remetheus

I keep seeing Very Smart People stating in an authoritative tone that Watership Down was ~obviously~ not a children's book and it is very annoying to me that people will make that assertion so confidently while either not having bothered to read anything about the book itself or else just leaving out the inconvenient fact that the author himself would disagree.

I think about how as a ten year old, which was around when I first read Watership Down I had already read large narrative chunks of the Bible. Since I was four years old, I had heard a story about a child killing a man with a rock and cutting his head off to show off to people and another story about a man being tortured for days and...

like, Watership Down was fucked up and dark but I think the thing that makes people balk at it is the idea that they don't expect it to be challenging.

There's this quote from Chesterton, something to the effect of 'the child doesn't need the fairy story to teach them about dragons; they know the dragon since the first time you turn off the light. But the fairy story tells them of the knight that knows how to slay dragons.' And I think about that a lot when I think about the horror in kids' stories that people recoil from

The idea that kids in general should not be exposed to... anything, really, but especially not violence, death, sex, anything we've declared "adult" is incredibly modern and frankly ridiculous. Until very recently your average kid would be familiar with slaughtering animals for food, hunting, animal husbandry, human death in the form of young siblings failing to thrive. Kids who were insulated from stuff like that were a tiny minority of nobles. Adams was born in 1920 and survived WWII, the idea that kids could be insulated from basic realities of life probably struck him as silly.

I grew up hunting and doing things like slaughtering chickens and helping slaughter and butcher pigs. Kids are fine with this stuff and can confront it quite easily with support; it's adults that are terminally freaked out by everything.

I would argue that it's not that adults are terminally freaked out by things but rather, adults who are in some way, not able to relate to the emotions of the reality they live in, as if they were, say, alienated as if by some sort of system of capitalism