alt Hacker NewsWhen I was a child in India, the fairy tale books that you could get easily were a bunch of Eastern European ones: Russian, Karelian, that sort of thing. And they were full of crazy stuff, man. The cossacks were constantly getting their heads cut off and this and that. I went back to India a year ago, and one of the things I made sure to bring back were my copies of those books (and the Journey to the West translations that I read as a child - also easily available at the time) along with the stories by the Brothers Grimm.
As one does these days, I asked an LLM to help me detect if I had a bowdlerized version, and while I'm sure the stories were already softened in translation, they're still far more 'rowdy' than stories you can easily find today. In the old folk tales, things just happen. Fairness isn't guaranteed; and sometimes a guy makes a deal and gets eaten anyway; and sometimes someone dies for no reason.
I wonder if the changing narrative structure of modern stories is a result of our improved civilization. In a world where you're probably reaching adulthood with your brothers and sisters without encountering any sibling death, a story with 'unfair' death and destruction probably feels out of place. Nonetheless, I sometimes am saddened when I read people talk about stories in media and how they 'glorify' bad behaviour or 'send the wrong message'. A thing I really treasure from childhood is the breadth of storytelling: not all stories were an Aesop's fable.
But perhaps that's not true. I suspect the truth is that with lowered barriers to publishing there are just more stories told. The ones from the past that we know are twice selected: once for cultural value, and once because the writer himself was selected. Today, anyone can write, so it's the same problem as we encounter when we look at personal websites today. Sampled randomly in 2004 you would get interesting ones easily. Today, that is not so easy.
This is most easily visible with foreign media. The Chinese stories I've read are alien and strange and interesting; and the Japanese ones take unexpected turns. But they're going through that selection process as well. So it's probably just a boring selection effect.
Still, I've got the old Grimms. I'm keeping that one as an heirloom.
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I think I remember that the original brother grimm stories were also much more violent, and dont forget german classics like the Struwwelpeter, gave me nightmares as a kid - especially the guy with the huge scissors cutting off the thumbs of a kid who sucked on them too much. Its in public domain if anyone is curious: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24571
I guess, there's another set of tranformations in stories.
At least in European culture, stories lost their religious part in the modernity. Probably people stopped understanding it earlier, but they were transformed in the XIX century. For example, a knight didn't serve a lady in medieval literature -- he served the god. Some story had a knight standing on his knees in lady's sleeping room, of course, having no sex, nor kisses -- not because of "romantic" self-denial, as we would think -- but just because they were praying. They were busy saving their souls before the judgement day. In the Enlightment age, people stopped understanding this, and replaced it with purely romantic motivation.
The other stories, that villagers told their kids, were probably to scare them, about the dangerous world around. The characters were motivated purely by the need to survive, and minding their own business, no high moral goal. In XIX century, with steam locomotives and boats, people could travel to unthinkable places, and many moved to cities, so you couldn't scare kids with a witch or a werewolf living in that forest beyond that lastmost house. So, storytellers invented the adventure genre. So, instead of trying to survive, characters go far away on purpose, where they need to fight to survive. Or there are some unknown human villains, who the good character has to fight.
In late XX century, this story becomes unconvincing too. Big villains and monsters are unimaginable, so stories start breaking this pattern, often demonstratively: here's a monster, ugly and huge, the little boy is scared of him, but suddenly the monster turns out nice, and loves dancing walzer or makes sweet pancakes, and they become friends. Soviet cartoons in the 80s were 100% postmodernist, whilst what I saw of the American ones, were still like 80% modernist -- the bad guys, danger, the righteous main character.
> In a world where you're probably reaching adulthood with your brothers and sisters without encountering any sibling death, a story with 'unfair' death
Two hot-take theories to add onto the pile:
1. In a traveling oral tradition, the teller doesn't want to memorize lots of different versions known in different towns or regions, and they also don't want people to get angry that your version doesn't have some key things from how they remember it. This leads to compromises that don't quite fit together.
2. If you can only store one version, you've got to decide between "fun" versus "faithfully honors the memory of our elders and how they told it", and maybe the latter wins. However with the printing press etc., now there's room to do a bit of both, and the fun version sells better.
You’d love the original sleeping beauty. It’s got rape, infanticide, cannibalism, all of it.
Oh and of course little red riding hood before they got rid of the cannibalism. And the rape.
Oh and of course the Grimm tale - “How some children played at slaughtering”. Murder, suicide, child abandonment - just… good grief. We live in a safe world today.
Those old stories may have been full of crazy stuff, but look at children's programming over the past 30 years. SpongeBob characters, under the ocean, jumping off a diving board into a pool, again, under the ocean. It isn't violent, but it is crazy.
I think that children's authors primarily amuse themselves knowing that it will pass right over the heads of their target audience. It sure seems true of Collodi.
The place I come from in eastern Europe has tons of similar dark folk tales for kids. Every single one had something properly dark. Brothers killing each other (or kids their parents, or reverse), canibalism, envy and greed getting the absolutely worst out of people. Since its historically very poor region the hero often prevails, but bad unfair shit happens left and right in between. Grimms were definitely not darker in comparison, in contrary, but their stories had more depth.
When encountering cca modern western kids tales (so not grimm for example), it was shocking how over-sweetened and dumbed down they were, emshittification in Disney style, but everywhere. Shallow naive predictable stories.
It didnt make us bunch of psychos, in contrary ot felt very enriching compared to shalow monotone sanitized storytelling western kids had access to.
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There’s just no reason to traumatize kids that early. It’s perfectly fine to be a happy Disney kid until 10 and then find the trauma gradually. It’s not like Bridge to Terabithia didn’t exist for the previous generation either.
I had a partner who was a teacher in very rough areas; the school principal was routinely called by the local gang leader to let school out early because rival gangs planned to have a shootout in the afternoon. Kids there were abused in more ways than I want to remember or recount, babies were sometimes found in dumpsters, and the whole thing had this constantly oppressive and hopeless atmosphere.
My partner did her best to help the kids in her class, and part of this included reading them stories so they at least got a glimpse of the world outside of what in my opinion was hell on earth. The stories the kids always loved most were the Grimms, the violent ones. I think they allowed them to process and in some weird way make sense of what was happening in the real world around them, if such a thing is possible in that environment. I agree, I think the environment most kids grow up in today necessitates a "sanitizing" of story content in order to make it relevant.