The case for not sanitising fairy tales
plough.com
plough.com
But Andersen's story was itself a sanitized version of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué'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.
Setting up a strawman for the kids would be par for the course though.
I'd say that argument has itself preemptively "retreat[ed] onto ever-shrinking intellectual turf. Defining God as something akin to the entire existence of the universe is something that essentially cannot be proved or disproved. Stick to that definition strictly, and yes there is nothing that an atheist can take logical issue with. But that strict definition also yields no conclusions/advice/insight either, so it's not very interesting. Hence seemingly no one ever being able to adopt such a definition and actually stick to it.
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.
Old Testament God is pretty firm on that line. :D
In short, it wasn’t really a test of either one, it was a public declaration that child sacrifice is bad.
(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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
I've never seen it and have no intention ever to do so.
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.
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.
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.
No longer.
Video games tend to have a pre-built path. The real world has minimal feedback loops and millions of bad choices.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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...
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
If you refuse to participate on debt system, you have no choice than share property with parents so I'm not surprised.
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.
Even leaving them alone at home is a felony. There have been sentences already.
https://www.brocardi.it/codice-penale/libro-secondo/titolo-x...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do Dr. Seuss next.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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
I stand by my comment. It is incredibly, incredibly hard to make a living as a creative and even more challenging to do something as memorable as the Little Mermaid in all the many challenges of the entertainment industry.
Guess I’m just stuck on the “man in the arena” moment. Criticism is not virtuous by default.
> 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.
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.
The Earthsea adaptation was more of an action film than the books were action books, which happens to Tolkien adaptations too.
I don’t know about you but I would absolutely watch a Muppets adaptation of a Shakespeare play.
When it comes to adapting classic literature they’ve given us the best adaptations of A Christmas Carol and Treasure Island.
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.
Making it more entertaining to contemporary audiences is fine or normal or whatever.
The term I've seen used is "bowlderize"
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
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.
The primary reason was to teach child to stay out out of the forest, or if absolutely necessary, then at the very least stay on the damn road and listen to their parents. The forest was a scary place full of beasts and bandits. People did not have cell phones. If a child got lost and injured in the forest they would probably starve to death, or if lucky, be devoured by wolves.
Let's not censor this so Disney can sell cartoons to the sad and ignorant. Instead let's enjoy it for what it was as it was written. People would lose their damn minds if you took the same actions to remove the violence and sexual fantasy out of Shakespeare, which was pale in comparison.
As a completely separate issue we have censorship, where Mark Twain or Roald Dahl have their works republished using words that are not their own but still using their name. That's deliberately confusing and masking historical context, and that's objectionable.
To object to a retelling of a Hans Christian Anderson story is basically to advocate for unlimited copyright terms.
On the other hand there is Disney's Aladdin. Uggghhh, yeah, its a complete whitewash. Nobody knows what Aladdin really is any more. Call that a new original story about some goofy cartoon who sings songs with some blue vapor clown thing. Don't call it a fairy tale, because its not remotely related to the fairy tale of the same name. Its no different than spinning the historical tragedy of the Trail of Tears into some positive romantic comedy cartoon fantasy to sell movie tickets. Sure, you if look hard enough you might be able to find some sliver of an encounter to support your whitewash idea, but that doesn't make it savory.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.drabblecast.org/2015/09/13/drabblecast-370-the-l...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The land literally heals when 'the rightful king' is back in power
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 :)
being in charge because you were born to be is justice
yea, being about justice doesn't improve it
As an aside, this is pretty much what the entire Bhagvat Gita is roughly about.
There's also this: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/lion-kin...
Add in the fact that it was heavily marketed as including black representation -- then having those messages just makes it worse.
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.
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.
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/danidiplacido/2023/02/21/woke-w...)
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.”
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.
The phrase 'bullshit tropes', so reminiscent of 'piece of shit people' is telling here.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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...
That is a very 21st century view of fairy tales, no less sanitized than what Disney does.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think she hasn't read enough of them
I might have enjoyed it, but this article claims fairy tales are a way of telling the truth about how the world is.
Lots of people use their experiences with fairy tales to internally deal with things like abusive relatives/relationships, prejudice, rejection, homelessness etc.
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.
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.
There's a series of books published here named 'Povești 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 :)
These books still hold up really well today with few changes.
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.
Even a cheap $3/3 EUR 'escape-room' book based on puzzles to solve it's far better than the average book today. Bigass fonts, dull content, near no mistery or troubles to solve.
http://markwestwriter.blogspot.com/2013/07/nostalgic-for-my-...
But there were just four independent stories in a single book, and there was a mistery/issue to solve every even page related to that mistery, most of them related to seek new hints, as you would do with an adventure game.
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.
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.
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/
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.
I certainly couldn't handle having it "playing in the background".
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was just so intense, and obsessive.
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
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 mladistvým intelektuálem (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)
- 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
- Broučci 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. Švankmajer https://youtu.be/tK_l74cSPGY
- many more
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I believe X is plotting a Coup d'état. 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...
WTF is going on here. You are talking about the cartoon for toddlers right?
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.
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...
[2] On YouTube: https://youtu.be/IFR06LNqJVs
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/grimm-grimmer-grimmest...
https://pinna.fm/library/kids-shows/pinna-podcasts/grimm-gri...
[1] Chapter 1 of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Cat_Massacre
> 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
That just filters for weirdos though? You should actually be terrified?
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.
Googling yields this Inuit piece: https://www.hatching-dragons.com/en-gb/blog/inuit-childrens-...
„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.“
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.
“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
>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...>.
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.
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.
emphasis on "some": https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/01/10/antidepr...
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.
For example, the lowest suicide rate in the US in over a century (and ever, as long as records were kept) happened in 2000.
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.
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.
>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.
As long as literally everything else remained the same, or in changing, had zero implications on the mental health of the population.
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.
Also the GP comment was arguably more about sanitized childhood in general, which is a more gradual trend than starting at the 1900s exactly.
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).
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)
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.
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.
I'm prone to bouts of depression but that's probably got more to do with reading too much news and chronically overextending myself.
>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".
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.
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.
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.
But i think not begin totally sheltered from every evil of the world will probably lead to a more well adjusted adult
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.
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.
Actually giving serious diseases (well, infestations) is being investigated as a solution:
Children who grow up with serious diseases (i.e., diseases that cause them serious health problems) are weakened for the rest of their lives, which leaves them more vulnerable to illness later.
That is not the goal of this therapy. They will keep the parasite population in check (e.g., by using parasites that cannot reproduce on their own) to ensure that the patient's health is improved by the treatment, not worsened by it.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Soon we have to change the pipe into a cup of herbal tea.
See : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controverse_sur_la_composition...
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.
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".
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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 Hausmärchen" 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Be less precious. The world is a brutal place and the lessons of that should NEVER be forgotten.
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.
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
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.
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