In a distant land, beyond seven seas and seven mountains, Goldilocks sat in a psychotherapist's office.
"You were locked in a tower for 18 years, you certainly didn't have a problem with quarantine," he tells her.
Although this may seem like the beginning of a modern fairy tale, it is one of the memes - internet jokes that connect fairy tales and psychology.
The psychological interpretation is just one of the slightly twisted readings of this genre that is not just intended for children.
They can also be interpreted from the perspective of feminist criticism, disability studies, or even erotic studies, research shows.
Placed in a short visual form, the mimes criticize the stereotypes that accompany fairy tale heroines and remind us that there is much we do not know about them, explains Tamara Stošić, a doctoral student in literature at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade.
"Their depth lies in the layered metaphors that reveal human fears, desires, and moral dilemmas."
"That's exactly why fairy tales can be read from different perspectives," Stošić tells BBC Serbian.
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From a psychological perspective: Princesses in therapy
In the mime, Snezana, who has moved in with seven adult men, tells a therapist about her addiction to male attention.
Cinderella questions her own tendency to wait for a prince to save her, while the Little Mermaid laments from the couch that she has changed to fit into the human world.
Princess archetypes in psychology are the subject of research by psychologist Nevena Topalović.
Her studies are based on the idea of Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and creator of analytical psychology, that "there is nothing in man that is not told in fairy tales and myths."
She divides heroines into sleeping, rebellious, and awake.
"Cinderella and Snow White can't stand up for themselves, they almost don't speak, and that's why we call them sleepwalkers."
"While Belle is from a fairy tale Beauty and the Beast "an example of courage and rebellion, because she goes alone to the Beast who captured her father, offering her own life for her father's freedom," Topalović tells BBC Serbian.
The beast could also be Bella's shadow - the dark side of the being, and confronting the dark side is a regular goal of analytical psychotherapy.
"Belle tames the beast and metaphorically becomes acquainted with its fears," the psychologist adds.
She was particularly interested in Goldilocks.
This fairy tale by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm was first published in 1812.
The main character with long golden hair has been living imprisoned in a tower without doors or stairs for 18 years with a witch, whom she believes is her mother.
"The tower is a symbol of dreaming."
"This princess doesn't live, but dreams, fantasizes and thinks about real life," explains the psychologist.
It is only when the prince calls Goldilocks to come down from the tower and run away with him that she "enters the real world."
This is also a story about entering adulthood, Topalović points out.
"The hair cutting at the end of the fairy tale carries the symbolism of breaking away from old patterns; when we move into a new phase of life, something must die," she adds.
Mermaid's tail as a physical defect
Another perspective on viewing fairy tales could be provided by disability studies, a theoretical field that views disability as a social and cultural phenomenon.
When The Little Mermaid, the main character of the fairy tale of the same name by German writer Hans Christian Andersen, turns 15, she is allowed to rise to the surface of the sea for the first time and see the world of people.
During a sea storm, she sees a young prince on a ship.
A storm destroys the ship, and the mermaid, swimming through the waves, manages to save the young man.
Seeing him on the shore, she falls in love and for the first time wishes she had legs instead of fins.
In Andersen's fairy tales, the heroes often don't feel comfortable in their bodies, considers Đorđe Đurđević, research intern at the Faculty of Philology and Arts in Kragujevac.
"The tin soldier has no legs, and becomes a grotesque figure - a foot soldier without a leg, the match girl is a sad, rejected female person, on the margins of society, whose body becomes icy and frigid," he writes in the paper. The Little Mermaid's big orgasm.
The miniature lovely Thumbelina is "so beautiful that her beauty brings her restlessness", ugly duckling, which later turns out to be a swan, "is rejected precisely because of this physical defect".
To describe the telling of a story that is caused by some physical defect in the hero, American scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder coined the term narrative prosthesis.
Describing the extraordinary beauty of the Little Mermaid, Andersen does not miss the opportunity to point out her physical flaw: "She didn't have any legs either, but her body ended in a fish tail.".
"She suffers enormous pain: from the decorations she adorns herself with before her first ascent to the surface, to walking on her newly acquired legs, where every step brings such bloody pain, as if she were walking on blades," explains Djurdjevic.
Eros in fairy tales
The same Andersen fairy tale can also be read from the perspective of erotology - the science that studies sexual love.
The sea, also the mermaid's home, is "hypersensual, tactile, not frigid, and so is The Little Mermaid." explains Djurdjevic.
"The sea is feminine, as is The Little Mermaid," he adds.
Fairies and mermaids stir up the depths of the sea, which causes shipwrecks.
"The ship belongs to the world of a man, who with his touch - the ship, cuts the sea open", it says Djurdjevic.
The Little Mermaid gave the sea witch her voice in exchange for legs and life on land, but if the prince does not return her love and marry her, she will die and disappear like sea foam.
After the prince falls in love with the princess from a neighboring kingdom, the mermaid meets a terrible fate.
When, turned into foam, she finally dies, "The Little Mermaid does not feel death," Đurđević explains.
"Perhaps the fairy tale ends in the absolute frigidity of The Little Mermaid, which again has parallels in Andersen's poetics - or - perhaps the fairy tale ends in the absolute erotic realization of The Little Mermaid", he concludes.
A fairy tale can also be read from an erotological perspective The Princess on the Pea in which a young prince traveled around the world in his desire to marry a real princess.
But he was out of luck.
Everyone he met had some flaw.
However, one rainy night, an unknown girl came to the door of the royal palace, claiming to be a real princess.
The Queen, the prince's mother, wanted to test this claim, so she placed a small pea under 20 mattresses and 20 feather duvets in her bedroom.
"The prince in this fairy tale is so consumed by carnal desire that he sublimates into a single grain."
"The princess appears on a night when a storm is also raging, and she is the real princess, the only one who manages to feel the pea, that small thing to which the prince's body is erotically compressed," Đurđević writes in his work. Erotology in the fairy tale "The Princess and the Pea" by Hans Christian Andersen.
Feminism and political correctness
In fairy tales, princesses are generally beautiful, they go to balls, and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are kissed by the prince without their permission - while they are sleeping or believed to be dead.
These scenes may be problematic from a perspective feminist criticism, believes doctoral student Tamara Stošić.
"Feminism reminds us that princesses don't need a prince to survive, but that they can take care of themselves," she explains.
By going to the ball secretly, Cinderella violates established social conventions, which may also indicate "dissatisfaction with women's position in society," Stošić believes.
In the mid-1990s, James Finn Garner, an American writer and satirist, wrote a book in which he edited what he considered problematic passages in fairy tales and titled it Politically correct bedtime stories.
The book is being played with political correctness, a social movement whose main purpose was to eliminate offensive speech and equalize all people regardless of gender, race, religious or sexual orientation.
Thus, Cinderella meets a prince who "was hosting a masquerade ball, celebrating the exploitation of the marginalized, landless peasantry."
In a fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs The queen who asks the mirror if she is "the most beautiful in the world" is actually "insecure about her own worth, due to social conditioning in the dictatorship of male hierarchy," writes Finn Garner.
New interpretations of fairy tales are constantly emerging, says the philologist.
"That's exactly why fairy tales will always be read," concludes Stošić.
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