Fortunately for my sanity and good cheer I consumed far more culture that I liked in 2011 than culture that raised my blood pressure. But there were some things that got me really irritated, whether because they’re noxious on their own or because they’re wasted opportunities. Here are ten of them:

1. Red Riding Hood is miserably conventional: The previews implied that Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight follow-up twist on a fairy tale would have Red Riding hood be the wolf, a parable of the violence of female desire and a throwing off of restriction. Instead, it featured a totally traditional love triangle, some impressively terrible dialogue, and a torture elephant. Good lord.

2. Lady Gaga’s incredibly terrible immigration reform song “Americano”: I love me some Gaga, one of the few major stars with any sense of how to use her platform to advance political goals. But this song was a hot, condescending mess. If she wants to dip back into these waters, she might want to take notes from Emma’s Revolution’s “If I Give Your Name.”

3. True Blood goes racist, incoherent:: Alan Ball should know that just because you say your show isn’t a political metaphor doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for the ideas your show expresses. And he should be pretty embarrassed by the way his show handled rape, gender identity, and the South’s racial history this season.

4. Colombiana is totally incoherent: Man, I want to adore Zoe Saldana as a badass tiny action heroine, but this movie featured laughable dialogue, fueled the idea that Ponzi schemers are solely responsible for the recession, and had what is possibly the least plausible romance on screens this year.
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My friend Elana Levin forwarded me the results of a writing contest with a noble goal — “bringing women’s and human rights values into mainstream culture” — and a weird way of going about achieving it:

How often have you been enjoying a book, movie, play, or TV episode…when all of a sudden things take a turn for the sexist, misogynist, needlessly violent, or worse? Have you ever wished you could jump into a story, shout at the characters, grab the pen (or keyboard) of the writer, and make it turn out the way you think it should?

Now you can! Breakthrough presents #Rewrite the Ending, our Bell Bajao campaign’s first-ever fiction (re)writing competition. Your job: take a work of fiction – a novel, movie, epic myth, opera, poem, TV episode, short story, play, or anything else that inspires you (or makes you nuts) – and rewrite the ending to erase the sexism, highlight human rights, and win yourself some great prizes.

Part of my issue here is that I’m just not that fond of the idea that art should exist to serve fans’ desires, however noble they may be. I’m fine with creators hiding Easter eggs for readers and watchers, and I think it can be totally appropriate to acknowledge common fan conceptions about a work or fan campaigns on on a work’s behalf. But that’s an entirely different thing from bending the curve of your plot or the conception of your characters in a direction that fans will find most satisfying. If that was the main obligation of artists, we’d have awfully homogenous storytelling — all couples would get together immediately, no one would ever die, and much more page and screen time would be dedicated to angsty hookups. Artists have a right to the facts of their characters and to carry out their visions of them within their own work. Art, as with life, is in part about not getting everything you want, and with reconciling yourself to that fact.

But more to the point, I don’t really want sexism to disappear from fiction, and I certainly don’t think we get to a point where the default in our culture is less misogynist by going back and redacting sexist (or racist, etc.) plot points and characters from our fiction. First, making sexism and the other isms visible is absolutely critical to getting something done about them. Not everyone is going to read about Robert Baratheon’s sexual assaults on his wife and go out and join Take Back the Night, but art can show people who don’t experience sexism directly the costs it exacts on the people who do. And it can put behavior in contexts that make clear how ugly it is: sexual harassment or domestic violence may seem like a series of isolated incidents or a slow grind when it happens in real life, but condense a pattern of escalating behavior into two hours or 400 pages, filter out the filler, and it may be harder to deny. Wishing that sexism was gone doesn’t make it so in art or in life.

And second, fiction ought to be a place that we can confront things that would be dangerous to us if we encountered them in real life, and where people get to make best-case arguments for positions we would hate to see carried to their logical conclusions if they had the force of law or norm. I don’t like the Twilight books, but if they’re the best argument in favor of women focusing exclusively on marriage and family, than I am more than happy to wade aggressively into that debate. I think Tucker Max is pretty gross, but if I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is the best manifesto a bro can hope for, it’s a useful sorting mechanism between people who have warped values and priorities and those who don’t. The answer here is not to hope that Bella Cullen throws off her vampire husband and gets a PhD in English literature, but to provide powerful and compelling alternatives. To get all Saul Bellow in this joint, “There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.” Does that mean we’ll suffer major bewildering culture fails along the way? Absolutely. But the real way to win is to join the battle of ideas, not to change the conditions in which it’s fought.

Unsurprisingly the results of the contest aren’t actually that funny, or that much of a narrative challenge to the works they’re critiquing. Yes, it’s creepy to do sexual things to people who aren’t conscious, but give me an actual rewrite of Sleeping Beauty over a lecture. Snow White in armor is a better rebuke to Snow White in the glass coffin than Snow White the lit professor. The Giving Tree telling off the boy isn’t nearly as weird and spiky a rewrite as Amy Winfrey’s “The Muffin Tree,” in which the tree poisons its ungrateful beneficiary.

In yesterday’s conversation about how to make retellings of Snow White more interesting, some commenters suggested, entirely correctly, that we not just transpose Western fairy tales into new settings, but that we try to tell stories from new mythologies. I agree with that suggestion, though I don’t think we’re going to stop telling Western fairy tales to Western audiences and so it’s important to see them as vehicles for more creative and multicultural storytelling as well. Instead, we need to both reform and refresh what we’ve got and look for new materials. So here are five awesome non-Western fairy tales that deserve movies of their own.

1. The Seven Chinese Brothers: The number of brothers vary in retellings of this story, but the principal remains generally the same: a group of super-powered brothers stand up to the Emperor (in some retellings, they do so because he’s mistreating workers building the Great Wall of China). When he tries to execute them in succession, they prove impervious to his punishments. It’s a nice inversion of superhero stories: these are extraordinary people who have chosen essentially ordinary lives, but bring their powers to bear against injustice, using both strength and cleverness to discredit a corrupt and powerful ruler. Grant Morrison and some of his coworkers created a superhero team with a little resemblance to the Brothers, but it would be nice to have a modern interpretation that challenges the Chinese government, rather than working for it.

2. Tokoyo: I have a particular weakness for stories about fathers and daughters, so this Japanese folk tale, about a girl who vows to return to her father after the Emperor banishes him is right up my alley. She visits forbidden islands, spies on imperial gossip, and offers herself up as a sacrifice to save a young girl — though instead of dying, she frees the Emperor from a powerful underseas curse. And I appreciate that it’s a story that’s about both social justice and filial love, rather than yet another story about a princess whose greatest accomplishment is getting successfully married. It’s a role that could produce a Japanese or Japanese-American Jennifer Lawrence, and how fantastic would that be?

3. Anansi, and Trickster and Culture Hero Tales More Generally: Speaking of being mired in marriages, getting away from an overreliance on the Western folk traditions would let us escape the omnipresence of marriage plots, and give us stories that up the stakes a bit. Anansi’s all about keeping — and sometimes upsetting — the balance of natural and intellectual resources in the universe. Culture hero stories are harder to sustain in an era of scientific reasoning — we don’t really need the invention of the wheel or other seemingly-inexplicable advances explained to us—but they can still be powerful statements about identity, divinity, and progress.

4. Nanabozho — and Paul Bunyan: I know Bunyan’s Western, specifically American. But Nanabozho, an Ojibwa spirit, threw down with one of the founding American culture heroes and in some versions of the story, killed him. A grand story of the frontier that’s told equally from the perspective of American Indian and American Gods, done right, could be an astonishing American epic. And it would certainly be more interesting than, say, Hell on Wheels.

5. Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Ravana, et.al.: If you want a team-up, it’s hard to get cooler than the Ramayana. You’ve got exiles! Kidnappings! Monkey deities! Demon kings who could be interpreted sympathetically (If we can have Magneto Was Right shirts, we can so have Ravana Was Right Ts)! The gender politics are kind of retrograde, but maybe Sita can organize a rebellion while in Ravana’s captivity, and an update could give Surpanakha motives other than being sexually rejected, though having your nose cut off is decent motivation for revenge.

Bonus: Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters. John Steptoe’s retelling of Cinderella in Zimbabwe is one of the most stunningly beautiful picture books I’ve ever read. A movie that captured its gorgeous vision of African civilization would both be a treat, and a fantastic starting point for a conversation about alternatives to medieval-influenced High Fantasy. And maybe it could get us to a point where we could have a Black Panther movie, too.

Well, the trailer for Snow White and the Huntsman looks visually bonkers in a way that I expect will force Tsarem Singh to up his game with Mirror, Mirror, his competing fairy tale adaptation also due out next year:

Also, it’s nice to see that Chris Hemsworth is getting to use his throwing-dangerous-objects skills from Thor in another movie: way to recycle, Hollywood!

When this trailer came out on Friday, Dodai Stewart over at Jezebel heaved a sigh over both Snow White movies, saying, “But despite looking at the story in a new way, both films feature overwhelmingly white casts. How new and twisty.” I don’t really think either of these adaptations is that new and twisty, though, and ultimately, I think that’s the key to both reinvigorating our fairy tale archetypes and to getting more diverse casting in those fairy tales. Sure, Snow White and the Huntsman has some action-y, monster-y stuff going on, but it’s still the same essential setting, a Christian, European feudal state, and the same basic conflict between two women. Mirror, Mirror, if anything, looks more traditional, with its Snow White in Disneyfied dresses rather than in armor.

You want a non-white or a mixed-race cast, and a genuinely fresh rethinking of the story? Switch regions or continents, and upset the dynamic between some of the main characters considerably. If Snow and the Seven ever gets made, we’ll get a kung-fu twist on the fairy tale, with Chinese warriors from different schools in place of a dwarf-run woodlands B and B. Want to stick to medieval Europe? Why not set the story in Al-Andalus, or during the Reconquista, and throw some genuine religious conflict in a story about a regime that’s trying to solidify itself in the face of an existential threat. Make Snow White a commoner rising up against the monarchy as the head of a peasant’s revolt, or a key player in a fictionalized version of the Haitian revolution. Or make the Evil Queen her mother, not just her stepmother, and use the story to explore mother-daughter rivalry in a much more direct and murderous way. I’m all for color-blind casting. But if we’re satisfied with the same old stories with different people schlepping through the same old parts, that feels like an awfully partial victory to me.

Because I spend a lot of time overanalyzing things, I tend to grade on a bit of a curve for pop culture I can just purely enjoy, like Revenge (though even there I get some sweet, sweet class warfare politics) or Once Upon a Time, ABC’s frothy fairy tale, which debuted last night. I’m a sucker for fractured fairy tales — I once won a Girl Scout writing contest by revising Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to make Snow White a union organizer and her evil stepmother a majority shareholder in a mining corporation.

But the show also got me thinking about a funny little holdover, the persistence of shows about magic set in small towns. In Once Upon a Time, Emma leaves the city where she’s working as a bail bondswoman and finds an eerily perfect little town in Maine that happens to be populated (perhaps entirely? We don’t know yet.) by amnesiac fairy tale characters. In Eastwick, the short-lived 2009 ABC adaptation of John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, magic turns another small New England town upside down. Grimm, NBC’s supernatural cop show, which premieres this weekend, is set in Portland, and while that’s not exactly a small town, the show is shot to make it seem like it’s taking place on the edge of the frontier, with cases that take its paranormal detective into the woods. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which eventually expanded in scope over the years, started in a Southern California version of a New England small town, a community that looped between school, home, and the Bronze, a closed little world.

It’s not really surprising that this is the case. We actually had witch trials in New England in the early years of our country’s history: the fear of and fascination with magic, as well as anxieties about how easy it is for misconceptions to set in and take over small communities, is part of our founding story. When characters live at the edge of what you consider the known or civilized world, maybe it’s easier to believe that there are things beyond the canon accepted human knowledge than it is to believe such things surrounded by the calming omnipresence of civilization in the city. And if you want magic to be something that disrupts the lives of a wide swath of characters rather than be the secret knowledge that binds together a small group of people, a small town is a more reasonable setting. But the presence of magic in small towns is an interesting photo-negative commentary on the idea that they’re a repository of values and a guarantor of safety. You may leave a set of contemporary, human-created concerns behind if you flee to the suburbs and beyond. But you may find a whole new set of concerns if you venture into — or close to — the woods.

Up to New York Comic Con today. The bridge is yours.

-Ten imperfect things Apple released under Steve Jobs.

-Snow White: killing motherfuckers.

-Is Superman no longer a journalist? Who will I look up to now? Curse you, Zack Snyder!

-Please, please tell me that Renee Zellweger’s new show is basically Valley of the Dolls.

-Love me some Glenn Close-as-butler:

Apparently, in addition to the 10 million Snow White projects under development, we’re also getting a new Cinderella movie. I have absolutely no hope that this will happen, but it would be pretty awesome if the writers considered the example of Ever After. Not only does it do a good job of thinking about fairy-tale settings — there’s Leonardo Da Vinci and sharply drawn class distinctions — but it’s an awesome story about protagonists who fall in love because they have shared political interests. I don’t actually mind a lot of fairy-tale tropes, be they deserving poor girls or rewarded morality, but love at first sight is silly and not that interesting. Even if they can’t pull off political consciousness, I’d settle for a story where Cinderella and the prince actually get to know each other, or where love at first sight doesn’t work out.

As preparation for the new television season (in particular, Once Upon A Time), I recently read the first two story arc of Bill Willingham’s Fables, “Legends in Exile” and “Animal Farm.” Willingham’s story of fairy-tale characters living their eternal lives in the modern world an interesting example of at least somewhat conservative storytelling, but it’s not as compelling a thought experiment as it could be, mostly because of what feel like weaknesses in the world-building.

The initial stories give us a sense of how at least two Fables interact with the modern world, Prince Charming by conning the women he lives off of, Rose Red by living the life of an indolent, spoiled party girl. The assumption seems to be that the rest of the world would be considerably hostile to the Fables, and that mainstreaming might be difficult, but we don’t actually see a lot of evidence of this. I don’t know if it would be more conservative to argue that society wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) be accepting of differences, especially when they’re miraculous, or if it would be rebuttal to liberalism to argue that the Fables could successfully be assimilated, but Willingham and his collaborators don’t really seem to be making that case in either direction. Either that, or the Fables are in some way going Galt from the Mundane world, but if that’s Willingham’s argument, it’s nigh-invisible.

And that’s a problem for some later stories. In “Animal Farm,” if the Mundanes had been established as an active threat to Fabletown as a whole, Snow White and her allies in Fabletown administration would have a much stronger case for cracking down not just on the residents of the Farm, and keeping tight control over the denizens of Fabletown in New York City. And as a result, the satire of wannabe revolutionaries, like Goldilocks, who is sleeping with Little Bear essentially to prove that she’s a rebel, would be a lot funnier if their cause was proved ridiculous and self-destructive in advance. Instead, the book sort of seems like it’s condescending to and about characters with legitimate grievances, and setting the supposed heroes up to be a bit brittle, which is a bit odd given how flexible they must have to had to be to survive for so long. “We haven’t yet been corrupted by the Mundys’ modern social philosophy concerning such things,” as Snow White declares after the executions that end the rebellion at the Farm. “The responsibility lies entirely with the perpetrators and not their victims.” But if you’re going to survive for millenia, and after a devastating war, the things you carry forward and the things you leave behind matter.

It’s fairly clear that the two big, competing Snow White projects that are under development have fairly different visions of the classic fairy tale. Tarsem Singh is directing Lily Collins in the title role as an update of the Disney version, but on visual acid:

While Kristen Stewart’s playing her as a warrior on a three-part journey “about being confronted with death,” of which Snow White and the Huntsman is apparently the first part:

I can get why vampires are big, a reckoning with the dangers and excitements of sex for the first generation of kids not to know a time before HIV, and I understand why angels, mostly in the form of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments books and their attendant movie adaptations, would be the next big thing after that, a return to innocence, a sanctification. But I’m grappling with our return to fairy tales, which are back in a big way.

The competing Snow White projects suggest two different draws for that particular story: do you wake up gorgeous, to a handsome prince? Or do you wake up a warrior? Are you happy within the confines of your fate? Or do you rail against it? But then there’s the other half of the equation: how do you get to sleep in the first place? And who who or what wakes you up? Something like the modernized update of Sleeping Beauty that Emily Browning’s starring in gets very directly at the horror and fantasy of that kind of passivity:

I was crushingly disappointed by Red Riding Hood, which I’d thought had the opportunity to be a really searing look at arranged marriage, sexual violence and revenge, so I’m going to avoid getting overly excited about any of these projects before I actually see them. But I think io9 is right to push hard for the idea that if we’re walking back into the woods with the Brothers Grimm, that we should make movies that grapple with the terrors of the originals.

In recent years, we’ve spent a lot of time turning monsters of legend cute or sexy, which is a bit odd. It’s not as if disobedient children in a modern society are at much risk of running away into the woods, as if girls in most communities are endangering not just themselves or their property rights if they’re sexually active before they’re married. But that doesn’t mean that modernity eliminates monsters. And I’d love to see a fairy tale movie with an acute sense of what we fear most, whether it’s a new monster, or an old one.