|
Anyone else remember reading Tales Of A Fourth Grade Nothing when they were young? It recently popped up in my head and even if you consider that it was written in 1972, and the titular 'Fudge' was two and a half years old, man, that kid was just an rear end in a top hat and an unthinking one. Okay, kids do nonsense and they can grow out of it. So maybe we can forgive stuff like screwing up his dad's business dinner, or jumping off some playground equipment and his brother getting blamed for it despite the fact he lost track of him for like ten seconds, or being a brat and deciding he didn't want to eat any more. Then we get stuff like him vandalizing his brother's visual aids for a school project...just because. But none of that tops when, at the end of the book, Peter, who got a baby, small turtle at the start of the book (which he names Dribble), having won it at a birthday competition, Fudge, for essentially no reason at all (or a dumb kid reason that basically translates to 'No Reason at all'), decides to eat Dribble. Yes, he just swallows the turtle (again, very small). And of course, all the attention and care goes to the brat who did this, first to get the turtle out, and then to celebrate him being 'all better', never mind he killed his older brother's pet. And most annoying of all, since Fudge was essentially the main character, the other books about the same family all got named after him. It's like even reality awards the brat. He kept being a brat in later books too; in the sequel he kicks his new teacher hard in the shin and then climbs on top of a tall drawer solely because she won't call him Fudge (his actual name is Farley, he hates it) and then at the end of it he and a friend of his goes off on an adventure without telling either of their parents, in something that probably doesn't seem so bad to the young readers who were supposed to read this book but would probably utterly terrify most parents. Though even Fudge gets outstripped by that bitch Sheila in the TV movie based on the third book. Fudge is a young child: Sheila's a pre-teen and knows what she's doing.
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2024 03:46
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 18:34 |
|
|
counterfeitsaint posted:I read those books and the only thing I can remember was later he got a dog and named the dog Turtle in memory of his turtle. Toddlers do do lots of stupid things. There's not even any real malice in them, because they don't understand that concept yet. But even so, everything Fudge does falls under 'This can be fixed' or 'This can be water under the bridge' or 'This can be taken back'. But committing to swallowing a small turtle, especially since the kid never gives any sort of reason, not even a "I wanted to try to do it"? That's not a 'can be taken back' thing. But you're right. While I can't expect the parents to have predicted their kid might do that (You can predict that kids want to play with matches, it's a lot harder to predict 'This kid will eat his brother's pet...just because'), they probably should have punished him, not rewarded him for being 'all better' once the turtle is extracted (IIRC, they give him castor oil, and milk of magnesia, and prune juice, so I'm guessing they had him poop the turtle out) and then giving the older brother a dog as a "Sorry" consolation. Then again, book's over fifty years old. Things were different back then.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2024 09:13
|
|
|
This thread is now the 'Talk about childhood books in general' thread. Something else that's come to my mind, and like the Fudge thing, this isn't new to my adult brain. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Okay, Golden Ticket contest, saintly main character Charlie gets one, the other four are gotten by 'bad kids'. These bad kids? Augustus Gloop, who's an avatar of sheer gluttony and found his ticket because he eats so much chocolate every day that his mother said it was inevitable he'd find one, and he literally found it the day after the contest was announced. Seeing how he's represented in the book and first film really shows how much the scale of is considered 'morbidly obese' has changed, especially in the Americas. Veruca Salt, an incarnation of 'spoiled rich terror', who basically had her father buy her a golden ticket by having him buy truckloads of chocolate bars and turn his factories into bar opening centers until they found one. Definitely the worst of the 'bad kids', for various reasons. Then we have Violet Beauregard, who is a 'bad kid' because...she chews gum. What? Even as a kid I was 'That's not a bad thing'. Is this some cultural change where chewing gum was once seen as a sign of delinquency and moral failing, like leather jackets? And finally we have Mike Teevee, who is probably more of an avatar of what the writer Roald Dahl disliked in entertainment (television), as he's so obsessed with television it's honestly amazing he managed to obtain one of the bars that had the golden ticket: all the other kids at least put forth some kind of effort to find them, Charlie included. I'll note that Dahl wasn't the only kids book author who was severely down on television: this thread brought up My Teacher Is An Alien series, and a plot device in that series is that aliens didn't like how fast humanity was advancing, so they introduced television to humanity to cause a societal 'brain-numbing' and slow them down, or something like that, it was revealed in the third book. So all the kids are 'hoisted' by their sins. Gloop is so greedy he drinks chocolate right out of a chocolate river like a four legged animal, falls in, gets stuck in a pipe, and shot off into Wonka's pipe works. Violet insists on chewing an experimental piece of gum that tastes like a full course meal, but somehow the last part causes the human body to literally balloon into a berry transformation. Veruca wants a squirrel that Wonka has a bunch of, and tries to force the issue, and the squirrels toss her in the rubbish chute (her parents swiftly follow because they are stupid), with Wonka hoping the incinerator is turned off that day. And Mike Teevee, having not learned anything from what happened to Violet, forces himself into Wonka's experimental 'sent chocolate by television' system and gets shrunk down to only a few inches tall. Then at the end of the book we briefly see all the kids again, confirming none of them died, but there's one glaring aspect of each of their fates. Gloop arguably comes out of it better, as he's now thinner/thin, because 'he got squeezed in the pipe', which isn't how biology works but whatever, and that probably hasn't fixed his overeating. But Violet and Mike get incredibly raw deals: Teevee was sent to be 'stretched back to size', but when next seen he's 'nearly ten feet tall and as thin as a wire', with Wonka saying 'They overstretched him, those foolish Oompa Loompas' (he also says that they can feed him special vitamins to 'fatten him up', but still), he's now seemingly permanently deformed because, man Roald Dahl sure thought television was horrible. And Violet has been successfully 'de-juiced'...but her skin turned purple during the process, and it's still purple, which Wonka outright says "That's what she gets for chewing that awful gum all day". But the worst one, the one who really could use a lesson in life to keep her from growing up into something just as bad, Veruca Salt? Her punishment is she and her parents are utterly covered in garbage. Okay yeah that's drat unpleasant. But that's a lot more addressable than 'is now permanently purple' and 'might now be freakishly tall for the rest of his life'. I do wonder what Dahl was thinking, and if he had more British 'upper crust is superior' in his subconscious than he realized.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2024 07:33
|
|
|
Powered Descent posted:The Girl Who Owned a City - A sudden plague kills everyone on Earth over the age of about twelve. The children all have to survive on their own, and they do start to band together, but then those bands start murdering each other for food. Ah yes. I remember being VERY confused by the ending of the book (basically, the female main character supposedly so effortlessly dissects the motivations and ways of the main villain that he and his whole 'evil gang' clear out of 'the city', or something like that?). Later I read that the book is basically Objectivist propaganda, which, reviewing certain plot details now, I can see. Powered Descent posted:I only learned the movie existed just now, but I also haven't read the book in like thirty years. I'd have to track both of them down before I could compare them. I went and checked Wikipedia for both. The plot between them varies a great deal. I'd say like 30 percent of the book actually makes it into the movie. Some of that is probably due to 40 years passing between the book's original publishing and the film, though. Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Feb 26, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2024 04:50
|
|
|
teen witch posted:Judy Blume wrote Blubber and that book was loving ROUGH. It’s great but it’s so hard to get through. I was returning to this thread to post that when I remembered it. JESUS CHRIST, even for young adult melodrama, Blubber is basically 'young teenage girls are innate psychopathic sadists who once they decide they want to destroy someone for fun, induce a torture routine that dictator secret police would take notice of', backed up by sheer utter banality. The main tormentor, Wendy, is basically shown to have no scruples or actual beliefs at all: she stooges out two of her so-called friends because, well, we never find out, probably because she'd find it funny, and when one of them finally puts her foot down, she drops a racial slur in regards to that person's (Chinese) best friend. And just to top it off, no one learns anything, no one really gets punished for their awful behavior, the adults are completely useless, and by the end there's just been a bunch of musical chairs in regards to 'friendships', when it's been demonstrated that to this vicious lot, 'friendship' is mostly just a series of power based transactions. In the days of cyber bullying and much greater awareness of suicide, it basically reads as the equivalent of splatterpunk horror for young female social interaction. Either be a monster perfect alpha nightmare bitch who has all the power, or pray you never draw their ilk's attention, or else your life will be hell and there will be nothing you can do to prevent it. The worst part is, it's not like the book is WHOLLY unrealistic, because I'm sure plenty of people have stories about how monstrous teenagers of both sexes, with their not yet proper developed empathy brain centers, can be, and just how banally (really, that's what gets me the most, the BANALITY of the acts) they can act if they're very slow to develop them or, for one reason or another, just don't. I recall a story (so, pure hearsay but whatever) of someone who went to a bad school, there was a feud between two older teenage girls over a boy, one was pregnant, and the other when there was some big distraction (I think a legit fire?) decided this was the best time to attack/'get back' at her 'enemy', which she did by attacking the heavily pregnant girl on the stairs and deliberately stomping/jumping on her belly to attempt to kill the unborn child. Just so she could hurt her 'rival', completely oblivious to just how far over the line and 'you can't take this back' such an action can/could be. But, again, this is a story heard secondhand so it could well be wholly made up, but I think it says it all that you can't dismiss the possibility that a teenage girl could be that ignorantly monstrous.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2024 01:26
|
|
|
The Bible posted:Growing up in the 80's sucked. Eh, you're right that these people exist. But I think personal pain and bad experience colors our ability to assess just how many of them there are. Bad experiences loom very large in our thought processes, after all. So I don't think 'most' people are like that. Heck I think it's a minority, maybe even a minority of a minority. Of course, that does one absolutely no good if you're the victim of this minority. Then again, I probably have a little TOO much empathy myself.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2024 02:48
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 18:34 |
|
|
No idea if it's middle school reading of any sort, in class or found by one's own self or whatnot, but I recently found out that the author of Picnic at Hanging Rock supposedly wrote a chapter that explained the deep mystery of the book. And it's probably best that unlike Clockwork Orange, that chapter was cut entirely. You want to know why? Here's a hint: I suspect perhaps the worst episode of Star Trek Voyager was inspired by the 'what really happened'. redshirt posted:I remember surreptitiously reading "Are you there God, it's me, Margaret". All I remember about that book is that it presented young teenage women as really, REALLY wanting to have their first period, because it meant they were now more adult, or something. I wager a lot of adult women would probably be wanting to tell the girls to enjoy the timeframe when they don't have to deal with a menstrual cycle.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2024 09:44
|
|