Magic Tree Resort

Keep Your Virtue: Emmy The Great

When I was writing my second album, I started to notice that each song had a character that was stuck in situation.

Over time, I started to see them as representatives of ‘reality’, lost in a strange world, trying to find their way out. As it happened, many of these situations ended up with themes that came from fairy tales or myths. This was unintentional but as time went on I started to see how these themes repeat themselves again and again in stories, legends, movies, comic books, video games…Then I read a bunch of books and realised I was not the first person to notice this.

Everybody loves a good quest – whether it’s to wake up a sleeping princess, save a princess from a tower, make it to the ball, or blow up a Death Star with your secret princess twin. In case you should ever find yourself in the middle of a fairytale quest, here are a few cast-iron rules to help you make it through the other side.

Remember, in testing times, only the virtuous survive.

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1. Don’t Stray From the Path In Angela Carter’s film, ‘In the Company of Wolves’, inhabitants of a village by a wolf-infested forest live literally by this rule. Stray from the path, and you might find yourself lost to a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle (Ms. Carter was not an Oasis fan). Other tellings of Red Riding Hood belie a similar moral – don’t talk to strangers, do as you’re told, beware the unknown. You might say of course, that only once she strays from the path does Red Riding Hood begins the journey of self-discovery that leads to experience.

Hansel and Gretel are other famous forest protagonists, but rather than deliberately deviating from the path, they are lost once a bird makes away with the breadcrumbs that should lead them home. Carter, ever the subverter of fairy tales, puts their destiny back in their own hands in her short story, Penetrating into the Heart of the Forest. In this, a brother and sister break the forest boundaries set by their migrant society, and must face the consequences when they find a magic tree that mirrors both the witch’s gingerbread house and Eden’s Tree of Knowledge.

2. Virginity! Keep it. “Sex equals death,” says Scream’s uber-nerd Randy Palmer, when trying to explain his survival in the first film, “I’ve never been so glad to be a virgin.”

Randy, who eventually dies after a little college-age messing around, is of course describing a tradition that dates much earlier than the slasher movie genre. In classical times, virginity was power. A woman who dedicated herself to chastity, or in service to the gods, freed herself of the social obligation to be married and bear children. In Christian tradition, martyrs were sainted for choosing the love of the heavenly bridegroom over physical love, seen as tainted by the sin of the flesh. Saints’ lives often overlapped with and wove themselves into fairy-tales – St Dymphna, patron saint of the insane, became the inspiration for popular 17th century story Donkeyskin. Both Dymphna and Donkeyskin are rewarded for resisting the advances of amorous fathers – Dymphna by martyrdom and Donkeyskin by marriage to a true king.

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Magic Tree is located less than two miles from Walt Disney World and minutes from Epcot Center, SeaWorld, Cypress Gardens, Kennedy Space Center, and Gatorland. Adult and children's pools are available onsite, as well as picnic areas, discounted ticket sales, and much more. Magic Tree Resort is the ideal place for family fun and entertainment.

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