Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Fairyland Safety Net

There has been a movement to make magical lands safer for children. In reality, if you were to cross over into a different plane of existence, you would become an alien entity within an alien environment. It stands to reason that it would be significantly more unsafe. We were only intended to exist within only one plane of planet Earth. Have you noticed that whenever we leave the atmosphere, things get increasingly more hostile? We need pressurized suits just to walk on the surface of the moon.

Fairylands often have a nitrogenous oxygen environments just like we are used to, but there are an abundance of uncanny and strange things which can cause us some very real problems. Most children who travel to this place would probably end up getting killed or enslaved in some way. I would not recommend crawling down that rabbit hole!

Nevertheless, we like sending children there in our stories. We soften the rules to allow this to happen. The child's natural intuition and curious nature interacts with the alien environment in a pleasing way. The creatures they meet are not all openly hostile, and even if they are, the price of failure is not usually so great. Most writers were very wary not to frighten children too much in their fairy tales. I still say, however, that this safety net is entirely unrealistic, but let's talk a bit about one of the very common tropes that may actually be a reality.

The one I am referring to is immortality. There are a lot of cases in both old and new stories that speaks of the child gaining immortality as well as the inability to age during there stay within the fairyland. There are also sometimes time dilation issues between the two worlds. Time may pass faster in our world than it does in Fairyland. Writers often use this to keep their adventurers safe, but it may actually be a real phenomenon. And if I could be honest, it is not really as safe as it sounds.

L. Frank Baum used this trope in his Oz stories for the same reason as most authors did. He wanted Dorothy protected while in the hostile environment of Oz. Even so, he went on to explain that a bad ending in that fairyland could often lead to fates worse than death. If Dorothy was crushed under foot by a giant, she would not die. But she would still be flattened to a pancake and be stuck that way for eternity. I forget exactly how Baum said it, but the implication was that the hamburger may be alive, but it is still clearly hamburger. Imagine living the rest of eternity in a broken state of existence. How awful!

Another thing that seems to be very prevalent in these fairylands is what happens when the child leaves after a very long time. A few moments after she returns to our world, she will quickly begin to get back all the time she lost. She will begin to grow rapidly until she is whatever age she should be. A young child will quickly grow up to be an old woman in some cases. In reality, the shock would likely kill the person. Most authors would not want to deal with that. It almost happened to Dorothy once, and she quickly returned before the growing spurt went too far.

The business of sudden aging is nasty and horrible. It would take an incredible constitution to survive it. It is clearly another reason why we don't belong there. If you are having difficulties believing that this sort of phenomenon would exist, consider the effect of living in outer space has on the human body over a long period of time. By the time the astronauts come home, they can barely cope in the gravity environment. Sometimes they need to relearn to walk. It's quite shocking. Now imagine the same thing happening after coming from a place where you cannot age and are completely immortal. Not good.

I do find it amusing that these tropes are often used as a safety net to protect the child when it is actually a very realistic thing that is more likely to cause the child more pain and anguish in reality. Children do not belong in Fairyland. I do not recommend that any child goes there. If your child is getting invitations to go to a magical world of talking animals, tell her not to go. It's a trap! She does not belong there. She never did. None of us do. Fairyland was made for fairy creatures. We're better off staying here.

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