Once upon a time there was a beautiful fairy princess who was eaten by bears.
This caused the bears no end of trouble. First off, bears are vegetarian (and fruitarian) and are not, in general, carnivores. (Can we agree that Kodiak bears are just not normally found in the pseudo-European settings of most fairytales?)
Secondly, of course, the only reason that the bears were not immediately hunted to extinction was that both faeries and humans are so bloodthirsty that, as both sides hurried to destroy the chewer-of-royalty, they ended up in a horrible bloody war which left them too busy to do anything for a good five or six years, although the Humans eventually made up for it by making all bears extinct, in addition to every other kind of animal whose name started with a “B”, or any other letter of the alphabet.
Third, princesses give you a terrible stomach-ache. I should know. (Don’t believe me? Feel free to find out for yourself; but I warn you in advance, you won’t be able to eat anything other than dry toast for like three days thereafter.)
And fourth, the narrator was definitely going somewhere with all this. Possibly the Princess was supposed to learn a valuable lesson. Or, if this were a modern fairy tale, we readers would find out that bears aren’t scary, they’re actually our friends. (A message which is only coincidentally sponsored by the Ursine Council To Prove That Bears Totally, Really Don’t Steal Your Picnic Baskets, Or Your Car, Probably).
Unfortunately, the narrator’s boss, who is the semi-mythical godlike figure behind this keyboard –
(well, godlike to the poor, helpless beings in this story; all-too-human, otherwise)
– just doesn’t like princesses OR bears. Or Faeries. Or humans. Or readers.
It was, in short, terrible for all involved, and everyone, especially you, lived unhappily ever after. Sorry about that. But the title might’ve been a giveaway.
