#90 – Straw

It’s interesting how when I was a kid a lot of the stories read to me seemed like weird abstract concepts that I had no real experiences to compare to. Now being an adult with a young child I think “Why did my mom read these horrible violent stories to me as a kid?” No wonder I had dreams about monsters with large teeth coming after me. I was just read a story about one right before falling asleep.

Today’s Biff has the winning move.

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11 thoughts on “#90 – Straw”

  1. Gwid says:

    My mum did that, but had the edited versions that made it so all of the little piggies survived. She even added “And so they rushed him off to hospital and fixed him all up” on the end of Humpty Dumpty and changed “roast beef” to “roast vegetables” in This Little Piggy. And quite a few other things.
    She even forbid me from singing “wouldn’t it be nice if the world was chocolate” because I had changed the lyrics to match what would really happen – “Would it be nice if the world were chocolate? Wouldn’t it be nice if we all died? Wouldn’t it be nice if we all suffocated….”

    Funny comic. How does that window fit in a straw house like that? It looks like straw, anyway. Then again, then there’s the TV, meaning it must have an outlet… I am hung up with technicalities. Better than getting a dial tone.

    ~Gwid
    (I am making too many puns.
    I must stop.
    They’re not even punny.
    See my point?)

  2. Rick2Tails says:

    if you had a straw house it wouldnt be a pile of straw.It would most likely be made of bricks or bundles of tightly packed straw covered with a mud plater. *starts singing Green Jello/Jelly`s 3 Little pigs song *

  3. Slogra says:

    When I was little, my mom gave me a 12-page picture book called “The Very Sad Book”. My favorite page was the very sad thing where “Dolores was ugly as hell, and she didn’t have any money, either.” Absoutely traumatizing.

  4. Jackson says:

    The hair on the chinny chin chin is a nice touch.

  5. Library Lady says:

    My mother bought me an entire set of books Grimm’s and others and couldn’t understand why I would NEVER read any of them after paging through the first 2. At 7 I never understood why people thought Grimm’s fairytales or Bambi were for kids. Scary and painfully depressing at times.

  6. Acies says:

    i think fairytales were meant to scare kids away from doing certain things? such as lying.. or talking to strangers.. or being lazy.. etc?

  7. NoriMori says:

    @Library Lady, I agree with Acies. Many of these are cautionary tales meant to discourage children from undesirable activities. Of course that was when it was considered appropriate to use irrational fear as a form of control, whereas these days it would be considered barbaric.

    And of course some stories were just meant to be stories, although I still don’t see how anyone thought they were appropriate for children, since many of them are actually worse than the modernized versions we hear today:

    Example 1 – The Little Mermaid: The mermaid was transformed into a human, at the price of her tongue (not her voice, her TONGUE) and feeling horrible pain in her feet like stabbing knives and her feet bleeding constantly. In order to gain an eternal soul (which was part of her goal; the author was religious), she had to gain the prince’s love and have him marry her. If he married someone else, she would die and disintegrate into sea foam as all mermaids do.
    The prince DOES NOT end up marrying her; he sees her only as a sister, and falls in love with a temple girl (who actually was a princess who came to the temple to be educated), and married her. But before dawn after their wedding, the mermaid’s sisters showed up with a knife they got from the Sea Witch in exchange for their long hair. They tell her that if she kills the prince with the knife and lets the blood drip on her feet, she will become a mermaid again and live out her full life. She still loves the prince, so she instead throws herself into the sea at dawn. But instead of dissolving into sea foam and ceasing to exist, she enters purgatory, where she is told that she earned a spirit by striving with all her heart for an eternal soul, and she will earn an eternal soul by doing good deeds in purgatory, and she will eventually rise up to the kingdom of God.

    Example 2 – In some stories where we hear of the “stepmother” doing something awful (i.e. Snow White, Hansel and Gretel), this has been changed from the original where the antagonist was actually the mother, not the stepmother. The Brothers Grimm made this change in later editions, presumably to make the stories more palatable, since it just seems repulsive to imagine someone’s birth mother being so lacking in maternal instinct, whereas this is easier to stomach if it’s a stepmother. It’s also more realistic, since children actually are more likely to be abused by stepparents, according to some studies anyway. In fact, this is called the Cinderella effect.

    Seriously though, I have no clue why people think that just because something is a fairytale, that means it’s appropriate for children. “Pan’s Labyrinth” is a modern fairytale, and I wouldn’t let any child approach it with a ten-foot pole. I was traumatized enough by the Pale Man, and I watched it as a teenager.

    I have a book full of fairytales from all over the world. They’re awesome (and I mean AWESOME), but there is no way they were all written for children. Like Library Lady said, many fairytales, especially of the Grimm variety, are scary and depressing. Some of the fairytales in this book I have would even repulse adults, like the one where an old woman captured a man’s fiancee, stole her FACE, and then wore it to impersonate the girl! There was actually an illustration of her pulling on the face. There was no blood but it was still disgusting. I don’t know how the girl survived not having a face for so long. And then there’s another tale that is probably meant as a cautionary tale but like most is a little extreme; it’s about a girl who is locked up in a house in the woods by her parents to protect her from her many suitors, and an alligator (or was it a crocodile?) wants to eat the girl and keeps trying to mimic her mother’s voice to make her open the door. Eventually the plan works and the alligator comes in and eats the girl. That story is about being vigilant (the girl didn’t check the time like she was supposed to when her “mother” came to the door, if she had she would have known something was amiss). I do like some cautionary tales though, like Lord Kotura of the Winds, which is about heeding instructions and being hardworking, kind, honest and respectful, or Black Bull of Norroway, which in my estimation is about never giving up.

    Okay, dissertation over. XD

  8. SurveySays says:

    i read a fairytale book once that went like this:
    the Cinder girl….
    Ella was kinda chubby. her evil stepsisters made her clean chimneys for money. then they took it all and used it to buy usless stuff at the mall. Ella didn’t care about that stuff. she really liked sports tho. then her fairy godmother came on the night of the prince’s engagment ball and, confused, Ella agreed to go, thinking it was some kind of royal baseball game. mean while the Princes parents were trying to explain why it was so important he got married and became worried when he seemed to have no intrests in anything else besides sports (See were this is going?) not even girls. but then he met Ella the Cinder girl and after spending half the night talking about the wonders of sports he decided to marry her. her horrible stepsisters got stuck with their own horrible credit card bills and dirty chimmneys and finally died in a clothes-landslide in a walk in closet.

    the whole book was like that. the princess was actually some random girl that didn’t actually look like anything Disney would draw and the the ‘evil’ villians were just ppl who took what the princess worked for and used it on useless things until they ‘got caught by irs’ or ‘ married some rich guy and forgot all about her…’

    being raised on disney movies i was very confused.

    1. SurveySays says:

      I just realized i had a good ryme thing going untill i ruined it with ‘stuff’ and ‘tho’

  9. Arcan says:

    As someone who began reading Edgar Allen Poe in elementary school, I’m probably not the best person to talk to about scary bedtime stories. The Three Little Pigs has nothing on The Pit and the Pendulum.

    1. Mahnarch says:

      The look on your first grade teachers’ face when she asks why your backpack looks so heavy and you pull out your copy of “The Stand”…

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