In a recent column for the Huffington Post, Richard Stearns wrote about a kind of diversity pop culture hasn’t integrated particularly well into its characters and storylines. “The vast majority of television and film characters seem to have no faith,” he explained. “People rarely attend church, pray, or make decisions based on religious beliefs. It is hard to find any Christians on popular television shows who are not belittled. There are virtually no television characters who I can fully identify with.” But one of the things that’s been striking this summer at the movie is how many characters have faith, and how often it’s implied to be Judeo-Christian.

In The Avengers, when Black Widow explains to Captain America that Thor and Loki are basically God, Cap’s response is a nod to his religious belief as part of what makes him an avatar of a certain kind of American traditionalism. “There’s only one God, m’am,” he tells her. “And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” The movie doesn’t spell out whether he’s a professing Christian, in part because there isn’t another really opportune moment to discuss theology, but the trail is there for people who want to follow it. In Snow White and the Huntsman, Kristen Stewart’s Snow White says the Lord’s Prayer in captivity. When she lies in a near-death state, the Huntsman’s (Chris Hemsworth) response is prayer, an attempt to speed her into heaven and to find solace for himself. And Elizabeth Shaw, the hero of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, is a Christian whose scientific exploration is directly motivated by her faith. The symbol of her Christianity, the cross she wears around her neck, becomes something that’s traded back and forth, a totem of trust between characters who have little other reason to see each other as sympathetic.

Whatever the virtues and failings of the first two movie, the careful integration of the characters’ beliefs into moments of emotional strain or the world opening up, is very smart. This is the way that a lot of people live their faith: it informs their decision-making as they make their way in the secular world. These aren’t niche movies, meant only to speak to a very faithful minority who view themselves as embattled by the secular world. They’re meant for hugely mass audiences, and their characters’ Christianity is self-confident, both in that they don’t have crises of faith, and that it doesn’t have to be the only element that defines the characters’ personalities. It stands on its own. This strikes me as a smart way forward for people outside of Hollywood who’d like to see more Christian characters in mass entertainment, and for people in Hollywood who’d like to give their characters religion without writing solely religious stories.

Part of the reason Prometheus doesn’t work as well is that Shaw’s religion is the only thing we know is her motivation, but the movie doesn’t flesh out the relationship between her belief and her work as a scientist, and doesn’t bother to establish any consistency in her worldview. If a character’s going to be faithful, what we see of that faith should be consistent in and of itself, and consistent with the other things a character uses to make decisions and to evaluate the world. People of all religions should want to see smart depictions of faith, whether it’s a minor part of a character or their main motivation. And folks who want to create good religious characters need to spend time thinking through theology. Belief is a complicated thing, and getting it right is an essential part of worldbuilding.

Once upon a time, there was a critic with a particular fondness for fairy-tale stories and for awesome action choreography involving winning. This critic was particularly excited for a movie called Snow White and the Huntsman, starring Kristen Stewart as Snow White, a young princess who is imprisoned after her stepmother, a sorceress named Ravenna (Charlize Theron) murders her father and begins scouring the countryside for young women whose youth and beauty she can cannibalize to preserve her own youth. The movie looked to be a sophisticated take on an old story, putting the princess in armor and at the head of an invading army. But Snow White and the Huntsman behaves more like an old tradition anxious about the rise of a new one than the coronation of a new moment for action heroines.

By far the best parts of Snow White and the Huntsman are those that hint at the source of Ravenna’s pathology, and at the damaging power of beauty myths. “I was ruined by a king like you, my Lord,” she tells Snow White’s father on their wedding night, her seduction turning to poison. “Men use women.” Meeting the Huntsman, Ravenna muses “There was a time when I would have lost my heart to a face like yours. And you, no doubt, would have broken it.” Later, we learn that some sort of trauma inspired an older woman in a young Ravenna’s life to turn her beauty into something more than normal human loveliness. “Your beauty is all that can save you, Ravenna. This spell will make your beauty your power and your protection.” Watching the natural lines on Ravenna’s face vanish after she sucks the life out of another young girl is Hollywood airbrushing rendered visible, an act of humanity-erasing magic with consequences both on-screen and off it. “You don’t even know how lucky you are never to know what it is to grow old,” she tells a woman whose life she’s stolen. Both Ravenna’s selfishness and Hollywood’s obsession with youth are pursuits of immortality without any sense of what life is good for.

But much like Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of Red Riding Hood, which was advertised with a suggestion that Red herself might turn out to be the wolf (a concept adopted well by Once Upon a Time) before revealing itself to be conventional, Snow White and the Huntsman is less interested in its promising concepts than in visual spectacle and hitting traditional fairy-tale beats that could have been jettisoned. When Snow tears through the dark forest, the insects that erupt from the ground and the mists that swirl around her are repeated so often they lose their power. When she makes it to a sacred sanctuary, the movie spends loving time on rich natural wonders, like a turtle who is a walking garden, that are visually stunning, but that prove to have no relevance to the plot and little metaphorical significance. And as much fun as it is to see Ian McShane, Toby Jones, Nick Frost and others kitted up and shrunk down to size as a gang of prophesying dwarves, their main plot function is to open a drawbridge at a crucial moment. They’re there, taking up precious minutes seemingly because the movie doesn’t believe that audiences will buy Snow White without a group of small men to adore her, even if they get a Huntsman as compensation.

It doesn’t help that when the plot does get moving, it’s burdened with some deeply puzzling writing and bad casting. Snow White’s been locked in a tower for a decade and has no evident battle skills or organized base of support, but we’re supposed to believe she can rally the support of a kingdom with an incoherent rallying speech about how people have iron twisted up inside them. Ravenna, for no other reason than to increase the sense that she’s deviant, is burdened with a brother, Sam Spruell in an epically terrible wig, with whom she’s overly familiar: in their scenes together, they come across as a pair of low-budget Lannisters.

But the movie’s real failure is to develop Snow White’s character enough to make rooting for her against Ravenna feel organically exciting. As a child, her mother tells her “you possess rare beauty, my love. In here. Never lose it. It will serve you well when you become queen.” We see her play with William, her childhood friend, speak kindly to a fellow prisoner in Ravenna’s tower, and play with a child from the marsh, but these are gestures of common humanity, not of extraordinary empathy and insight. The dwarves follow her because of a prophecy, rather than on evidence, and the blessing she receives from a white hart with a magnificent rack of antlers that supposedly confirms the prophecy gives her no powers and is in recognition of no deeds—it’s just another opportunity to state, rather than demonstrate, Snow White’s goodness. “But how will I inspire?” Snow White worries at one point. “How will I lead men?” Snow White and the Huntsman would have been a better movie had its events given her, and us, confident answers to those questions rather than handing Stewart one of the most poorly-written inspirational speeches to make it into a Hollywood movie in a long time.

It’s a group of women Snow White and the Huntsman encounter living in a marsh at the edge of the dark forest who feel like a truer alternative to Ravenna than Snow White, who beats Ravenna but essentially preserves the game. These women ritually scar tear tracks into their cheeks because “without beauty, we are worthless to the Queen. It’s a sacrifice we make so we can raise our children.” But it’s only by Hollywood’s rules that these beautiful, independent women are less than lovely. Snow White and the Huntsman is on the edge of important ideas about beauty, just as it’s on the edge of a good story. But like Ravenna, it looks into the mirror for confirmation of old Hollywood standards and old stories, rather than for the truth.

Every summer, Fandango polls consumers about the blockbusters they’re most excited for. And it turns out that the movie women reported being most excited to see is Snow White and the Huntsman, followed by The Avengers, Men in Black III, The Dark Knight, and Dark Shadows. Now, there are a lot of dedicated female fantasy and science fiction fans out there—I should know because I talk to all of you on a constant basis. But I don’t know that we represent 22 percent of the female moviegoing population, the percentage of women who named Snow White and the Huntsmen as their top ticket-buying priority.

And I think that gets at an important point: women, even outside the core fan community, will be interested in fantasy and science fiction if work in those genres have anything to say to them. Snow White and the Huntsman is being explicitly sold not just as a story with two female leads—Charlize Theron and Kristen Stewart—but as a story about the connection between beauty and power, about competition between women, and about styles of rule and command. From the outside, the women in the movie don’t look like women acting like men. They appear to be women acting like women but with the force of armies and heroes available to play out the issues that they’re grappling with personally.

Women watch Game of Thrones not for the incest and other sexual skulduggery, as the New York Times suggested in its utterly bizarre review when the show premiered, but for the variety of women we see on-screen the way they exercise power. We watch to see Cersei Lannister wonder what it’s like to be a man, and to struggle between the imperatives of command and family. We watch for that moment when Brienne of Tarth beats the Knight of Flowers, and reveals herself for what she is (and I watch The Return of the King for the moment when Eowyn spits out the declaration of her gender at the Witch-King of Angmar). We watch for Sansa’s bitter, brittle bravery, and Arya’s nourishing hatred.

The dudes who make much of our science fiction and fantasy are rightly confident that they’ll get my, and other women’s money, even if they don’t speak to us. We’re going to Men in Black III and The Dark Knight, after all, and we’ll turn out for The Avengers even if we’re supposed to accept Black Widow and Maria Hill as our representatives. But from a purely mercenary perspective, you could always get more of our money once in a while by catering to us as women first, and counting on dudes to come along for the swords and dragons as a secondary market.

I suppose Joel Stein thinks he’s being rather clever and sophisticated in his riff for the New York Times about why grown-ups shouldn’t read literature aimed at young adults (something he conflates with picture books). He sniffs:

I appreciate that adults occasionally watch Pixar movies or play video games. That’s fine. Those media don’t require much of your brains. Books are one of our few chances to learn. There’s a reason my teachers didn’t assign me to go home and play three hours of Donkey Kong. I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. Maybe there are Pynchonesque turns of phrase. Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace proud. I don’t know because it’s a book for kids. I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.

Where to begin? First, with a bit of history. Adolesence as we understand it is a rather new invention, and more to the point, the idea of literature aimed squarely at children or at young adults is a relatively new phenomenon in narrative fiction. The first picture books begin trickling out in the 1600s as a combination of instructional or pleasurable reading. And the distinction between children’s, young adult, and plain literature doesn’t come until 1802 when British critic Sarah Trimmer proposed two categories of books, one for those younger than 14, another for literature specifically aimed at those between the ages of 14 and 21, a time when children transitioned into formal adulthood. In other words, those 3,000 years of fiction include an awful lot of writing intended for audiences of mixed ages, whether it’s Jane Austen’s novels or lives of saints, which can be decidedly R-rated.

Second, the ideas that children and young adults are only capable of digesting mush, or that the only way to discuss sophisticated themes is to include explicit sex and violence are pure hogwash. Young people are capable of fairly sophisticated reasoning, of empathy, and even of significant evil, and many of them can rise to meet fairly high bars as readers. A series like the Hunger Games franchise can keep Katniss a virgin throughout the majority of the three books and still communicate the horror of surrendering your sexual and romantic autonomy. Harry Potter may be the first encounter a generation of readers has with the evils of torture and nasty class bias. Tamora Pierce’s Provost’s Dog series is an unflinching exploration of crime and poverty. Simply because these novels are also appropriate for younger readers doesn’t mean the ideas in them are stupid or the prose is unworthy. Not all things written for younger readers are masterpieces, of course. But there’s plenty of bad trash, insipid prose, and deeply stupid ideas in books written for adults. Joel Stein is welcome to it.

I spent a lot of my childhood reading the Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library, which is highly recommended for the semi-macabre young person in your life. They’re particularly a good reminder of what our fairy tales really are, and how sanitized Disney in particular and Hollywood in general have made them for mass consumption. But I wonder if we’re at a moment when fairy tales might be having not merely a resurgence, but recovering some of their original, horrific power.

First, there was Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood. The movie was a huge disappointment, failing to fulfill its promise to do something novel with the identity of the wolf, and full of cheap-looking foam sets and MTV-styled hair. But it at least had the right impulse: Hardwicke wanted to restore the sense that the night is dark and full of terrors, particularly when you’re surrounded by the big woods. And she was wise to suggest that order can bring fear with it, too, though the message gets watered down a bit when it comes in the form of Gary Oldman in doofy facial hair and wielding the power of a Torture Elephant:

A short film called Red (thanks to io9) does a better job of getting at those ideas. It’s bloody and it’s heartbreaking: if you have to cut your way out of the belly of an animal that’s devoured you and drag the broken body of your grandmother out with you, even if you win, you’re likely to end up fairly traumatized. Becoming a warrior is not always a particularly delightful experience. And having to kill to survive is exhausting:

Snow White and the Huntsman, which arrives in theaters in June, appears to be going the same route, albeit with a bigger special effects budget. The Queen’s evil isn’t implied, she’s not killing her victims with anything as quaint as a poisonous apple. She’s sucking the life force out of them, stabbing them in bed, ravening for their hearts. The forest may be more full of wonders than terrors, but said wonders aren’t of the adorably singing woodland creatures variety. And becoming a hero means going to the front lines in a medieval siege, an enterprise that carries as much risk of grisly death as it does potential for glamour:

By contrast, the dreadful-looking Mirror, Mirror looks like an anachronism precisely because it’s so pristine. These aren’t dark woods so much as they’re a Hollywood set, or an incomplete CGI rendering. It’s hard to be terrified of a world where people’s teeth literally sparkle, and curses turn people into adorable simulacra of puppy dogs. These people are plastic: even if you cut them to the quick, there’d be no blood or guts to spill into that snow.

Once Upon a Time has a bit of that shininess problem, though conceptually, it’s gone darker. There’s a girl who turns into a wolf, and an actual heart in a box that’s been identified as belonging to a character we’ve gotten to know. That’s upsetting, even if we don’t see the organ itself. Grimm, which recently got a second-season pickup, and has improved by focusing on the core relationship between the detective and the werewolf, has been horrific from the beginning: we’ve got stolen organs, fights to the death, and incredibly ugly acts of murder all of them. The premise of the show itself is deeply unnerving—that there’s something else hiding under the skin many of us present to the world.

And Once Upon a Time and Grimm are nodding at a question it’ll be important for fairy tale storytellers to consider if this trend is to continue. In the absence of the dark woods, the arbitrary nature of feudal lords, the horror of high infant mortality rates (at least in the developing world), the wolves that steal the sheep, what are our terrors? And which stories are the best matches for telling them? The persistence of crime dramas would suggest that the big city has replaced the big woods, that serial killers are our ravening beasts. But I’m not sure we have myths to embody the new fears generated by a world that’s much larger than the village, or the disembodied terrors of the digital age.