Re:A Survival Guide to Medieval Fairy Tales
by _carbyau_ on Thursday November 26, 2020 @05:55PM
(#25224142)
The world being harsh is true.
And I agree that modern western society seems to simply expect bad things not to happen. Whether it is bullying, other human-human violence or "business can't be let fail".
A simple look at the animal kingdom tells you this is not a sane "expectation".
In this instance, I wasn't planning to censor the story out of existence. Just perhaps wait a bit longer than the other stories would require.
Interesting theory on the mental illness. I won't entirely subscribe to it as I think there are a wide variety of illnesses with a wide variety of causes. Whether this is the "likely source of a lot" remains to be proven I think.
If you raise children in a bubble of safety and only throw them out into the real world at adulthood, they have many problems.
Scary stories are a safe way to introduce developing humans to the realities of the world so they are prepared for them.
Biologically it is the likely source of a lot of mental illness. Basically your brain tunes itself towards the expectations set in its early environment, if the adult environment is quite a lot different than the childhood one, the feedback systems tuned to keep things on the level can’t cope with the foreign environment and you get mental illness.
It wasn’t so long ago that wandering off into the forest would likely get you murdered or worse.