Goldilocks, or the Three Bears

The fable "The Story of the Three Bears". better known to modern audiences as "Goldilocks and the Three Bears", is a classic cautionary tale of a young girl's rash impulses getting the better of her and leading to an unfavorable outcome. She trespasses into the bears' cottage, eats all their porridge, sits in their rocking chairs, and finally lays in their beds before getting caught and scared off or eaten by the bears. Its message is clear: don't let your impulses get the better of you and end up getting punished for doing something rash.

But what if things were different? What if instead of just being a bored young girl in a forest, Goldilocks was a young girl with an absent father left to her own devices as her mother worked to sustain them? What if she, in her carelessness, had ended up straying too far away to make it home before dark. What if she was hungry from having minimal food with her and hurt from an accident while traveling through the dark and scary woods? Maybe that small cabin in the woods would look even more tempting to her.

"Goldilocks, or the Three Bears" is a modern-day retelling of the Goldilocks story meant to gear it more towards a middle-school audience and to deconstruct the moral presented in the original work. It also gives more backstory to Goldilocks' actions and makes her a more sympathetic and rounded character. The story is focused more on Goldilocks' thoughts as she moves through the story that's ingrained into our public body of work and throws in a few twists to make it a more fresh experience for a modern audience.