he idea for this story came to me in a flash, and I wrote a quick outline and then the story. It was fun, so I decided to continue with the theme as I had with the KP stories so long ago. Since this wasn't quite a KP story, however, I decided to start a whole new section of the site for these fractured fairy tales, complete with more graphics than usual, as is the case with the first letter of this paragraph. Hee.
I used to watch "Rocky and Bullwinkle" when I was a kid, and I enjoyed the fractured fairy tales segment of the show even before I knew the original fairy tales. It was probably what triggered my lifelong obsession with parody, irony, etc.
I named the protagonist Gaylord since it seemed like the most cruel name for a male, especially a loser like Gaylord. I also couldn't resist giving the female lead a stupid name like Mary Sue Desdemona Cordelia Rainbow since a ridiculously long and/or hard-to-pronounce name is so common to cheap romance novels and bad Mary Sue fan fiction. If you don't know what a Mary Sue is, go here, and you'll learn everything you never needed to know. Anyway, I also named the horse Fitzwilliam after Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, partly as a tribute to the genius of Jane Austen, but mostly so I could make jokes about Gaylord riding Fitzwilliam. I didn't bother with naming the Evil Witch Lady because in the outline for the story before I came up with names for all the characters, I just called her the Evil Witch Lady, and I decided not to bother naming her since a lot of fairy tales don't have real names for their witches.
I included the phrase "hardening member" strictly for laughs, again poking fun at bad Mary Sue fan fiction and romance novels where that phrase occurs seriously. The same applied to the bit where Gaylord wants to rescue a damsel in distress not so much because it's the right thing to do but because he wants to get laid. Hee. Exposing the truth behind all those fairy tales young girls were raised on. *snort* Those fools.
I especially liked the part where Gaylord "brandish[es] his enormous sword," because, as with the above, it was yet another irresistable chance to poke fun at phallic symbols in childen's stories, plus I could actually refer to it as such. The phrase "totally not a phallic symbol" amused me no end. It had been on my check list of phrases to sprinkle into casual narration or conversation for a while; I think I'll use it again sometime.
At first, I was troubled by how to have a wuss like Gaylord rescue a damsel in distress, and then it occurred to me that I could make the "distress" something incredibly lame that no reasonable grown man—or woman—would fear, hence the fire ants. I was terrified of fire ants a baby. At one point, perhaps unintentionally but more likely as a cruel joke, someone gave me a picture book with an enormous blown-up shot of an ant on the first page. Apparently, I opened the book, saw the picture, gasped, and said, "What do I do?!" Ahem. Yeah. So that's what inspired Gaylord's idea of distress; something that would only frighten a small girl.
I like the idea of a reluctant damsel in distress, both the untimely insistence on what her name is and the part during her second "rescue," where she says, "I'm just going to walk out of here in a minute." The idea of her riding off without Gaylord after the first rescue amused me, too, especially when he catches up to her and he's all covered in calamine lotion, the big wuss.
Gaylord's line "Ow! Shit!" as he lands in the ant bed was a direct reference to "Vinh's Abduction." I just really like that line.
The part where Gaylord "point[s] a shaking finger at [the princess]" was an allusion to James Thurber's "Recollections of the Gas Buggy," which, having been unable to locate on the Internet, I have reproduced here. Please don't sue me; I can't afford it.
The part where Gaylord throws a tantrum and shouts " . . . no faiiirrr!!!!!!1" contained an intentional use of the number one instead of an exclamation point at the end; that's not a typo. It's a jab at idiots who don't know how to type.
There was also an obvious, obligatory allusion to Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Gilliam and Jones, 1975) with the classic phrase "not covered in shit."
The phrase "perilously close" near the end of the story alluded to Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth, where a similar phrase described Tick the Watch Dog's wild gesturing that caused him to come perilously close to falling out of an automobile.
I don't really have anything to say about the ending of the story; I just thought it would be funny to have the damsel in distress turn out to be a lesbian. Almost a counter to "Herman the Hermaphrodite," in a way. Also, it was a gratuitous excuse to use the phrase "hot lesbian sex," which ensured that all the males who read this site would read the story. Heh.