but in practice I find myself emotionally attached to a lot of children's fantasy even though it does tend to oversimplify, I think.
Oh, definitely, me too. But at the same time...I think that if there had been more moral complexity to the average children's fantasy when I was a kid, I would have read more children's fantasy (instead I read a lot of adult SFF, of varying quality).
The real problem I have with so much of children's fantasy is the gratuitous cruelty of the endings.
This, too. I get the impression with some types of children's books that the authors have...not found adulthood kind, and perhaps didn't find childhood kind, so they're trying to, I don't know, recreate something that never existed? But they know it's not real, and so there's this edge of bitterness or nastiness to all of it. (Roald Dahl is a prime example.) I'm not sure, really.
no subject
Oh, definitely, me too. But at the same time...I think that if there had been more moral complexity to the average children's fantasy when I was a kid, I would have read more children's fantasy (instead I read a lot of adult SFF, of varying quality).
The real problem I have with so much of children's fantasy is the gratuitous cruelty of the endings.
This, too. I get the impression with some types of children's books that the authors have...not found adulthood kind, and perhaps didn't find childhood kind, so they're trying to, I don't know, recreate something that never existed? But they know it's not real, and so there's this edge of bitterness or nastiness to all of it. (Roald Dahl is a prime example.) I'm not sure, really.