On that point, just to clarify, I do think that actually even in the original grim version, her mother dies giving birth to her and we were dealing with a stepmother even there. So yeah, sometimes it is the direct mother. But in this case, yes. Yeah. And as

soon as the child was born, the queen died a year later, the king took himself another wife, she was a beautiful woman proud and arrogant. She could not stand it if anyone might surpass her beauty. She had a magic mirror. So you see, you know, if we're just noticing those details, right, like the first queen is sitting it framed by a window, a clean a window, a frame of black ebony wood, the author is careful to tell us. And then the second queen has a magic mirror, which is like a window. It's a framing device, except this one is a transparent object with an internal kind of right what's through the looking glass, right, versus just kind of out a window. But these women are framed in a certain way, right? And the second queen is her struggle is now kind of set up as this internal struggle. She's looking out a window, but it's a mirror. She's looking into herself. And she has a male voice telling her about herself and her beauty, right? So it sets up this kind of struggle between, yeah, femininity and patriarchy on the one side and femininity and its internal

contradictions on the other side. Some interesting context too, for like the reason why you like the figure of the stepmother would actually be quite common in these older stories is because like the reason that like the husband might take a new wife is because the first wife is obviously dead, right? And the way that that happened most often was because they would die in childbirth, because that was much more common, like before the 20th century, historically, even in Germany, even in Europe. So stepmothers were quite common in that way. And that's why like they show up in a lot of these older stories. And that's also where some of these like tensions come from, because like the stepmother like she's not actually like biologically related to her stepdaughter at that point. So like, yeah, you know, they're technically family, she's married to the husband, but it's a little bit of a tricky dynamic, because you know, there's a question of inheritance, there's a question of like, you know, who's the husband gonna pay most attention to like again, it kind of gets back to the patriarchal, you know, like context is all being staged in, but that's where you see like those tensions are already like historically present. And it's like they're very sort of like ready to be taken to these dramatic places in a fairy tale. It's like, let's look at a story where the stepmother tries to kill the stepdaughter, you know, that's the sort of, you know, that's where it all comes from is the competition basically at that point in a patriarchal system between the older woman and the younger kind of daughters. So, even though again, like this is all a fairy tale fantasy, the actual historical social issues that it's exploring are very grounded. They're very much a product of the times that these stories were being written or told out loud. And it's

been a long time too, but does the Disney version seems to tell it more from Snow White's perspective too? That I mean, we do get a lot of the sort of the queen we get enough of the queen to understand what she's up to and what the action of the story is. But a lot of it is Snow White kind of running around in the woods in the cartoon, right? Like making friends with animals, they emphasize this attunement with nature and the more innocence, right? Where we don't eat animals and dominate nature, women go into nature and are at harmony with it kind of thing. And yeah, so they changed the perspective quite a bit as well as the ending. Yeah, totally. I think that Neil Gaiman doesn't do that. He actually maintains the same perspective as the original, which is very interesting.