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 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.
> But Andersen's story was itself a sanitized version of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué'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.
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.
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.
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.
I think OP is referring more to the current 2020s trend of book publishers making posthumous edits to classic books (such as Roald Dahl's) to remove things that are problematic to modern PC codes.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That framing is a bit of a stretch given the widespread tendency of the religious to anthropomorphize God in terms like having human-grokkable preferences and communicating them to us.
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.
Any metaphysical framing of ‘why existence’ is a bit of a stretch and can never be proved or disproved. I’ve also wondered whether a logical atheist would care if they were logical considering time is zero sum :) Also, these ideas are harder to grok in the modern mindset of reductionism (also unprovable), but this conception of God and being is millenia old.
I mean the framing of an abstract non-entity God is a stretch from how basically everyone actually invokes God. Sure, that conception of God has been around a long time - however I've yet to come across any religion that sticks to that conception. Instead it's generally used as part of a Motte and Bailey setup - such an abstract conception of God cannot be disproved, and so one has to agree that such a God may exist. But then having established that, the general feeling that there is some kind of higher power is used to give weight to a whole bunch of assertions of what a completely different conception of a higher power supposedly wants us to do.
Maybe in some circles, but the abstract idea of God being love (assuming one has faith that consciousness and free will exists in reality) go back millennia. The abstractions predate the Simpson’s ‘beard in the sky’ by a few years ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe the nightmares are a method for the child to process the perceived trauma and come out on the other side as more resilient. What actual harm is happening?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
> 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.
Yes, exactly. There is too much romanticizing of scary fairy tales as useful educational tools. It's important to remember that the pedagogical model behind these stories was the same that lead people to believe that harsh corporal punishment was a crucial component of successfully raising a child.
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"?
> '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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
All the more reason to take historical accuracy seriously. These stories were intentionally written to scare the shit out of little children in immediate graphic horror, to give them paralyzing nightmares.
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.
The only plausibly defensible purpose of scaring kids was to scare them into staying safe. Not for the sake of scaring them. But if you’re actually interested in scaring children to protect them you should be writing stories about guns, car accidents and drugs, not wolves and witches.
AFAIK many of the tales that Grimm collected were told in the context of Germany during the 100 year's war. Due to economic and geopolitical conditions of the times, it was literally true that the woods were full of predators. They were just human veterans of a lifetime of war and deprivation, rather than wolves. It was a very good idea to instill in your farm daughter the notion that the world out there is not safe, and don't trust people.
I see these as two completely different topics. One is about retelling classic stories in a way that is more relevant to modern audience. "Disney's The Little Mermaid" is most definitely not "Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid" and is never really presented as such. It's just a retelling of a story that happens to have been first told in some fashion by Hans Christian Anderson
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 one hand there are works like Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies. Its not a whitewashing of the original and its not trying to be. Even better is that it does a moderately good job of preserving the direction of the original story while adding absurd extensions like zombies and busty breasts overflowing their blouses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaking of Stephen King, The Mist is another great example. The film adaptation completely changed the ending, and people almost unanimously agree for the better.
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.
> 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
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.
Directors and PMs in multiple FAANG companies that I worked in would commonly say that "a lot of people worked really hard on this" and therefore we couldn't internally criticize an awful implementation or a terrible business plan that caused massive brand / reputation damage that could have been avoided if people outside the org had been able to file complaints sooner in the process.
In this case it is who is being criticized, or even more to the point, outright ignored.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
Am I the only one who sees the irony here that you're triggered by a particular word, which is ostensibly the same reason most of this "sanitization" is happening?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> "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.
> - 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 :)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.”
> 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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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%.
> 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.
Cinderella doesn't even have it's name from the German versions, that'd be Aschenputtel or Aschenbrödel, 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."
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
I've seen some Spanish books from Spain written from Youtubers and the quality compared to what I've got in late 80's and 90's it's abhorrent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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]
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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
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]
> 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 mladistvým intelektuálem (I was a teenage intellectual)[1]. Completely surreal, and worth a watch.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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'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]
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Our kids love reading Andersen's tales same as: Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
| The Little Prince by A. de Saint-Exupéry
| 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 Horáček, Jiří Karafiát, Daisy Mrázková...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
„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.“
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.
“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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would consider this an example of a safe exposure to allow the immune system to exercise, rather than a serious disease, unless the plan is to literally to make children grow up sickly and malnourished.
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’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”.
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
...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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I went through grade school without dealing with any of this. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) not everyone has an environment where they can experience this.
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".
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?
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.
> "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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
“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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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
> 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?
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.