Hi! Just a genuine question, I was curious as to why you dislike the Rainbow Fish?
Because Rainbow Fish can be retold like this:
A fish has a part of their body - their physical, incarnate body, what they were born with - that makes them very happy and that they are very proud of. They also have an unfortunate habit of thinking that they are better than other fish. That part isn’t good, and causes the other fish to be unhappy with them and avoid them.
The fish is now very sad. The only person who likes the fish anymore tells him to go to the octopus, the animal framed as the adult in the story.
The octopus tells the rainbow fish that they have been a snotty jerk and that the only way to make people like them again is to take off their scales and give them away. That in order to have any friends and make up for their behaviour, they have to rip off pieces of their own body and self and give them away to other people to make the other people happy and make up for their transgressions.
And the rainbow fish is upset. And then another fish comes and asks them for a scale. And the rainbow fish takes off a piece of themself, their body, the thing they were born into, and gives it away. And now that fish likes him, and is materially benefitted by this piece of another fish’s actual body that has been given to it.
And then the other fish come, and the rainbow fish rips off more parts of its body - all of the parts that used to make it happy and that it was proud of - and gives them to the other fish, because it’s not fair that the rainbow fish’s body was so much nicer. And when the rainbow fish has ripped all but one scale off, tearing out of themself all but one of the things that they possessed in their self that made them happy, then all the fish are friends with them! And everything is great! And everyone has a fair share.
Of the rainbow fish’s, and I do quite mean to keep hammering this point, own body.
What the book says is:
1. if you are born with something nice - like, for instance, an attractive body or a clever mind or a talent or whatever - and it makes you happy and proud, you are a horrible person and deserve to be shunned. Absolutely no line is ever drawn between Rainbow Fish’s self, their actual own body, and their behaviour. In reality, it’s their behaviour that’s the problem: they are mean and aloof to the other fish. This could be the case whether or not their body was all covered with magnificent scales. However, the book absolutely conflates the two: their behaviour is framed as a natural and unavoidable outcome of being happy about and proud of their special, beautiful body. So don’t you dare ever be happy or proud of anything you have or can do that everyone else doesn’t have exactly the same amount as, because if you do, you are horrible and by definition snotty, stuck up and mean.
2. That in order to make up for the transgression of having something about your actual self that makes you happy and proud (which, remember, has automatically made you selfish and snobby, because that’s what happens), you must rip pieces of what makes you happy out of yourself and give them to other people for the asking, and you must never ever EVER have more of that part of - again, I hate to belabour except I don’t - your self than other people have, and that makes you a good person that people like and who deserves friends.
To summarize, then: to be a good person you must never have something about yourself that makes you happy and proud and if you happen to be born with that something you must absolutely find a way to give it away to other people and remove it from yourself, right up to tearing off pieces of your body, in order to be a good person who deserves friends.
This, I am absolutely sure, is not what the author intended: the author definitely meant it to be a story about sharing versus not sharing. But the author then used, as their allegory/metaphor, the fish’s own actual body. Their self. It was not about sharing shiny rocks that the rainbow fish had gathered up for himself. It wasn’t even about the fish teaching other fish how to do something, or where to find something.
The metaphor/allegory used is the fish’s literal. body. And so the message is: other people have rights to you. Other people have the right to demand you, yourself, your body, pieces of you, in a way that makes absolutely sure that you have no more of anything about your body and self that is considered “good” than they do.
And that might just suck a little bit except, hah, so: Gifted adult, here. Identified as a Gifted child.
This is what Gifted children are told, constantly. All the fucking time.
(Okay, I overstate. I am sure - at least I fucking HOPE - that particularly by this time there are Gifted children coming to adulthood who did not run into this pathology over and over and over and over again. I haven’t met any of them, though, and I have met a lot of Gifted adults who were identified as Gifted as children.)
Instead of being told what’s actually a problem with our behaviour (that we’re being mean, or controlling, or putting other people down), or - heavens forfend - the other children being told that us being better at something doesn’t actually mean moral superiority and is totally okay and not something we should be attacked for, we are told: they’re jealous of you. That’s the problem.
Instead of being taught any way to be happy about our accomplishments and talents that does not also stop the talents and accomplishments of other children - whatever those are! - from being celebrated, we are left with two choices: to be pleased with what we can do, or what we are, or to never, ever make anyone feel bad by being able to do things they can’t. And the first option also comes with two options: either you really ARE superior to them because you have skills, abilities and talents they don’t (or are prettier), or you are a HORRIBLE stuck up monster for feeling that way.
(It is not uncommon for Gifted kids to chose either side, which means it’s not uncommon for them to choose “okay fine I really AM better than you”; this can often be summarized as “intent on sticking their noses in the air because everyone else is intent on rubbing them in the dirt”; on the other hand I have met a lot of Gifted women, particularly*, who cannot actually contemplate the idea of being Gifted because to do so is to immediately imply that they are somehow of more moral or human worth than someone else and this means they are HORRIBLE HORRIBLE SELFISH PEOPLE, and so will find literally any reason at all that their accomplishments are not accomplishments or that they don’t deserve anything for them.)
Instead of being given any kind of autonomy or ownership of ourselves, we are loaded down by other people’s expectations: we are told that because we can accomplish more we must, and that daring not to do what other people want to the extent that they want with what we are capable of we are selfish, slackers, lazy, whatever. We are taught that we owe other people - our parents, our friends, even The World - excellence, the very best we can possibly do, and trust me when I say people are ALWAYS insisting We Could Do Better. And we should, or else we will be disappointing them, or letting them down, because (because we are Gifted) the only reason we could possibly be failing is not trying hard enough.
We are, in fact, told over and over and over and over again, to rip off pieces of ourselves to give to other people to make them happy, because those pieces are valuable, but forbidden from enjoying the value of those pieces - pieces of our selves - for our own sake because that would be selfish and arrogant. And we owe this, because we were born a particular way.
Because, metaphorically, we were born with rainbow scales, so now we have to rip off those rainbow scales in the name of Sharing, and otherwise we are selfish and horrible and deserve to be alone.**
That is why I fucking hate The Rainbow Fish.
Because whatever the author INTENDED, the metaphor they chose, the allegory they picked, means that THAT is the story they actually told. (And is the story that child after child after child after child I have encountered actually takes from it.) I don’t hate the author; I’m not even mad at them. But I do hate the book with a fiery passion, and it is among the books I will literally rip apart rather than allow in my house when I have kids, because I’m not going to give it to anyone ELSE’s kid either.
*but, I would like to note, not UNIQUELY: this is something I encounter in Gifted men as well.
**I can’t remember who it was, in relation to this, put forward the thought: if people actually talked about the access and use of children’s bodies the way we talk about access to and use of Gifted children’s minds and talents†, the abusiveness would be absolutely clear? But they’re right.
†because sometimes it is Gifted children’s bodies in an abstract way, in that its their talent for gymnastics or their talent for ballet or sport or whatever, so I mean in a very raw way, the actual physical embodied flesh we are.
In addition to all this (which I agree with very much) the ‘happy ending’ in that story is that everyone is the same. Not just equal, but THE SAME.
It’s a story about the virtues of conformity, as well as being a story asserting gifted people have no sovereignty over their own bodies and minds.
The rainbow fish had to mutilate himself until he and the other fish were identical in order to be allowed to be happy and accepted. And this was presented as a good thing, a right thing.
While I’m at it, here’s another thing I hate about this book: okay, like, the rainbow fish thought he was inherently superior to the other fish because of a special attribute he had, and that special attribute was the only valuable thing about him. Then he got his come-uppance and learned he could only have value by being unselfish and giving away the only thing of value he had.
The book does NOT challenge the idea that his special thing – and his sacrifice of it – was all he had of value. In fact, it props that idea up by suggesting he needed to give the other fish his scales, that they needed his scales, that they would still be lesser unless his shared his specialness with them.
And that is horribly untrue. He has value because he’s a person. Each of the other fish also had value because they are persons. Take all his scales away and he would be hurt and grieving but would still have inherent worth and dignity. That is WHY it was wrong for him to be a jerk to the other fish: he was disrespecting their inherent value as people.
And that, too, is a thing gifted people are taught: that their giftedness is the only thing that matters about them and they are worthless without it.
*points up* Vass’s addition is excellent extra unpacking for which I was too braindead to elaborate on at the time. A+, would appreciate again.
Can i add, as a librarian, I saw a lot of children’s books with a really fucked up adult agenda in them. Stuff that doesn’t belong in a kid’s book but the book gets lauded because it makes adults happy. There’s a book where an older brother forces his little sister to act like a dog degrades her by doing dog things and it basically follows the scenario of bestiality porn. There’s one that’s all about how much kids annoy their mother and the kids need to learn to be quiet and polite. Parents think it’s hilarious, the message to kids is “you’re annoying, stop acting like a kid.” Remember that children’s books are marketed to adults. Parents, librarians, and teachers primarily buy children’s books. Children’s likes and preferences are really far down the list in terms of what publishers will contract.
Fucking seriously. As both nanny and librarian-in-training, some of them are deeply, deeply hideous, and the thing about KIDS books especially is that they’re almost all explicitly didactic. (Almost. Not entirely! But almost.) These are NOT things that get in By Accident; they’re things that get in and are MEANT to teach a point. And some of them are really, really awful.
OH MY GOSH THIS (actually thinking about it there’s a whole bunch that are really disturbing. And it was never the ones (or mostly not) people shrieked about me reading (like I got shrieked at for reading Matilda because ‘NOT RESPECTING AUTHORITY’)
“Children’s books are marketed to adults” is one of the gloomy truths that I’ve had to learn as an author. I can no longer count the number of things that I’ve had to pull from a book where I said “but kids would LOVE this!” and my editor (who is a kind and decent soul and not responsible for the system) says “yes, but grown-ups will think it’s way too dark”–or graphic, or in one memorable case, hallucinatory.
True Story–my first real success, the book that went on to move something like three hundred thousand copies, was rejected by the first editor because she said she couldn’t find a moral to it.
I’ll never forget the time that Stephen Gammell, an extremely well known Children’s Book Illustrator who’s had a lot of huge successes and even won the olympic gold medal of illustrator’s (A Caldecott Award) came to my children’s book illustration class at MCAD and told us all the story of how, even so late in his career, even after he’d achieved so much, his own publishing house and editors refused to let him illustrate his own book. He had written a story about his grandfather (loosely) and they accepted to publish it, and he even went along and submitted his illustrations with all the other illustrators that they sourced for the job. He said the story went from something he loved to something he couldn’t stand to look at, because the illustrations were nothing like what he’d wanted for the book and changed the meaning of the story.
