Briar Rose- Alex

"And they lived happily ever after? How could they, the dragon was dead. No, I mean the princess and the--Oh, who can say? The prince had other tasks and maidens to attend to, making a name for himself as he was, for all I know, my dear, that one's chained there still."

I think one of the main messages in the story is the dissonance between reality and the happenings of fairy tales. Each time the princess wanders in and the crone tells a tale in which the ending isn't happy, she insists that that's not how the story is supposed to end. However, the princess is living in a 'dream,' and not just her 100 year enchantment. Most young girls grow up on the idea of the ideal male figure; something that is impossible to reach and hopeless to look for. Like the prince can never truly make it to the spires of her castle, the romantic ideals set in fairy tales are unrealistic hopes of idealistic dreamers. The repetition of lines is also a metaphor for the passing down of the tale, of the unreachable ideal, from generation to generation. No generation really remembers the reality of love, identity, and sexual intimacy, and so the lie is perpetuated for even longer than the 100 year fictional enchantment.