Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Raven Queen, First Among Rebels.


This year, Mattel launched Ever After High, its fairytale spinoff from Monster High.  Monster High was about accepting your “freaky flaw”s, that nobody cares if you’re the offspring of Dracula, Medusa, The Phantom of the Opera, Mr Hyde or The Boogey Man because you can still be a great ‘person.’  Ever After High is more discordant.  The children of fairytale characters are broken up into Royals and Rebels, and the division isn’t as clear as it might seem from their titles.


Raven Queen is the daughter of the Queen from Little Snow-White (Snow White’s stepmother).  However, Raven is not a ‘Royal’ but the instigator of rebellion at Ever After High when she chooses to forge her own legacy.  Rather than be destined to poison her roommate (Apple White, who’ll then sleep until she gets kissed by a prince, becomes a queen and has her ‘happily ever after’), Raven wants to write her own destiny.  Raven has good reason not to follow in her mother’s footsteps - the Queen was a narcissistic assassin-hiring woman who cannibalised what she thought were her own stepdaughter’s organs and danced herself to death.  (At least, in some versions of the tale.)  However, if Raven Queen doesn’t pledge her evil destiny by the end of the school year, the headmaster (Milton Grimm) claims that both Raven’s ‘story’ and Raven herself will cease to exist.  So Ever After High is in itself going to be an extended parable about conformity versus nonconformity, and if Raven doesn’t want to be evil then some of her peers and the faculty might well to do their best to drive her evil.

You can watch Raven’s first two adventures below:

Raven's Tale: The Story of a Rebel

Stark Raven Mad

Using Ever After High as a structural device, this EAHigh blog will look at the history and mechanics of fairytales, toys and wherever else the franchise might lead.  ‘The End’ is just the beginning.

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Mad thought: Raven is her roommate’s aunt.

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