Cinderella “plot holes” I am tired of hearing about
- “Why didn’t her step family recognize her?” Because royal balls were basically the candle lit equivalent of clubbing in terms of both lighting and sheer numbers. Even if they were right next to her, they probably wouldn’t get a good look, especially since it would have started after sundown. Also, she was the help; they probably hadn’t looked at her in years.
- “Looking for someone based on their shoe size is stupid!” See above.
- “Was he going to have every size seven in the kingdom try the slipper on?” Prior to industrialization most garments were made by hand to fit the buyer’s measurements, including shoes. It’s why poor people only had one pair. It’s a lot smarter when you consider that they would’ve fit her like a glove.
- “You can’t run down stairs in heels!” I know this is a misconception resulting from historical revisionism and disneyfication, but high heels were not originally women’s shoes. They were worn by men. Women wore slippers, which were basically ballet flats. So it’s debatable.
- “Glass shoes don’t make any sense!” Okay first of all, it’s called the suspension of disbelief, and secondly, they’re gold in every other version but Perrault decided to change them to something else expensive.
- “She just went to the ball to find a man!” I know this isn’t a plot hole but listen. As the daughter of a widower Cinderella would’ve been running the household finances and acting as hostess if he hadn’t remarried. By demoting Cinderella to a servant, her step-mother essentially guaranteed that she would never escape the house, because the only way for her to escape and maintain her status was to marry well, and no one was going to marry a servant. It was essentially the historical equivalent of your mom stealing your college acceptance letters out of the mailbox.
this was not an analysis i was prepared for, i’ll tell you that
Technically the original version has them being fur slippers. Which was uh, intentionally suggestive, if you get me.
7. “If the shoes fit her so perfectly how come she lost one?” The short answer is ‘it got stuck’, the long answer is, there had actually been several balls that she went to and she kept fleeing before the end of each one and not giving the Prince her name and the Prince really wanted to know who this mystery lady that he was enamoured with (and who seemed to return the affections) was so he finally coated the steps with pine tar, which is sticky stuff, to try and delay her a moment so he could get her name. And one shoe got stuck.
8. “Why did everything else turn back but not the shoe.” Ok so we don’t actually have an answer to that one but, my own theory that the shoe was made of magic while everything else-the dress, the carriage, the horses, the footmen/coachmen, was transformed from something else. The spell ended and the transformed things reverted back, but the slippers, made of magic, remained.
Tl;dr magic and plot convenience
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