This Local TikTok Star Sheds Light on ‘F-ed Up’ Fairy Tales
In the wake of her web series going viral, Liz Gotauco is releasing a book on fairy tale origins this month.
Liz Gotauco went viral with her web series “F*cked Up Fairy Tales.” Photograph courtesy of Liz Gotauco/Brittanny Taylor
Liz Gotauco remembers the day she went viral.
It was during the pandemic — Feb. 26, 2021, to be exact — when a glance at a desktop calendar told her it was National Tell a Fairy Tale Day.
So she stood in front of her bookshelf, set her phone to “record” and told her favorite fairy tale, “Peau d’Âne,” an unsettling little ditty about a creepy king who wants to marry his beautiful daughter. (Don’t worry — she flees to a neighboring village thanks to a disturbingly lifelike donkey costume.)
She uploaded the short video to TikTok and thought nothing more of it.
Illustrations by Jade Gotauco
Within a year, she had a half-million followers, drawn in by her playful skits featuring dark stories, fanciful props, homemade costumes and fun filters. Since then, her web series, “F*cked Up Fairy Tales,” has reached millions across the globe on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.
And now — especially fitting for a children’s librarian — her stories are being adapted for the page in F*cked Up Fairy Tales: Sinful Cinderellas, Prince Alarmings, and Other Timeless Classics, coming to bookstores Oct. 7.
“It’s a coming together of all the things I do and like — being a theater kid, being a fairy tale kid, being a librarian — in this one weird package,” says Gotauco, a Providence resident who works as a children’s services coordinator at the Cumberland Public Library.
She was first introduced to the world of fairy tales at eight years of age, when her mother — seeing her love of Ariel and all things “Little Mermaid,” thanks to the wildly popular Disney film — gave her an illustrated volume of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. Gone were precocious Flounder and Sebastian the crab, replaced by a witch who cut off Ariel’s tongue and eternal heartbreak when her true prince marries another.
Illustrations by Jade Gotauco
The stories were dark, tragic, true. Gotauco loved them. She moved into the world of theater, performing in Into the Woods, a musical based on a mashup of Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, and later Cinderella. As she grew older, the classic fairy tales gained more nuance and meaning: A shy Gotauco related to the mermaid who felt out of place under the sea, and found comfort after a failed engagement in realizing the mermaid sought more than true love; what she really sought was an immortal soul.
Those universal themes are why she thinks her web series resonated with people during the pandemic.
“I wasn’t the only one using fairy tales during COVID,” Gotauco says. “They were a balm for a lot of people. Teachers were using them with kids to relate to how they felt because so much in fairy tales felt like the pandemic. Like Rapunzel trapped in a tower, or Cinderella can’t go to the ball, or there’s a mysterious wolf at your door.”
Her book features twenty-five dark fairy tales from around the world, divided into chapters like “F*cked Up Family Trees” and “Crappily Ever After.” Her sister, Jade Gotauco, a scrimshander, drew the ethereal black-and-white illustrations.
October and November will see her traveling the Northeast and mid-Atlantic — from Portland, Maine, down to Richmond, Virginia — on a book tour. She’s holding a book launch Oct. 7 at Riffraff Bookstore and Bar in Providence: Those who buy a book there will receive an extra fairy tale in the form of a zine. On Oct. 16, she’ll be at Charter Books in Newport and at the Cumberland Public Library on Oct. 23.
She’s excited to share the timeless tales and — for a while — step away from the screen and get lost in the world of books and storytelling once again.
“Now I have this nice thing to remember this weird time of my life when people liked to listen to me tell fairy tales,” she says. cosbrarian.com; @cosbrarian
