Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

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.

These brothers traveled in Towns and collected the tales that the adult told to each other, e.g. when spinning wool or whatever boring but necessary winter job they had. They called their first collection "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" (children and house tales). The children aimed ones where ... more or less ... okay. Being on the cruel site, of course. But the ones not aimed children could be quite explicit or sexy-hexy --- at least for the times. Small kids probably didn't get most things.

The german wikipedia e.g. writes "Die Texte wurden von Auflage zu Auflage weiter überarbeitet, teilweise „verniedlicht“ und mit christlicher Moral unterfüttert. " which I translate as: the texts were edited from edition to edition, belittled/diminished and bolstered with christian morality" --- the latter probably because most of the editorial work happened in Kassel, which at the time was hugenotic evangelical.

Since the Grimms played a remarkable role in the german language, there is LOTS of academic literate on then, their german words dictionary, their tales collection. So you dive as deep into it as you want.

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.

When I was a pre-teen I found a book of Indian fairytales in a library. It was a translation, it was thick, the stories were few pages each, easy to read and beautifully illustrated. The content however was terrifying. So much violence, greed, poverty and suffering. The retribution when it was dispensed was as satisfying as it was over-the-top cruel. Eye-gouging was like an entry level option.

It was very long time ago, don't remember any details, but I still shudder remembering it.

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.

Do you mean in Indian and Eastern European folk tales? Interesting! I should read more of those (I'm familiar with the usual suspects, but I'm sure I'm missing lots).

If I'm ever magically transported to a classic folk tale like Grimm's, this is my survival guide. Not fool-proof, but good enough:

- Always be kind to strangers, especially old men and women.

- Do not make promises lightly, but when you do, always honor them. Especially if you promised something to an animal that can, bizarrely, speak.

- Do not accept gifts from strangers, and do not follow strange old ladies into their homes.

- Always share what you have with others, e.g. food. If a stranger asks for a favor, always say yes and don't ask for anything in return.

- Do not go into the locked room / open the box they told you not to. You'll live a possibly ignorant but long and happy life.

- Do not mock anyone who looks strange or hideous.

- Always respect your parents and do not lie to them.

- (This is the hardest one) Always be the youngest son / daughter.

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.

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.

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.

Is this even true or is it just your personal impression?

This is an obviously AI-generated site. There is no interest on correctness, just "engagement".

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.

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.

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.

An interesting anecdote, in France Pipi Longstockings was heavily censored until the 90s because it was viewed as promoting disobedience. Naturally that made it so dull that nobody wanted to read it, so French people (at least those who were children then) generally don't know pipi. I only found out about all this when we moved to Sweden and my French partner had never heard of pipi, which I couldn't believe.

On one hand, if we want the children to grow up into the better world, and for them to keep making it better as adults, perhaps we should set up in their minds more examples of the better world, than of the worse kind of the world. Sounds somewhat reasonable?

On the other hand, there is this "shattered assumptions theory" of psychological trauma: that such traumas are caused by the reality violently shattering one of three core assumptions, one of which is "overall benevolence of the world". So it can be argued that the more you try to shield children from the unpleasantness, the more traumatized their experience will be when they inevitably meet it; vice versa, someone's who never really assumed the world is all the benevolent ("yeah, there are nice parts of it, but you have to maintain and upkeep them") can't have that assumption shattered since he never held it.

One of the main themes of Lovecraft's work is that a man is alone in a vast, uncaring universe filled with terrible, powerful, and unknown things. Which is factually true, of course, and is not really that scary of a thought — unless you're a devout Christian who had a sudden crisis of faith, got interested in astronomy, and then lived through WWI. In this case having a benevolent God who made the world for its beloved children replaced by an empty mechanistic universe where life has sprang up mostly accidentally is indeed quite a traumatic experience. Others would those "things the man weren't meant to know" quite unpleasant, sure, but being driven to madness simply because apparently the rest of the universe doesn't revolve around humanity? Yeah, we knew that already, it's not news.

Could you elaborate on this?

TL;DR heavily moralistic stories are probably more relevant in a society where you're commuting to a factory at 9 or 12, vs modern society where your education continues into the mid 20s for many and the 5 or 6 year degree being more common than 4 these days.

Yes. And we gave children Disney and television or Netflix, with only violence, with, when existing, a dumbed down plot.

Pinocchio is a selfish brat and that's a central tenet of his redemption arc.

He was ported to Russian too but they called him Burattino (Italian for 'puppet').

The image of burratino goes back hundreds of years before the story was ever written. He was one of the Zanni characters alongside other lower-class mischevious, comedic 'naughty' (anti-authority) characters like Harlequin.

Pinocchio is mean, undisciplined, hedonistic, disrespectful, naive, and, of course, a liar. As soon as he is created, he runs away and behaves selfishly and impulsively.

Then he pays for each flaw with scars. The story shows him learning these lessons on his own wooden skin.

It is a moral story in the deepest sense. It shows what feels to me almost like "forbidden" knowledge. There is no magical thinking in it; it is not trying to preach "Doing bad things is bad, full stop". Instead, the author shows realistic consequences and the full messiness of being in the world. It shows exactly how naivety can result in exploitation (the Fox and the Cat stealing from him after promising him easy riches), laziness in humiliation (skipping school and ending up forced to perform for strangers; he loses his agency and is released only by Mangiafuoco's arbitrary mercy), vanity in manipulation (he is steered by praise, attention, and promises of fame), dishonesty in isolation (his lies literally disfiguring him in front of others, making him ridiculous and impossible to hide), and hedonism in literal dehumanization (Pleasure Island turning boys into donkeys).

It is quite rare for a children's book to be so honest about all the vile things in the world, and to show so directly that these things exist and that their consequences are not clean or neat either.

It also shows how we learn as humans. We do not start out good or bad and stay that way; we are not born "finished". We start as little monsters, full of impulses and feelings we cannot control or do not yet know how to interpret. Yet we learn by acting on them and seeing where they lead us. We are messy creatures, and Pinocchio makes it visible. I believe reading it made me a more robust person with a more sophisticated view of the world.

Which Penguin edition is this?

I've stopped relying on third-party translations because it's common for people to editorialise or miss subtleties, especially in social media... but even professional journalists.