Fairytales have always reflected the morals of the age. It's not a sin to rewrite them
Should we update classic stories with modern morals? Two film-based kerfuffles have reopened the question. Reports that the next James Bond “won’t be white” have provoked a backlash, as did the launch of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which features a black Ariel.
Negative “review bombing” of the film, which has been the target of criticism since its lead actor, Halle Bailey, was announced, caused the Internet Movie Database to make a rare intervention and change its ratings system. There is abhorrent racism on show here – about which perhaps little more needs to be said. But alongside it is a broader, longer running argument that might be worth addressing. Namely, that 21st-century mores – diversity, sexual equality, and so on – should not be shoehorned into old stories.
General outrage greeted “woke” updates to Roald Dahl books this year, and still periodically erupts over Disney remakes, most recently a forthcoming film with a Latina actress as Snow White, and a new Peter Pan & Wendy with “lost girls”. The argument is that too much fashionable refurbishment tends to ruin a magical kingdom, and that cult classics could do with the sort of Grade I listing applied to heritage buildings. If you want to tell new stories, fine – but why not start from scratch?
But this point of view misses something, which is that updating classics is itself an ancient part of literary culture; in fact, it is a tradition, part of our heritage too. While the larger portion of the literary canon is carefully preserved, a slice of it has always been more flexible, to be retold and reshaped as times change.
Fairytales fit within this latter custom: they have been updated, periodically, for many hundreds of years. Cult figures such as Dracula, Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes fit there too, as do superheroes: each generation, you might say, gets the heroes it deserves. And so does Bond. Modernity is both a villain and a hero within the Bond franchise: the dramatic tension between James – a young cosmopolitan “dinosaur” – and the passing of time has always been part of the fun.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/04/contemporary-values-no-place-in-fairytales-you-must-be-living-in-a-fantasy-world
= new reply since forum marked as read
It's something entirely different to mess with the fact that James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, part of legitimate literary canon ... are a couple of British dudes.
Halle Berry has no business being cast as James Bond. Make her a new IP, based loosely on Bond ... that's been done like 1000 times, in fact with male and female actors/characters.
Beloved fairy tales should be handled similarly. Don't call it 'Hansel and Gretel' if the two main characters are the same gender, just call it something else that makes reference to it.
MHO, fwiw 
