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Comment by jojobas | Hacker News Reader

Moomins don't depict anything like saving the world, it's a whimsical universe dealing with whimsical non-issues.

I can see why Tolkien lovers are upset at these even though I'm not really one of them.

The Hobbit is also a whimsical children's book, and doesn't have anything to do with saving the world (a world that Tolkien had not developed anywhere near the state in we see in LoTR when he wrote The Hobbit almost 20 years earlier).

It was a children's book and probably isn't anymore.

Was its license rescinded by the International Society of Children's Books? Thanks for letting me know, I'll be sure to tell my child to stop enjoying it.

How could that status ever chance? Being widely read by adults doesn't change if its an children's book or not.

Theoretically it could change via literacy rates and attention spans going down?

No it couldn't.

Rest assured, I can personally confirm that it is still a wonderful children's book.

I read it to my daughter when she was six, and she loved it. We did one chapter a night. I did almost no editing as I read.

By the time we read LOTR she was eight, and we never did finish ROTK because the Frodo and Sam parts really do drag on (I get that he wrote them this way so that the reader would get a sense of just how arduous the journey was, but...)

The world was pretty well developed, but The Hobbit isn't really set in it. The Hobbit was retconned into his broader Middle-earth as the sequel grew in the telling. He'd been re-writing the material that became The Silmarillion for decades. (And he offered it to the publisher instead of a Hobbit sequel, and they said "what else ya got?)

This despite the fact that some names and elements were re-used. He often cycled the same names around until he found where they fit. Which also makes reading early drafts of the Hobbit fun when Thorin was named Gandalf.

And like all good books for children, it contains many things that can inform your character for life.

Somewhat whimsical, yet somewhat grappling with dark undertones, possibly due to the trauma of the war.

The moomins starts with a great flood that washes them all away to live in a new place (I think this is a parallel to the Finns moving out of Karelia after the war. I believe this was the largest migration of people that had occured at the time, and it has been described as causing generational trauma to the Finnish).

In addition I believe MoominPappa deals with issues of depression or something?

Fantastic creatures diving to retrieve their pantry supplies or the head of a family grappling with a mild midlife crisis is not exactly on the same scale with a band of warriors reclaiming their homeland and in passing dealing with the eternal evil.

I love that you use "fantastic creatures" to describe the world of Jansson, but "warriors" to describe Tolkien. Last time I checked, it had hobbits, dwarves, elves, talking trees... but none of that fantasy nonsense of Moomintrolls, right?

There are some seriously dark themes in there - and unlike in Tolkien, the protagonists are completely helpless when facing them. No epic battle in which magical eagles and a magical bear show up to save the day.

Just for the record, I don't at all think they're similar. I just don't think it's correct to call the moomins entirely whimsical (though they are a bit I guess.)

Mostly just trying to contextualise the moomins with some info I found interesting and unexpected given that it looks like a children's show about anthropomorphic hippos.

There is an enormous difference in tone if you actually read any of Tove Janssons books. The animated moomin series is childish and cute. The world of the books is dark and scary and contains monsters and threats that are almost lovecraftian. The moomin trolls are victims to their surroundings and the forces of nature...

At least one of the adaptations as of the 1980's also had moments that were very much dark and scary as a child. I haven't read or seen anything of the Moomins since, but I think the Groke might have been one of the things that freaked me out.

Some of the animated adaptations were freakier than others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVQlJDtzUbo

(And even the books, floods and comets, children's books about impending natural disasters, not of the magical kind that you know aren't real anyway, but of the kind that have actually destroyed life on earth before and might happen again, that's real nightmare fuel for active children's imaginations.)

Are you sure you haven't confused these books?

One of the books you mention is about an adventure involving a treasure. The other book is about catastrophic flooding in the first book and a comet that threatens the planet in the second, if I recall correctly. Which one did you think was about saving the world and which one was about whimsical non-issues again?

Of course, you don't have to like the books. They are both children's books. But of all the possible critique this one was particularly strange.

Comet in moominland is about them learning about a comet heading towards earth that they believe is going to kill them all.

Damn. Don’t look up, Moomins!

It is fantastically bleak, with the sea drying up, and that doomsday prophet reminding them that everything will be destroyed. Then the comet somehow misses, which they react to with a sort of dreamy, "oh. Right." and even the cake moominmom bakes to celebrate that they're not all dead after all, gets ruined because that damn doomsday prophet sits on it.

It wouldn’t be “Tolkien lovers” who are upset at these, it would be people too narcissistically self-involved with their own preconceptions.

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