nesting doll of all time.

Katrina and Geoff get silly! Inspired by the legendary meme status of the D&D alignment chart, we pull fairy tale character names from a hat and decide where they fall. Is Cinderella really Lawful Good? Or could she actually be Chaotic Evil? Is Sleeping Beauty the closest thing we can get to a True Neutral princess? Some of our answers might surprise you.

Katrina and Geoff discuss Mulan! In an episode that's been on the calendar for over 4 months, and specifically scheduled to coincide with the release of the, now delayed, live action remake of Disney's Mulan, we retell multiple versions of this well known Chinese folktale. We compare each version and talk about how and why they changed with each retelling. Let this episode fill the hole in your heart where the new movie was supposed to be.

Katrina and Geoff retell three veeeeery different versions of Sleeping Beauty! Geoff starts off by retelling the Brothers Grimm version, which is probably the version of the story you are most familiar with today. Then Katrina takes us on a journey back through time by telling the earlier Charles Perrault version, complete with a baby eating ogress-in-law.  After that we go back even further with the Giambattista Basile version, the most graphic and disturbing of them all. We discuss the similarities and differences between the versions and make some educated guesses about why the story changed along the way.

CW: Rape. Cannibalism. Infanticide.

Katrina and Geoff discuss voodoo! Katrina retells the totally true (but probably not) story of how the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau ruined the last public hanging in New Orleans. We briefly discuss the origins of the voodoo religion in America, how it was used to help the people of New Orleans, and how it got an undeservedly bad rap due to, you guessed it, racism.

Happy Mardi Gras! Enjoy the king cake.

Katrina and Geoff discuss love! Geoff retells East of the Sun West of the Moon, a Norwegian fairy tale about a poor peasant girl who is sold off into marriage to a White Bear and the trials she endures to be with the man she loves. Katrina retells the story of Cupid and Psyche, a Roman mythology-adjacent story, which is the basis of soooooo many other fairy tales around the world including, you guessed it, East of the Sun West of the Moon. In this episode we get into the nitty gritty on love, marriage, troll anatomy and physiology, and what an absolute hunk Jack Black is. Settle in for the long haul while we retell you a thing (or two).

Katrina and Geoff dip back into the well of Aesop's Fables! This time we retell four fantastic fables about fairytaledom's most infamous villains, wolves. For real. Why are they always the bad guys? We do our best to figure it out. And though Aesop's fables weren't meant for kids, we can't help but draw parallels to our favorite pieces of children's entertainment.

In this episode Katrina is a little too excited to talk about the devil! Geoff retells The Devil and His Grandmother, a lesser known Grimm fairy tale about, well, the Devil and his sweet adorable grandmother. Then Katrina introduces us to the world of Tall Tales by recounting the totally true, in no way made up, 100% factual story of how real life Revolutionary War hero Major Robert Stobo cheated the Devil out of claiming his soul. CW: Suicide