news

yeah i think hunger games is exactly the same as like a sesame street movie you're so right.

I love it when hexbears are this fucking sassy over the most ridiculous shit

Do you think Sesame Street is intended for 12 year olds? It's for kids who are like 2 - 5. There are many differences in children as they develop, meaning "children's media" is a pretty broad umbrella and it would be very unusual to have something that is seriously targeting everyone from 2 - 17. Sesame Street is for children and Hunger Games is for children (Is this strange to you? It was extremely popular in middle and high schools), but that doesn't mean they're for the same children.

yeah i think hunger games is exactly the same as like a sesame street movie

I didn't say that. Sesame Street is for babies. Hunger Games is for children. Those are different things.

calling demon slayer capeslop could be a pretty funny bit though lol

It's not a bit, that is literally the American equivalent of shonen manga. Easy to read action slop for 12 year old boys.

can you please give me an example of something more morebid than finding your entire family slaughtered by a demon in a ronald dahl book?

I said "gruesome" because that's more pertinent to the age rating than something being conceptually dark. For example, in Dahl's telling of Cinderella, one of the stepsisters hacks her own foot apart with a knife to get the stub to fit into the glass slipper. "Revolting Rhymes," where that scene is from, has a lot of other stuff like that.

I generally wouldn't say that Dahl's work is all that conceptually dark, it's mostly in the direction of shock, but for example there's an aside in "The Witches" about a girl who is trapped in a painting which stays in the possession of her parents, who watch her age within the painting over the course of years (changing position, implying that she is conscious even though she only appears at a given time as a static image) until eventually she stops appearing, implicitly ending up as a corpse that has fallen out of view.

But you can find no shortage of material that is aimed at children that is much conceptually darker as well, most obviously in historical fiction (look at many stories about the Civil War or WWII) and semi-historical fiction like the Book Thief, but I'd even consider Coraline to be much darker at times than that scene in Demon Slayer. Gaiman (who I think is a pretty good author but, besides being personally monstrous, also just fucking sucks sometimes as an author when he's not writing for children) has a lot of work that's pretty dark, another example being Graveyard Book, which I'd say skews on the younger side of YA but has more or less the expected level of morbidness, starting with the protagonist's family being killed not by a demon but a dude with a knife while the protagonist is still a toddler.

Another one I read as a teen that mercifully wasn't by Gaiman was the Thin Executioner, which has some pretty brutal deaths and fates-worse-than-death, like I think some guys who are literally named Bush and Blair after that Bush and that Blair end up fused into a cliff face while remaining conscious and aware, seemingly just left to suffer forever. More than their deaths though, what I tend to remember is how they killed people, because they had a "magic trick" with some balls that had metal triangles affixed to them. They would toss the ball at their target's throat, it bounces back, and they reveal that the triangle is gone. The audience is then directed to look at the victim's throat, which now has a triangular bulge visibly pressing out of it as they choke and sputter before dying.

also curious, would you describe the upcoming chainsaw man movie as a children's movie...?

Chainsaw Man really pushes the shonen thing because it really does have strong seinen elements (including things much more interesting than just the gore and nudity), but overall I'd say probably yes, it's targeted mainly at teenage boys. Naturally, it also probably won't be received that way in America, but that's how the manga was written and the anime is pretty faithful to it.