This post is like Araldite in that it comes in two parts and when combined, is a hideous sticky mess.
Part 1:
If I may be so bold that I may say something stupid, I have a guess that the reason why everyone's 'favourite' number is 7, is because it is a smallish prime number which is a little bit mysterious. Okay, people probably neither care that it is prime, not that it produces stupid decimals when used as a divisor but they are at least aware that there are seven days in a week, seven deadly sins, and seven dwarves in the tale of Snow White.
Or rather... the seven dwarves are an invention of the Disney corporation because in almost every edition of the story which existed before the animated feature (that I could find), they are merely described as 'some' dwarves. Now I have heard it said that Disney made the choice to use the number seven after they'd done internal A/B testing with nine dwarves and decided that this sounded better; which if this is true, then the arbitrary amount of dwarves is an aesthetic choice.
Probably ever since the 1937 Disney animated feature, many people like me have seen the number of dwarves and the number of deadly sins and wondered it there is a connection. Certainly in mining fairy tales and folk stories, the Disney corporation has made more than passing use of witches and wizards and even The Mouse himself was pressed into service as 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice'; which has made many people wonder what kind of witchcraft is going on underneath the house of the mouse.
The thing is though that if you actually try to map the seven deadly sins onto the seven dwarves, it very quickly falls to pieces.
Sure, two are obvious:
Sleepy - Sloth
Grumpy - Anger
Maybe there is a case to be made for their leading press-ganging the rest of them into diamond mining:
Doc - Avarice
But the rest?
Bashful - Superbia?
How do you map Happy, Dopey, and Sneezy, onto Lust, Envy, and Gluttony?
I just don't think that there is a particularly strong case for Snow White and the Seven Deadly Dwarves. Indeed if there is a case for Lust, Envy, and Gluttony in the film, then those three defects can be properly mapped onto Snow White's stepmother and stepsisters. Also I find it interesting that the useful trope of having an orphan child who has been adopted by an unkind family is used here, because then we feel no kind of remorse or sadness when they finally leave. This is a useful plot device.
To interrogate the dwarves themselves, is having an allergic reaction to the environment really a sin? How come Doc neither has a character trait, nor a physical trait associated with him? How come he is a doctor? Is it by trade or academia? What's up Doc? Are these even their actual names or are these nicknames? Are we in fact looking at a series of NPCs with no actual characters at all beyond their names?
If we run the question backwards, then what kind of dwarves would we get? Mr Lazy, Mr Angry, Mr Greedy, Mr Proud, Mr Sexy, Mr Envious, and Mr Hungry? Congratulations, you have just reinvented the Mr Men. Maybe we have invented Snow White and the 14th Century Morality Play. To be fair, I would watch "Snow White and the 14th Century Morality Play"if it was an animated film.
It matters not which way you run around inside this question, seven dwarves and seven deadly sins are not connected.
Part 2:
As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks;
Every sack had seven cats;
Every cat had seven kits.
Kits, cats, sacks, wives - how many were going to St Ives?
Answer: 1. The perpendicular pronoun: I.
Maths time!
Man: 1
Wives: 7
Sacks: 49
Cats: 343
Kits: 2401
However, having more than two-and-a-half thousand cats is a problem. That is unless they own that weird cat island in Japan. This is the unholy kitty army of the night that they warned you about. Even with a rough guess, that's ten thousand cat poos per day which someone is cleaning up (or not clearning up).
I do not know what kind of legal or moral framework the man with seven wives is living in but I do know that he has a very serious feline infestation problem. Nobody needs more than two-and-a-half thousand cats.
This is the proper amount of cats to have and why:
1 cat - unacceptable because they get lonely.
2 cats - is the perfect number of cats to have, if you are going to have any at all.
3 cats - is already too many cats because that's a dozen poops a day.
2744 cats - is utter madness.
No comments:
Post a Comment