Board Thread:Fanon Discussion/@comment-24185671-20140903034328/@comment-14800267-20140903052156

Fairytale is a very definate genre. JRR Tolkien did a rather in depth lecture on what a Fairytale is and isn't. Basically it's down to specific writing  structures and themes- the explaination of which is kind of long and involved. Fairytales often have specific motifs and patterns- numbers are important (three and seven, specifically. Though multiples of these can be used- like six and twelve.)

Age has nothing to do with it, it's just a rather in depth side of literature and there are exceptionally few people who write fairytales nowadays, mostly because if you follow a traditional fairytale structure, things get kinda gorey and publishers nowadays want to save the delicate minds of children from things like symbolism of how barbaric the world can be.

This is why so many traditional fairytale fans and writers HATE Disney. They ruin the structure of a fairytale and turn it into something closer to a picturebook. A good way to tell if someone is up to speed on their fairytale theory is to talk about the Grimms brothers- if they go up in flames about how much they hate them, then they're bone fide. Though the Grimms tales might seem quite dark and gorey by todays standards, they were essentially the Disney of the time, taking traditional stories and sanitising them, removing a lot of the dark themes and also eliminating many of the female roles in the stories, either replacign them with men or toning the stories down so the women in them had lesser or passive roles.

Foketales and Fables are just that, Folktales and Fables. They also have their own defining features. Folklore, however, often crosses over with fairytales, so the line is blurry there.

In the Ever After High setting, they use the term "fairytale" lazily to cover the whole length and width of Childrens literature, including fairytales, childrens novels and nursery rhymes. Alice in Wonderland is a children's novel, not a fairytale. Little Bo Peep is a Nursery Rhyme. It's okay though, Fairytale is a much nicer word than "Children's literature" and most people can't tell the difference anyway- besides, the body of stories actually recognized as fairytales is broad, but most of them are pretty obscure.