I really want someone to write a paper on what it means that we are so in love with taking our classic fairy tales and applying the "real world" to them. I've seen it in children's fiction, young adult series, and even some adult books, plus tv shows and movies. It's everywhere - taking fairy tales and making them dark (as dark as they originally were? Maybe?).
I don't think it's just run-off from Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. Something is drawing us to the fairy tales again. And the REAL fairy tales. As a society, we don't want the perfect princess stories, we want them messy. We want to know about the dark and scary things that lurk out there...thoughts???