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.
It's important to remember that these stories are orignally an oral tradition that only fairly recently began to be written down. They would have had a myriad of differing versions depending on the preferences of the storyteller, their community and the intended effect on specific audiences.
In a way, retelling these stories in a way that's meaningful to the listeners is the way it always has been. We just have to remember that the darker versions also served a purpose of sense-making, and they can come to serve it again if we need them.
Good on your partner for trying to help those kids.
Isn't that the other way around? People back then had more contact with the darker reality we live in - hence it was more relatable.
Current generation of people in the west have been completely sheltered and protected by the establishment for all their life and have completely forgotten that isn't something natural. With every generation since WW2 this has gotten more pronounced, and at this point people unironically go onto the streets to demonstrate for counties with "less then clandestine governments". They cannot comprehend the reality of living as a powerless victim in a world which will callously destroy them- for no reason whatsoever - because they've been protected from it all their lives.
Or maybe I'm just reading your comment wrong and you meant the same, idk
Is that really true? I find that more and more TV series have a lot more gruesome elements in there nowadays, also ones aimed at not-only-adults like Stranger Things for example. And horror movies moved from being a niche thing to Hollywood.
I guess I was too unclear with my comment... Because I can see were you're coming from.
Eg. BBCs Black Mirror - which is obnoxiously turning out to be more of a prediction then a cautionary tale - is definitely in the range of "darker content" in the vain I was talking about. But the target demographic is adults.
The old stories are meant to relate to you. The whole reason they were being told to very very young kids (<6yo) was to make them understand the unfairness of the world in order for them to hopefully be on guard against it when it matters.
They also weren't really fantasy in nature, even if we consider them to be fantasy nowadays. And that's a big part of why a series like stranger things feels inapplicable here - unless I miss remember it's setting. Wasn't it fundamentally just entertainment? More about spectacle then actually relating to the viewer?
The young adults/teenagers are both 10+ years older then the target demographic of the old tales, and won't relate the story to themselves because it's too disconnected from reality? At least that's my impression.
If stranger things ended with everyone dead and no happy ending then sure but no, everything is fair and the heroes always win. Horror has always been mainstream fyi, it’s not a recent invention
> 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 once read somewhere that after an earthquake, the children who drew pictures of the injuries and catastrophe, later showed fewer symptoms of stress and anxiety than the children who drew happy happy sunshine butterfly rainbows after the event. Seems like it's more beneficial to acknowledge the bad stuff than to encourage positive thinking.
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