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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.”
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undine_(Friedrich_de_la_Motte_...
[2] https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/andersen/maerchen/chap127....
(1) HC Andersen writing his own version of an old story, and
(2) A 2024 editor rewriting HC Andersen's story and selling that as written by HC Andersen.
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.
[0] https://biblehub.com/kjv/genesis/22.htm
Setting up a strawman for the kids would be par for the course though.
That we can overcome danger. We have basically cured Aids, we have fully eradicated smallpox.
The daemons are real and dangerous, but we can win.
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https://mana.fandom.com/wiki/Undine
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.
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 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.
I've never seen it and have no intention ever to do so.
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.
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.
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.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab...
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.
I find your claim very hard to believe, can you back this up? I did some searching and could not find anything to back up your claim.
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.
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.
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.
No longer.
Video games tend to have a pre-built path. The real world has minimal feedback loops and millions of bad choices.
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.
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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.
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].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning:_Parental_Advisory
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Bowdlerise
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.
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.
The term I've seen used is "bowlderize"
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/12/grimm-brothers...
Changing the text and claiming that they are still the versions written by those people is the issue.
By all means sanitise and change fairy stories as much as you like, but they must be released under the new authors name, not the originals.
But it must also be understood that the first edition already was a retelling of story material and not a true transcription of the tales told.
It’s also that they actually didn’t have all that many sources when collecting stories.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
The land literally heals when 'the rightful king' is back in power
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.
There's also this: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/lion-kin...
Add in the fact that it was heavily marketed as including black representation -- then having those messages just makes it worse.
As an aside, this is pretty much what the entire Bhagvat Gita is roughly about.
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.
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.
I thought the main message of the original was "mermaids don't have souls". It doesn't really matter what she does or doesn't do.
https://www.drabblecast.org/2015/09/13/drabblecast-370-the-l...
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.
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 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.
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.
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...)
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.”
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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.
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.
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%.
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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella
Two years ago I saw an excellent performance of Rossini's La Cenerentola at the Volksoper in Vienna, they put the choir into a 24-legged horse costume to pull the prince's carriage. https://www.volksoper.at/produktion/la-cenerentola-aschenbro...
That is a very 21st century view of fairy tales, no less sanitized than what Disney does.
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.
I think she hasn't read enough of them
I think most movies have a happy ending.
To do it otherwise is usually to give up the mass market.
...except some genres that have to go too far the other way to get your attention.
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.
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.