Talk:The Nutcracker and the Four Realms/@comment-25563752-20181208233124

"Don't know a lot about the original story, but that villain twist seems odd."

A lot of people don't know the original story, but I remember it from my childhood:

In the Land of Sweets, the royal family was having a feast. The Mouse Queen, Mouserinks (it seems that for this movie, they gave the Mouse King her name), approached the queen and asked if she may join in on the feast. The queen said she could, and the Mouserinks brought her entire kingdom, and the mice overrun the castle and devoured all the food. The king had an exterminator come in and kill all the mouse, including the Mouse Queen's 7 children.

In retaliation, Mouserinks cursed the king and queen's daughter to become a nutcracker. The king then  brought in wizards to break the spell on his daughter with the promise that  they could marry her if they were successful. One wizard has his nephew perform the ritual to break the spell. Mouserinks sabotagued the ritual, resulting in the curse transfering from the princess and falling upon the wizard's nephew instead. When he tured into a nutcracker, he fell on Mouserinks, crushing her. With her dying breath, Mouserinks cursed the wizard's nephew, declaring that her new son, the 7-headed Mouse King (each head meaning to be a replacement for her 7 dead children), shall chew him to splinters. The restored princess is repulsed by the wizard's nephew's nutcracker appearance and refuses to marry him, banishing him from the kingdom instead.

Fastforward to the present, Godfather Drosselmeyer gives his goddaughter Clara a nutcracker as a Christmas present, which turns out to be the wizard's nephew. The 7-headed Mouse King appears at night to chew the nutcracker apart. Clara offers her treasured itsems instead as a sacrifice for the Mouse King to chew on. The Mouse King accepts the offer because he enjoys watching Clara suffer and appears night after night to eat her valuables, taunting her of how he'll eat the nutcracker once she runs out of sacrifices.

Clara confides in her brother what's happening, and her brother leaves her his toy soldiers to protect her and the nutcracker. When the Mouse King appears that night, there's a battle, ending in the nutcracker killing the Mouse King with Clara's help. Clara's love for the nutcracker breaks his spell, turning him human again. He takes her to the Land of Sweets to become its new princess (where Clara meets the different characters from the film). However, Clara turns down the princess title, saying that she can't leave her family behind, and goes back home, thinking she'll never see the wizard's nephew again. When she gets back home, Godfather Drosselmeyer introduces her to his nephew. Turns out he was the wizard and his nephew was the nutcracker; he had ben hoping Clara would be able to break the spell on him. Clara and the nephew live happily ever after.

So, yeah, that was the original story before it was adapted into a ballet before Disney turned it into... this.