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Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

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Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#101

Post by spacechild1 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #76
arjie wrote: post #15

When I was a child in India, the fairy tale books that you could get easily were a bunch of Eastern European ones: Russian, Karelian, that sort of thing. And they were full of crazy stuff, man. The cossacks were constantly getting their heads cut off and this and that. I went back to India a year ago, and one of the things I made sure to bring back were my copies of those books (and the Journey to the West translatio…

You’d love the original sleeping beauty. It’s got rape, infanticide, cannibalism, all of it. 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.

You mean the versions of Charles Perraults? These are indeed interesting. According to wikipedia, the Grimm brothers did not even use the original sources for "Rotkäppchen" and "Dornröschen" and rather relied on second-hand retellings.

As a side note, there is also a fair share of cannibalism in Grimm's "Schneewittchen" (= "snow white"): the evil queen tells the hunter to kill Schneewittchen and cut out her lungs and liver so that the queen can cook and eat them. The hunter, however, has pity for Schneewittchen and kills a boar instead. The queen proceeds to cook and eat the boar's lungs and liver, thinking it is Schneewittchen's. Only after the meal the magic mirror reveals the truth.

The death of the evil queen is also pretty brutal: at the wedding of Schneewittchen and the prince, the queen is forced to wear shoes filled with glowing coals and dance until she faints and dies.

For some reason, the Disney version decided to omit these parts of the story :-D

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#102

Post by spacechild1 »

virtualritz wrote: post #97

On that note, there is a recent live action Pinocchio film [1] that is very faithful to the book and absolutely magical; with Roberto Benigni playing Geppetto no less. It has some highly entertaining scathing reviews on Amazon of not being family-safe and faithful to "the original" from people who think Pinocchio was invented by Disney and use the animated movie as a reference for their critiques. As hilarious as it…

Wow, thanks for the tip!

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#104

Post by [deleted] »

rob74 wrote: post #50
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #8

Some of these things described as "weirder" really aren't. For example, Pinocchio burning his feet off and getting them replaced by Gepetto - this is a comical example of things implied by the story premise. We have a child carved of wood, a flesh and blood child burns off their feet is a tragedy, but carved of wood we make new feet, hah hah! Not saying this particular incident is to be expected exactly, but events o…

It's "weird" if you compare it with modern-day "child-safe" stories/comics/movies. It's definitely not weirder or more shocking than its contemporaries or predecessors. Here in Germany, the most well-known ones from that era are probably Grimms' Fairy Tales ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales ), Struwwelpeter ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter ) and Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz ( https:…

[deleted]

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#105

Post by holgerschurig »

arjie wrote: post #15

When I was a child in India, the fairy tale books that you could get easily were a bunch of Eastern European ones: Russian, Karelian, that sort of thing. And they were full of crazy stuff, man. The cossacks were constantly getting their heads cut off and this and that. I went back to India a year ago, and one of the things I made sure to bring back were my copies of those books (and the Journey to the West translatio…

If you have a collection of children tales from the Grimm brothers... then this is already watered down.

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.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#106

Post by anbotero »

gchamonlive wrote: post #100
yowo wrote: post #75

> This is, again, a children's book. Children are capable of understanding cruelty, pain, death, suffering, in young age, overprotectiveness is why we have many >20 y/o people who can't speak for themselves and are overly shy.

> overprotectiveness is why we have many >20 y/o people who can't speak for themselves and are overly shy. Is this even true or is it just your personal impression?

I'd like numbers/evidence on it too, but for my own generation, I compared my cousins for years precisely about overprotectiveness, and those who were only protected against extreme imminent danger have succeeded in life way further (for their starting conditions, socially and economically) than those who had my aunts all over them not letting them fall and have scrapes.

Anecdotally, again, the parents of those who did NOT fall on dirt were much more wealthy, so these cousins of course inherited (so to speak, their parents aren't dead) the wealth and status, but gosh, they do everything they are told to do, what to study, etc. While those who did fall frequently when babies these days have generated about half of the wealth the others inherited and they are vocal, really nice professionals and of course awesome people to spend time with.

Girls were more protected than boys, regardless of everything else.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#109

Post by fractallyte »

moravak1984 wrote: post #64
fractallyte wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the Claude "indications"? Because there's a danger now that any writing (human or otherwise) can be labeled LLM-produced. So we need accurate heuristics, or none at all.

The copy on the main page gives a first clue. "A daily reading club for language learners" available on 7 languages, on a .club domain... Now, look at the number of books on each language. Does it sound reasonable that a no-name startup with no contact details (except an email to an aktivlang.com domain that redirects to storica.club) will invest in a serious effort to human-translate and adapt that many books to lan…

Many (human) translators use DeepL (https://www.deepl.com) in their daily jobs. It employs deep learning (hence the name), but not necessarily LLMs. And it's way better than Google Translate for many languages.

So this offers an alternative, legitimate, route to exactly the website content you're suspicious of.

Re: Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered

#110

Post by pwdisswordfishq »

ffsm8 wrote: post #90
47282847 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really true? I find that more and more TV series have a lot more gruesome elements in there nowadays, also ones aimed at not-only-adults like Stranger Things for example. And horror movies moved from being a niche thing to Hollywood.

I guess I was too unclear with my comment... Because I can see were you're coming from. Eg. BBCs Black Mirror - which is obnoxiously turning out to be more of a prediction then a cautionary tale - is definitely in the range of "darker content" in the vain I was talking about. But the target demographic is adults. The old stories are meant to relate to you. The whole reason they were being told to very very young kids…

Black Mirror was on Channel 4, not BBC.
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