YMMV / The Red Shoes

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Some read the red shoes as representing Karen's budding sexuality, or at least of her exploring her own sexual allure. Karen receives both pairs of shoes at major "coming of age moments"; first at her mother's funeral, the second right before her confirmation, and a noted sighting of the country's princess in between who is also wearing red shoes. The curse only manifests after an "old soldier" notes that they're "good for dancing" before (apparently) cursing them. Karen follows his suggestion by dancing and her life unravels immediately afterwards. In other words: a little girl suddenly gets something that her foster mother and church disapprove of, that a more privileged young woman displays without shame, that quickly becomes all she can think about, and suddenly becomes an uncontrollable curse after a creepy older man gets involved. Add in the Values Dissonance and you get...
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is the soldier a demonic presence enabling Karen's hubris? Or is he a divine messenger ironically warning her of the consequences of her vanity?
• Esoteric Happy Ending: OK, so Karen has found peace and joy at the end. But she has to endure ridiculous trials and die first, all over a moment of envy for a pretty pair of shoes? It's hard to overlook the Values Dissonance to see what would have made Andersen (and his audience) consider this a happy story.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the late 2010s, "Karen" has become slang for a spoiled and demanding woman, which describes the protagonist of this story all too well. Well,at times, anyway...
• Karmic Overkill: A girl roughly in her early teens who has spent the first years of her life in poverty pays a bit too much attention to her shoes and is not attentive enough to her prayers, then leaves her foster mother to die alone of neglect so she can go out dancing. For this, she gets overpowered by the shoes, dragged across the countryside by them, and has to endure having her feet cut off and further harassment from both an angel and her severed feet in order to induce her to repent of her sins. Rather cruel to say the least.
• Moral Event Horizon: Overtly this happens when Karen decides to go to the ball instead of nursing her dying foster mother, and the shoes take control of her feet immediately after. Arguably, given the religious nature of this story, Karen already crossed it when she thought about her shoes in church at her confirmation and at communion. By showing a lack of interest in these important religious acts just when she should have become a grown-up Christian, she is prioritizing secular interests, and the rest of her downfall could be seen as only emanating from it.
• Nightmare Fuel: The entire climax of the story and the subsequent consequences. Karen is forced to dance without stopping night and day across the countryside. When she comes to the church, a sword-wielding angel tells her: "Dance you shall! Dance in your red shoes until you are pale and cold, and your flesh shrivels down to the skeleton. Dance you shall from door to door, and wherever there are children proud and vain you must knock at the door till they hear you, and are afraid of you. Dance you shall. Dance always." At one point, she dances by her home just in time to see the coffin bearing her foster mother, who has just died of her illness, being carried out. She finally comes to the executioner's house and he rids her of her shoes by cutting off her feet, which dance away with the shoes still on them. After being fitted with prosthetic feet and given crutches, Karen is twice stopped from entering the church by the sight of the shoes blocking her way in, because she hasn’t repented enough. Even prior to this hellish sequence, Andersen paints a vivid picture of the goings-on in church while Karen contemplates her shoes when she should be engaged in the service, and some of these details are quite spooky. The portraits of the church's former pastors and their wives look down accusingly at Karen. When she takes the communion cup,^note I.E. during the very Sacrament of the Altar, during which the Lutheran church teaches the body and blood of Christ are present in the consecrated bread and wine Karen visualizes the red shoes as floating around in the chalice. These details can seem rather unsettling, especially if one is well-versed in the concepts of proper piety and of damnation and hellfire.
• Values Dissonance: The vice of vanity — and its accompanying distractions — was taken far more seriously in Andersen's day. While a 21st-century audience would find Karen a bit immature, no one would suggest she needed to lose her feet in order to save her soul. In addition, the Scare 'Em Straight narrative is very much at odds with how we educate children today. Needless to say, Karen is almost always Spared by the Adaptation in modern retellings. They typically also find a less painful way to get the shoes off her feet.

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