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What I liked most about this assignment was seeing the cross-cultural similarities between these stories. For example, in the European and Chinese fairytales, the heroines were always beautiful, quiet, and willing/ eager to marry the handsome monarch without getting to know him first. Interesting how these qualities were valued in both cultures despite their geographical distance. The African American tale of the boarhog, however, shows the clever/ tricky boy in a more flattering light than the beautiful daughter. Also, that same daughter was given a choice in her future husband, unlike the maidens in the other stories. Spirituality/ religious faith were valued in the Grimm's fairytales, "Yeh-Shen", and "Buddha". Most of the stories included magical and/ or anthropomorphized animals. Throughout the fairytales, music also has magical properties: Cinderella sings to the tree to get her dress; the boarhog sings to change forms.

Another interesting pattern I noticed between the stories had to do with the relationships each heroine/ hero had with each of her/ his parents. In the German Cinderella, the stepmother was much closer to her own daughter than Cinderella’s father was to her. In “Buddha”, the father represents an evil perspective by taking protectiveness to an incredibly detrimental level. In the original Briar Rose, neither of the parents seemed closer to the girl than the other, but in Anne Sexton’s retelling, she explicitly assigns simultaneously protective and traumatic parental actions similar to those in “Buddha” to the father; she hardly mentions the mother. The African American tales often have a similarly overprotective father.