sleeping-beauty-2
Explanation
The Joke
This comic retells the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale with a more realistic and uncomfortable lens. A narrator sets the scene: "Here, the princess sleeps. Only true love's kiss can awaken her." A prince kisses the sleeping princess, and she wakes up. But instead of the expected fairy-tale romance, the conversation turns awkward. When asked what happened, the princess says "Nothing happened" and the prince awkwardly says "I guess you're not... creepy guy now?"
The characters then confront the deeply uncomfortable implications of the original fairy tale: the prince has just kissed an unconscious woman he has never met. Someone points out "You just kissed an unconscious lady you never met before because you felt you were in love with her. You want her to connect the dots for you?" The scene devolves into everyone acknowledging that this is "a little more complicated" than the fairy tale suggests, with observations that it is "technically legal" adding to the discomfort.
The Humor
The comedy comes from applying modern ethical standards and consent frameworks to a classic fairy tale. The Sleeping Beauty story has always contained the problematic element of a man kissing an unconscious woman, but the fairy-tale framing traditionally papers over this. By having the characters themselves recognize and discuss how creepy the situation actually is, Weinersmith creates humor through the collision of fairy-tale logic and real-world social awareness. The prince's defensive awkwardness and the bystanders' uncomfortable attempts to parse the ethics of the situation mirror real modern conversations about consent.
References
- The fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, known from Charles Perrault's and the Brothers Grimm's versions, in which a princess is awakened from an enchanted sleep by a prince's kiss.
- The comic reflects broader cultural conversations about consent and how classic stories look different when re-examined through contemporary ethical lenses.