Old School Fairy Tales

So my wife got my 4 year old daughter a book of fairy tales for her birthday.  These are the classics in their original form more or less.  I have not read these in quite some time.  Some of them are... well they vary wildly.

The Ugly Duckling.  I don't know what the point of this is.  Are we supposed to lie to ugly kids and tell them they'll be beautiful when they grow up?

The Little Red Hen.  Good message.  Take that you communists!

Jack and the Beanstalk.  Now we're getting kind of weird.  Jack trades a cow for beans.  Jack climbs the beanstalk and robs some guy for money.  When he's out of money he goes back and robs him even harder.  Then he returns for a third time and robs him really for no discernible reason.  Adrenaline maybe?  Everything Jack does is the exactly wrong choice in this story.

Hansel and Gretel.  A shitty step mom is forcing her deadbeat husband with a loser job to abandon their kids in the forest.  Then there's an old crazy lady in the forest who attacks them, and okay she's not a goddamn witch.  Witches have powers.  The only power this feckless penguin demonstrated in this tale was to get tricked being oven fuel by small children.

This has been my favorite so far.  Just the look of shock and confusion on these kids faces.  I especially liked leading an analysis with them asking them what they thought the moral of the story was.  We came to an understanding that the moral of the story was to always push old women who were moderately suspicious into ovens.

The stories are nightmare seeds.

The Ugly duckling;

Just because your child is a bit of a munter doesn't mean that those bat ears and big teeth won't metamorphise into something agreeable in time, give them the confidence to see beyond the jeers, beauty comes from within.