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3bsambi

chupachups

꒰ྀི১ art by bbydolly2003 ໒꒱ིྀ

tyriq-edits

Having folklore autism instead of math autism is a pretty odd experience

like tf you mean i just spent the past half hour watching a movie adaptation of the 7 swans that’s like 6/10 AT BEST.

forgottenpnffacts

I seem to remember Doof used the swear dummkopf (the German equivalent of dumb***) in at least one occasion. Is that true. Has he used any other German swears?

Yes, you're remembering correctly! I believe (as far as my extremely limited knowledge of German goes) that's the only German swear he's used, unless him calling himself by the first part of his last name in “Cheers for Fears” counts (since he otherwise consistently refers to himself as “Heinz” in episodes like “Oil on Candace”/”The Curse of Candace”/”Oh, There You Are, Perry”).

sp-spyder-g

what if trolls just do the riddles thing for liability purposes. like they gotta eat but they can't just go around murdering people right? the fantasy government would take them out. so you come up with a work-around. a wager. wagers and deals are generally binding in fantasy, so it's not like anyone could blame a troll if they played a game where the wager was death, then when they won, they killed the other person.

"your honor, they agreed to the terms when they tried to solve the riddle. as i stated clearly, if they answered the riddle incorrectly, they would die. since they accepted the terms and lost, it was a fair wager and i did NOT murder that tradesman when i killed and ate him!"

fictionadventurer

Maybe I need to watch every version of Beauty and the Beast ever.

themousefromfantasyland

I have been reading The Adventures of Pinocchio on my way back home, and never a book has made me feel so conflicted feelings.

For one, I love how wide and weird this world is. I love how every single animal talks, but some are anthropomorphic and some are not. I love how puppets are understood to be alive. How fairies, ghosts, and giants are a part of this world.

I have seen some scholars comparing Pinocchio to the Odyssey, and yeah, that tracks. It's all about the journey of this mischievous and clever protagonist along a wide surreal world.

It's a very entertaining read, that's for sure.

But damn, judging Collodi's writting by Pinocchio only, the guy must have been a massive conservative.

It's Pinocchio. It always had preachy 19th century morals that would seem harsh and outdated for us. I expected that. Many adaptations carried that outdated preachiness, even the Disney film.

But reading the book and it's somehow even worse than all the adaptations I have seen so far.

The book goes with a thesis that if you are a boy that doesn't go to school, you don't deserve food, shelter, or any type of rights, and you deserve to be cheated, exploited, and abused.

Recently I reached the Land of Toys part, the most striking and nightmarish part, so haunting that it's included in almost all adaptations. I already expected the culture shock, but damnit, the Coachman is essentially trafficking children, selling them into slavery, and it's somehow the children's fault to be caught.

I'm not saying the book is part or anything, but it's annoying how much of it hammers the message that "Obey blindly your elders and government. Never question anything". Poor Pinocchio is a very bratty, mischievous character, but the narrative seems to take pleasure in making him suffer, sometimes for very silly reasons.

And I hate how the Girl with Turquoise Hair, the Blue Fairy, always give him advice that she herself doesn't need to follow.

Yes, Pinocchio, everyone should work or they should starve, but the Blue Fairy, who lives in a fancy manor, has legions of servants, and doesn't seem to do nothing all day.

Excuse Miss Fairy, but from all the characters who ahould tell him this lesson, you aren't one of them.

@ariel-seagull-wings @mask131 @the-blue-fairie @theancientvaleofsoulmaking @maimoncat @princesssarisa

onlymollygibson

I need fairies to stop being hot. Give me more stories of the uncanny valley fae with alluring contracts that rob you of something precious in the fine print.

Yes this is about internet safety.

lunainw0nderland

Don't Go Breaking My Heart

alpaca-clouds

How does children’s liberation interact with media intent on, say, inflicting lessons where a child being able to make their own decisions and suffer the consequences for them is a key aspect of the story? Your Willy Wonka type stories and assorted Grimm Fairy Tales, etc.

So, here is the thing: surprisingly enough Grimm's fairy tales (which are after all mostly just collections of stories told orally at the time) are all in all surprisingly okay towards the child characters. Like, the adult characters will suffer all sorts of horrific punishments, but surprisingly enough kids in those stories tended to majorily suffer reversible fates. There is some exceptions (usually wicked step sisters - with the consequences often being tied more to misogyny than adultism), though even in those exceptions it should be noted that it rarely happens to characters who by the understanding of their time were full children - largely related to the fact that a lot of the Grimm stories do predate the modern idea of childhood.

The stories that were more cruel towards kids were stuff like the Struwwelpeter or also the Mother Goose nursery rhymes in the UK.

In general it should be noted that the worst stuff almost exclusively is English, because... I just cannot stress enough how fucking meanspirited British kids literature is (to this day). The fact that Roald Dahl and Rowling have risen from British literature is not really surprising.

But to the actual question: I do think those stories are bad.

Because all in all these stories imply a bunch of things that not just from a youth liberation perspective but a general human perspective are horrible.

In many of those stories the end point of the narrative is for the child character to be punished. Yes, in many cases the punishment is not administered by teachers or parents, but by "karma" in one way or another, but the implication of the story is: "This kid misbehaved in a mild way, and experienced horrific punishment for it, and this is actually good. Children suffering debilitating physical abuse up to death for misbehaving slightly is a thing we should absolutely teach kids."

Because what is happening in those stories is not a child doing something dumb and experiencing a consequence of this that is normal. This is not "kid is climbing trees, falls, has a broken wrist" or something. But it is largely: "kid misbehaves in a way that breaks social conventions by not listening to adults or not performing gender or childhood correctly and the universe creates a horrific punishment for this, which is then framed in a way that the reader should assume this was right and deserved".

Struwwelpeter for example has stories of: "Older child still sucks their thumb. So they get all their fingers cut off. Child is a picky eater. So they die of starvation. Child is a daydreamer. So they drown." Which is already fucking horrifying.

And then stuff like Roald Dahl's books is kinda even worse. Because the Dahl book evil kids usually are misbehaving in a way that is very much encouraged by their parents, but the parents are not punished for it. It is the kids who are.

But Dahl in general was a horrible person, because again: British kids writers are just somehow all horrible people. Like, it is not necessarily surprising, given the British are responsible for so much of the shit happening in the world right now. But good grief.

All in all those stories are not about consequences, but about punishment and how it is right to physically abuse children as punishment. While in those stories the punishment is enforced by some sort of karmic agent, it is still about punishment, not consequences.

fictionadventurer

It's wrong to say that the original Villenueve Beauty and the Beast novella is one of the best retellings that I've read, but it feels that way. I'm used to the shory story version, and like the short story version, so I never bothered with the novella. Everything I'd heard about it made it sound needlessly long and overly complicated, so I never felt like I was missing out.

Well, it turns out that before that overly-complicated epilogue, there's a ton of charming and imaginative detail that I've never seen in other versions, which makes this feel fresh and new retelling.

There's a lot of focus on the social consequences of Beauty's father losing his fortune. Her sisters had been surrounded by suitors, who all abandon them the moment they're poor. No one helps--everyone just gossips about them and assumes they're involved in fraud or something.

The merchant has twelve children, including daughters who are old enough to consider marriage, and boys who aren't yet old enough to go out to work, which implies the boys are all younger than the girls, and Beauty has an army of teenage-and-younger boys who adore her.

When Beauty's father finds the castle, he assumes that "some good spirit" must have meant to give him all of this, and he makes plans to take possession of the entire castle and move his whole family there.

(Which makes the Beast's anger over the rose feel a little less ridiculous. Like, the thing the father actually stole was small, but he was (inadvertently) planning to steal everything the Beast owns).

One of the few physical details mentioned about the Beast's appearance is that he has a "sort of trunk like an elephant's". And given that the other main description of him boils down to "ugly and frightening at first, but then it turns out he's mostly big and lumbering", it's not totally implausible to imagine him as a big Babar elephant man.

Beauty's father comes back to the Beast's palace with her, and until the moment he has to leave, he's trying to convince her to come home with him.

When Beauty shows up at the palace, there's an awesome fireworks show, and Beauty quips that "the Beast must be very hungry, because he celebrates my arrival like it's a royal wedding."

While Beauty is afraid of the Beast at first, this quickly fades into focusing on how he's big, dumb, and dorky. His only interactions with Beauty are showing up every day for a few minutes, saying the same five sentences, and ending with a blunt and clumsy marriage proposal. It reads like the Beast is her big, dopey, harmless friend who's in love with Beauty and can't understand that she can't reciprocate.

I knew that Beauty dreams about the prince in this version, but I didn't know there was a Superman-style love triangle between the Beast and the Prince. Every night, Beauty falls asleep and has dreams about this gorgeous prince who eloquently declares his love for her, and begs her to free him. The existence of the prince directly interferes with the romance with the Beast. The prince outright tells her she should marry the Beast, and she's just like, "I can't marry him! I love you too much!" Everything is blaring the truth at her, and she just can't figure it out.

In this version, Beauty does like to read--it specifically mentions that she was sad her father had to sell his library, and she's glad to have access to books again--but her true love is the theater. She finds a room in the Beast's castle that lets her watch performance, festivals, and current events, and she spends most of her day in the Beast's home theater livestreaming stuff.

Instead of invisible servants, her servants are monkeys and parrots. The monkeys use sign language, and the parrots serve as translators for the monkey. At one point, the monkeys put on a whole play, first in mime, and later with the parrots hiding under their hats and speaking all the lines for them.

There are just so many details that make it clear this is written by someone who lived in this time period, and not someone from the modern day writing about what they think life in the past was like. Details like what kind of shades are on the lights, or the fact that Beauty's room contains the best kind of supplies for ladies' work.

Before Beauty finds the theater, there's so much time spent on Beauty's exploration of all the wonders of the castle. Lots of it involves cute animals. I found myself wishing that Disney had been able to complete their film in the Golden Age--it would have fit in so well with that style.

So, yeah, it's a lot of fun, and I can't believe I let myself miss out on the original for so long.

zethry

I fucking love fairytales. So ridiculous.

Oh, the king has heard of the most beautiful lady in the world whose name is “Beauty with the golden hair” and decided he was so love with her and stopped eating and drinking.

So stupid. And shallow. Bless his heart.

Oh, the queen’s baby was born so ugly because she had as many freckles as a trout? Let’s name her Trout-ette. (In the original French her name is Truitonne; but that is basically what it means.)

What a loving mother.

coolcomicbookcovers

superkat500

So did we collectively read the Brothers Grimm fairy tales and decide that Grim means dark or did their name already mean that and they just knew they needed to do the fairy tale thing?

maimoncat

So I am reading "La Bella e la Bestia: quindici metamorfosi di una fiaba" (Beauty and the Beast: fifteen metamorphoses of a fairy tale), which is a compendium of some of the main versions of the "Beauty and the Beast" story, and I love how the editor talks about the tuscan version, "Bellinda and the Monster":

... The most influenced by the french versions. With merchant, roses and wicked sisters. And an unexpected yet revealing ending. After the fateful sentence "Monster, Monster, there's nothing left for me without you" the girl turns around, missing the metamorphosis. When she looks back, a handsome knight stands before her, thanking her for having turned him back. At which Bellinda, still shocked, answers "But I want the Monster!"

darklinaforever

The day we get an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast with Belle kissing the Beast when she's in Beast form instead of prince form ?! The 2014 version almost gave it to us !!!