Fairy tales for 20-somethings

Are you tired of self-centered,  single-serving tumblrs for malaised urban twenty-somethings? Me neither! Sometimes it’s nice to wallow in your own numbness.

Fairy Tales for Twenty-Somethings is a Tumblr started in mid-August. It’s a folkloric version of Fuck I’m in My Twenties, with each post a self-contained story. Every post has the same competing senses of generalized anxiety and germinating self-actualization that characterizes the work of Emma Koenig, Lena Dunham, or Noah Baumbach.

Creator Tim Manley writes, and lately illustrates, every post. The most popular one, counted by number of notes on Tumblr, is about the trials of online dating:

 Little Red Riding Hood put up a profile on OkCupid, but all she got were these creepy messages from wolves.

“Well that was disappointing,” she said to herself, then went out and bought a vibrator.

Rapunzel gets a new haircut:

Rapunzel cut all her hair off and everyone was totally into it but one unexpected consequence was that she kept getting hit on by women.

After like the tenth time it happened she wanted to say to the girl, “Is this still a thing, that only lesbians have short hair? Can’t pretty much anyone have short hair now?” But then she was like, Eh, yolo, and they made out.

The Emperor has poor taste in actual clothes:

The emperor bought a new bowler hat but all his friends were like, “Seriously, what the fuck is he thinking?”

My personal favorite:

The tortoise and the hare met for coffee. They each casually mentioned their recent successes, secretly hoping to appear better than the other. As they walked their separate ways home it hit them at the same time: There never was a race. There is no destination. There is no winner.

Tim was kind enough to answer a few questions:

Where did you get the idea?

Fairy tales were an integral part of how I made sense of the world as a kid. As I try to make sense of it now, it felt natural to return to fairy tales.

What influenced you?

This might seem unusual but I’d say the biggest influence on these fairy tales is Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. In a very short space, each of those comics packs a lot of humor or a lot of emotion, and often both.

Which one is your favorite?

It’s pretty impossible to choose favorites, but I’d say a recent favorite would be this one with Peter Pan.

Read the whole blog here.

By Angela Saunders, illustrations via Fairy Tales for Twenty-Somethings