[michaelscott]

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.

[kombookcha]

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.

[ffsm8]

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

[isityettime]

> Or maybe I'm just reading your comment wrong

Yes, you are. Their point is orthogonal to whether people in other times or places typically have/had it worse in terms of agency, fairness, safety, etc. Their point is about the flexibility and natural variation of the original oral medium as opposed to the crystalization of written text.

[47282847]

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.

[ffsm8]

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.

[pwdisswordfishq]

Black Mirror was on Channel 4, not BBC.

[ffsm8]

Oof, thanks for that correction. I must've mixed its producer up with Sherlocks which I watched at a similar time

[aardvarkr]

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

[sillywabbit]

What? Eddie and Alexei were the heroes of that story, and they got screwed.

[smelendez]

I would say just the opposite.

Think about all the serial killer and urban crime movies in the ‘80s and ‘90s, or the film noir of the postwar period.

TV is more complicated, but cop shows like the early seasons of Law and Order and all of SVU, NYPD, and then later The Wire and The Shield were pretty gritty.

Video games have always been a mix of squeaky clean Mario and Zelda and gory content: Think Doom, Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, Postal, etc.

[ahazred8ta]

There's a gallery of variant versions of Cinderella from different countries, even China. In many of them she has an enchanted cow. http://www.365cinderellas.com/

[theturtlemoves]

> 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.

[ordu]

> Seems like it's more beneficial to acknowledge the bad stuff than to encourage positive thinking.

Psychologists are sure it is. You should get all your traumatic experience and deal with it. You'd better learn how to remember these things without panic attacks or whatever. And the methods they use is replaying the traumatic memories multiple times while controlling the emotional state. The controlled emotional state sticks to the memories and replaces the one that was remembered before.

Well, that's the theory at least. I tried it and it kinda work but not perfectly, it may require some recurrent sessions over time if the effect fades. Though if you practice it a lot, it becomes a habit, an automatic response to traumatic memories, so any memory replay reduces the strength of the memory.

It is like a positive thinking (you get your negative reaction to the memories and replace it with a positive one... well, maybe just less negative), but it is definitely not burying unprocessed memories deep inside your mind.

> the children who drew pictures of the injuries and catastrophe, later showed fewer symptoms of stress and anxiety

I believe it is easier for kids, they are more focused on "here and now", and just replaying a memory in a safe environment has much stronger therapeutic effect than for adults. It is easier for adults to ignore the present safety and to dive deep into their past memories with all the associated emotions, so replaying memories can easily make them worse by intensifying remembered emotions.

Adults have crystallized worldviews, which were probably shaped by their traumatic memories, and it shapes their automatic emotional response, and makes matters worse, harder to change. Children are more fluid, they have more plasticity.