No more than a tale

[nine_k]

In a typical tale, a hero rescues a princess. If she is not a princess, than he is Prince Charming himself. At the very least, he is simply a hero of fabulous valor, capable of overcoming the most impossible of difficulties. Once the hero has completed his heroic act, which usually involves liberation of a beautiful maiden, they immediately fall in love with each other and proceed to live happily ever after.

This popular fairytale plot rarely occurs elsewhere, though.

Because it fails to explain what happens to the hero. In past he used to slash dragons with his faithful sword, defeat evil sorcerers, cross seas and overpass mountains, and all of a sudden he is leaving for a moderate family life? Heroic acts take a certain temper, of a sort that will not let the hero stay at rest; it will drive him to go slay more dragons and swim over more seas. Possibly the damsel he has liberated will love him for what he is and take his regular leaving for a quest for granted. But what if another quest will have the hero help out another damsel in distress, which surely read fairy tales and is preset to fall in love with her liberator?

Possibly, Ulysses after his return from Troy still felt an affinity to faraway lands and adventures. Homer says nothing about this. We can imagine though that Ulysses never took another expedition, due to peaceful life happening around, the burden of statesman's care, and age. We can picture him watching the sea wistfully from windows of his palace, taking his fabled bow and shooting arrows at a straw dummy in a fit of frenzy, sparring with Telemachus with training swords, and looking at the blunt bar of metal in his hands afterwards with a bitter squint. Then seeking relief in talking with Penelope and in wine, sometimes not as diluted.

But maybe our hero is different, he is not going to stay no matter what plans the lady rescued by him might have. See the abandoned lady sitting and repeating the ancient mantra: "All men are pigs". Of course, she will tell her son that father was a famous hero and died valiantly fighting a dragon. Her daughter she might tell the whole truth, though—when she grows up.

On the other hand the beauty set free from a dragon could also consider the hero not as brilliant as to match her. Or just the first rung on the ladder up. Here the hero, who mastered the wielding of sword, may be hit with a very different weapon. Frankly, he'd better go first, leave for a new adventure where foes are distinguishable from friends and princesses are lovely.

Maybe there's a place for a heroic deed even in daily life, but for the hero himself, there is not. It the hero wanted to or be capable of living an "ordinary life", he would be like most of us and will never make it into a fairy tale. Many things are possible in a fairy tale that are impossible in ordinary life. But even at the end of a tale the storyteller squashes hastily all of the main characters' following life into one short formula, "They lived happily ever after", lest excessive detail makes us, and the storyteller himself, fail to believe that so they did.

Source.