[UA] Darkening Children's Tales

[Brian V (Vajra) King]

I see it completely differently.  I see children's stories as 
artificially sterilized: they take out most of the death, poverty, moral 
confusion, bad things happening to good people, good people having dark 
sides, world-is-a-frightening-alien-place stuff which is part of a 
realistic story.  This sterilization makes the story appropriate for 
children in modern western culture.  As we grow up though, we realize that 
the good things in life can not exist except in contrast to the bad 
things.  The happy beatific stories of old can no longer exist in the 
lives of our minds because they lack a dimension that we ourselves have 
grown in to.

I think the darkening of childhood tales is an act of love for those 
tales, it's breathing in to them the life they need to live in the 
current life of the mind.  It's saying "I still want this to be part of 
my worldview."  You're adding the bad things so you can keep the good 
things and have them still be good, to you, not just distant echoes of 
goodness.

Of course, each person has a different worldview.  In order to make Oz 
more realistic, you might add war and disease.  I might add a blind mad 
god dancing at the center of the universe, an ever-present reminder that 
human concerns are ultimately meaningless.

> > the players get a "Wow!" moment when they finally twig to 
> > the fact that it's based on this happy childhood memory.
> 
> See, I believe, Jonathan Carroll's LAND OF LAUGHS and William
> Spencer Browing's ZOD WALLOP, as well as GURPS FANTASY II: THE
> MADLANDS.
> 
> A little of this goes a long way, in my opinion. My current
> feeling is that it's very easy to "twist things out of true" but
> very difficult to make something staight and level in the first
> place. Like bending a pipe cleaner or hanging a picture. 
> 
> Which, in my opinion, makes the the straight and true things all
> the more precious.

Brian V King

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