Posted by cemsakarya 1 day ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
Uhm, 50/50. Bear in mind Don Quixote made fun on the old farts from the Middle Ages saving "damisels" in distress. Sancho Panza was the simple, new man but far more grounded than Alonso Quijano which could be depicted as the last living "priest" because since 1492 no one gave a shit about kingdoms, local lords or whatever; everyone wanted to go to The Americas for a quick fortune (either by selling goods, or getting many more times food than in Spain).
>So, storytellers invented the adventure genre.
The adventure genre was what people liked before the mentioned Don Quixote, not by reading, but from folk tales, which are older than dirt, especially if you lived by the coast and met sailors around.
>this story becomes unconvincing too. Big villains and monsters are unimaginable,
Cosmic fears replaced big, concrete monsters (the rapist from the woods) with abstract fears under Lovecraft.
Nietzche depicted the old pre-Industrial values as obsolete. Lovecraft was scared of the new times. Cervantes just made a good laugh on both the "mythical, glorious times" but also on the "dumb, clueless future man". In the end both idealistic/realist roles learnt from each other across the adventure, which is what happens IRL in societies.
Cervantes was wiser, the laughted at the old fart seeing dangers everywhere against its outdated values, but so did on the new man with no "elevated" purposes.
Well, maybe. I meant the genre like Jules Verne, Robert Stivenson.
Actually, I checked facts and found out that Daniel Defoe (I thought he lived in the same epoch), in fact lived in XVII-XVIII, much earlier.
The Oddysey, Gilgamesh and basically every tribe in the Earth ever. has its own lore about some hero doing an incredible quest
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.
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.
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.
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.
We have a child carved of wood, a flesh and blood child burns off their feet is a tragedy, but carved of wood we make new feet, hah hah!
Not saying this particular incident is to be expected exactly, but events of this type are to be expected from any competent writer who has taken up the premise. Especially as it is structured as a picaresque fairy tale, it would be weird if this kind of thing didn't happen.
Also - The fairy, originally a corpse - why is a dead revenant of some sort bringing a puppet to life any weirder than a magical fairy? That's not weirder, just different than we've been told.
Children are capable of understanding cruelty, pain, death, suffering, in young age, overprotectiveness is why we have many >20 y/o people who can't speak for themselves and are overly shy.
This is an obviously AI-generated site. There is no interest on correctness, just "engagement".
Because there's a danger now that any writing (human or otherwise) can be labeled LLM-produced. So we need accurate heuristics, or none at all.
Now, look at the number of books on each language. Does it sound reasonable that a no-name startup with no contact details (except an email to an aktivlang.com domain that redirects to storica.club) will invest in a serious effort to human-translate and adapt that many books to language learners, without anyone noticing?
I'm not going to argue about the writing style because we know it is an arms race. But look at the underlying business, that business would not exist without AI generated content.
>AI-powered feedback
>Storica uses artificial intelligence (OpenAI) to provide feedback on your writing. Your written content is sent to OpenAI's API to generate corrections and suggestions. We do not use your writing content to train AI models. Your writing is processed solely to provide you with immediate feedback.
It does look LLM-generated though.
I remember hearing about "Pinnocchio soulslike" and just couldn't imagine how that'd work. Now it's one of my favourites - especially with the expansion.
The good Tom and Jerry episodes are completely devoid of tact and care, yet marvellous as entertainment .
In 19th century Italian (but maybe also other countries') children had to grow quickly to cope with life and work brutalities. They often had no mother, died while giving them birth, and started working at 7 or 8 to help their families.
In 20th century, instead, they have been constantly exposed to either real life violence and harshness (like war) or fiction brutality from movies, cartoons and video games.
Nope, Pinocchio is not that weird. It is when compared to an idyllic and peaceful world that has never existed but in our wishful thinking minds.
But even if you accept that children's lives back then were particularly brutal and this was in fact meant as a children's book: there is no evidence to suggest that exposing children to brutality in books will somehow help them function in a brutal world. If anything, I would think that such children especially need something "beautiful" in their lives: the fairy who comes with good advice, the dragon slain in the end, the lost child who finds their way home. A bit of hope.
But I'm not a pedagogue, just a dad.
Did they prepare me better for life? Nobody can answer that without time machine. For certain they didnt instill any trauma, you need real world for that and not fantasy. Dont treat kids like some fragile porcelaine dumb beings, they grok most of real world fast, see all the bad parts and can handle it way better than overprotective parents like to admit. They often cant express their thinking effectively but they see, hear and understand most of the adult world well.
I certainly read those stories too to my kids.
And I've read gorier stories from damn Catholic journals for late aged kids in the 50's -from my parents, as they had tons of distinct books- will full depiction of beheadings from God's will in Africal trives and whatnot that would set a straight +18 sign in the cover today.
So a 14 year old in the 1960 could one-hit KO a current 18yo kid from today in the spot because they had drastic hormonal and physical changes due to the hard work. OFC when they hit 30 they almost looked like 50 yo's from today.
I always laugh at some old soccer trading cards from the 80's where tons of players being at 19 look like men in their 40's. Yes, tons of them smoked like chimeneys and drank like pirates.
Also, definitely likely you will remember some abridged version or Disneys'.
I'm not convinced of the argument that it's making fun of contemporary children books: Pinocchio regularly misbehaves and gets punished for it, which seems pretty much in line with contemporary books.