Fairy Tale Of Stardust By Neil Gaiman

Fairytale and fantasy is a genre of literature that has been introduced to generations and generations of children from very young ages. The tales that never have an unhappy ending are regarded as stories for children in today’s society; however Neil Gaiman, the author of Stardust, argues that children were never really the targeted audience for these narratives that they were in fact intended to be delivered to adults.
“Children listened to them and enjoyed them, but children were not the primary audience... it was not that the furniture had originally been made for children: it had once been for adults and was consigned to the nursery only when the adults grew tired of it and it became unfashionable.”
This quote from Gaiman is simply stating that fairytales were designed for adults but they simply grew bored with them and passed the tales onto their young. The Oxford Dictionary states that the term fairytale by definition is “A fabricated story, especially one intended to deceive.” So how does Stardust fit into the adult fairytale genre?
This is where a star falls from the sky and it magically turns into a beautiful woman named Yvaine, who meets a terribly heartbroken man named Tristan Thorne. In a similar fashion to a fairytale, the story possesses villains who are growing old and need to find the star and kill her in order of attaining eternal youth but because this is a fairytale, it doesn’t happen. The witches are defeated and Tristan discovers he has royal blood flowing through his veins, meaning his mother is the princess of the Kingdom. Yvaine, the star, gives him a stone and he becomes king. They both then get married and live happily ever after. If that doesn’t spell out fairytale, I don’t know what