Source: Existential Comics #667
Transcription:
Evil Queen: Mirror mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?
Mirror: Snow White.
Evil Queen: Hmmm …
Evil Queen: Mirror mirror on the wall, does that mean there is an objective standard of beauty?
Mirror: Uhh … yeah sure …
Evil Queen: So how did you determine your answer? What is the objective standard that you used to determine this?
Mirror: Oh you know, she is just the woman most people would think is most beautiful.
Evil Queen: What? But that’s not objective!
Evil Queen: If that were true I don’t even have to kill Snow White, I just have to kill enough people who have the hots for her to tip the scales for me.
Mirror: Okay fine, then it is her pale skin.
Evil Queen: That’s it, pale skin?
Mirror: Yeah paler the skin, the more beautiful the girl.
Evil Queen: You know … that almost sounds a little racist, mirror on the wall.
Mirror: And another thing, there are too many immigrants …
Doesn’t fair mean light skinned?
No, her skin hungers for justice
Yeah, the Queen asked who is pale as fuck, mirror responds with <pale-ass-bitch>. The Queen then decides that means <pale-ass-bitch> is most beautiful and moves the goal post. I’d probably start being a snarky ass mirror by panel 4 as well.
Yeah, this comic is poorly written. First she literally asked who was the “fairest”, second I’m side eyeing the idea that she’d care about those concerns and would be the “good one” between her and the mirror. Sure, there’s a bunch of story villains that are actually more relatable than the heroes of their stories but the queen from Snow White was just a cartoon villain. And a despot that orders the assassination of a young girl for daring to look better than her isn’t raising what looks like leftist (or at least social liberal) talking points about beauty standards and racism.
Based on this, I think this might be conservative propaganda dressed up as “woman can’t be wrong” propaganda.
It’s not conservative, it’s Existential Comics. Their whole deal is using comics as a vehicle to discuss/make fun of philosophical concepts.
To be fair, quite a lot of these snow white memes move the goalposts in regards to the word “fairness”.
Or it is just a comic that isn’t very good
Yeah, and that’s probably more likely, since this isn’t likely going to be making a big impact either way.
The earlier meaning of fair is beautiful. Before that there was already a meaning of “suitable”. The “light” meaning grew out of the “beautiful” due to prevailing beauty standards.
Right but,
Source
So by the time the story was written in 1812 wouldn’t fair have just meant light skinned? Is this just bad translation from the German?
Although it’s archaic now, I think this meaning of fair is still understood today. The original German word was “schönste” which unambiguously means “most beautiful” so I don’t think it’s likely any translator would have had trouble with it. My guess is it was even more common back then.
If I were to speculate, the translator will have wanted to give a good poetic meter of this line (which is in verse) and “most beautiful” would bugger everything up. The modern English version scans the historic German one, so if this is true, it’s not down to a desire to get the perfect accurate translation…