[HN Gopher] The case for not sanitising fairy tales
___________________________________________________________________
The case for not sanitising fairy tales
Author : crapvoter
Score : 279 points
Date : 2024-06-24 19:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.plough.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.plough.com)
| colechristensen wrote:
| Theory: A large proportion of adult mental illness is caused by
| an environment mismatch between adulthood and childhood. Fairy
| tales with disturbing themes were a good way to safely introduce
| the real world to children. Insulating children from reality
| leads to them learning the wrong things about the world both on a
| conscious intellectual level and a very low level as in cortisol
| response to stress. You grow up and then have to live in a world
| that is completely alien compared to your childhood and your
| brain just doesn't work right because it wasn't trained to handle
| things while it was malleable enough to learn them.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Alternately, it's parents who confuse comfort and security with
| love and do their best to shield the children from consequences
| of the children's actions.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Maybe those parents are also victims of fairytale
| indoctrination
| pc86 wrote:
| I would have expected most mental illness to be the result of a
| chemical imbalance and/or trauma (either physical or
| psychological). Also, this presupposes that by the time you are
| old enough to experience the world your brain isn't "malleable
| enough" to handle it which seems unlikely unless you're really
| sheltered from the vast majority of the world until your late
| 20s.
| rexpop wrote:
| OP _is_ describing a form of psychological trauma.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >chemical imbalance
|
| One, this is a mostly unsupported phrase used by therapists
| which may be comforting to patients but isn't actually backed
| by neuroscience. The best that can be said is that drugs
| which affect the brain help some people with diagnosed mental
| illness. The chemical mechanisms for most mental illnesses
| are not known or barely hinted at.
|
| >Also, this presupposes that by the time you are old enough
| to experience the world your brain isn't "malleable enough"
| to handle it which seems unlikely unless you're really
| sheltered from the vast majority of the world until your late
| 20s.
|
| This seems to be parroting the "your brain doesn't finish
| developing until 25 (or whatever)" which has gone around
| quite a distance as a meme but has no scientific basis.
|
| There are many development windows for many different things,
| some known better than others. A 20 year old does not have
| the same language acquisition skills as a 3 year old. My eyes
| work a little funny because I was myopic at birth and some
| control systems didn't develop between birth and 6 months and
| that window is just permanently closed. Most things remain at
| least a little malleable and some much more than others but
| this does not mean that there aren't developmental periods at
| a young age which aren't very important. Two, many chemical
| feedback systems are trained in early life. The "chemical
| imbalance" could be exactly this, childhood experiences not
| matching adult ones and as a result brain chemistry responds
| poorly to adult stimuli.
| airstrike wrote:
| > The best that can be said is that drugs which affect the
| brain help some people with diagnosed mental illness
|
| emphasis on "some": https://www.economist.com/graphic-
| detail/2023/01/10/antidepr...
| tptacek wrote:
| If that were the case, you would expect the consequents of
| mental illness (most obviously suicide, but also violent crime)
| to have increased since 1900, around the time that sanitized
| fairy tales were popularized; and: they have not.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I doubt that fairy tails in particular could be isolated from
| the whole culture of insulating children, and it was never,
| as far as I can tell, a sudden change. You can watch kids
| movies from the 80s and see a significant difference in the
| things which children were being exposed to compared to new
| releases. The change is gradual and has been ongoing for a
| long time.
| tptacek wrote:
| What changes are you referring to, since the 1980s? We can
| pick some of them, call them the next intervention you want
| to propose as responsible for increases in adverse events,
| and then look if the epidemiological data lines up with it.
| I bet, though: the data won't work out for you.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| On the other hand, kids these days can pretty easily get
| access to stories which were extremely hard to find way
| back when.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > they have not.
|
| That's a bold claim. Especially given your starting year,
| where religious attitudes predominated, and suicide was
| considered a mortal sin. It seems that quite possibly
| suicides might have increased since 1900, if only because it
| has become an organic disease instead of an express ticket to
| an eternity of torment. Do you have any numbers to back this
| up?
|
| For that matter, we've also noticed from time to time that
| there are upswings and downswings in suicide (usually
| explained by economics), and cultural differences. There's
| plenty of room for for differences in suicide rates over that
| time period, and it wouldn't really surprised anyone.
| epx wrote:
| They have and a lot.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Source your data.
|
| For example, the lowest suicide rate in the US in over a
| century (and ever, as long as records were kept) happened
| in 2000.
| llm_trw wrote:
| https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-
| since-19...
|
| And today the rate is higher than in 1900 and raising.
| Sounds like whatever we did in the 1950-1980 worked
| extremely well and what we've been doing since hasn't.
| tptacek wrote:
| That is, obviously, not a graph of suicide trending
| upwards as a result of an intervention that occurred at
| roughly 1900.
| llm_trw wrote:
| And it is also not a chicken. What does that have to do
| with suicides increasing in the last 25 years after
| falling for 50.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't know, but it sure won't have anything to do with
| sanitizing fairy tales, which is what we're talking about
| here.
| llm_trw wrote:
| You should probably read the reply above mine.
|
| Let me quote it for you in case tree based navigation is
| too difficult:
|
| >For example, the lowest suicide rate in the US in over a
| century (and ever, as long as records were kept) happened
| in 2000.
|
| If you'd like more context, which I understand can be
| difficult to remember after reading two 20 word posts,
| I'd be happy to provide it.
| hifromwork wrote:
| Your snark is unnecessary, unjustified, and frankly
| probably breaking this site rules. The original claim
| was:
|
| >would expect the consequents of mental illness (most
| obviously suicide, but also violent crime) to have
| increased since 1900, around the time that sanitized
| fairy tales were popularized
|
| i.e. "if fairy tales are the cause of suicide, it should
| increase consistently since 1900". This is clearly not
| the case, as proven by your own data. "Things we were
| doing in 1950-1980 worked and things we did later don't"
| is a very different discussion and not the one you were
| having. It seems to me that it is you who misunderstood
| the argument and are aggressive to your opponent for
| absolutely no reason.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > you would expect the consequents of mental illness (most
| obviously suicide, but also violent crime) to have increased
| since 1900
|
| As long as literally everything else remained the same, or in
| changing, had zero implications on the mental health of the
| population.
| magicalist wrote:
| Seems like a better objection to your GP's post? Or do the
| covariate "kids these days are coddled" vibes it's based on
| cancel each other out.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| More importantly, you would expect not to see high rates of
| childhood mental illness.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Seems to me like the blame is with the schools and parents
| - bringing kids up as helpless victims (can't fight back
| and the schools don't do much to the bullies), the over use
| of screens, and surveillance culture never letting them
| start over (stuff follows you forever now).
| tuatoru wrote:
| My wife was for a time on the board of a local hospital.
|
| I recall her recounting a report from the head of the mental
| health unit saying that there was an increasing number of
| upper-middle-class young women with "princess syndrome" in
| the unit: they have been brought up to believe life is a
| Disney fairy tale, and cannot cope when they get out into the
| world. So they end up in the mental health unit.
|
| This is maybe ten years back?
|
| The Disney Corporation has a lot to answer for.
| tptacek wrote:
| "Princess Syndrome" is not a medical diagnosis, and I
| encourage people to go look up the origins of the term.
| tuatoru wrote:
| No, of course it isn't. Her retelling wasn't verbatim, it
| was heavily edited for confidentiality, nor is my
| recollection 100%. It's the gist.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I don't think that's a sound prediction. There are lots of
| kinds of mental illness, and at least in my view the ones in
| question are mostly depression, anxiety and the like. Not
| exactly famous for producing violent outbursts, and a lot of
| people get treated, which cuts down on suicide. Besides, I
| don't know if I would trust historical stats for suicide, but
| whatever.
|
| Also the GP comment was arguably more about sanitized
| childhood in general, which is a more gradual trend than
| starting at the 1900s exactly.
| tptacek wrote:
| The reason you look at suicide and violent crime is that
| they're clear indicators. Diagnosis of mental illness is
| not: definitions, diagnostic techniques, and access to
| diagnoses have changed radically over the last 100 years.
| It's similar (though less rigorous, for several reasons) to
| homicide being the gold standard crime statistic.
|
| I'm not making a claim that mental health doesn't matter if
| it doesn't result in suicide or incarceration. I'm saying:
| those are two sets of numbers you can find going back to
| the intervention (the sanitization of fairy tales) and
| trace since then.
|
| The story those numbers tells doesn't match the just-so
| story the comment provides. Maybe there's more going on
| than those numbers represents! But I think you'll have a
| tough time supporting that argument with facts. For
| instance: the claim was made across the thread that suicide
| levels were artificially suppressed in 1900 because of
| religious norms, which works against the story; moreover:
| you can see in the actual charts what suicide tracks with
| (it's not a smooth line).
| lmm wrote:
| > I'm not making a claim that mental health doesn't
| matter if it doesn't result in suicide or incarceration.
| I'm saying: those are two sets of numbers you can find
| going back to the intervention (the sanitization of fairy
| tales) and trace since then.
|
| That's like the drunk searching for his keys under the
| streetlamp because that's where the light is! Yes, those
| are the numbers we have, but do they reliably measure the
| things we care about?
|
| (Are you denying that the millennial mental health crisis
| exists at all? The fact that it doesn't show up in your
| preferred statistics is completely independent of any
| discussion of what the causes may be)
| tptacek wrote:
| If you want to make the concession that there's no
| evidence in either direction for the hypothesis that
| roots this thread, I'm fine with that.
| lmm wrote:
| That's already backing off from your last post. Are you
| claiming that your statistics mean there is no
| significant downturn in mental health, or not?
| tptacek wrote:
| No, that doesn't hold. I'm not addressing that at all.
| For the previous commenter to be correct, the trend
| should start with the intervention, which occurred
| in/around 1900.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I've already hinted at why that's not a very strong
| prediction either. Sanitizing fairy tales are only one
| part of a broader trend toward sheltering children in
| general, which, to my knowledge at least, did not start
| at exactly the same time. The changes in mental health
| would track with the intensity of the broader trend, with
| a time lag of around 20 years. Yes, these are both very
| difficult to measure. Truth is hard.
| jackpirate wrote:
| I think you're wrong.
|
| Suicide does not have stable reporting rates. It was very
| stigmatized in the past, and so investigators would
| notoriously report suicides as "unknown cause of death"
| if they could.
|
| Violent crime, on the other hand, is much more correlated
| with things like poverty than with mental health.
|
| I think it's quite obviously the case that there are no
| clear indicators about what "mental health" looked like
| 100 years ago and there. Any projections into the past
| will involve a lot of extrapolation and have all sorts of
| biases.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| But if the clear indicators are only tenuously linked to
| the question you're interested in, then you may just have
| to accept that you can't answer the question, neither
| proving it nor resoundingly falsifying it as you
| attempted.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Since 1900 we have invented painless dentistry.
|
| As someone who got to experience a minor filling done without
| anesthetic when I was 9 I'd say that alone improved mental
| health by an order of magnitude.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| I had a full-blown pulpotomy (baby tooth root canal) done
| with no novocaine injection. I was terrified of the needle.
|
| I'm prone to bouts of depression but that's probably got
| more to do with reading too much news and chronically
| overextending myself.
| hobs wrote:
| For most children of history I dont believe this was a real
| problem, my father for instance was a farm hand herding goats
| and picking olives at 5 years old - there was no time for an
| idyllic childhood.
| colechristensen wrote:
| "Childhood" is a fairly modern invention.
|
| >herding goats and picking olives at 5 years old - there was
| no time for an idyllic childhood
|
| I bet you could charge wealthy people $50,000 tuition to have
| their 5 year olds herd goats and pick olives if you had a
| good marketing team. You could lean heavily on calling it an
| idyllic childhood experience, make sure to overuse the word
| "rustic".
| robohoe wrote:
| "farmhouse chic"
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| The most common cause of death during the American Civil War
| was disease. Not bullets, not bayonet wounds, not cannon fire.
|
| Disease.
|
| Imagine being the guy who discovered that washing your hands
| and tools meant less maternal mortality immediately after
| childbirth and being shunned because people had real
| understanding of infections or microbiology.
|
| When you think about those fairy tales, you cannot do it
| properly without thinking about the context in which they were
| written. Children were face to face with mortality every day.
| Polio, measles, typhoid, cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, plagues,
| minor wounds that got infected, etc.
|
| Kids today live in a world where if you make it to adulthood,
| you have a very strong likelihood that you will survive until
| you are no longer able to be productive.
|
| Your mental illness "theory" makes absolutely zero sense,
| because virtually all mental illnesses outside of degenerative
| conditions present themselves during childhood. I've had ADHD
| since I was a child. I didn't get diagnosed until well into
| adulthood, because my family never sought treatment. I didn't
| get this "mental illness" because of a lack of proper fairy
| tales. I was born with it.
| ajuc wrote:
| A lot of fairy tales are just there to scare children into
| obedience. Probably most of them.
| avereveard wrote:
| It's not really obedience, they convey that fire burns
| without the need to have it proven by trial.
|
| Stereotypes keep children alive until higher cognition kicks
| in and that learn consequences
|
| Now I do agree some of the stereotypes are antiquated,
| biased, and need a 21st century refresh, but there's more
| there than obedience.
| ajuc wrote:
| It's not teaching "fire burns", it's teaching "whatever
| authority tells you - you should do, even if you really
| want to investigate for yourself, because you'll die".
|
| Which I call obedience. And yeah - it's useful for parents
| because when your kid runs towards a busy street you don't
| have time to explain the reasoning and persuade it to go
| back. You need it to listen to you immediately. So it has
| some value. But let's not sugercoat it in psychological
| theories. It's simply obedience.
| techostritch wrote:
| So in this theory, people with rough childhoods have less
| mental illness and those with pleasant childhoods have greater
| mental illness?
| Iulioh wrote:
| ...these are extremes and i bet someone with a "rough
| childhood" will have greater mental illness chances
| because...material conditions but it depends how you define
| it.
|
| But i think not begin totally sheltered from every evil of
| the world will probably lead to a more well adjusted adult
| smegsicle wrote:
| if by rough childhood you mean being safely exposed to rough
| concepts under the supervision of caring and mentally stable
| parents, and by pleasant you mean anything else, then i think
| you got it
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| No, trauma is harmful. The whole idea here is to reduce the
| risk of trauma, not cause trauma.
|
| Think of it like this: Growing up in an excessively sanitized
| environment leaves children's immune systems weak and makes
| them susceptible to serious diseases later.
|
| The solution: Give children inoculations, let them play
| outside, etc., to exercise their immune systems in safe
| conditions.
|
| Not the solution: Give children serious diseases.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| This, this and this. And just like how kids who spend too
| much time in sanitized indoor environments are more likely
| to develop allergies and other autoimmune disorders, kids
| who are kept psychologically sheltered to too large a
| degree are more likely to develop anxiety disorders as
| adults.
|
| When "getting everything perfect" is normal to you and not
| a refreshing exception, you feel like you're a screwup most
| of the time even when you haven't done anything wrong
| besides being too hard on yourself.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| > Not the solution: Give children serious diseases.
|
| Actually giving serious diseases (well, infestations) is
| being investigated as a solution:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy
| kergonath wrote:
| You're exaggerating, there are degrees between "being exposed
| to disturbing concepts" (which does not imply abuse) and
| "rough childhood" (which does, or at least mistreatment).
|
| You could frame it the other way: "are people with sheltered
| childhood more likely to suffer mental illness"? And my
| experience would suggest that the answer is "yes".
| anthk wrote:
| Nah, pollution did far more against mental health. And drugs.
| NeoTar wrote:
| I encourage everyone to read the original versions of the fairy
| tales, as told in the Grimms, Perrault, etc.
|
| These stories sometimes read like something from another world.
| Like they are set in a world with hidden rules and assumptions,
| that we do not understand and seem alien to us.
| gwd wrote:
| Reading Thumbelina to my four-year-old, and realizing that she
| was basically... trafficked? Kidnapped from a loving home by a
| mother toad to marry her ugly son; she escapes but then is
| homeless, eventually taken in by a kindly field mouse. But then
| the field mouse eventually decides to force her to marry a mole
| who wants her to live underground, before finally escaping
| _that_ and finding people of her own kind who respect her
| decisions. Makes you wonder for how many children that was more
| an allegory than a fairly tale, and how many didn 't manage all
| their escapes.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > Like they are set in a world with hidden rules and
| assumptions, that we do not understand and seem alien to us.
|
| Is that so difficult to believe? That world existed (and still
| exists), and each new generation of young people acts
| flabbergasted when the rules and assumptions smack them in
| their faces. I was young once, and only now am starting to
| recognize the world(s) that is far older than myself, whose
| rules and assumptions I can only vaguely begin to comprehend.
| You find this in fairy tales too, but not only there.
| zhynn wrote:
| Also recommend the Kalevala if you are curious about such
| things. It's very interesting.
| techostritch wrote:
| I've been collecting this series of folk tales, and some of
| them really are a completely different view of the world /
| sense of morality. It's wild.
| derbOac wrote:
| I read the first edition of Grimm's fairy tales in translation
| not too long ago after having wanted to for awhile, since the
| translation was released.
|
| The thing I was most surprised by was how bizarre some of the
| stories were. Not how disturbing or dark they were, but how
| bizarre and dreamlike they were. Things coming out of nowhere
| in ways that seemed like nonsequiturs, I still can't tell if
| there's something about past culture that is lost on me, lost
| to time, or if the original storytelling was in fact poor, or
| what.
|
| I completely agree with the general sentiment of the linked
| article, and I think some of the commenters are exactly right
| to point out that these tales have been edited and reedited in
| various forms over time for all sorts of reasons, sometimes to
| make them less dark than they originally were.
|
| But some of the revisions I knew from animated films and mid to
| late twentieth century children's books weren't just happier,
| they made more sense, and were easier to follow for whatever
| reason.
|
| I loved reading the first edition and agree that it's great to
| go back to them. I also don't mean to suggest the originals
| were bad -- I think some of the twists and plotlines were
| better in the originals. But I get the sense that some edits
| might have been made not to "lighten" the tales, but rather to
| just make them simpler. In some cases lightening might have
| been a secondary result of simplifying, and in other cases the
| latter type of edit encouraged the former.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I loved _Tales from Tang Dynasty China: Selections from the
| Taiping Guangji_. ( https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Tang-Dynasty-
| China-Selections/d... )
|
| As the title suggests, it is a collection of stories mostly
| written in 10th-century China, translated into English. It
| includes copious introductory material, on every story
| individually, to help you understand what's going on.
|
| Even then, there's plenty of material in the stories themselves
| where it's easy to tell that the author expected you to be
| familiar with something, but you have no idea what it might be.
| zeristor wrote:
| I remember watching the Czech version of The Little Mermaid, not
| the Russian one.
|
| It was just so intense, and obsessive.
| icepat wrote:
| Czech children's TV is something else. I've seen some of it too
| and, to my North American perspective, it feels like a
| feverdream.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Who can forget "Worker and Parasite"?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI
| troad wrote:
| The Czechs have historically had a fairly significant
| animation industry, and the vast majority are very cute,
| e.g.: [0][1]. There also exist a few stop motion animation
| films intended for adults, and those can be more arthouse
| (e.g. Alice). [2]
|
| In America, Czech cartoons somewhat unfairly have the
| reputation for being weird, because a dozen Tom & Jerry
| episodes were made in Prague in the early 1960s in very weird
| circumstances, on a shoe-string budget by animators
| unaccustomed to the very idea of violent cartoons. [3] These
| were received with some confusion by the American audience in
| the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. From this you then
| have consequent parodies like The Simpsons' _Worker and
| Parasite_ , which - though not exactly a fair reflection of
| Czech animation - is absolutely hilarious. [4]
|
| [0] Krtek a telefon / The Little Mole and the Telephone :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYwrCTxF9Oc
|
| [1] Krtek chemikem / The Little Mole as the Chemist :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8xO4PiJ--w
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_(1988_film)
|
| [3] The story of this is told here:
| https://www.awn.com/animationworld/tom-jerry-produced-prague
|
| [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI
| 0xDEADFED5 wrote:
| I came across a Czech film (A Jester's Tale - 1964) when I
| found this video years ago, and it's been stuck in my brain
| since:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqVs_dUgTKM
| icepat wrote:
| > There also exist a few stop motion animation films
|
| There's also a stop-motion TV series for kids, with someone
| who's always doing some sort of handy man task that gets
| completely out of hand? What's that one called again?
|
| In terms of general TV humor, I've found it rather similar
| to English humor. Very dry, a great example is the movie
| Byl jsem mladistvym intelektualem (I was a teenage
| intellectual)[1]. Completely surreal, and worth a watch.
|
| I, personally, rather enjoy it all.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-HNEyBN3Lo (English
| Subtitles)
| blkhawk wrote:
| The brilliance didn't only extend to animation - there were
| at least a dozen of non-animated fantasy and science fiction
| series some that were produced together with the German PBS.
| For instance Adam84/The Visitors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/N%C3%A1v%C5%A1t%C4%9Bvn%C3%ADc...), Arabella
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabela_(TV_series)) and Pan
| Tau (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Tau). The visitors in
| particular have a banging soundtrack you can listen to it on
| YouTube.
| zeristor wrote:
| Who'd have thunk, it has been almost 50 years since I watched
| it...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VCE2PRS-C8
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Czechoslovakian animation was indeed famous abroad even though
| communist regime regulate everything they could. Good to
| mention:
|
| - Krtek (Little mole) by Z. Miler - its never dying cartoon
| that basically every kids since 1y still watching in Czechia
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8ZKvF049Iku9y41WpIUUCA
|
| - animated feature films by Karel Zeman (I was a student at
| school that is located in ateliers where he was making his
| films) https://youtu.be/fP7T9J6AiHM
|
| - Broucci by J. Trnka https://youtu.be/8Apo0tj5Rso
|
| - Bob a Bobek (one of director was my teacher at high school)
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAqhvvA2ar-wN0PRnQVxaEsre...
|
| - Pat a Mat (one of animator was my teacher as well)
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAqhvvA2ar-w9QewRWADbr6DW...
|
| - surrealist animation films by J. Svankmajer
| https://youtu.be/tK_l74cSPGY
|
| - many more
| tnias23 wrote:
| My knee jerk reaction to the title was a strong feeling that
| racist, sexist, and ageist tropes absolutely should be sanitized
| out of fairy tails. But this article discusses a different kind
| of sanitizing, and i feel more comfortable with its premise.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > My knee jerk reaction to the title was a strong feeling that
| racist, sexist, and ageist tropes absolutely should be
|
| How can we ever have our utopia, if there are hints in
| centuries-old stories that people were once racist or "ageist"?
| Why can Winston not stuff all these fairy tales down the memory
| hole?
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Should we sanitize history of the nazis? How about Rome?
|
| Be less precious. The world is a brutal place and the lessons
| of that should NEVER be forgotten.
| petesergeant wrote:
| I'm unclear how teaching someone about an unpleasant
| historical event is perpetuating "racist, sexist, and ageist
| tropes"?
| zer00eyz wrote:
| You don't just pretend bad things don't exist and then have
| them magically stop happening.
|
| What is being advocated for is control of language. It is
| UNACCEPTABLE.
|
| Part of me wants to hand out copies of 1984. I fear that
| some of you would see it as a how to manual.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i don't think this is a fair comparison to sanitizing racism.
|
| it would be more like if we taught the story of the Nazis
| from the perspective of Nazism as wrongfully defeated. we
| certainly do sanitize narratives of history so the victors
| are the good guys
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Well we have two good lessons on how we deal with history.
|
| Germany, and Japan.
|
| One is rather recalcitrant for its actions the other is in
| abject denial that they even did anything wrong.
|
| Not teaching the ills of the past has an impact.
| woopwoop24 wrote:
| yeah and both ways are wrong. I have as much in common
| with the the german nazis as i have with the japanese war
| crimes with the chinese and i am german.
|
| We should have strived for understanding that racism is
| to be fought against and not "hey these countries are bad
| because they lost" If you have seen the horrors what the
| americans did to the vietnamese or other way around, or
| the serbs against their neighbors the bosnians, you come
| to the conclusion every country is shit.
|
| We need to understand as a species that in order to
| evolve, we need to break out of the violence and dumb
| wars, over resources. We have so much potential and we
| are wasting it, because of stupid and greedy people
| pushing misery and hate. Don't get me started on religion
| anotheraccount9 wrote:
| I recall a quote from Mr. Gaiman:
|
| "Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that
| dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be
| beaten." -- Neil Gaiman, Coraline
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| I love that quote too! I have it from the introduction, I
| believe, to _Smoke and Mirrors_ :
|
| >Fairy tales, as G. K. Chesterton once said, are more than
| true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because
| they tell us that dragons can be defeated.
|
| The corresponding original Chesterton quote is
| supposedly/apocryphally:
|
| >Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children
| already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the
| dragons can be killed.
|
| I like the original for the "children already know" portion,
| but I prefer Gaiman's for lyricism and, perhaps ironically
| given TFA, saying "defeated" instead of "killed."
|
| At any rate, Chesterton didn't say it in so many words. There's
| some back-and-forth noted here, seems like it's oft-
| misquoted--<https://www.tumblr.com/neil-
| gaiman/101407141743/every-versio...>--with a longer version
| here:
| <https://saveversusallwands.blogspot.com/2016/05/tracking-
| bac...>.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Speaking of Gaiman, and fairy tales, I'll always recommend
| _Snow, Glass, Apples_ (1994).
| kouru225 wrote:
| My mom read Grimms to me when I was a kid. I loved it. We also
| read D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths, which I remember being
| pretty wild.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| I had that Greek Myth book plus D'Aulaires' Book of Norse
| Mythology.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| With two such comments I took a chance and ordered both.
| Thanks for the tip.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I was always partial to the Looney Tunes' Hansel and Gretel.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCwas_GPBxU
| bitwize wrote:
| J.K. Rowling satirized the idea of "sanitized" fairy tales in
| _The Tales of Beedle the Bard_ through the character of Beatrix
| Bloxam, whose bowdlerized versions of Beedle 's tales were so
| wretched they caused kids to vomit, thus undermining her stated
| goal of writing stories more appropriate for children.
|
| Relatedly, recently an image appeared on Facebook of the
| character Lady Elaine Fairchilde as she appears in _Daniel Tiger
| 's Neighborhood_; both her ugly face and her irascible attitude
| are considerably toned down. It only made me miss the original
| version of Elaine from _Mister Rogers ' Neighborhood_ all the
| more. Fred Rogers was not one to shy away from the ugly feelings
| we all feel from time to time; and Elaine's original design draws
| heavily from the Punch and Judy tradition (which itself could
| have very dark and scary themes whilst still being entertainment
| for children, and itself has been toned down).
|
| When all the hard surfaces of our culture have been made soft,
| spongy and safe, when all the sharp edges are filed down smooth,
| how will we raise children who grow into adults adequately
| prepared to deal with the harshness of the real world?
| cogman10 wrote:
| > When all the hard surfaces of our culture have been made
| soft, spongy and safe, when all the sharp edges are filed down
| smooth, how will we raise children who grow into adults
| adequately prepared to deal with the harshness of the real
| world?
|
| Scarred and maimed kids aren't more ready to take on the real
| world. Losing a toe doesn't make you any more prepared to deal
| with a difficult coworker.
|
| Daniel Tiger is actually really excellent in how it prepares
| kids for the real world. No other kids show does a better job
| of talking about strong emotions, acknowledging them, and
| dealing with them (or dealing with conflict in general). It
| shows parents getting upset, kids being shits, and stuff
| generally just not going right all the time.
|
| I see no way that having an ugly mean Elaine would benefit the
| show.
| relaxing wrote:
| The kids will soon need an episode where Lady Elaine is
| jailed for her interracial relationship with Music Man Stan.
|
| Miss Elaina visits her mother in prison and learns the cruel
| and capricious nature of King Friday (featured frequently in
| the original series and sadly missing from the spinoff). Bob
| Trow plays the LEO and jailer.
| cogman10 wrote:
| King Friday is a regular character in DT. He cruelly makes
| his son prince Tuesday run the entire city because his
| favorite son, Prince Wednesday, is being groomed to be the
| true heir to the throne.
|
| I believe X is plotting a Coup d'etat. What he's doing in
| the enchanted forest is shrouded in mystery. The very name,
| X, conjures intrigue.
|
| If anyone is running the Jail cells, it's Tuesday. He does
| that in-between babysitting daniel, maintaining the
| baseball field/running the little league, and working as a
| volunteer fireman. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DanielTigerConspiracy/comments
| /brsf...
| jandrese wrote:
| > I believe X is plotting a Coup d'etat.
|
| WTF is going on here. You are talking about the cartoon
| for toddlers right?
| cogman10 wrote:
| Just some dumb fun.
|
| Making up dumb conspiracies about the show is just a way
| to pass time. Hence the /r/danieltigerconspiracy
| subreddit.
|
| X is a fairly unflushed out character in the show. You
| really don't know much about him other than the fact that
| he takes care of O the owl. That leaves a lot of room to
| imagine what he might be doing with his spare time.
| owendlamb wrote:
| I've posted this before[1], but I have a feeling you'll like
| Dirt Poor Robins' _But Never a Key_ [2] and the concept album
| it lives in, Deadhorse.
|
| It begins: Algernon You won't need these
| flowers They've revoked the horrors Your tragedy
| now ends happily And I'm sure that they won't be
| done Till they fenced off the ledges And rounded
| the edges of all that goes wrong For you, Algernon...
|
| [1] I mentioned it on an HN discussion on _Flowers for
| Algernon_ , the story the song references:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39666956#39670386
|
| [2] On YouTube: https://youtu.be/IFR06LNqJVs
| KittenInABox wrote:
| > When all the hard surfaces of our culture have been made
| soft, spongy and safe, when all the sharp edges are filed down
| smooth, how will we raise children who grow into adults
| adequately prepared to deal with the harshness of the real
| world?
|
| Unfortunately, child marriage is still legal in the majority of
| the united states, and approximately 1 in 4 children experience
| abuse or neglect within their lifetime. So I'm pretty confident
| this isn't a concern that surfaces within either of our
| lifetimes.
| quacked wrote:
| I feel so frustrated by nearly any degree of censorship. "Should
| we censor fairy tales? Should we censor Roald Dahl? Should we
| censor the speeches of Confederate generals?" No! Why do the pro-
| censor groups think that an uninformed populace with incorrect
| understandings of what people in the past said and did is better
| for the future?
| techostritch wrote:
| This wasn't exactly my reading of the article, in this case,
| sanitization seems more about capitalism and appealing to the
| lowest common denominator (I.e. a happy version of the Little
| Mermaid) than censorship.
|
| I'm conflicted because do we live in a free society where
| people are free to choose the type of material they popularize
| or should we force legacy versions of fairy tales on them in a
| paternalistic sense it's good for them.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| we should absolutely make the originals available, next to
| the "sanitized" versions that are clearly labeled as _" not
| original"_ or _" loosely based on the original story"_
|
| Even "The Shining" is labeled as _" based on the original
| novel from Stephen King"_ and not as a _" faithful adaption
| of ..."_
|
| Any other way of presenting the redacted material it's bad,
| as in "universally bad".
| techostritch wrote:
| "we should absolutely make the originals available, next to
| the "sanitized" versions that are clearly labeled as "not
| original" or "loosely based on the original story""
|
| My point was definitely not to imply otherwise and I'm
| sorry if I did. I don't think it's wrong to create a new
| work that happens to eclipse the old work in popularity, I
| do think it's wrong to eliminate or censor the old work
| entirely.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The thing with traditional fairy tales in particular is
| that they don't _have_ original versions.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| The thing is that the original fairy tales are surely not
| "sanitized" versions of the ones we know.
|
| So if the idea is that we should clean-up the original
| stories so that they can replace the ones we know now in
| the future, we're doing a disservice to future people,
| because we have the oldest ones that have been printed at
| disposal and should not deprive them of the possibility
| of reading them, if they want to.
|
| The fact that before the press there was no book of fairy
| tales is irrelevant.
|
| The Grimm's are the Grimm's and we should keep printing
| and reading them as they were intended by the authors.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Which edition? The first edition wasn't even available in
| English until relatively recently, and they went through
| continuous change. The first editions weren't even meant
| to be suitable for children _at the time_ , so it's kind
| of weird to insist that that's the version that kids need
| today.
|
| This recent translation means English readers probably
| have _better_ access to the original Grimm tales than
| they ever had before! Which is of course a good thing.
| Obviously the originals are in the public domain and aren
| 't going anywhere, and so are lots of older 19th century
| English translations, presumably with varying degrees of
| fidelity. Nothing's being hidden from anyone; "actually
| the original Grimms' stories were pretty dark" is a
| factoid that is pretty widely known these days, I think?
|
| But anyway, the article supposes that specifically _kids_
| should be exposed to the earliest, least expurgated
| versions of the story possible, which is very odd. Even
| in the 19th century people thought these stories were too
| dark for kids, which is why there was commercial success
| in selling shorter, lighter, more family-friendly
| versions, which the Grimms did. I don 't think these
| stories would be awful for a bright 12 year old to read
| or anything, but the implication throughout is that these
| were considered kid-friendly in the past, which they
| weren't, at least in their original versions.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/12/grimm-
| brothers...
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > The first edition wasn't even available in English
|
| Does it even matter?
|
| The Grimm brothers were German, the books in German do
| exist.
|
| Pinocchio is an Italian work, in Italy it's always been
| available and a huge success, does it matter if the
| english version came out much later?
|
| To me the fact that they have become available, shows
| that the interest among the English readers has grown.
|
| > "actually the original Grimms' stories were pretty
| dark"
|
| > kids should be exposed to the earliest, least
| expurgated versions of the story possible, which is very
| odd.
|
| I read "The Hobbit" as a kid, it's pretty dark too, but I
| loved it. Read it again as an adult, didn't like it that
| much.
|
| People are different, kids are not a monolith, they come
| from different backgrounds, especially different parents'
| backgrounds and opinions and values.
|
| People I know don't let their kids watch Peppa Pig or the
| Winx, others don't want them to be schooled about
| religious stuff, they should be exposed doesn't mean they
| should be forced to read them, but that we should not
| pretend that we know better than them what it's good for
| them
|
| It's not pornography or nonsense gore violence.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I think kids should definitely be allowed to read the old
| stories! I'm just objecting to the article's handwringing
| about adaptations being "sanitized." It's good to adapt
| things, it's also good to read the stuff that's being
| adapted. If a bright 12 year old wants to read the gory
| Grimm versions of the stories then by all means, have at
| it.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Indeed, today's issues of censorship and "sanitization" isn't
| caused by the government, or bands of overzealous activists,
| but the Free Market and capitalism working as intended -
| appeal to the greatest possible audience by removing anything
| that could be seen as questionable/objectionable to capture
| the largest possible market share & thus derive the most
| profit. The free market has created a kind of crisis of
| creativity where all the movies, TV shows and books kind of
| look and feel the same, where nobody's feelings get hurt and
| nobody's ideas are challenged, because that kind of media is
| objectively the most profitable.
| techostritch wrote:
| I'd like to be more charitable to your response so please
| correct me here:
|
| Wouldn't it be more censorship to say that people are not
| to create such media where "nobody's feelings get hurt and
| nobody's ideas are challenged." Like who would decide what
| media is sufficiently challenging?
|
| I feel like this is always the problem with the complaint
| about popular culture is it seems like the only solution is
| something that doesn't look like freedom.
| philwelch wrote:
| That's not entirely true. Media corporations (or, to be
| more precise, the managers running them) often impose their
| own preferences and agendas even when doing so is contrary
| to audience preferences. This is a classic example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_purge
| cogman10 wrote:
| Do you have an example of someone wanting to censor these
| things? This isn't something I've seen.
| bonzini wrote:
| Roald Dahl was censored a couple years ago.
| cogman10 wrote:
| His estate decided to modify the property they own to
| exclude words they found offensive. Do the owners of a book
| with the rights to its publication not have the right to
| publish whatever they like?
|
| The only thing I don't like about this is copyright keeps
| his books from being republished by anyone but his estate.
| Copyright lasts far too long.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| They had legal rights, sure. But moral rights? No. Any
| author would turn in their grave at the mere thought of a
| publishing house bowdlerizing their work after they're no
| longer around to defend it.
| doe_eyes wrote:
| The argument is that we don't use Dahl's books as cautionary
| tales. They're entertainment. The concern is that kids may
| instinctively pick up some harmful stereotypes from that.
|
| Personally, I don't like it and I think we are so obsessed with
| sanitizing the language mostly because it's _easy_. You can
| search-and-replace all "blacklists" in the codebase and pat
| yourself on the back and feel like a good ally. Fixing real
| issues is a lot less convenient, and it's a lot harder to agree
| on the approach.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Even the Grimms themselves seem to have toned down the gore in
| their stories to appeal to larger audiences. It seems like many
| people _at the time_ didn 't think the original editions were
| suitable for children, so they brought out more family-friendly
| editions once they realized there was a demand for it.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/12/grimm-brothers...
|
| > "Zipes describes the changes made as "immense", with around
| 40 or 50 tales in the first edition deleted or drastically
| changed by the time the seventh edition was published. "The
| original edition was not published for children or general
| readers. Nor were these tales told primarily for children. It
| was only after the Grimms published two editions primarily for
| adults that they changed their attitude and decided to produce
| a shorter edition for middle-class families. This led to
| Wilhelm's editing and censoring many of the tales," he told the
| Guardian."
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| Well, if the authors believe it, the authors have all the
| rights to change their books.
|
| But not the rest of us.
|
| EDIT: if the Grimms edited their books, it was in their
| rights. If we decide to edit Rolad Dahl (or the Grimms) and
| still call them Roald Dahl/Grimm's brothers we have no right
| to do it.
|
| It's as simple as that, regardless who the original author of
| the story was, the author(s) of the books are very well
| known, it's the Grimms (in this particular case) and we
| should not edit them and call them "Grimm's brothers works"
| but "The X works (based on the Grimm's brothers works)" and
| see how many copies it sells (I bet not many as exploiting
| the Grimms' name).
|
| Imagine Tolkien being rewritten based on "The rings of power"
| and still attributed to Tolkien or if Dune is republished as
| it is in the movies, with all the scenes removed, but it's
| still called Frank Herbert's Dune.
|
| Wouldn't it be disappointing?
|
| It is also about cultural heritage.
|
| These works are from different cultures, they are not native
| of the US, where the debate is taking place about them.
|
| Some time ago I read about rewriting Pinocchio. The majority
| of people think it is a Disney's story, they do not know or
| imagine that it is one of the most important piece of the
| Italian culture, written by Carlo Collodi and it's as
| important to us as Sherlock Holmes is for UK.
| roywiggins wrote:
| They're fairy tales. They don't have singular authors. They
| were transmitted orally and almost certainly adjusted based
| on whoever the audience was at the time. Just because the
| Grimms fixed them in print (more or less) doesn't make us
| beholden to them: they're still fairy tales. Fairy tales
| have always changed. There is no canonical version of a
| fairy tale, and no ownership. Disney's Snow White is as
| valid a telling as anyone's.
|
| The original stories weren't even _meant_ to be read to
| children. They got adjusted to be more child friendly even
| in the 19th century. It 's very weird to insist that we
| must read children the original Cinderella even though 1)
| Grimm's story isn't the "original" Cinderella because there
| is no original, and 2) even the Grimms didn't think these
| stories child-friendly.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > They don't have singular authors
|
| True, but that is true for everything before the press
| was invented, it's also true for music, before music
| notation was invented or for kitchen recipes...
|
| What we are talking about here is publishing the Grimm's
| fairy tales, that are the most popular _adaption_ ever of
| German folklore (we know they are mostly not original,
| but we can almost say they saved them from oblivion) and
| republish a sanitized version using the original title
| and the original authors names.
|
| We still adapt fairy tales when we tell them in front of
| a campfire, that doesn't change the fact that for some of
| them the author exists and we know who that is.
|
| Charlie and the chocolate factory, for example, is partly
| inspired by the author's real life experience with
| confectionery manufacturing plant Cadbury, it also
| contains more than one timeless archetype, inspired by a
| long tradition of orally transmitted tales, but at the
| same time it's also a completely original story, written
| by a man named Roald Dahl.
|
| Disney chose those fairy tales exactly because there were
| no copyright fees involved, ironically today they refuse
| to let mickey mouse go...
|
| EDIT
|
| > the Grimms didn't think these stories child-friendly
|
| AFAIK this is not what happened, the book was criticized
| for its content not deemed suitable for kids, given that
| the title "Kinder- und Hausmarchen" made people think
| otherwise.
|
| They decided to change them and made a specific version
| for kids, that had an immense success and was re-
| published many times (I believe it was 10 editions).
|
| We know that, we can refer to the original stories, tha
| doesn't mean Disney's Cinderella is not a Cinderella
| story, it means it is based on the Grimm's story, but
| it's not a faithful adaptation.
|
| I don't see what difference it makes for the sake of the
| argument if the Grimms decided to edit _their_ books.
| madars wrote:
| If you like dogs, one can recommend
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishbone_(TV_series) which got
| praise for "refusing to bowdlerize many of the sadder or more
| unpleasant aspects of the source works." Not sure if PBS is
| streaming it anymore but there are magnet links around.
| tombert wrote:
| I loved Wishbone as a kid precisely for that reason; despite
| the premise being pretty bizarre (telling a classic story but
| make the main character a dog), even as a kid I always thought
| it was cool how little they "talked-down" to me.
|
| I remember the Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde episode unambiguously
| kills off Jekyll at the end of the episode, and it genuinely
| kind of disturbed me a bit when I was a little kid, but in a
| good way.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Speaking as someone who's always hated dogs, I liked Wishbone
| anyway because it was that great of a show. Unqualified
| recommendation.
| roywiggins wrote:
| This article is a bit weird: even the Grimms sanitized their own
| stories to appeal to wider audiences, it seems like people _in
| the 19th century_ didn 't think their original editions were
| suitable for children. The first edition didn't even get
| translated into English. Reworking fairy tales for different
| audiences likely is as old as fairy tales- after all, these were
| ostensibly originally orally transmitted.
|
| They're _fairy tales_. There is no canonical version. Stories
| repeated by the fireside do not have original authors. Neither
| the Grimms or the Germans they got the stories from have a
| monopoly on what the correct version of the story is.
|
| The original published versions _weren 't meant for children in
| the first place_:
|
| > "The original edition was not published for children or general
| readers. Nor were these tales told primarily for children. It was
| only after the Grimms published two editions primarily for adults
| that they changed their attitude and decided to produce a shorter
| edition for middle-class families. This led to Wilhelm's editing
| and censoring many of the tales," he told the Guardian.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/12/grimm-brothers...
| wirrbel wrote:
| Iirc Wilhelm rewrote and Jacob Grimm was against it.
|
| But it must also be understood that the first edition already
| was a retelling of story material and not a true transcription
| of the tales told.
|
| It's also that they actually didn't have all that many sources
| when collecting stories.
| alt227 wrote:
| The issue here is that the Grimms sanitized and changed
| stories, but then released them under their own name, just like
| Anderson.
|
| Changing the text and claiming that they are still the versions
| written by those people is the issue.
|
| By all means sanitise and change fairy stories as much as you
| like, but they must be released under the new authors name, not
| the originals.
| roywiggins wrote:
| the article is complaining about adaptations in general and
| Disney in particular, which aren't billed as "The Brothers
| Grimm's Cinderella" etc. it's specifically complaining that
| the nastier bits were removed at all, not that doing so was
| impugning the Grimms' authorial intent
| wonder_er wrote:
| I've been reading the original brother's grimm to kids for
| _years_ and the stories are always gripping. I don't love the
| reinforcing motifs of the world as perpetually experienced as
| dangerous, however.
|
| I've been LOVING working through the Studio Ghibli anthology with
| my toddler. Been curating a list (and then finding the right
| file) of the movies they like with the best audio tracks. (she
| cannot read, so watching them in the original audio, while
| engaging, isn't as helpful as good dubs. Some english dubs have
| been terrible, some quite good.
|
| We most recently watched Ponyo ["poh-noh-fish" as its sometimes
| called around here], had it playing on the background a few more
| times. She's been vastly less drawn to things like baby shark and
| it's ilk, with the availability of Ghibli's works, and we discuss
| the characters and events and the ups and downs in the movies
| throughout, and after.
|
| The pacing, the anti-imperial bent, dignifying many oft-de-
| dignified tropes, the art, the music, the foley, the mystery and
| the spiritualism and obvious deep love of the harmony of nature.
| mmm. I've paid Jeff Bezos more than I wish I had in my pursuit of
| the best/easiest files, but alas. Here's my beta, if you'd like.
| [0]
|
| I discovered Studio Ghibli only as an adult, more than 30 years
| old, so for anyone who doesn't know about it, you might be one of
| today's lucky 10,000. huzzah [1]
|
| [0]: https://josh.works/recommended-reading#studio-ghibli [1]:
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| cebu wrote:
| Maybe the world is dangerous, but maybe that doesn't mean we
| have to be afraid. It's dangerous business stepping out your
| front door after all
| wonder_er wrote:
| exactly. Also, there's so much adventure to be experienced,
| so much beauty to appreciate. It's worth it. Also, the world
| _does not have to be experienced as constantly dangerous_ and
| it's important to allow a respite from that message.
|
| That the world is dangerous is self-evident, but it's not
| interesting to me to force that message into places it ought
| not be. And I think adults conceptions of 'the world is
| dangerous' does not always match the harm as experienced by
| children. They know the world is dangerous. They experience
| it all the time.
| cebu wrote:
| Of course. It certainly depends on context. Maybe some
| children need a respite from safe places. Others, an invite
| into them
| techostritch wrote:
| Is it though? I mean yes, but one argument I would have
| against overly glorifying some of these fairy tiles is that
| the way the world is dangerous today is very different from
| the way it was two hundred years ago.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| Man, "Grave of the Fireflies" crushed me - once.
|
| I certainly couldn't handle having it "playing in the
| background".
| wonder_er wrote:
| Yeah this isn't one of the background ones. 'My neighbor
| Totoro', 'howls moving castle', ponyo, princess calagua
| troupe wrote:
| I agree with the overall idea of the article, but it is important
| to recognize that our modern assumptions make us think there is a
| particular version of a fairy tale that is the "correct" or
| "original" version. Stories handed down orally are likely changed
| in each telling to better fit their audience, so in that sense,
| the way fairy tales were told almost always included some type of
| sanitization or embellishment depending on who was listening.
| noodleman wrote:
| This is actually an interesting point. There's a tendency to
| assume that the core of a story is the same, even if the way
| it's told is different. I wonder how many generations of
| retellings it takes for us to notice significant differences.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I think stories about King Arthur would be a good comparison.
| They fit a similar cultural niche, but we have lots of
| different versions that were written down over the centuries.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I wonder how many generations of retellings it takes for us
| to notice significant differences.
|
| That's not really a sensible question. Compare the 17th-
| century European story of Cinderella to the 9th-century
| Chinese story of Ye Xian:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Xian
|
| The story stayed nearly identical for a period of many
| centuries. Significant differences _could_ have been
| introduced at any point, but they weren 't.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Even the Grimms' original versions weren't meant for children
| _at the time_!
| jonahx wrote:
| You're technically correct, ofc, but I feel this is a red
| herring.
|
| Sure, all fairy tales have oral origins, and with Grimm you
| even various translations over the years.
|
| Nevertheless, me, my parents, and their parents were all
| reading basically the same thing, and often the exact same
| book. That is, the _books_ have been around over 150 years and
| have become canon in their own right. It is the sanitization of
| those books that people are objecting to.
|
| So you can't just say "hey these things come from an ever-
| evolving oral tradition and this is just one more evolution".
| That doesn't accurately describe what is happening.
| relaxing wrote:
| I'm missing the point where that's not happening. Is it that
| a book is not oral transmission?
| jonahx wrote:
| Correct it is a book. The analogy to what's going on now is
| not "oral evolution" but the OG bowdlerization of
| Shakespeare by Bowdler himself, and we (rightly) see that
| today as ridiculous.
| pyrale wrote:
| > So you can't just say "hey these things come from an ever-
| evolving oral tradition and this is just one more evolution".
| That doesn't accurately describe what is happening.
|
| On the other hand, why should people stop doing what they've
| done for cenuries because some guy wrote something down at
| some point? Part of what keeps stories relevant is that
| parents adapt them to the current context. Stopping their
| evolution is the best way to kill their transmission. Whether
| the transmission is oral or written is kind of irrelevant.
| magicalist wrote:
| Saying "my book is the canon because I've had it a long time"
| is a type of censorship itself. Having more than one version
| of a story is not the type of sanitization this article is
| talking about.
| schneems wrote:
| I think in an ideal world they come with some kind of a diff.
| Maybe an activity guide with prompts for parents.
|
| I picked up "Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and
| Ourselves" from naeyc and that's more or less what they
| propose. They suggested that when you see a problematic
| representation in your kids media not to hide it, but note it
| "That doesn't seem very fair to be judged only by <blank>"
| and if there's time engage the kid "what do you think?"
|
| It gives a natural way to talk about the problems while also
| showing good examples of how they might come up in the kids
| life.
|
| You can also do the inverse. Remove the gnarly reference and
| then introduce a surrogate conversation with possibly easier
| to understand plots or themes. Later when they are older you
| can, and should, talk to them about how the differences and
| ask what they think. Ask them to come up with a different
| change and think how that might influence the reader.
|
| Now not only did they get the changed and original they get a
| healthy dose of media literacy to understand how changing
| narratives can change how we view the world.
|
| There are challenges and difficulties of course, but it's
| certainly possible to do well in my opinion.
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| >I think in an ideal world they come with some kind of a
| diff.
|
| I've got a couple annotated editions of famous books that
| do just that by way of marginalia and extended footnotes.
| It's a great way to learn about a story's evolution or
| context.
| taberiand wrote:
| I don't think it's a question of the correct version, just a
| question of the most appropriate for what our children need.
| The article also mentions modern series and YA novels that have
| in some ways even bleaker themes, and I think there's nothing
| wrong with a feel good Disney story either.
|
| I think there is a tendency for parents to excessively avoid
| letting their children be afraid, instead of providing a safe
| place to experience fear, and these older stories didn't shy
| away from those themes and so can be useful for bringing some
| of that safe fear back for children.
| slg wrote:
| You don't have to go back that far to fairy tales and oral
| traditions for this to be true. For example, when people
| complain about the recent edits to Charlie and the Chocolate
| Factory, the canon version that people tend to want to return
| to is an edit from the 1970s. People rarely advocate for going
| all the way back to the original version in which the Oompa-
| Loompas were more directly African pygmy slaves.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| The world is good, bad and everything else in-between at the same
| time, and we try to stick to the good bits. I remember reading
| that children gain the ability to understand that around the age
| of 7. Prior to that, seeing the bad taints the whole world for
| them.
|
| I can't tell if that's true, but intuitively rings so. Now, if it
| is of life-or-death importance to condition your children never
| to go into the forest alone while you are tilling the fields,
| perhaps that's a good tradeoff. Most medieval people died in
| their childhood anyway, worrying about their psychological
| baggage in adulthood was premature optimisation.
|
| But in 21st century, I think we can do better, and wait with
| teaching children about the good and evil parts of the world
| until they are more ready for it.
|
| That's not to say we dumb everything down and take away nuance.
| But it doesn't have to be gory. Bluey is full of nuance and
| suitable for all ages.
| squidbeak wrote:
| My parents read Roald Dahl to me and would put on Watership
| Down years before I was 7, without ever tainting the world for
| me. The same was true for several generations of British kids.
| A happy ending after a disturbing struggle is more like a way
| of instilling durable optimism in children.
| wonder_er wrote:
| strongly agree. I've been loving anything/everything produced
| by the animation studio "Studio Ghibli".
|
| I was introduced via the first few works created by the first
| director, Hayao Miyazaki, it's absolutely ruined me for
| nearly all other works that claim to be for children.
|
| Their productions feel so dignifying to everyone, embracing
| the full human experience, not so necessarily dark and
| disturbing.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Funnily enough, my parents read Watership Down to me too, I
| would have been around 4-5 then. They skipped the worst bits,
| and yet still I remember being scared. I liked the rest of
| the story, including the happy end.
|
| You can sanitize without hurting, and even if you think you
| remove the worst bits, it can still be too much, for some
| children at least.
| wirrbel wrote:
| I think i once heard Neil Gaiman explain that he doesn't
| think that the level of violence is what distinguishes a book
| for adults from a book for kids but whether or not the
| protagonist looses control in the novel and to which extent.
| pneumatic1 wrote:
| My 4 year old and I just finished Charlie and the Chocolate
| Factory. He sometimes got a little nervous when the other
| kids disappeared, but he loved the story. Charlies virtue was
| so obvious to him. We just brought home a stack of more Roald
| Dahl from the library.
| Swizec wrote:
| > I remember reading that children gain the ability to
| understand that around the age of 7. Prior to that, seeing the
| bad taints the whole world for them.
|
| My country had a [short] war when I was 4 years old. Kids are
| plenty capable of experiencing bad and not being permanently
| tainted by it. Takes parental guidance of course.
|
| I also grew up on the version of Little Red Riding Hood where
| they actually get eaten and the hunter has to cut them out of
| the wolf after killing it. It was one of my favorite stories
| growing up because bad things happen but they get rescued.
|
| Anyway I think my argument is that bad stuff exists and you
| can't hide it from kids, but you have to guide them in how to
| process and have some uncomfortable conversations sometimes.
| taberiand wrote:
| I'm frequently surprised by what is considered by other parents
| as too scary for their children to watch or read, when it seems
| to me the whole point of scary stories is to provide a safe place
| for children to feel scared and learn what it takes overcome
| fear.
|
| That's not to say that anything goes, just that I think parents
| need to be willing to let their children be appropriately afraid
| and comfort them and teach them courage. Avoiding any scary
| themes or dangerous ideas, instead of providing safe ways to
| engage with these things, I think leads to children growing into
| adults who will have a much harder time recognising and dealing
| with the real dangers of life.
| ip26 wrote:
| Nobody anchors with age. One parent will advocate for allowing
| children to watch Scarface, without mentioning their child is
| 17. Another parent will explain The Neverending Story is far
| too scary, without mentioning their child just turned 4
| yesterday.
|
| Much like parents who trumpet how children should be free to
| roam and explore without meddling from adults, but never
| clarify whether they are talking about middle schoolers or
| toddlers.
| pnutjam wrote:
| I control movies, but books are much more open. If a child
| can read it; they should be allowed. The process of ingesting
| a novel is so different from a video. You're experiences and
| maturity put limits on how you perceive things you read.
| Books open your mind to new ideas and that should be
| encouraged even if the ideas are more mature.
| ben_w wrote:
| You've just reminded me that I learned about Texas Chainsaw
| Massacre when I was 8 or 9 from a girl in my class describing
| the ending.
|
| I've never seen it and have no intention ever to do so.
| cess11 wrote:
| I'm not going to try and convince you to watch it, but
| would like to remark that it is not at all as visceral and
| graphic as it is commonly made out to be.
|
| It's more about disturbing atmosphere than gore. Personally
| I find it interesting in part because it's pretty much
| based on (early seventies) news reports about crime and
| serial killers, trying to capture that kind of
| storytelling.
|
| The horror comes more from socially prevalent suspicions
| about working class, rural and mentally disabled people
| than on the nose depictions of violence. A supposedly
| frightening revolt of the subaltern, of sorts.
|
| I find much of what I see in the news much, much nastier
| than anything this movie has to offer.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Nobody anchors to temperament, either.
|
| I don't think twice about letting my 7 year old watch shows
| that I steer my 9 year old away from. The 7 year old, a
| thrill seeker, enjoys things that would give my 9 year old
| nightmares for a week.
| lynx23 wrote:
| I can relate to this, however, I come from a very different
| angle. I was born visually impaired, and went blind at the age
| of 7. If I were to name the single most important thing that
| was holding me back, then it was the protectiveness of my
| _father_ and my _mother*. Counterintuitive, but if anything is
| really bad, then if you prevent your kid from making its own
| experiences._
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| Is it odd that that's how I used to see video games, as a safe
| environment to learn grit, how to reason about systems and
| choosing better actions, where "better" is defined as "actions
| that lead you to beat the game" or "achieve a better score"?
| pavlov wrote:
| _> 'how to reason about systems and choosing better actions,
| where "better" is defined as "actions that lead you to beat
| the game" or "achieve a better score"'_
|
| This is a double-edged sword because in the real world,
| actually interesting systems don't have this kind of closed
| feedback loop.
|
| Training your mind for this can lead to an inside-the-box
| mindset where you need to find the score which would provide
| the external validation of your actions. For a lot of people,
| money provides that reassuring score, and then money becomes
| the primary value in one's life replacing any deeper
| intrinsic motivation.
| ben_w wrote:
| Indeed; "Money is a way to keep track of the score" was
| explicitly stated in some of the entrepreneurial
| presentations I went to at the end of my degree, the first
| time I tried self employment.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| I did too.
|
| No longer.
|
| Video games tend to have a pre-built path. The real world has
| minimal feedback loops and millions of bad choices.
| epolanski wrote:
| In Italy is now illegal to send your kids to school alone
| before they turn 14, it's now legally child abandonment. Even
| if the school is few hundreds meters from your house.
|
| I went to school alone since my second day of elementary
| school, in Japan kids cross Tokyo streets at the same age.
|
| I have given math lessons for two decades and during that
| timespan kids have changed a lot due to how much parents
| changed. It went quickly from "if he doesn't listen you slap
| him hard" to "how dares the teacher give him a bad grade".
|
| I have brought that topic with some people my age on a
| programming board and all fellow devs surprisingly told me they
| agreed, that it is child abandonment and streets are dangerous.
|
| I feel like such over protection makes for young adults that
| are absolutely unprepared for the harshness of real life.
| graemep wrote:
| That is insane!
|
| I had taken my kids out of school by that age, but they would
| go to places alone much younger than that - depending on
| where we lived, the time of day etc.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| if you don't mind me asking, why take them out? did you
| homeschool them?
| epolanski wrote:
| Will never understand homeschooling, social (and even
| survival) skills are the most important to learn when
| young imho.
| polymatter wrote:
| And they can be learnt outside of school just as well.
| I'll never understand how readily people are to accept
| schooling.
| bluGill wrote:
| I hear this all the time, but so far every time I've met
| a home schooled kid they show that lack of socialization.
| I'm not saying it can't be done, but it is so rare that I
| doubt any home schooled kid is.
|
| Sure they will have a lot of kids, but that is not the
| same. Do they interact with kids that are different?
| Poor, rich? Different religion? Different political
| background? (note that many private school suffer from
| the same problem - generally not as bad as home schools,
| but it is easy to find private schools that don't really
| socialize kids well either.)
| alt227 wrote:
| I fully agree with you, however....
|
| > Do they interact with kids that are different? Poor,
| rich? Different religion? Different political background?
|
| This is often the main reason that parents take them out
| of school in the first place.
| adolph wrote:
| Schools seem like a poor place to learn social skills
| unless one plans to live out Lord of the Flies later in
| life.
| epolanski wrote:
| Life is tough and the dynamics of the book are common in
| real life.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Isn't Italy a country where "mama hotels" come from? There
| was some statistic showing that average age of man leaving
| parents house is 39 years or so.
|
| I was going to alone to elementary school since second day as
| well. I had 2 younger siblings, it was not possible for my
| parents to take me at school at that time. Nowadays, having
| siblings is not common when US fertility rate is 1.6 and in
| EU 1.4 per woman.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-
| un?tab...
| arlort wrote:
| 39 feels too high, but yeah, it's one of the worst, and
| depending on the statistic the worst outright, in Europe.
|
| In 2022 the average was 30 years
| https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-
| news/w/d...
|
| A significant factor in that, beyond cultural ones, is the
| fact that it's quite expensive to buy/rent, especially
| given the high youth unemployment
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| These unemployed folks could literally be building their
| own homes with the right institutional policies and
| support.
| epolanski wrote:
| On which money?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The power of debt and helping an economy grow faster than
| the debt growth rate. A healthy society has a good roi,
| Italy is dying as is.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Debt is tool for making citizens obedient and always
| voting for system that they benefit from.
|
| If you refuse to participate on debt system, you have no
| choice than share property with parents so I'm not
| surprised.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Debt just means young families can have a place to live
| now while they pay off over time. No one can afford
| upfront housing...
| t0bia_s wrote:
| So debt (to what anyway if currency doesn't store value)
| is default state for living?
| tda wrote:
| > In Italy is now illegal to send your kids to school alone
| before they turn 14, it's now legally child abandonment
|
| I find your claim very hard to believe, can you back this up?
| I did some searching and could not find anything to back up
| your claim.
| epolanski wrote:
| Sure I do.
|
| Even leaving them alone at home is a felony. There have
| been sentences already.
|
| https://www.brocardi.it/codice-penale/libro-
| secondo/titolo-x...
| novok wrote:
| And now the fertility rate of Italy will go down even
| further, as less will bother to have children.
| davidcbc wrote:
| Where are the examples?
|
| The only ones linked on that page are for someone who
| left his disabled son in the car for many hours, someone
| leaving a 9 month old alone, and someone abandoning their
| elderly disabled mother
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| In Switzerland kids are expected to go to school alone from
| primary school, but I've seen kids to the Kindergarten alone
| as well (5-6 yo). It's normal.
| ordu wrote:
| _> streets are dangerous._
|
| I have a vague hypothesis that people's mind have a detector
| of a danger, and mind adjust sensitivity of the detector to
| get some specific average value of danger. The safer our
| streets, the more sensitive detector becomes, so the
| perceived level of danger remains the same.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| You are experiencing the power of television/media for sowing
| division. The more you watch, the more misinformed about the
| mean you are :)
| noneeeed wrote:
| That's wild. 13 is so old. In the UK it's completely normal
| for most secondary kids (11+) to travel to school on their
| own, and many younger kids will go to primary on their own.
|
| We live about 10 minutes from school. My eldest is 9 and in
| the penultimate year of primary school. He walks home and I
| meet him half way (mostly as an excuse to go for a walk),
| he's fine. From next year he'll probably go by himself half
| the time.
|
| The only concerns I have are around crossing the road. And
| even with that I'm aware that my worries are overblown, we've
| taught him how to cross carefully. He will be fine.
|
| I can understand if you live in a rough neighbourhood, or
| where the roads are really terrible for crossing, but making
| it a blanket rule is ridiculous.
| ska wrote:
| > and streets are dangerous.
|
| In most places I've lived, streets are objectively less
| dangerous than they were a few decades ago in all aspects
| except traffic density, which is a mixed bag. In places with
| poor urban design, I can see the argument that street
| (crossing, particular) is high risk for say 6-8 year olds. In
| places with better design, the idea that a 8 year old, let
| alone a 14 year old, shouldn't be able to navigate a
| reasonable distance by themselves seems pretty crazy.
| pflenker wrote:
| > when it seems to me the whole point of scary stories is to
| provide a safe place for children to feel scared and learn what
| it takes overcome fear.
|
| That's not the point of the original scary fairy tales. The
| point was to keep kids from danger by scaring them so much that
| they don't expose themselves to said danger. The downside of
| this style of child raising , of course, is that kids are
| unable to realistically assess the danger and sometimes don't
| shed their fears when they get older.
| taberiand wrote:
| I suppose so, but I think from a modern parenting perspective
| scary stories should be used to teach resilience to fear.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I agree for reading. The example of Cinderella's sisters
| chopping her feet isn't too much for a child to read about, but
| nobody wants to watch that in an animated film.
|
| There's also a point where books become unsuitable for
| children. "All Quiet on the Western Front" with its gruesome
| WWI details probably wouldn't have been a good idea before 5th
| grade, and it was a good thing we were older reading "Cupid and
| Psyche" in Latin where the main character gets r---d within the
| first 3 pages.
| llm_trw wrote:
| >Fairy tales can often be brutal and cruel - people and animals
| die - and yet, despite everything, the positive powers always
| win. There can be no other ending.
|
| That is a very 21st century view of fairy tales, no less
| sanitized than what Disney does.
| 6510 wrote:
| A wise man one day created a standard formula for fairy tales:
| They should involve the 3 evils in the world, your employer,
| your government and your god. Then the protagonist worships
| them and works hard only to be punished by all 3 for not
| working hard enough and not bowing deep enough. In each story
| the protagonist should embrace a logic fallacy that justifies
| the punishment.
|
| The writers he hired struggled hard implementing the formula
| but ultimately couldn't write any part of it into any story.
|
| The children worked a shit job, paid many fines and burned in
| hell for ever, until the end of times.
| hifromwork wrote:
| I wonder if the author has read Hans Christian Andersen. I
| still remember reading The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf as a kid. A
| story about a girl who used a loaf of bread as a stepping stone
| to go over a pool of mud. And then sank into an evil underworld
| where she was tortured by scary creatures, starved, and
| paralysed for many dozens of years (enough for everyone she
| knew to die), while a few visions of people on surface
| recollecting her sins. She never returned back to earth.
|
| The positive powers have won because I think the prideful girl
| regretted her action in the end, but even as a kid this struck
| me as extremely over the top punishment.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Keep in mind that in the 19th century a loaf of bread was the
| difference between life and death many a time. It's difficult
| to understand why people took food so seriously until you've
| gone through some amount of starvation yourself.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Nah. It was just a Mom trying to terrorize a child into
| being careful with the bread she baked. Probably because it
| was inconvenient to Mom. Folks beat kids back then for
| talking back, for spilling milk, for looking at them wrong.
| No need to justify the over-the-top punishment - it was par
| for the course for kids.
| m463 wrote:
| > no less sanitized than what Disney does.
|
| I think most movies have a happy ending.
|
| To do it otherwise is usually to give up the mass market.
|
| ...except some genres that have to go too far the other way to
| get your attention.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Most fairy tales were told by overworked grandmothers with
| arthritis and less teeth than fingers.
|
| And then everyone died because they didn't shut up is a story
| I remember from my childhood. I imagine the further back you
| go the more often everyone died because the story teller had
| enough of talking.
| croes wrote:
| I remember lots of fairy tales without a happy ending.
|
| I think she hasn't read enough of them
| petsfed wrote:
| Its curious, because I have pretty stark objections to The Little
| Mermaid (chiefly, the subtext seems to be "it's totally ok to
| change everything about yourself to win the affection of a boy
| you literally just met" and in light of that, the only moral
| becomes "read the fine print before signing a contract"), they
| are neatly addressed by the original text. The original is more
| an allegory about how changing everything about yourself is
| actually _bad_ than the fairy tale romance that Disney pitches,
| which is not AT ALL what I expected.
|
| There's real benefit to exposing kids to darker themes (my eldest
| loves a book that kills its main character's father on the second
| page, and after she recovered from being a little weepy about it,
| it became one of her favorites), but there's also merit to
| letting the kids choose to hit pause on scary/disturbing/whatever
| themes until they're in a place to deal with it.
|
| Showing your kids The Two Towers might have a really positive
| impact on them at the right time, but only if they're mature
| enough that it doesn't lead to e.g. bed-wetting levels of dis-
| regulation.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The original is more an allegory about how changing
| everything about yourself is actually _bad_ than the fairy tale
| romance that Disney pitche
|
| I thought the main message of the original was "mermaids don't
| have souls". It doesn't really matter what she does or doesn't
| do.
| hedora wrote:
| I'd suggest "The Little Mermaid of Innsmouth" to everyone in
| this thread, though it might be a bit less kid-friendly than
| the original:
|
| https://www.drabblecast.org/2015/09/13/drabblecast-370-the-l.
| ..
| savingsPossible wrote:
| It even has the ultra-harsh punishment for misdeeds :P
| sapling-ginger wrote:
| > but there's also merit to letting the kids choose to hit
| pause
|
| Why is there a "but" there? Nobody is implying that children
| should be strapped to a chair with their eyelids propped open
| with toothpicks so that they have to watch all the gory details
| of a horror movie.
| petsfed wrote:
| Looking at the original article, that was for sure the
| subtext (especially in light of the fact that its coming from
| an unapologetically Christian source). _Their_ pushback seems
| to be "parents are trying too hard to protect kids from
| disturbing images/themes", but also (quoting directly here)
| "have we swung so far in our attempt to protect children that
| we don't tell stories that help them process dark things?"
|
| I resonate strongly with the idea that children today are
| sheltered too much from how the world really is. But I
| definitely disagree with the idea that we should force them
| to listen to those "truths" when they can tell for themselves
| that they aren't able to deal with them. The article expends
| a lot of words on the idea that good and evil are atomic unto
| themselves, and not at least partially determined by both
| outcome, intent, and method. I guarantee that kids in
| general, and my kids specifically, won't be helped by hearing
| about (as expressed in the article) Cinderella's step-sisters
| hacking off their toes and heels to fit into the glass
| slipper. There are loads of other tropes in classic fairy
| tales that I'm also uncomfortable with; physical beauty is a
| reflection of inner beauty, step-mothers are always cruel to
| their step children, princesses (or marriages in general) as
| prizes for the heroic feats of princes/knights errant/other
| adventurers, etc.
|
| Fairy tales often seem needlessly cruel given the current
| state of our society, and they also pack in a lot of warning
| messages that just don't apply anymore, and clinging to them
| is itself harmful to kids.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > chiefly, the subtext seems to be "it's totally ok to change
| everything about yourself to win the affection of a boy you
| literally just met"
|
| I _really_ object to this relatively modern interpretation of
| the Disney movie. For all the perfectly valid flaws in Disney
| movies, this one is far off the mark that I don 't understand
| how it's become so popular, or why even Disney themselves
| leaned into it.
|
| Ariel in the Disney movie is obsessed with "land culture" long
| before she ever meets Eric or "falls in love". She has a
| massive collection of trinkets and artifacts, of which she only
| has as surface level understanding at best, and a flawed
| mistranslated one at worst. She's missing family functions for
| her obsession. She is basically a "weeb" for human culture.
| Yes, she gets herself love struck when she goes to the surface,
| but she already wanted to be up there. Her "I want" song comes
| before she's ever laid eyes on Eric. She's got plans to move,
| and she's already chafing under her father. Falling "in love"
| with Eric might be the instigating incident, but she already
| wants to make a change and get up there. Also bear in mind that
| she doesn't know anything about Eric at all, she's not
| "changing herself to win the affections of a boy she just met",
| they haven't met at all. She's obsessed and made up a fantasy
| in her head. Again to continue with the weeb analogy, this is
| like a hypothetical weeb going to an "Atarashii Gakko" concert
| and deciding they're in love with one of the singers and
| they're moving to Japan to be with them. It has nothing to do
| with "love" or "affection" and it's all about the obsession.
|
| Ursula leverages this and the recent fights Ariel has had with
| Triton to trick her into signing the contract, but again this
| is about fueling an unrequited (and unknown) obsession, not
| about trying to do something that she has any reason to believe
| Eric would be asking of her. And then the ENTIRE rest of the
| movie drives home the point that she doesn't need to change
| anything about herself. Remember, Eric is obsessed, with a girl
| with a pretty voice. He doesn't think Ariel is the girl he's
| interested in at all. But he falls "in love" with her, the
| person she is, no changes required. Her lack of voice isn't
| whats appealing to him. Her legs aren't what's appealing to
| him. It's her personality, her whole self and she's limited to
| only being able to express herself as herself via her
| personality because her captivating voice (and the thing Eric
| supposedly was in love with) she'd given up. In the end the
| message isn't "change yourself to win affection" it's quite
| literally "you are good enough as you are for the right person,
| even when/if your 'love at first sight' attributes (like your
| singing voice) are lost"
|
| If one's kids come away from Little Mermaid believing it's ok
| to change themselves for someone else's affections, one needs
| to make sure those kids are getting more critical media
| analysis practice, and maybe also a few sit down talks on their
| feelings of inadequacy.
| sgift wrote:
| Thanks for spelling this out. I always thought the same, even
| as a child when I first saw the film: Ariel has a deep
| feeling of not belonging where she is combined with a
| yearning for human culture. It's obvious from the movie that
| her falling in with the prince is just the last step in a
| long line of "I should be up there, not down here" and not
| just some spur of the moment decision.
| petsfed wrote:
| I'll concede that its less "give up your voice and
| everything about yourself for a boy" and more "give up your
| voice and everything about yourself for this way of life
| that you are clearly irrationally obsessed over and don't
| understand at all". But its also made clear via the voice
| subplot that her mad dash to separate herself from who she
| was to begin with is itself a source of conflict.
| Certainly, don't ignore the voice in your head that says
| "this isn't the place for you", but also accept that the
| change needs to happen slower than you want, for a variety
| of good reasons.
|
| I suppose there's an interpretation of Disney's The Little
| Mermaid where its an allegory for LGBTQ (especially trans)
| kids. But even then, it mixes its metaphors by adding in
| the romantic subplot. Luca does a much MUCH better job of
| balancing the two worlds, because the happy ending is "gets
| to be human" and not "gets to be human, so they can get
| married to the person they met a 4 days ago". The Little
| Mermaid really muddies the water (pardon the pun) by
| adhering to _that_ aspect of the old story.
|
| And while I have _considerable_ misgivings about
| introducing the happily-ever-after romantic ending to 5
| year olds, Disney does manage to get it more correct:
| Beauty and the Beast shows the (potentially problematic)
| relationship between Belle and the Beast developing over
| time, as they get to know each other. Tangled has the love
| story as ancillary to the main story of getting out from
| under the thumb of an abusive parental figure. Even
| Sleeping Beauty expends a lot of screentime to show how the
| love story specifically contradicts the arranged marriage
| to be (although its all for naught, since they were
| arranged to be married to each other anyway). Its just that
| The Little Mermaid piles up a lot of unsubtle allegory and
| doesn 't even attempt to mitigate it.
| epolanski wrote:
| > "it's totally ok to change everything about yourself to win
| the affection of a boy you literally just met"
|
| Meanwhile I always taught that the underlying message of The
| Lion King to be insane and it seems like I'm the only one:
|
| - don't do what you want but what society/religion tells you to
| do (Simba is happy with Timon and Pumba, but then they send
| other animals including the monkey shaman to tell him he has to
| fight his uncle)
|
| - your destiny is decided at birth
|
| - there are tier all tiers of living creatures (eating a pig =>
| bad, eating insects => okay cause they don't talk) and genetics
| decide it
|
| I'm not against cancelling it by the way, I just find the
| message of the film...insane.
| savingsPossible wrote:
| Not to mention quite a bit of divine right of kings...
|
| The land literally heals when 'the rightful king' is back in
| power
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| The story's pretty clearly borrowed from both Hamlet and
| Moses, so I bet that's where that sort of thing slipped in.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| > - don't do what you want but what society/religion tells
| you to do (Simba is happy with Timon and Pumba, but then they
| send other animals including the monkey shaman to tell him he
| has to fight his uncle)
|
| Interesting interpretation. I always saw it as being more
| about justice (i.e. don't live a blissfully ignorant life
| while your own kin are suffering when you can do something
| about it) Although maybe that's actually what you're saying
| too - the message is "don't do what you want" - but we
| disagree about whether that's insane or correct :)
| LanceH wrote:
| putting the hyenas in their place is justice
|
| being in charge because you were born to be is justice
|
| yea, being about justice doesn't improve it
| dyauspitr wrote:
| > don't do what you want but what society/religion tells you
| to do
|
| As an aside, this is pretty much what the entire Bhagvat Gita
| is roughly about.
| cess11 wrote:
| I think that interpretation is quite robust.
|
| There's also this:
| https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/lion-
| kin...
| LanceH wrote:
| I've been saying this exact same thing since it came out.
|
| Add in the fact that it was heavily marketed as including
| black representation -- then having those messages just makes
| it worse.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I took Lion King to mean not to take your family for granted,
| and I'm fine with it. The other Disney prince/princess movies
| don't really have messages other than "you can have your cake
| and eat it too."
|
| Like, whenever it's supposed to be about beauty being on the
| inside, the couple that ends up together is good-looking on
| the outside anyway. The writers for Shrek must've noticed
| this and done things differently.
| lukas099 wrote:
| We use kids' tales to teach kids. The lessons of fairy-tale
| Europe are not the same lessons we need now, but we can use them
| to teach kids what yesteryear's kids used to be taught.
| sltkr wrote:
| It's interesting that the article mentions Hans Christian
| Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" as an example of a story that was
| "sanitized" by removing the part where Ariel is forced to choose
| between killing her prince or turning into foam on the waves.
|
| But Andersen's story was itself a sanitized version of Friedrich
| de la Motte Fouque's "Undine", a fairy/morality tale in which a
| water spirit marries a human knight in order to gain an immortal
| soul. In that story, her husband ultimately breaks his wedding
| vows, forcing Undine to kill him, and losing her chance of going
| to heaven.
|
| Andersen explicitly wrote that he found _that_ ending too
| depressing, which is why he made up his whole bit about Ariel
| refusing to kill Prince Erik, and instead of dying, she turned
| into a spirit of the air, where if she does good deeds for 300
| years, she 's eventually allowed to go to heaven after all.
|
| Even as a child, it felt like a cop-out to me. But my point was:
| "The Little Mermaid" is itself a sanitized version of the
| original novella, adapted to the author's modern sensibilities.
| chewxy wrote:
| I told a variant of the original Little Mermaid story as part
| of a school outreach program. The kids came to the conclusion
| that God wasn't a fair being because he didn't give mermaids
| souls. I walked away satisfied that my little
| counterprogramming against catholic school indoctrination might
| have worked. I wasn't invited back (at least for school year
| 2024).
| b800h wrote:
| I'm not surprised the school didn't invite you back. Was the
| school outreach programme organised by your employer?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| You made the common mistake of assuming God was/is a being:
| https://nwcatholic.org/voices/bishop-robert-barron/who-
| god-i...
|
| Setting up a strawman for the kids would be par for the
| course though.
| copperx wrote:
| I wouldn't blame anyone for assuming God is a being. It's
| hard to reconcile the idea that God is both an abstract
| entity, like a force in the universe, but it also can
| become fully human as Jesus Christ.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| In some novel, the author discussed Abraham's sacrifice of
| Isaac [0] as not a test of Abraham by God, but a test of God
| by Abraham.
|
| As in, 'I am about to murder my only son on your orders. If
| you are indeed the kind of god who would order me to do such
| a thing, then we'll see where that leaves us...'
|
| That interpretation always struck me as truer to Old
| Testament tone.
|
| [0] https://biblehub.com/kjv/genesis/22.htm
| mhuffman wrote:
| I don't know. If memory serves life was pretty cheap in the
| old testament with millions being murdered and everyone(?)
| killed if you count the flood.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Weren't those non-believers, though?
|
| Old Testament God is pretty firm on that line. :D
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Within the context of the narrative, Isaac's importance
| to Abraham was practically infinite.
| kristianbrigman wrote:
| At the time, child sacrifice was apparently common, enough
| that if a country was in trouble, the populace would demand
| the king sacrifice his kid to save the country (even shown
| in scripture ... see 2 kings 3:27 though later in time).
| This was a very _public_ display that this God does not
| want that.
|
| In short, it wasn't really a test of either one, it was a
| public declaration that child sacrifice is bad.
| chowells wrote:
| Sounds like Dan Simmons' Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. I
| _think_ that particular bit was in the second book, but Sol
| spent a lot of time grappling with Abraham in both.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| That sounds correct and in keeping with the themes!
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| _Leaving the classroom, I tip my fedora and chuckle to
| myself. As I smile at my own cleverness I wonder how much
| karma this story is going to get when I post it on the
| atheism subreddit later._
| BurningFrog wrote:
| True. But there is a big difference between...
|
| (1) HC Andersen writing his own version of an old story, and
|
| (2) A 2024 editor rewriting HC Andersen's story and selling
| that _as written by HC Andersen_.
| geysersam wrote:
| In this context that's a rather small difference though. At
| that point the discussion is not anymore about if it's wrong
| or right to rewrite stories and tell rewritten stories to
| children, it's more about the rights of the author to not be
| associated with work that isn't theirs.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| No, it's about not being lied to when looking up a work of
| fiction.
|
| Revisionism of historic facts and artwork is one of the
| oldest forms of political manipulation and has never served
| a good purpose, no matter how well meant. If you want to
| alter a story, make it clear that you altered it, don't
| replace the original with your version and then lie to
| people.
| foldr wrote:
| The article is talking about the Disney adaptation of The
| Little Mermaid. I don't think anyone went to see that
| assuming that it was a 100% faithful adaptation of the
| original text (insofar as such a thing exists in this
| case) so I don't see that anyone is being lied to.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| To me it's 98% about the book buying consumer's right to
| get the product they paid for!
| davidcbc wrote:
| Did Disney claim that The Little Mermaid was "as written by
| HC Andersen"?
| dirkt wrote:
| > But Andersen's story was itself a sanitized version of
| Friedrich de la Motte Fouque's "Undine"
|
| Now I got curious. Wikipedia actually has a summary of each
| chapter of "Undine" [1], and it's COMPLETELY DIFFERENT both in
| style and plot from Andersen's version [2]. Basically the only
| similarity is that it is about a mermaid and a prince/knight,
| and the (potential) death of the prince/knight at the end. For
| it to be a "sanitized version", it should be MUCH closer.
|
| [1]
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undine_(Friedrich_de_la_Motte_...
|
| [2] https://www.projekt-
| gutenberg.org/andersen/maerchen/chap127....
| konschubert wrote:
| I like the take that Noah had on Twitter: the Disney version,
| where the evil witch gets killed, teaches an essential lesson
| too:
|
| That we can overcome danger. We have basically cured Aids, we
| have fully eradicated smallpox.
|
| The daemons are real and dangerous, but we can win.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The erstwhile namesake of Ondine's curse.
| foobarian wrote:
| What a very satisfying thing to connect to my favorite 90s
| game!
|
| https://mana.fandom.com/wiki/Undine
| james_dev_123 wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken, society used to be structured quite
| differently. Kids were not grouped so much by age in school, and
| with so much intermixing of ages in society, young kids were
| forced to grow up quite quickly.
|
| For example, Alexander Hamilton began working full-time at the
| age of 11.
|
| Nowadays, we try very hard to shield children from the realities
| of the world, sanitize their fairy tales, etc. but that's a
| relatively recent practice.
| Daub wrote:
| In the original Cinderella, the slipper was made of fur, not
| glass. Still now, fur slipper is slang for... Well, you know.
| miniwark wrote:
| In the Perrault version the shoes are undoubtedly in glass, not
| in furr (and so the Disney one are too). There was a debate in
| France since the XIX century, but it's now concluded to
| "glass".
|
| See :
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controverse_sur_la_composition...
| khazhoux wrote:
| > Fairy tales are the best way for children to learn that the
| world contains evil, violence, and danger.
|
| Don't worry about this. They'll learn in grade school to be
| afraid that at any moment, a stranger might come on campus and
| shoot them all up. And in high school they'll learn about suicide
| and rape from their classmates.
|
| They'll have plenty of horrors to keep track of.
| drajingo wrote:
| Doesn't apply outside America, but I accept your point
| nonetheless. Middle schoolers can be cruel.
| cvoss wrote:
| > > the best way
|
| The examples you cite do not strike me as the best way, so I
| will continue to worry about this.
|
| Learning from a story crafted by experienced people, sometimes
| encompassing many generations of experience and wisdom, is so
| often superior to having to learn from one's own myopic,
| incomplete experience in the real world. This is, in some
| sense, the whole point of having and telling stories.
| shswkna wrote:
| The parent poster was being sarcastic. ;-)
| khazhoux wrote:
| I wasn't being sarcastic.
|
| The article's plain premise is that kids' stories have gone
| soft in an effort to shield them from the harshness of the
| world.
|
| To which I say: what's the rush? They'll learn fear and
| death and worry soon enough.
| alt227 wrote:
| > To which I say: what's the rush? They'll learn fear and
| death and worry soon enough.
|
| The thing is that these fairy stories at a pre school
| level give children some tools to use when they
| experience the real horrors you are talking about. If
| kids go into rape and shootings blind then it can be
| really disturbing, and leads to mental health issues and
| suicides. If they have experience of internalising trauma
| through the safety of stories then these experiences have
| been proven to be processed much more effectively.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I went through grade school without dealing with any of this.
| Unfortunately (or fortunately?) not everyone has an environment
| where they can experience this.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| As a kid in communist Romania, with basically no TV to watch, I
| spent much time reading whatever I could get my hands on, and
| fairly tales were a big part of the 'curricula', especially when
| I was younger.
|
| There's a series of books published here named 'Povesti
| nemuritoare' (Immortal Fairytales) which were hugely popular back
| then with kids:
| https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pove%C8%99ti_nemuritoare
|
| I don't think they were much sanitized if at all and some stories
| were really disturbing. I see that the emphasis on what to censor
| lays on violence (ex: hero cutting the head of the dragon,
| chopping off toes to fit in shoe, stabbing the groom) but that
| never bothered me as a kid, I barely noticed that to be honest.
| Probably because I had little realization in their gruesome
| meaning.
|
| But stories involving the inevitability of death disturbed me and
| there were a lot of them. One is Romanian, I fucking hated it:
| https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinere%C8%9Be_f%C4%83r%C4%83_b...
|
| Otherwise the stories tended to be grouped by source/nationality.
| Like "German stories" or "Arab stories" or "Chinese stories". If
| these were movies, German stories would be "action & adventure",
| Arab stories would be "comedy" (loved them) and Chinese ...
| "Horror and drama" :) If you want to traumatize your kids, give
| them unsanitized versions of Chinese fairy tales :)
| anthk wrote:
| The Germans had 'The adventures of the Black Hand Gang', where
| the book was split in four mysteries to solve. In the left you
| had the narrative and a question/riddle to solve by looking up
| a big and detailled picture. Such as 'how did X main character
| guess that the bad guy stole something'?
|
| These books still hold up really well today with few changes.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| Interesting, seems a modern book for kids. If we're at it, we
| can probably include Harry Potter and such?
|
| I would include then books such as the "Dunno" series
| (Neznayka in Russian) from Nikolai Nosov:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunno
|
| I read those books several times as a kid. In a pre-overly-
| technological society, those books are a sort of SciFi for
| kids, I was utterly fascinated by the contraptions and
| machinery employed by the little people. Particularly the car
| that ran on soda water and used syrup for lubricating, with a
| useful tap where you could get a glass of mixture to drink.
|
| By contrast, I visited the bookstore kids section a few times
| but seems inundated with dull, modern stories. Worse yet, I
| find such books on the obligatory reading list in school,
| there were such lists when I was a kid too but almost never
| read those because they suck. School is the worst selector of
| good literature.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| At least one of the Dunno books was set/written in an
| idyllic Kiev suburb at the time - Irpin.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Here in the USA, in the Sunday comics section, a lot of
| newspapers had "Slylock Fox", which had much the same format.
| fyrn_ wrote:
| Part one was great, then suddenly The argument is replaced by
| "Jesus is the reason I'm right" There's a place for that, but
| trying to frame fairy tales as Christian fables was decidedly
| _not_ where I thought the essay was going after the first part.
| less_less wrote:
| Not even "Jesus is the reason I'm right". The point of the
| article is that life is like (the authors' conception of) an
| unsanitized Grimms' fairy tale: it's full of horrors, but has a
| happy ending, namely an afterlife in paradise and the final
| defeat of all types of evil. The authors especially love the
| HCA Little Mermaid, since she manages to acquire a soul and
| become saved, though I didn't notice any discussion of the
| homosexuality / transsexuality aspects of that tale (dunno
| whether they're the type of Christian who object to those
| things or not).
|
| IMHO in America today there is a significant problem of "fairy-
| tale thinking", especially among certain American Christian
| groups. The issue is not that fairy tales teach that a happy
| ending is possible, but rather that it often comes almost
| entirely through external deliverance. The same is true within
| specifically Evangelical theology, in which salvation is
| entirely by God's grace through your faith, and not at all
| through your actions. So while some millenials and zoomers
| struggle with despair about e.g. climate change because they
| believe that no happy ending is realistically possible, certain
| other people believe that it will "just work out somehow", e.g.
| there will be a miracle of technology, or global warming will
| turn out to be good or whatever, which is IMHO even less
| helpful.
|
| Anyway, I partially take their point, but I also think it's
| important to strike a balance where endings are sometimes only
| partially happy, and usually come about through (physical,
| emotional, inter-personal) work of the people involved.
| graemep wrote:
| It is a reasonable argument for an article in a Christian
| magazine, and I suspect readers of the magazines would be more
| likely to expect it than random people going to it from HN.
|
| I do not think the author does a great job of it - it would be
| better without the rhetorical middle part of the paragraph
| linking fairy tails to Christianity. Then again, I (though a
| Christian) may not be the target audience of this magazine
| either.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I've encounter barely any evil, violence, violence or danger in
| my life on a personal level, let alone the amount seen in fairy
| tales. It's quite unclear how reading the Grimms would have
| better prepared me for anything at all. If anything they'd have
| mislead me.
|
| I might have enjoyed it, but this article claims fairy tales are
| a way of telling the truth about how the world is.
| RCitronsBroker wrote:
| that is something most parents can only ever dream of providing
| for their child. I don't mean that in a demeaning way, that's
| something hugely desirable and probably positive in terms of
| development. But it's sort of unattainable for a whole lot of
| people.
| alt227 wrote:
| You have lived a very priviliged life and you should be very
| grateful for it. Unfortunately most others are not in the same
| situation.
|
| Lots of people use their experiences with fairy tales to
| internally deal with things like abusive
| relatives/relationships, prejudice, rejection, homelessness
| etc.
| protomolecule wrote:
| Then maybe fairy tales can help you empathize with people who
| are not as lucky as you. Or me, for that matter.
| hoseja wrote:
| >Any girl who loved the fairy tales passed young O'Connor's test.
| A kindred spirit had been found.
|
| That just filters for weirdos though? You should actually be
| terrified?
| pb060 wrote:
| I'm not a child psychologist but I observed how my daughter
| became almost instinctively scared of the wolf. I think that less
| sanitized fairy tales can be a bridge between children's
| imagination and the real world. Modern versions of fairy tales
| where the wolf becomes good give me more cringes than the ones
| where he is shot by the hunter.
| trustno2 wrote:
| Just read them Leviticus and Deuteronomy
| Vecr wrote:
| Numbers too?
| trustno2 wrote:
| That's just to make them fall asleep
| Vecr wrote:
| Even Numbers 31?
| trustno2 wrote:
| I have to say I forgot that one. All I remember from
| Numbers is the numbers. All right
| cies wrote:
| Sherlock Holmes used to take cocaine to help him solve the crime,
| they replaced it with a pipe ~100 years ago.
|
| Soon we have to change the pipe into a cup of herbal tea.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| In the BBC series "Sherlock" he uses caffeine patches (or
| nicotine patches? I forgot), multiple at the same time.
| anthk wrote:
| I have some public domain translations into Spanish which the
| original settings are kept like that because they were
| different times.
| miniwark wrote:
| The example case of "sanitising" Cinderella, do not have a lot of
| sense. Sure if you compare the Disney version to the Grimm one,
| the Disney version look like far less horrific. But the Grimm one
| is just one of the many versions of Cinderella.
|
| The (probably) oldest know version is the story of Rhodopis,
| where there is only an eagle who bring the shoe of a woman to the
| king. Apart from the fact than Rhodopis was probably a slave,
| there is no need for sanitation in this story.
|
| Also, Disney have used the older Perrault version as a base
| instead of the Grimm one. In the Perault version, Cinderella
| forgive her stepsisters in the end. There was no need to sanitise
| anything.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella
| teekert wrote:
| I would not sanitize them indeed, but I would not just tell my
| kids (or anyone too young to grasp historical context) the raw
| versions either. Just like the bedtime books I grew up with,
| fairy tales (apart from extreme violence) can contain racism and
| very often contain sexism (very strong gender roles for example).
| I don't want my kids to see such stories as examples. When I read
| my old childhood books I often need to catch myself, or explain a
| context to my children I'm pretty sure they are unable to grasp.
| We've started buying more modern books.
|
| I.e., in one example in the Dutch Children book "Pinkeltje" he
| meets an African tribe and the language to describe them is using
| terms like devilish, undeveloped and black almost as synonyms.
| muzani wrote:
| I was listening to a talk by RL Stine of Goosebumps fame. He says
| that stories are like a rollercoaster. You go through the scary
| stuff because you know that everything turns out fine in the end.
| When he made a slightly unhappy ending, readers were _pissed_ and
| would write letters to him, telling him to write a sequel to that
| story to give it a proper ending. Bad endings cheat the young
| reader out of the experience they wanted.
|
| I'd think most of the sanitized stories are just that -- they're
| seen as incomplete/ _wrong_ endings rather than inappropriate.
| And children are just so _unhappy_ with them, rather than being
| traumatized. Adults are more willing to accept incomplete
| endings.
| emblaegh wrote:
| These fairy tales don't actually have an "original" version. Most
| of them were folk tales being told and retold for generations
| before being put to paper, and lots of details would change from
| time to time and place to place [1]. Disneyfying is just one more
| step in this process.
|
| [1] Chapter 1 of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Cat_Massacre
| librasteve wrote:
| great article
|
| > While protecting the innocence of children by sheltering them
| from overly gruesome material is something all good parents seek
| to do, have we swung so far in our attempt to protect children
| that we don't tell stories that help them process dark things?
|
| i am worried that we have done similar harm to young coders by
| wrapping them in Python and hiding away the power tools like
| http://raku.org
| leobg wrote:
| What I find much worse is the kind of narcissism/outrage/drama
| porn that most "for kids" stories and franchises are.
|
| If my seven year old reads about some horrible things that
| happened in World War II, that usually leads to some of our best
| conversations. If she reads some something written for kids about
| girls and ponies, she just doesn't want to stop consuming it,
| drifts off into some fantasy world, and you can't have a
| conversation with her at all.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Our kids love reading Andersen's tales same as: Chronicles of
| Narnia by C. S. Lewis | The Little Prince by A. de Saint-Exupery
| | Six Bullerby Children by A. Lindgren (and many more form
| Lindgren) | Pettson and Findus by S. Nordqvist | Winnie-the-Pooh
| by A. A. Milne | few local authors (Petr Horacek, Jiri Karafiat,
| Daisy Mrazkova...)
| animal531 wrote:
| There was an article on here a while ago about some culture out
| there in the world who uses stories to educate children.
|
| Googling yields this Inuit piece: https://www.hatching-
| dragons.com/en-gb/blog/inuit-childrens-...
| b800h wrote:
| I'm particularly aggrieved by the publishers who try to modern-
| wash Enid Blyton stories. Really exciting and living prose gets
| turned into bland nothingnesses. It's depressing.
| loudmax wrote:
| Just want to make a recommendation for Philip Pullman's "Grimm
| Tales: For Young and Old". It's an excellent publication of fifty
| fairy tales.
|
| It is a modern retelling and I'm not certain they weren't
| somewhat sanitized, but Pullman does include a lot of the
| weirdness from the older stories, along with moral dissonance
| relative to contemporary ethics.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I have a copy of some early Grimm's version. It's a bunch of
| disconnected fragments of stories with events out of order and no
| particular moral.
|
| The Grimm brothers went around interviewing busy people about
| stories. Not the storytellers for the most part; just regular
| people. They had imperfect memories of the old stories, got them
| confused and mixed up, and probably the whole household was
| competing to tell the scholars their version. Result: fragmentary
| and confused.
|
| Not one of the stories in this old book resembled anything in any
| modern telling. E.g. There were several versions of Cinderella-
| like stories all different, with entirely different endings, some
| with no ending. Different slippers or no slippers. One or two or
| three sisters. Various parents dying, sometimes both! Her
| inheritance stolen and she exacted revenge to get it back. And so
| on.
|
| The second half was more like story fragments, nothing complete.
| Just notes really.
|
| So never mind 'original' versions, there may be no such thing.
| wang_li wrote:
| > So never mind 'original' versions, there may be no such
| thing.
|
| There may be no authoritative version of a particular story.
| But there is an authoritative version of a particular writer's
| version of a particular story. If you want to retell the Little
| Match Girl story so that she gets to stay inside and have a
| nice meal and wake up on Christmas morning with a whole pile of
| gifts under the tree, fine. But don't call it Hans Christian
| Anderson's Little Match Girl. Call it Bob McBobface's Little
| Match Girl.
| TomK32 wrote:
| Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875, the copyright is long
| expired but of course there might be other right-holders on
| the title or such.
|
| Why would you want to write his story like this? The whole
| point of it is for the girl to die in cold, a critique of
| society's downlooking stance on poverty; just like Jonathan
| Swift wrote in his work a century earlier and looking at the
| number of children in poverty in Europe and the US I'd say
| there's no happy end in sight. 30% of the children in UK live
| in poverty, 21% in Germany, even Finland (which simply houses
| the homeless) has a rate of 10%.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| > But there is an authoritative version of a particular
| writer's version of a particular story
|
| Not necessarily. I heard this about, I think "Ulysses," but
| probably applies to most published books -- there are almost
| always changes between editions (if a books goes through
| multiple printings), differences in printings between
| different markets (even if those markets are in the same
| language), notes the author may have written at home but
| didn't get published, notes the author wrote on the review
| copy that got left out of the published version or got
| misunderstood or misspelled or otherwise improperly
| published...
|
| A "text" turns out to be a lot less definitive of thing than
| it may at first appear.
| TomK32 wrote:
| Cinderella doesn't even have it's name from the German
| versions, that'd be Aschenputtel or Aschenbrodel, but from the
| French variant which was already 1700 years old when you take
| the story of Rhodopis from ancient greek as its origin (as far
| as we know now). The greek geographer recorded: "They [the
| Egyptians] tell the fabulous story that, when she was bathing,
| an eagle snatched one of her sandals from her maid and carried
| it to Memphis; and while the king was administering justice in
| the open air, the eagle, when it arrived above his head, flung
| the sandal into his lap; and the king, stirred both by the
| beautiful shape of the sandal and by the strangeness of the
| occurrence, sent men in all directions into the country in
| quest of the woman who wore the sandal; and when she was found
| in the city of Naucratis, she was brought up to Memphis, and
| became the wife of the king."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella
|
| Two years ago I saw an excellent performance of Rossini's La
| Cenerentola at the Volksoper in Vienna, they put the choir into
| a 24-legged horse costume to pull the prince's carriage.
| https://www.volksoper.at/produktion/la-cenerentola-aschenbro...
| smeg_it wrote:
| I have no opinion on the sanitation for kids, as I have none;
| however, I myself love to read non-sanitized fairy tails. It's
| not a huge hobby but it's a fun interest I would love to devote
| more time to.
|
| Any and all resources would be appreciated! I'm ignorant in all
| languages except English (and I'm not great at it! ;P)
|
| I have one 19th century book entitled "fairy tails from the land
| of the czar". It has several versions of what might be versions
| of "Cinderella" and "Baba Yaga" stories. I would love to find
| more books like that, no mater where they are from.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I hate when people use the word "sanitize" in this context. For
| one, it's a weasel word and needlessly moralistic. But, even more
| than that, when people write essays complaining about sanitizing
| classic stories, most of what they succeed in communicating to me
| is that they don't actually understand how literature works.
|
| Adjusting older stories to reflect contemporary cultural values
| has been happening for as long as there have been stories. The
| reason for that is simple: one of stories' major functions is to
| express things about ourselves - lessons, observations, etc. When
| an element gets dropped from a story, it's because that element
| is no longer culturally relevant, plain and simple. Stories, too,
| need to choose between evolution and extinction.
|
| Take an oft-bemoaned example: Disney's version of the Little
| Mermaid. It's a very good adaptation. _Adaptation._ It differs
| from Hans Christian Anderson 's in part because the lessons we
| think are important to teach our kids are different. But also,
| the medium itself affects things: children's movies don't have to
| be as graphic to achieve the same excitement level and emotional
| impact as written stories with few or zero pictures. A movie that
| didn't change anything from the original version of the story
| wouldn't have had nearly the same cultural impact, because it
| wouldn't have been nearly as _good_.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| I agree with what you wrote mostly but I think you are
| dismissing the criticism of sanitizing stories too easily. It's
| a real phenomenon, and it is genuinely motivated by changing
| cultural precepts. And it is unfortunate, something about
| ourselves is lost in the process. Is it in the best interests
| of civilization? It may be. But not always.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| I think that I couldn't disagree more with this point.
| Riffing and building on existing cultural artifacts does not
| erase them. Nobody's telling Hans Christian Andersen to shut
| up, and nobody's telling publishers to stop publishing him,
| and readership of _The Snow Queen_ - the original version -
| is presumably much greater now than it was in 2012. My kids
| have specifically asked for it, while I wasn 't even aware it
| existed as a child.
|
| On the other hand, the implied message of people who complain
| about modern retellings is that they should not exist. (What
| else can it be?) And if they have their way, something
| absolutely would be lost: the ability of these stories to
| continue to participate in _living_ culture.
| samatman wrote:
| > _Nobody 's telling Hans Christian Andersen to shut up,
| and nobody's telling publishers to stop publishing him_
|
| Do Dr. Seuss next.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| A commercial decision to bury a set of works, made by the
| corporation that owns the exclusive rights to Dr. Seuss's
| creative output, falls into a completely different
| conceptual category, and bringing it up here is the kind
| of whataboutism that only serves to muddy the waters.
|
| Or, to put it another way, invoking a concrete example of
| the kind of cultural loss that's an inevitable result of
| the ongoing erosion of the public domain does not
| actually function very well as a counterpoint to a
| defense of one of the primary virtues of having a
| vigorous public domain.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > falls into a completely different conceptual category,
| and bringing it up here is the kind of whataboutism that
| only serves to muddy the waters
|
| Does it though? Seeing several comments in this vein of
| "it's fine to put your own spin on a classic because the
| classic still exists" but it's clear that publishers do
| in fact have the power to stop producing new copies of
| classics
|
| What then? Is it still whataboutism if the publisher says
| "we're no longer publishing new copies of the original
| and will only make this new revised (read: sanitized)
| edition available"?
|
| Because it's a fact that over time the originals in
| circulation will dwindle and it will eventually become a
| near forgotten work. And we in society will have lost
| something with it
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Reminder here that we were originally talking about fairy
| tales.
| Kamq wrote:
| The easy solution seems to be to only let a work retain
| copyright so long as it's obtainable from the holder of
| the copyright.
| samatman wrote:
| The post you were responding to includes this sentence:
|
| > _I agree with what you wrote mostly but I think you are
| dismissing the criticism of sanitizing stories too
| easily._
|
| Bringing up Dr. Seuss is not whataboutism, nor is it
| muddying any waters. It is directly relevant, your
| preference to focus more narrowly notwithstanding.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I don't think we really lose anything about ourselves unless
| we are going back and changing the original work. The Hans
| Christian Anderson version of The Little Mermaid is still
| readily available.
|
| For thousands of years, stories, myths, and legends were
| handed down through oral tradition and changed radically over
| time. The key difference today is that anyone with basic
| literacy and access to a library or the internet can go back
| and see old "versions" of these stories.
| nottorp wrote:
| I believe the right term is bowdlerise:
|
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Bowdlerise
| copperx wrote:
| I understand your point, but you're overlooking who does the
| adapting. Oral stories were naturally updated with each
| generation, and I think that's wonderful. However, in this
| case, we're discussing literature being adapted by a global
| corporation with shareholders aiming to please a broad
| audience.
|
| If Disney were to adapt The Lord of the Rings in 100 years to
| reflect new "lessons," I would be relieved to no longer be
| around to see it.
| sirspacey wrote:
| The adaptation was by a group of screenwriters, story
| tellers, and artists.
|
| Sure, it lived inside a soulless corporation that imposed
| limits & expectations. But please don't do a disservice to
| the brilliant artists and creatives who make animation.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Sure, it lived inside a soulless corporation that imposed
| limits & expectations. But please don't do a disservice to
| the brilliant artists and creatives who make animation.
|
| Just because people are hard working and skilled does not
| place them above criticism. In fact they should be
| criticized even more when the stuff they produce is
| substandard
|
| We would never say something trite like "don't do a
| disservice to the brilliant programmers and techies who
| make software" when we're criticising bad tech industry
| security practices
| lukas099 wrote:
| But they were specifically responding to a point about
| the identity of the creators, not the quality. And if it
| _were_ about the quality, well, Disney 's Little Mermaid
| is a classic.
| mindslight wrote:
| Are you referring to the _brilliant artists and creatives_
| who refer to their place of employment as "Mousechwitz",
| or a different group who likely have their own affectionate
| nicknames? Because I'm pretty sure artists themselves are
| some of the most aware of how commercial imperatives warp
| the creative process.
| talldayo wrote:
| The Amazon Prime adaptation _Rings of Power_ was an
| interesting (see: bad) case-study on what happens when you
| try to write Tolkien without him. It 's perpetually insipid,
| like watching a puppet show try to adapt Shakespeare. So much
| is stripped off the bone that no story exists anymore, and
| all the characters and their motives blend into one another
| or aren't shown at all.
|
| > If Disney were to adapt The Lord of the Rings in 100 years
| to reflect new "lessons," I would be relieved to no longer be
| around to see it.
|
| What's funny is, these adaptations don't even do _that_.
| Peter Jackson 's films are fun because they're essentially a
| "Spielbergian" take on what these books should be. They're
| still pared-back, but they have enough of the throughlines
| with the original story that you still get the big takeaways
| at the end. They're reductive films, but powerful.
|
| Rings of Power just, _exists_. It doesn 't want to adapt
| Tolkien's original themes of death and transcendence, it
| doesn't want to embrace a _new_ theme, so it 's stories feel
| incidental and pointless. There are no conflicting plots or
| overarching adventures. You're just watching people in
| costume do pretend-errands so we can point at the TV like
| Leonardo Decaprio when we see our favorite character. It has
| no intention to conserve the original narrative _or_ puppet
| it 's corpse for something new. It's just a cruel mockery of
| an IP that can be bought out for the highest bid.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| A completely faithful film adaptation of Tolkien's books
| would make for a terrible movie.
|
| Which isn't to say that all the adaptations are good, of
| course. But the changes that were made in Peter Jackson's
| LOTR or the Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Hobbit were well-
| intentioned and generally made sense for their respective
| media.
|
| Probably Tolkien wouldn't like either, but that doesn't
| automatically make them bad. A good example here would be
| Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining, which was an
| excellent film regardless of what Stephen King thinks about
| it.
|
| Which isn't to say that all adaptations are good, of
| course. But ragging on artistic license in general just
| because some works of art fail is a depressing, philistine
| conclusion to draw.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| A terrible _action_ movie, maybe. I think Studio Ghibli
| could pull it off (not that that 's what they do).
| cm11 wrote:
| Good point. It's just that some weirdness arises as stories (or
| adaptations) begin to pass as originals, which I think happens
| by default. More effort to not take the thing at face value,
| more effort to asterisk every story you tell. Sanitizing is
| sorta like politeness in its (usually mild) degree of
| dishonesty. We tend to accept this level and sometimes praise
| it. Both also usually add slight bias towards the teller's
| needs.
|
| Even the idea of telling _the_ story of Cinderella vs _a_ story
| of Cinderella adds a not necessarily warranted suggestion of
| what people hundreds of years ago moralized and embellishes it
| with a kind of "time-tested" truth of humans.
| bunderbunder wrote:
| The thing is, though, that there's no such thing as an
| "original" when we're talking about folkloric fairy tales.
| People give way too much deference to the first person who
| happened to get his own version of a story into print,
| typically imposing their own middle- or upper-class
| sensibilities onto it in the process. Those versions deserve
| respect as literary and scholarly works, but they neither
| require nor merit actual deference. Rich people using public
| domain stories as a vehicle for for-profit moralizing in the
| 18th or 19th centuries is not inherently more laudable than
| rich people using public domain stories as a vehicle for for-
| profit moralizing in the 20th or 21st centuries.
| cm11 wrote:
| Agree there's no or few "original" stories, and also that
| that's not exactly something to bemoan. The quibble I'm
| making is that the longevity, whether intended by the
| tellers or not, tends to stick to the story in such a way
| as to lend not-necessarily-earned historical validity. The
| story is "time-tested" in an evolutionary sense not "time-
| tested" as a truth. That is, the story changed to survive,
| it didn't hold up against time. Many of the stories take on
| the latter shine of certainty and legacy--as key selling
| points.
|
| Making it more entertaining to contemporary audiences is
| fine or normal or whatever.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| > I hate when people use the word "sanitize" in this context
|
| The term I've seen used is "bowlderize"
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Sure, like cautiously removing key words from Huckleberry Finn
| because words matter and its more important that people consume
| less Xanax than accurately reflect on the contemporary nature
| of historical setting in its linguistic context.
|
| Really though, its sanitizing. Even _sanitize_ is too nice a
| word. Why not just call it what it is: selective censorship.
| Its pulling a Tipper Gore so that you can pretend to be a
| carefully concerned liberal in full hyper conservative
| hypocrisy[1][2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning:_Parental_Advisory
| janalsncm wrote:
| These are fairy tales we're talking about. Accurately
| representing a historical context was never the goal. Telling
| a compelling story is the goal, and to do that you need to
| adapt to your audience.
|
| The question is whether to choose broad appeal or narrow
| appeal. Narrow appeal is more salient to a smaller group of
| people. Most narrow appeal media won't be profitable enough.
| So large companies target broad appeal media. It is good, but
| may be altered to broaden the appeal. For example Red Dawn
| 2012 changed the enemies from Chinese to North Korean because
| China has a huge middle class (potential customers) and North
| Korea does not, despite the fact that a Chinese invasion
| might be scarier or more plausible.
| lukas099 wrote:
| The race relations part of Huck Finn still _is_ culturally
| relevant. We shouldn 't lump it together with changing
| stories that aren't.
| cess11 wrote:
| It's a tangent but I'd like to recommend reading 1001 Nights.
| It's a rather interesting collection of stories, well suited for
| reading aloud among consenting adults.
|
| With kids around I'd sanitise quite a bit, there's a lot of sex,
| violence and bigotry in there that I'd prefer that they won't
| repeat in other settings and connect my name to.
| onetimeuse92304 wrote:
| It is hard to me to understand how much this revisionist tendency
| is just a recent invention and to what extent it has been present
| throughout the history.
|
| For the most part, I can see old books on bookshelves are still
| unedited. But maybe some other books have been completely
| destroyed due to not being acceptable to future readers/powers?
|
| But I really hate it. I dislike when people do not understand
| that moral and social norms change over time and you can't
| blindly apply your current views to historical people who were
| brought up and lived in a different world.
|
| I am pretty sure people in some distant future will think about
| us as heathens for eating meat, driving cars and wearing plastic.
| I hope they will be wise enough not to cancel us complete for
| this and hear out other wisdom we might want to pass.
| timcederman wrote:
| It's not new. Books have been getting revised for decades now
| for newer sensibilities. (e.g. even the Hardy Boys was revised
| more than 60 years ago to sanitise it - https://www.theatlantic
| .com/entertainment/archive/2019/01/re...)
|
| There was recent controversy about Roald Dahl's books getting
| revised (and he said himself 'change one word [in my books] and
| deal with my crocodile'), yet he also made revisions in his own
| lifetime for the same reason (https://www.forbes.com/sites/dani
| diplacido/2023/02/21/woke-w...)
| dbspin wrote:
| There's a world of difference between an author revising
| their own work voluntarily, and their work being censored and
| amended without their consent. Any writer may review their
| work and find it wanting for any variety of reasons - but it
| remains the record of their creative vision. The most perfect
| expression of their ideas and deepest self. Even children's
| stories. The Forbes article you link to lists a variety of
| nonsensical changes that seem to have been made 'just
| because'. As a writer myself, I find the concept of
| 'sensitivity readers' condescending, troubling and downright
| dangerous.
|
| To cite the article you've linked - Author Salman Rushdie
| wrote, "Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd
| censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be
| ashamed."
| KittenInABox wrote:
| > s a writer myself, I find the concept of 'sensitivity
| readers' condescending, troubling and downright dangerous.
|
| Also a writer myself, I find 'sensitivity readers' just
| another tool in the toolbox. I wouldn't find it appropriate
| to have a generic one, but if I'm, say, depicting an addict
| I might want to consult someone who either has lived
| experiences with addiction or someone who is an expert on
| addicts, so that I'm not unintentionally spreading bullshit
| tropes. A basic "am I the asshole" sort of check.
| dbspin wrote:
| What you're describing already existed. It's the role of
| a researcher or fact checker. A sensitivity reader
| explicitly serves a different function. Not checking for
| accuracy but perceived offensiveness. This is an ever
| expanding rubric and one that (for the 'sensitivity
| reader' like the bureaucrat), can only fail
| catastrophically in one direction. The incentive is not
| to ensure accuracy, it's to avoid controversy.
|
| The phrase 'bullshit tropes', so reminiscent of 'piece of
| shit people' is telling here.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| So what if it's not new? That doesn't really make it better.
| An author rewriting another edition of his own work is not
| the same as deceptively presenting an unoriginal work as
| being genuine.
| timcederman wrote:
| I'm answering the musing from the person I replied to:
|
| > It is hard to me to understand how much this revisionist
| tendency is just a recent invention and to what extent it
| has been present throughout the history.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| Fair enough.
| JackFr wrote:
| > I am pretty sure people in some distant future will think
| about us as heathens for eating meat, driving cars and wearing
| plastic. I hope they will be wise enough not to cancel us
| complete for this and hear out other wisdom we might want to
| pass.
|
| I think we're pretty poor at predicting what future generations
| will think about us. To that point I heartily recommend "But
| What If We're Wrong" by Chuck Klosterman.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| It's hard to know how predominate views will change, but it
| is certain that they will change. If views change, the future
| generations must, by necessity, see us as wrong on some
| dimension(s) or else their views would have remained the
| same.
|
| So I think the need to be able to look at past generations
| and "hear them out" (i.e. not cancel them, take the good,
| leave the bad, etc.) is important regardless of how well we
| project out the future.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| It's fun to think about how much meducal and scientific stuff
| they were wrong about. But today people still persist with
| dogmatic belief in what they believe to be proven. It was more
| often quakaey than not... so the trend is continuing
| KittenInABox wrote:
| > It is hard to me to understand how much this revisionist
| tendency is just a recent invention and to what extent it has
| been present throughout the history
|
| How could this be a recent invention when the bible literally
| exists? That we know that greek and roman gods have a complex
| and related history, itself derived from even older gods? We
| literally know that we know almost nothing about the vikings
| because they didn't write much stuff down so all accounts we
| know are almost entirely by people who hate them!
| Andrews54757 wrote:
| I'm sure children can distinguish fiction from reality better
| than adults give them credit for. Sure, it's possible for a kid
| to mimic a violent kid's show from time to time. But such
| incidents are rare, and seem to coincide with poor parenting
| for the most part.
|
| That said, I find it reasonable to think that children may have
| an underdeveloped capacity to understand sophisticated
| phenomena such as social norms. I remember that I didn't truly
| understand the dynamic nature of social norms till middle
| school. Children can be quite trusting when it comes to moral
| instruction. In that sense, perhaps one can justify
| "sanitizing" stories for an audience with impaired discernment.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I just found out about the opposite effect, Grimmification:
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Grimmification
|
| Apparently many of the fairy tales weren't originally just for
| kids, so it made sense that some would have more mature themes.
| It was adult entertainment.
|
| I think we might worry that broad-appeal media might be too
| sanitized, even by huge corporations. But that's always been the
| case. Niche media is always there to fill in the void. And we're
| living in a golden age of media to satisfy every conceivable
| long-tail interest.
| amai wrote:
| Fairy tale or horror story?
|
| ,,A mother warns her son Konrad not to suck his thumbs. However,
| when she goes out of the house he resumes his thumb-sucking,
| until a roving tailor appears and cuts off his thumbs with giant
| scissors."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter
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