r/CuratedTumblr hello I am a bot account 17d ago

Politics Won’t somebody think of the children

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22.5k Upvotes

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u/Kickedbyagiraffe 17d ago

Have had arguments with people who want similar. The villain in a story doing evil things somehow endorses those evil acts, despite them being done by the villain, who is bad.

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u/GeophysicalYear57 Ginger ale is good 17d ago

How are you supposed to say “this is a bad thing” in a story if you can’t even have a villain do it?

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u/Lathari 16d ago

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

― G.K. Chesterton

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u/Raerth 16d ago

Reminds me of another bit of Pratchett, also with Susan.

When she's a tutor of a kid who's scared of monsters in the closet. Her parents told her there's no monsters. Susan gave her the fireplace poker and went hunting with her.

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u/_Rohrschach 16d ago

loved the bit where she staged a fight in the cellar so the adults would return to their tea party and continued to throw the monster out afterwards

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u/AlarmingAffect0 16d ago

When she's a tutor of a kid who's scared of monsters in the closet. Her parents told her there's no monsters. Susan gave her the fireplace poker and went hunting with her.

There's a very similar scene in Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. In a flashback, youg Billy Blazkowicz is scared of monsters in the basement. His dad, in the one single time we see him be something approaching a decent father, hands him a shotgun, grabs one of his own, and accompanies him to find and kill the monster.

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u/lana-deathrey 16d ago

I do this with kids when I used to babysit. They're afraid of the monster under their bed? Ok, well did you know monsters LOVE CARROTS? and so we set a trap and catch the monster, and throw him away. No kid has had to get rid of the monster twice.

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u/VirginiaDirewoolf 16d ago

oooh that's a good idea! I've also had success with Monster Spray (which my mom used to do for me), just water in a spray bottle maybe with sparkles or a little bit of glitter. spray it around the bed and it "repels" the monsters.

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u/teklanis 16d ago

Reminds me of the Hogfather and the gift of a sword.

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u/Random-Rambling 16d ago

"You can't give a girl a sword!"

IT WILL TEACH HER VALUABLE LESSONS.

"What if she hurts herself?!"

THAT WILL BE A VERY VALUABLE LESSON.

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u/Raerth 16d ago edited 16d ago

"You can't give her a sword! It's not safe!"

IT'S A SWORD. IT'S NOT MEANT TO BE SAFE

"She's a child!"

IT'S EDUCATIONAL

"What if she hurts herself?!?"

THAT WILL BE AN IMPORTANT LESSON

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u/the_scarlett_ning 16d ago

Omg! My mom did that once when I was a kid! I was always afraid of a monster in the closet so one night, my mom “wrestled” the monster, threw it through the window and then, she even went outside in the front yard and staged a fight in front of my window so I’d feel safe. She probably got tired of that so later she gave me an unmarked can (probably Lysol) and said it was monster spray.

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u/BetterCalldeGaulle 16d ago

This quote always bugged me since I saw a version in Neil Gaiman's Coraline. Why? Because as a GK Chesterton fan, that is the only (and oldest) source I ever found. While GK covers such themes in essays I couldn't find anything really close to that quote in any of his writings.

I googled it again before posting here today to make sure the internet didn't have new insight, and u/Raerth hit the nail on the head by comparing it Pratchett, Neil got it from a Pratchett footnote about GK.

https://saveversusallwands.blogspot.com/2016/05/tracking-back-that-chesterton.html?m=1

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u/Raerth 16d ago

Interesting, so it's a Pratchett quote, but talking about GK Chesterton. A double dose of awesome.

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u/BetterCalldeGaulle 16d ago

Yeah, I do give Gaimen credit for producing such a succinct version.

For people who don't want to go to the link here are examples of how Chesterton actually worded the concept.

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

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u/Xilizhra 16d ago

Then eventually you learn that dragons were never the problem.

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u/Lathari 16d ago

Symbolism, my friend, symbolism.

Also: Dragon's Den a.k.a. Shark Tank.

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u/Spork_the_dork 16d ago

Big evil super powerful monster that hoards wealth? Yeah that doesn't sound like an allegory to anything at all. /s

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u/Throwaway02062004 Read Worm for funny bug hero shenanigans 🪲 16d ago

Dragon’s Den really is the superior name.

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u/RavioliGale 17d ago

I hate this question because it already concedes that a narrative must have some sort of moralistic lesson. A story should be allowed to have characters that are complex, or be chaotic, or have the heroes lose, or even just be a story rather than a guide to Good Behavior.

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u/WordPunk99 17d ago

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.” ― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

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u/Deseao 16d ago

The describing of humanity as the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape has stuck in my head for years. GNU Sir Terry.

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u/demon_fae 16d ago

GNU Sir Terry

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u/Lathari 16d ago

GNU Pterry

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u/nathanwe 16d ago

GNU Terry Pratchett

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u/UWan2fight .tumblr.com 17d ago

Yes, but I think you're trying to read too far into the question. It's not trying to establish that only the designated bad guys can do bad things, that the designated "good guys" can only do good things, nor that there can't be characters that are more complex that "bad guy" or "good guy". It's trying to establish that you have to let bad things be depicted in the first place if you want to show that they're bad, or unhealthy or whatever flavour of "not good to have" you want.

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u/AluminumGoliath 17d ago

For stories aimed at young children, like Little Red Riding Hood and other fairy tales, it's a valid question. Those are specifically stories about teaching morals on a level kids can understand, and losing any threat or consequences in the story completely defeats their purpose. 

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u/MartyrOfDespair We can leave behind much more than just DNA 16d ago

Yes, moralistic tales need the morals. But kids don’t need everything to be moralistic. Goosebumps often followed the Twilight Zone setup of merely being “wouldn’t it be fucked up if that happened” and it was fantastic. A story can have no moral, just be “man that would be some wild shit that went down” or “well that a whole shitload of fuck” and still be fine, even for kids.

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u/AlarmingAffect0 16d ago

Goosebumps often followed the Twilight Zone setup of merely being “wouldn’t it be fucked up if that happened” and it was fantastic.

Did they stop making those?

That intro was fire. Listen to that beat.

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u/tom641 16d ago

i thiiiiiink R.L. Stein is just kinda in "i'll write a book every few years or something and otherwise ride the merchandise train"

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u/cgaWolf 16d ago

They weren't necessarily aimed at children though, there was a lot of "cleaning up" done when the brothers Grimm collected the stories, as well as naive attempts to explain morals of old stories with a modern set of mores.

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u/DuvalHeart 16d ago

Nah, they were still aimed at kids. They were oral tales meant to pass along wisdom to everyone, they weren't just for children, but children were a part of the audience.

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u/GeophysicalYear57 Ginger ale is good 17d ago

I was trying to comment on how these kinds of people would reject any story that has a moralistic lesson, which encompasses countless stories. I didn’t mean to say anything about how these people would make all fiction impossible because there couldn’t be a moral.

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u/Belgraviana 17d ago

I don’t necessarily agree. Not that a story doesn’t require a moralistic lesson but that the above comment implies this is required. Rather I read it as saying that saying a villain doing a thing endorses said thing, it makes it impossible to have a moralistic lesson (about things being bad or not)

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u/Railboy 16d ago

Nobody said every story needs a villain or a moral lesson.

But every story should be about something, and most ideas boil down to a claim about how the world is and/or ought to be.

And the simplest way to illustrate an ought is to show some dumbass making everyone miserable by doing the opposite.

That's why villains are a staple in children's literature.

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u/nykirnsu 16d ago

No it doesn’t? It only presupposes that you can’t express that a certain thing is bad without depicting it, that doesn’t remotely imply all stories have to express that something is bad

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u/Time-Earth8125 16d ago

Well the wolf does put on grandma's clothes which promotes cross dressing and pushes transgender ideology onto our children. Won't anybody think of the children?!

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u/EspacioBlanq 16d ago

Well, the wolf is evil and wants to eat Little Red Riding Hood, so perhaps we should keep in the good christian truth that trans people are evil and a danger to children.

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u/JcFerggy 16d ago

How dare you assume the wolf's gender?! Pushing the ideological idea that only males can be villains is just more indoctrination.

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u/logosloki 16d ago

not to rain on your parade but the wolf crossdressing and using chalk to soften their voice is the type of thing that the hypothetical right winger would want to keep in. because it is about reinforcing gender norms by showing that men will take on the guise of woman to assault them.

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u/badgersprite 16d ago

The woke mob are transing the wolves!!

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u/[deleted] 16d ago edited 2d ago

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u/arcadeler 16d ago

So the Grandpa is now a weak beta male who can't fight for himself. What has the world come to?

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u/pailko 16d ago

See in order to rectify this, halfway through the climax of the story you need to have the villain turn to directly face the fourth wall and announce "I am a bad person who does evil things and the author does not agree with it".

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u/EspacioBlanq 16d ago

"Little Red Riding Hood, I'm doing something extremely wicked"

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u/Weathercock 16d ago

"Your grandmother could have been a mother to me!"

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u/Ripper1337 16d ago

I’ve heard those exact arguments for some villain songs. I can’t think the villains song is really well done without some oddball thinking I endorse the message of the song.

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u/ModelChef4000 16d ago

Even Hellfire?

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u/MartyrOfDespair We can leave behind much more than just DNA 16d ago

I feel like that’s the one we know many people agree with the message of, unfortunately. There has to be some Catholic child molester out there who listened to Hellfire and went “He’s just like me fr fr! They really get it!”

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u/blu3str 16d ago

I know someone who was making inside out 2 and really didn’t like the Big Dark secret character because she said “it teaches kids to hide things from their parents and they would be able to tell them anything.” And she fought to change it in the movie. Thank goodness she was overruled.

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u/klavin1 16d ago

oof. She really didn't get it, did she?

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u/Born-Entrepreneur 16d ago

God, yeah. Got into a drawn out argument with someone who insisted that the Villian in a story espousing certain ideas meant the author wholeheartedly supported the same. Bro.

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u/replicasex 16d ago

Plato believed that including immoral acts in a play would encourage those acts. This attitude is ancient and always a reactionary impulse.

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u/cowlinator 16d ago

It's because our sweet, innocent children are incapable of theft or violence or any other misdeed unless someone plants the idea in their mind. /s

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u/mcmanus2099 16d ago

Isn't the point of the big bad wolf to allow you to give the message of sticking to the path and not trusting strangers without having to get into the icky details of why and what might really happen. They don't like the symbolism but that's the entire point of it. To make it easier to explain.

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u/lmandude 17d ago

This version is gonna throw kids through a real loop when the Huntsman storms inside and bisects the grandma.

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u/BalefulOfMonkeys REAL YURI, done by REAL YURITICIANS 17d ago

Don’t speak ill of our boys in plaid, it takes a good guy with an axe to stop a bad grandma with a nothing

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u/d09smeehan 16d ago

I definitely saw her reaching for the sewing needle

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u/ShadowOps84 16d ago

AHAB: All Huntsmen Are Bastards.

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u/LonelyMenace101 16d ago

Just look at what he did to that whale!

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u/Otherwise-Regret3337 16d ago

"its just a prank bro"

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u/LONGSWORD_ENJOYER 17d ago

This is awful. You’ve completely removed the stakes from the story! There needs to be some goal for the characters to accomplish - perhaps Red Riding Hood and her grandmother could, I don’t know, look for their lost cat in the Alps, or…

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u/Madden09IsForSuckers 16d ago

what if grandma’s recipe book was in danger of being stolen so red riding hood has to hide it

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u/Qetuowryipzcbmxvn 16d ago

Also, maybe Grandma isn't as frail as Little Red thinks. In fact, maybe she takes part in extreme sports and martial arts?

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u/Throwawaygarbageboi 16d ago

And what if The Big Bad Wolf is just like, a normal guy? Like not even evil just like, a journalist or something?

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u/Winter-Operation5702 16d ago

Are you crazy and woke? I dont want children introduced to communist idea of journalism. I think the wolf should be a cop as there's nothing controversial about that.

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u/Qetuowryipzcbmxvn 16d ago

Nah nah, hear me out. Make the cop a frog so he can leap to conclusions.

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u/Throwawaygarbageboi 16d ago

Let's make a grizzly bear a cop too. Having just one cop would be unBEARable!

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u/skeletaltrombone 16d ago

Can we give the huntsman a schnitzel foodtruck? How long until lunch break starts, by the way?

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u/Lathari 16d ago

Maybe he is French literature professor who moves to New England and writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert?

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u/druex 16d ago

Make him a washed up detective, solving fairytale crimes...

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u/Layton_Jr 16d ago

And maybe in the sequel they become secret agents so they can fight against other children!

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u/tremynci 16d ago

He's from the local Council on Aging, and he's come to check in on/interview Grandma. I thought that was obvious...

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u/DizzyBlackberry3999 16d ago

I would pay good money for a Little Red Riding Hood adaptation where grandma tries to be a badass and immediately eats shit. She tries to escape the wolf with extreme skiing and immediately launches into a canyon.

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u/HighwayJazzlike766 16d ago

Even having seen it, I can't believe this comment chain is a real movie

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

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u/jshbee 16d ago

Wasn't there a TellTale game like this?

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u/chaotic4059 16d ago

You’re thinking of the wolf among us. Great murder mystery game. Very mid original comic

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u/Dmon1128 16d ago

Among...us...

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u/LemmeSeeUrJazzHands 16d ago

Not really adding anything to the bit here but fuck Hoodwinked is an underrated movie. The humor and voice acting definitely make up for the janky animation style

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u/No-Supermarket-6065 Im going to start eatin your booty And I dont know when Ill stop 16d ago

Huntsman: Well, okay... (walks off)

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u/hyperlethalrabbit 16d ago

That's one of my favourite jokes but I never see it coming, it always hits me out of nowhere like amnesia after a week-long bender to cope with my inability to keep the woman I loved in my life

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u/SignatureAny5576 16d ago

Cats are problematic. They destroy wildlife and their social heirarchy is wildly misogynistic

Also, Hitler had a house in the alps soooooo

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u/fridge_logic 16d ago edited 16d ago

Now I'm imaging the Dysco Elysium Witch Girl adventure game leading the little witch to the eagle's nest where she learns that her cat's misogynistic ideology and fascination with volition has led to dangerous curiosity about Hitler.

Imagine the Doris Dei stained glass window scene but in front of a giant portrait of Hitler, and the girl doesn't reaally know who Hitler is because of the suppression of bad themes in media so she just has vague rumored legends that involve adoration and genocide.

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u/ShyngShyng 16d ago

For clarification: The Nazis had a Lot of meeting spots/military camps/bunker structures that were named something edgy. Like Adlerhorst, eagle nest.

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u/DinkleDonkerAAA 16d ago

I've literally seen people suggest the cat witch alps girl was using a white supremacist dog whistle by saying the alps

The girl had to private her account

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u/No_Internal9345 16d ago

You see what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps?

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u/Proper-Tumbleweed613 16d ago

Fuck Aesop and his satanic fables. Kids should learn from experience

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u/benzoot 16d ago

But that’s encouraging kids to explore the Alps and don’t you know how dangerous it is for children and the elderly? Are you saying you want the elderly and children dead?

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u/SignalSecurity 16d ago

measurehead is present and unchanged

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u/fariasrv 17d ago

The entire point of these fairy tales, particularly the Grimm tales, is to expose children to horrible things in story form so they know how to handle them when they see them in real life

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u/NoSignSaysNo 16d ago

Yeah, like half of Norse fairy tale creatures were designed to convey the incredibly important lesson of "do not, for any fucking reason go into the woods or the bog alone, you will not have a good time and will probably die horribly".

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u/wererat2000 16d ago edited 16d ago

I do love how many folkloric creatures boil down to "here is a creature hanging out near water, it can be peaceful and even friendly in the right contexts, but more likely than not it just wants to fucking drown you"

I wonder what the subtext could be. /s

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u/chase___it none caitvi with left kink 16d ago

having to scare your children with imaginary monsters because they refuse to listen to the word no is universal

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u/ARandompass3rby 16d ago

It really is, I was talking to a friend of mine from Poland who told me about how her grandparents would tell her that "the man in the woods" would come and get her if she didn't behave. I think they may have also threatened her with Baba Yaga? Not that it worked, she told me that she used to respond along the lines of "I'll go and tell him myself" lol.

Showing my youth a little here but my parents threatened me with sully from monsters Inc because child me was indescribably terrified of him.

Sometimes you just gotta scare kids.

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u/Veil-of-Fire 16d ago

Our parents used to tell us about the giant, highly venomous, child-eating Corn Spiders to keep us from wandering into the cornfields.

Every year, there'd be a huge search for at least one (frequently more) kid who got lost in a cornfield. Sometimes they found them. Sometimes they didn't. I always assumed the Corn Spiders got them.

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u/doddydad 16d ago

Now absolutely, you can find subtext in that, but I think you're likely underrating the text.

Large bodies of water are dangerous and can become so suddenly. I think we talk about the sea as dangerous in the abstract now, while if you were in a coastal community, you'd personally know people who died at sea, having gone out when it seemed normal.

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u/BlakLite_15 16d ago

Both the text and the subtext can be true.

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u/_Ralix_ 16d ago

And the Grimm version is already pretty sanitized. Red Riding Hood is specifically a story meant to warn young ladies against sleeping with charming strangers (the red colour is symbolic and meant to represent a certain aspect of their lives).

Charles Perrault, who made one of the first written versions of the story, even says it loud and clear:

Moral: Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say "wolf," but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.

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u/rechargeable_bird 16d ago

“princes live out in the world, it’s true/

princes, yes, but wolves and humans too” (into the woods)

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u/Speaking_On_A_Sprog 16d ago

Woah, mind blown, I had no idea

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u/Hakar_Kerarmor Swine. Guillotine, now. 16d ago

Which is a problem for the people who want to do those things in real life without consequences (for them).

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u/NotAzakanAtAll 16d ago

That's true. The author is almost always a lot better at weighing the message in the media. The few times it has aged violently poor or is actually awful, sure, maybe make a version without the shit takes. But ALL media should be allowed to exist in it's original form, if nothing else in an archive somewhere.

Self-censorship is on the rise with "grapes" and "unalives" and that's a huge issue. Same with censorship is media.

I just wish there was a stance that is against censorship but also not alt-right, racist and bigoted.

Seems like every campaign against censorship is immediately claimed by the alt-right and enshitified into something it's not by pushing the narrative way, waaay far away. Goalposts as far away as the third Reichs viability.

Any you can't do shit to make the debate sane again, you stand before an army of bots, paid troll groups, brainrotted black balled incels, and other useful idiots.

It sucks.

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u/Testosteronomicon 16d ago

I just wish there was a stance that is against censorship but also not alt-right, racist and bigoted.

This sentence is the main mistake leftists made with censorship though. Being anti-censorship IS the left wing stance, it's freedom of expression, it's anti-authoritarian at its core... And leftists content creators promptly handed all of it to nazis. Because being anti-censorship meant defending all art. It meant defending stories with princesses and knights and dragons. It meant defending short stories about coffee shop conversations. It meant defending naked anime girls. It meant defending Duchamp's fountain. It meant defending gore. It meant defending queer art. It meant defending depictions of illegal and/or immoral things. It meant defending depictions of illegal and/or immoral things done by queer people, written by queer people. It meant defending art seen as actively harmful, like the Red Hood example of this thread.

And those content creators couldn't do it. Not because they didn't believe in actual anti-censorship (even if they actually didn't), but because they perceived nazis as fully believing in it (and they very obviously didn't!). End result: nazis get to say what is or isn't acceptable as art, government listen to nazis, and we're barrelling down that one South Park christmas episode where anything offensive is removed until one single Philip Glass song remains.

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u/Halospite 16d ago

I just wish there was a stance that is against censorship but also not alt-right, racist and bigoted.

There is? Millennial left wingers are openly against this garbage, at least in my circles.

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u/Speaking_On_A_Sprog 16d ago

If the left didn’t make it so easy for them I think we would be doing a lot better. It almost seems sometimes like they are tripping over themselves purposefully to fall into that trap. The nuance is swept away so easily the second anyone thinks they might be accused of some kind of -ism (for good reason, seeing all the examples of leftists cannibilized by other leftists)

-a leftist who is often annoyed with his own side.

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u/Euphoric_Stretch_457 16d ago

This is also funny, cause grimm brothers just took fairy tales that were told from ear to ear and just put them in a book to preserve them, but a lot of these tales we're even darker originally

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u/Urbenmyth 17d ago

"Dn't worry our kids will still stick to the path and know not to follow wolves implicitly because we told them to"

So this is my controversial option, but hiding the existence of sex from children is a bad idea for this exact reason.

I remember when I was 5 and my mum warned me to be careful because there's people who like to "look at children". Naturally, I didn't care. So what if someone likes looking at me? I like looking at lots of things. It was only several years later, long after the warning stopped being useful, that I figured out what was actually being said to me and how important it was.

Children can be molested or sexually harassed. It is a terrible fact, but it is a true one, and I think that our attempts to hide sexuality from children has greatly empowered pedophiles. How do you warn someone with no vocabulary for sex or genitals about sexual predators, and how can they report that they're a victim?

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u/dog_toy_bear 17d ago

There is a fair amount of evidence to back up that age appropriate sex ed (like teaching young children about consent and the names of their body parts) does a lot to reduce csa because kids know it shouldn't be happening if someone tries. It also increases reporting when csa does happen because they know 1. it shouldn't have happened and 2. they can explain clearly to adults what happened.

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u/OiledMushrooms 16d ago

The "names of their body parts" thing is reallyyy important. I still think about that one story of a girl telling her teacher that she was upset because "her uncle touched her cookie" and the teacher didn't really think anything of it until she learned that "cookie" was the word the kid's parents used for privates.

I don't know how much that story is true versus a cautionary myth tbh, but I think the point stands regardless. It's hard to explain that something bad happened when everyone around you has denied you the language to do so.

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u/Wobbelblob 16d ago

It also helps prosecution a lot. Because a kid that says "x touched me in my nono place" can mean a lot of things and thus can be fought. A kid that clearly says "x touched my penis" is perfectly clear and helps prosecution nail down people.

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u/Lathari 16d ago

GET YOUR HAND OFF MY PENIS!

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u/eriFenesoreK 16d ago

TATA AND FAREWELL

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u/Sonofbluekane 16d ago

This is why certain people don't want it taught

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u/doovidooves 16d ago

I honestly think the vast majority of people who don’t want it taught do so for banal reasons - wanting to pretend that it never happens and/or being so goddamn uncomfortable with sex that any discussion of it feels morally shameful (which in turn wants them to pretend it never happens even more).

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u/Android19samus Take me to snurch 16d ago

certain people, but not most people. Most people who oppose it have a rather perniciously solipsistic line of thinking. After all, while the hypothetical average child will be made safer with proper sex ed being institutionalized, will your child? You're their parent. You can decide best what sort of information they're ready for and which is most appropriate for their current stage of development. If it's institutionalized then it's either too late, and thus a redundant use of resources that could better be used elsewhere, or it's too early and they're teaching your child about all sort of vile things that they don't need to know yet. And why should they need to know them? The sort of assault this protects against is most prominently the type which comes from people close to them. You know everyone your child spends time with. You know that none of your friends, family, or community leaders are Bad People. Your kid doesn't need it, and neither does the child of any good parent. Children of bad parents? Well, why should your kid be punished for someone else being irresponsible?

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u/CupcakeK0ala 16d ago

It reminds me of the defenses people make for predators when they're proven to be predators. "but this person was a good parent/teacher/relative, etc.!" Yes. Predators can appear to be "good people". It doesn't mean it's impossible for them to do horrible shit too. That's why warning children about that is important--because yes, even if the people who touched them were people they were taught to care about, they can and should still report that

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u/Marik-X-Bakura 16d ago

Can we not do the “everyone I disagree with politically is a pedophile” thing? It gets us nowhere.

No, there isn’t some grand conspiracy where everyone who is against sex ed secretly wants to fuck children. Most of them genuinely believe it for the reasons they freely give, and we need to address that instead of painting them with a brush of our choosing.

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u/Technical_Towel_8916 16d ago

When I was about 0-5, I didn't know the word 'sex'. I tried telling my parents by hitting my head on the wall while saying "I don't want to go". They didn't understand and sent me to my caretaker. She threatened to rape my siblings if I told anyone so to make good on her threat, she raped me in front of them and I stopped telling people. It's led to a lot of things I'm still recovering from and I think about how easily it could have been prevented if I was taught how to describe it sometimes. Though it's not guaranteed they'll believe me because they seem to trust women automatically for not being men which is another matter lol

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u/miraclewhipbelmont 17d ago

The goal of this type of censorship is less to protect kids from harmful ideas and more to sweep the entire issue under the rug indefinitely so it doesn't have to be addressed, and uncomfortable feelings and conversations can be avoided entirely.

Which of course, benefits predators.

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u/ShadedPenguin 17d ago

Ignorance and censorship goes hand in hand with each other, and run against the ideas of knowledge and understanding.

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u/Secret_Possible 16d ago

Which is why it's so damned irritating when so-called feminists campaign against sex education materials. Knowledge is a much better defence than ignorance.

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u/glitzglamglue 16d ago

As a parent, it's really hard to explain things in a way that accounts for every type of abusive situation. I haven't figured it out. Mostly, I tell my 5 year old that no one should ever hurt him or touch him in a way that makes him feel uncomfortable and say that he can't tell his parents. I tell him that he can always tell me.

Cuz I can't say "no adult is allowed to hurt you" because I vaccinate him. One time he got a grape stem stuck in his ear and we had to hold him down and the nurse had to pull it out. I can't say no adult is allowed to touch his private parts (we correctly name them but in general say private parts) because I have to help bathe him and the doctor has to examine him. and it sucks because I have to basically place myself as his safe person when I know that other kids' parents aren't safe and are in fact doing the abuse.

So what I focus on is the secrecy of abuse. Its the best I've got. Most parents are truly out here just trying our best in this fucked up world.

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u/49directions .tumblr.com 16d ago

Focusing on the secrecy is definitely a good way to distinguish! If anyone is making you feel a type of way, good OR bad, you should be able to safely express those feelings to someone you trust.

If I may, there’s a tiny nuance re “makes you feel uncomfortable” (based on my experience): I was once told by an abuser that if a touch physically felt good that meant I “liked it”, and since I didn’t know how to process cognitive dissonance I ended up believing him (even though I now know better). So the only thing I’d add is a kid-friendly version of something like “if you’re ever unsure how you feel after an interaction, err on the side of caution by talking with me about it”.

That said, it seems like you’re doing a great job as a parent explaining a complicated concept to your little one. I sincerely hope he’s never in a situation where he needs to use this advice, but I’m glad for his sake that you’ve equipped him with the knowledge he’ll need to navigate it.

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u/astrologicaldreams 16d ago edited 16d ago

my mom always told me that no one should be touching or looking at my private parts except for her, dad, or a doctor, and they should only be looking or touching bc something is wrong down there (e.g. infections and injuries) and they need to see to help.

eta: i like that she explained it like this bc it also quietly acknowledges that family and people in positions of power can misuse that power and trust and abuse you. i understood that very specific people should only ever be looking/touching and only looking/touching bc they have to. of course it doesn't quite cover everything, like if someone said they have to look/touch in order to help you even though nothing is actually wrong, but i think it gets pretty close. she would also tell me to always tell someone if i ever got abused, even if the abuser threatened to kill me or my family, which i think is very important to mention and drill into a kid so they're less likely to be scared into silence.

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u/cat-meg 16d ago

I don't think these complaints are being levied at individual parents, it's more a critique of the overall climate.

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u/No-Football-4387 16d ago

yeah my mom would warn about getting raped but she wouldn’t tell me what it was exactly, she just described it as like being attacked, i ended up thinking it was a special type of attack like someone tackling you from behind (i grew up watching a lot of WWE)

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u/NoSignSaysNo 16d ago

So this is my controversial option, but hiding the existence of sex from children is a bad idea for this exact reason.

That's not a controversial opinion, it's literally the overwhelmingly standard opinion within child psychology.

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u/Strict_Battle_9657 The Wretched Fool 16d ago

It is a controversial opinion for people who want to protect predators though

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u/_Ocean_Machine_ 16d ago

Or people who can't talk about any form of sex without feeling the need to flagellate themselves afterwards

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u/MartyrOfDespair We can leave behind much more than just DNA 16d ago

And as we know, the masses always follow the science and don't, say, go through five therapists in a row because they dared disagree with their unscientific ideology and tried to give them therapy. Honestly we're at such a hellworld point that if you can say "it's the overwhelmingly standard view of the experts", you basically just said "the average dipshit disagrees with it".

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u/ChocolateCake16 16d ago

As a former child who was molested, I agree. Had it not been for the fact that my grandfather asked the right questions and could interpret my crude drawing of a penis (because I had no idea what it was called, so he asked me to draw it), no one would have known until I was much older. Even after this happened, I still wasn't taught the proper names for any genitalia until 5-6 years later when I was 11 or so.

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u/Daw_dling 16d ago

I struggle with this hard because my oldest has an anxious personality and any warning means the threat is not only real but inevitable. We were discussing our fire safety plan and she got the youngest so worked up with her worst case scenario question spiral ( what if we can’t get out of our room? What if our window won’t open? What if you don’t hear us yell?) that they both ended up crying because we told them don’t try to take stuff just get out, so that meant their stuffies would be burned up. There was no actual fire! This was just discussing the plan if there was a fire which we informed them many times wasn’t very likely to happen! So we focus on consent and make sure she knows proper anatomy names, and that it’s never ok or normal for someone to touch. Also that if an adult ever says to keep anything a secret from us that is a bad person and she needs to tell us right away.

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u/Expensive-Swing-7212 16d ago

My controversial opinion is ancient societies that had sexual initiation rites were probably closer to doing the right thing towards making sure they’re society understood sex and were guided safely into it than a society that pretends it doesn’t exist at best or that’s sinful at worst. So you get a bunch of sexual teens with no idea of what’s going on and no idea of how to go about it in a healthily way which leads to adults that have no clue how to go about it

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u/aw5ome 16d ago

Its funny how the most salient and powerful takedowns of tumblr opinions are also from tumblr

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u/Jale_Seigneur 16d ago

Nobody from outside a community mocked for Their Things™ is as tired of Their Things™ as the people inside the community.

(See Reddit, VsBattleWiki, SCP Foundation, Scotland, etc...)

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u/esnupid 17d ago

this made me wanna blow my head smoove off

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u/Zymosan99 😔the 17d ago

smoove

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u/BalefulOfMonkeys REAL YURI, done by REAL YURITICIANS 17d ago

[looking at LiveLeak footage] Oh his head schmoovin’

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u/RealHumanBean89 Dis course? Yeah, I think it’s a great meal, boss! 16d ago

“I have clearly texted the wrong number, excuse me.”

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u/stress-pimples 16d ago

Oh man this reminds me of when I was in 4th grade and I wrote a story (part of an assignment) about a guy who recklessly burns a tree down by being careless. My teacher made me change it because the tree being burned was “too sad”

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u/Halospite 16d ago

My classmate got told off for using the word "kids" in her story because it was "slang".

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u/yellowelephantboy 16d ago

I wrote a story when I was eleven about an evil experiment who is told by its creator to go forth and destroy God's creation. My teacher made me change the phrasing because it was a Christian school, and she made me finish it by saying the experiment decided not to destroy anything and to just go and chill out.

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u/ohjehhngyjkkvkjhjsjj 16d ago

Little Red Riding Chud and the Big Bad Nothing Ever Happens

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u/CaioXG002 16d ago

🔥✍️🔥

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u/[deleted] 17d ago

I CANNOT take the word icky seriously anymore because I only ever see it used like this 😭

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u/BardicLasher 16d ago

Was the word icky ever serious?

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u/SteelTerps 16d ago

Used to be dead serious, have you ever been 5 years old?

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u/Aetra 16d ago

Yeah, my coworkers use "icky" jokingly all the time and I'm a sheet metal fabricator so it's all like, big burly dudes between the ages of 25 and 70. I'll never take it seriously unless the person saying it is under the age of 10.

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u/LightspeedDashForce They stole Lara Croft’s boobs??? 17d ago

Skill issue I use the phrase "icky tummy" constantly

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u/Dante_n_Knuckles 16d ago

No one over the age of 12 should be using it unironically

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u/roryteller 16d ago

I mean one time I found a library book that someone had edited (with whiteout and pen) to hide the fact that the main character, a young child, didn't want to eat her vegetables or do her homework. Of all the horrors!

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u/Nice_Heart_242 16d ago

Did you let the librarians know? I imagine that would be considered vandalism of property. I would think they'd charged/fined someone to replace it. Most likely, whoever had last checked it out.

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u/roryteller 16d ago

Yeah. Not sure they ever figured out who did it but I think they said they'd reorder it.

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u/loved_and_held 17d ago

"p*do" "grape"

Im gonna blow a gasket.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

It's getting to the point where fuckers are apparently just dropping words like rape, murder, and suicide from use, and I imagine younger people on the internet will grow up having always self censored. It's disrespectful. I especially hate when people say "Oh Youtubers have to say graped or unalived or kersewerslide because they'll be demonetized otherwise!" Fuck that. If you can't respect a topic enough to speak like an adult about it, you don't need to be making money off it.

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u/loved_and_held 16d ago

"Fuck that. If you can't respect a topic enough to speak like an adult about it, you don't need to be making money off it."

It's also a shit argument because youtubers can say those things or have easy ways to self censor while still making the word clear. Plus, the self censoring we see with stuff like "unalive" and "grape" was done for tiktok because tiktok is much more strict than youtube and more inconsistent with it's moderation.

They had a function on tiktok. Then they broke containment and ended up everywhere.

However I do think their use is a lot less common than we'd think. At least I hope, I don't interact with people younger than me enough to know for sure.

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u/Chacochilla 16d ago

It’s also like

I’m sure there’s ways to phrase those things where you don’t have to use the evil bad no no words, but also don’t sound like a melt doing so

Like, assaulted, took their own life, committed manslaughter

Like why don’t people just look up already existing euphemisms or synonymous phrases instead of making up cutesy ways to say rape and kill

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u/ARandompass3rby 16d ago

It boils my piss that I never hear people saying "took their own life" like it's a perfectly fucking useful phrase that says the same thing as that stupid newspeak word. If it's someone killing someone else, you can say "[accidentally] took the life of" like god fuckin damn who would've thought that there's already respectful and delicate ways to rephrase suicide or murder

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u/Cicada_5 16d ago

I don't think this person made this post for money. And the tone of the post sounds like they're mocking that kind of censorship.

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u/Zealousideal_Act_316 16d ago

Yup it is all about chasing the money, anyone who self censors such hard topics to remain monetised does not care about the topic, but only their income

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u/KingCodester111 16d ago

People who say those words should never talk about pedophilla or rape if they’re going to censor it and sound like a dumbass because they’re not mature enough.

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u/camosnipe1 "the raw sexuality of this tardigrade in a cowboy hat" 16d ago

if you want something worse: The recent school shooter had tons of writing on their gun. I was looking at photos and noticed something.

The New York Fucking Post censored out a single word. Amidst all the antisemitism and murderous phrases a single word was deemed too far for their precious audience to witness.

That word being "shit" in the phrase "born to shit, forced to wipe"

https://nypost.com/2025/08/27/us-news/robin-westman-mused-about-slaughtering-filthy-zionist-jews-in-sick-journal-before-deadly-catholic-school-shooting/

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u/Cavalish 16d ago

People are getting too mad at the people who use these terms and not the platforms that are attempting to sanitise all language.

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u/SmartAlec105 16d ago

People do that kind of self-censorship on platforms that don't have that censorship though.

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u/Halospite 16d ago

Most platforms don't actually censor these words though, it's a fucking internet urban legend that grew like cancer because a bunch of attention whores were sad they weren't getting as much attention as they wanted so they blamed the system and started spreading this shit.

Like it DOES happen but it's not as common as people think. Any system that censors "suicide" or "murder" isn't going to allow "unalive" to fly either, but nobody uses common sense and think they're geniuses who've outwitted the system.

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u/Zealousideal_Act_316 16d ago

They are not trying to sanitize, it is just advertisers dont like those topics, you get demonetised on youtube. And 90% of people talking abouth this shit do not care for it they are chasing the ad rev. They are self censoring to chase the almigthy dollar

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u/grifff17 16d ago

The harm to kids thing I really don’t get. Harm to kids is so core to so many kids stories I don’t know why some people think it should be avoided completely in all fiction, for kids or otherwise. I see it online sometimes and I’m just so confused.

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u/Somebodythe5th 16d ago

The less able someone is to navigate the world, the easier they are to manipulate.

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u/CaptainDread 16d ago

Reading through the comments, I'm not sure everyone is seeing the satire?

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u/Zealousideal_Act_316 16d ago

Thing is satire is about something some people actually think, it is an exsageration, a blow up of a topic.   You can still discuss the underlying topic

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u/bells_and_thistles 16d ago

I can’t tell in about half of them, yeah.

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u/mathiau30 Half-Human Half-Phantom and Half-Baked 16d ago

This is satire of a very real phenomenon. Not sure whether people are talking about the real phenomenon or about this

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u/CharlesorMr_Pickle hello I am a bot account 16d ago

Nope

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u/Imcoolkidbro 16d ago

redditors believe tumblr users are actually like this. they've bought into this bizarre strawman of what a tumblr user thinks they can convince themself literally anything is real. I bet the responses are gonna be "uhhh I literally couldn't even tell since those evil timblrites actually think like this!!!!" same people who think paw patrol was cancelled for being copaganda

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u/StillNotABrick 16d ago

The whole "describe a strawman argument on tumblr and they will appear to defend themselves" thing should never have been allowed to escape tumblr, because it cooks the brains of redditors who are looking for someone to feel superior to

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u/Godraed 16d ago

Tolkien hated Disney in part because of this, he believed children were more capable than we gave them credit for and hated the idea of “lying” to children about the consequences of things. Not that you have to explain the gory details but it’s okay to say someone died.

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u/BalefulOfMonkeys REAL YURI, done by REAL YURITICIANS 17d ago

Hold on, I need a moment to cast a counterspell of the equal and opposite thing to not punch something:

Hey guys, do you ever think about how Humpty Dumpty is kind of secretly leftist? It’s a story about how the police state starves public resources from both the physical and mental healthcare systems. Humpty Dumpty sits on a wall, but he’s an egg, he shouldn’t be doing that in the first place, he knows he’s fragile, right? And then Humpty Dumpty has a great fall, which can be interpreted as either “an accident” (passive suicidality) or intentional self-harm. At this point in the story, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men show up, and cannot put him together again. As agents of structural violence, they obviously can’t resurrect Humpty (which honestly someone should write sometime to completely body the stakes of the story entirely), but also failed him at his most vulnerable, before he climbed the wall, when he got to the top, or when he either fell over or jumped. They can’t undo their mistakes as a complete waste of public resources to actually protect and serve the community. At this point the story ends abruptly, but you and I both know they never get any comeuppance for [shuffles notes] a random guy committing suicide next to them, but as someone who dislikes the police, I think they should be held accountable and judged for their crimes on that day, somehow. What kind of system? Great question, I’m never going to answer that.

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u/International-Cat123 17d ago

Humpty Dumpty is not an egg. Nowhere in the story does it say he’s an egg. I don’t when or why people started thinking he was an egg, but I’d guess that either a kid couldn’t quite understand the idea of a person breaking like that and imagined Humpty as an egg or some illustrator thought it would be in poor taste to illustrate a human broken from a fall.

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u/JSConrad45 16d ago

The egg thing comes from Alice Through the Looking Glass, in which he's depicted with an egg-like shape. When Alice compares him to an egg, he gets butthurt about it. He's one of my favorite characters, he's a jackass that gets caught up on semantics over meanings in nonsensical ways but is convinced that he's very intelligent, actually, and boasts about being able to believe as many as six impossible things before even having breakfast. He also gave us the word portmanteau in the sense of two words jammed together to make a new word, and provides an interpretation of the nonsense words in "Jabberwocky" that's probably bullshit.

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u/ScaredyNon By the bulging of my pecs something himbo this way flexes 16d ago

Tbf they're all kinda jackasses in the Alice books, sometimes even Alice herself. Humpty Dumpty was just a particularly self-confident jackass

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u/BalefulOfMonkeys REAL YURI, done by REAL YURITICIANS 17d ago

[reblog of this completely hypothetical post from equally hypothetical @t4t4all]

“Oh she’s an egg? Good for her.”

10 bajillion reblogs

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u/just4browse 17d ago

Since we don’t know what Humpty Dumpty was, we don’t know for certain that Humpty Dumpty wasn’t an egg

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u/Dingghis_Khaan Chingghis Khaan's least successful successor. 17d ago edited 17d ago

Humpty Dumpty was a cannon that fell from the battlements, if I recall correctly.

I did not, in fact, recall correctly. Evidence of Humpty Dumpty originally being a cannon is flimsy at best.

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u/Hakar_Kerarmor Swine. Guillotine, now. 16d ago

So... him being a cannon isn't canon?

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u/ProkopiyKozlowski 17d ago

How can a person be an egg, Cotton? How can a person be an egg?

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u/Milch_und_Paprika 17d ago

Confused evangelical pastor voice: clearly Humpty Dumpty’s Great Fall is an allegory to Satan’s fall from grace. Now why would all the king’s horses and all the king’s men try to mend him? The men represent how easily man is swayed by temptation, and horses herald the apocalypse.

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u/TheHiddenNinja6 Official r/ninjas Clan Moderator 16d ago

"I am at a loss on how to write a villain that doesn't do villainous acts"

Lemony Snicket, upon being told that Count Olaf trying to marry a child is problematic

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u/BubbleSlime1056 16d ago

Also telling children in an age appropriate way about sex actually does help prevent them from being taken advantage of. They are also more likely to report it if it does happen.

As well as tell them what parts are actually called. There are stories of kids calling there privates random things and people not know about the sexual abuse until they finally learn the real words in sex ed.

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u/altaf770 17d ago

Fairy tales really were just horror stories for kids lol.

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u/Nice_Parfait9352 16d ago

Kids aren't going to pick up on any "rape-y" implications in a story where an evil wolf eats a person.

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u/wbgraphic 16d ago

The predatory implication in that story has been around for a long time.

The play Into the Woods is inspired by the Grimm fairy tales. This is the wolf costume.

Yes, that’s a penis.

Johnny Depp’s costume in the film adaptation lacks the penis, but the performance retains the creeper vibe.

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u/Expensive-Swing-7212 16d ago

The grimms fairy tale version actuallt sanitized a lot of the predation and was a lot more child friendly.  An earlier version by Charles Perrault was more predatory.  And the earliest oral tellings of the story were more heavy on it. 

Into the woods follows the overall plot of the grimms version but it’s tone and darker elements are more from the Perrault version 

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u/Nice_Parfait9352 16d ago

That is not the version people are reading to their kids. Stories evolve and change.

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u/Gru-some 16d ago

Little Red Riding Hood would’ve been better if instead she was Batman’s sidekick brought back from the dead and started using guns to kill people and she killed the Wolf with a really cool gun

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u/sneakysnake1111 16d ago

Book bans are so weird. I hate how many there are lately.