skin as white as snow

I've started sketching out a few drawings with a Snow White theme. Like many Grimm tales turned Disney, the original folklore is pretty horrific. It's actually a conglomeration of various stories from all over Europe; the gist is the same but the elements vary. Older stories involve our Heroin's mother, not stepmother, ordering her slain in order to consume her daughter's heart and liver. There 7 dwarfs, or thieves, or a city of fairies, even. There's a magic mirror, or a pond, or the moon. There's three attempts to kill Snow, then a death-like sleep and an obsessive royal who somehow rescues the 'tween girl, necrophiliac overtones and all.

And really, Snow herself, while beautiful, was certainly not blessed with brains of any kind. She's gullible and naive. It's the Queen herself who's got the brains and the guts, really. That's what I get from it; the really smart, strong woman, her position usurped by a dim-witted young beauty, attempts to keep her position in the only way available to her; manipulation. So the moral of the story? Hell if I know, maybe that nubile young beauty will always win against brains and experience? Maybe that the opinions women have of one another are too often determined by the opinions of the men they share in their lives...