Ok, I'm going to point out a few things. 1) Grimms' Fairy Tales and Andersen's Fairy Tales. Here, we have murder, torture, death, poisoning, abuse, revenge, occasional cannibalism, yet these are /children's tales/. Cinderella's stepsisters get their feet mutilated and their eyes pecked out. Snow White's stepmother is forced to dance in iron shoes on a red hot floor until she drops dead. In Andersen, you have the tale of the Red Shoes, which force a girl to dance until she cuts off her own feet, for the sin of wanting red shoes instead of black ones!
2) Anne of Green Gables, one of the works that a commenter thought should should be read instead, has a girl who can't control her temper, breaks things over a boy's head because he teases her about her hair color, gets her best friend drunk, nearly drowns because she wants to pretend and 'borrows' a boat to do it, not knowing that the boat was leaky, takes foolish dares and injures herself because of it, and dyes her hair when she's twelve, when that was considered 'wicked' at any age.
The fact is, kids want to read about themselves. The reality today isn't really any darker than it was then, it's just more publicized and kids are more used to it. Should abuse, drugs, divorce, homosexuality, and murder not be written about because people want to believe that teenagers are innocent, thus leaving them no heroes to look up to and no way to deal with the reality handed to them?
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branchandroot
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Date: 2011-06-07 07:02 pm (UTC)1) Grimms' Fairy Tales and Andersen's Fairy Tales. Here, we have murder, torture, death, poisoning, abuse, revenge, occasional cannibalism, yet these are /children's tales/. Cinderella's stepsisters get their feet mutilated and their eyes pecked out. Snow White's stepmother is forced to dance in iron shoes on a red hot floor until she drops dead. In Andersen, you have the tale of the Red Shoes, which force a girl to dance until she cuts off her own feet, for the sin of wanting red shoes instead of black ones!
2) Anne of Green Gables, one of the works that a commenter thought should should be read instead, has a girl who can't control her temper, breaks things over a boy's head because he teases her about her hair color, gets her best friend drunk, nearly drowns because she wants to pretend and 'borrows' a boat to do it, not knowing that the boat was leaky, takes foolish dares and injures herself because of it, and dyes her hair when she's twelve, when that was considered 'wicked' at any age.
The fact is, kids want to read about themselves. The reality today isn't really any darker than it was then, it's just more publicized and kids are more used to it. Should abuse, drugs, divorce, homosexuality, and murder not be written about because people want to believe that teenagers are innocent, thus leaving them no heroes to look up to and no way to deal with the reality handed to them?