#the human kills are actually fairly gruesome for a non-gory game

[robo-dino-puppy]

just a red blade of grass

[radioactivepeasant]

Fic Prompts: Folklore Friday

So, I realized that my version of The Boy Who Went To Learn About Shudders doesn’t really match the original story all that much, so now I’m doing a “Radio Explains Fairytales Badly” for this one.

Right, this is a weird one.

So this isn’t one you’re likely to see a Disney adaptation of, unless Disney really really runs out of ideas. And they might. Who knows.

So to start with, we’ve got this man, and he’s got two sons. Fairytale patterns dictate that the younger one is going to go out on some kind of adventure. The dad goes to his boys like, “Okay, it’s time for you to learn a trade!” (In other words, get a job! ) And he asks them what they’re going to do with their lives. The older one’s answer isn’t really recorded that I remember, presumably because he’s the oldest and is probably going to take over whatever the dad’s business is, being the firstborn and all.

The dad asks the younger one, “What kind of trade do you want to learn?”

And he says, “I want to learn to shudder.”

Hm. Ah. Okay, so, in this day and age, that could mean “I’m going to make Let’s Plays of horror games on the internet and earn money that way!” or “I’m going to be a professional tester of carnival haunted-houses and get paid to be scared out of my wits!” or “I’m going to sew clothes made out of that awful material they make picnic tableclothes out of, the kind that gives you goosebumps whenever it touches your skin.” But in presumably-medieval fairytale-land, that’s just not a viable career choice.

And everyone seems to realize, “Wait, I don’t think this kid actually knows what fear is!”

Now, the local sexton, for some reason, hears about this. And he tells the dad, “Hey, tell the kid -- okay, he needs a name, let’s say Charlie -- to go to the belltower in the church at midnight and ring the bell. I can help him learn to shudder, then he can go job hunting like the rest of us.”

This apparently does not strike the dad as odd. The sexton clearly has some kind of prank in mind, the lack of reaction does make you wonder how many other people he has done this to.

So the boy is sent out to the church at night, and he rings the bell at midnight. And in comes the sexton, wearing a sheet, and pretending to be a ghost. That’s not all that concerning to the boy. Maybe he could see the guy’s feet, I don’t know.

“What are you doing here?” the boy asks, and since he’s in-character at the moment, the sexton doesn’t answer. The boy decides he doesn’t like this in the slightest, and chucks the guy down the stairs, which seems like a fairly drastic reaction to a guy in a bedsheet wandering a belltower at night.

The sexton breaks his leg.

There’s a little bit of a hue and cry over that in the village. This is understandable, but to be fair, he was up in a dark belltower at night trying to scare a guy with no concept of fear. He probably should’ve planned for something weird happening.

So the dad says, “Son, you should probably skip town, lay low for a while. You broke that guy’s leg!”

And he’s like, “Okay Dad, maybe I’ll find someone else to teach me how to shudder!”

He goes off, probably hitchiking, and wanders into this other town where he apparently tells anyone who will listen that he’s trying to learn to shudder. He meets this guy who says “Hey, you should spend a night sitting under the gallows. That will guaranteed creep you out.”

This is fair, that is a perfectly logical thing to creep a person out. Unless you’re this kid, apparently.

He goes and he sits under the gallows that night and --

Okay. So, I do have some questions about this protagonist. I’m kind of wondering how old he’s supposed to be, or else whether he’s just been living some kind of idyllic, sheltered village life. Because at this point, it’s midnight, and he’s sitting under the gallows and there are actual dead men up there. Actual, very dead men, and he doesn’t look at them and think “Hey, those are some dead guys!”

No, he looks at them and thinks, “Hey, they look cold!”

That...wouldn’t be my first thought when I’m looking at a corpse, I’m just gonna be honest with you. But that’s apparently his first thought, so he goes up and he cuts them down! Off the gallows! He cuts these guys down off the gallows and sits them down in front of his fire!

These are, as we have established, dead men, so they don’t really sit up well at the fire. They kinda...lean, or sort of flop, I guess. And one of them’s clothes catch fire. Because the kid sat a dead guy right up against the fire. And the kid gets mad.

“Well if you’re not sensible enough to move away from the fire,” he says, apparently thinking this corpse can hear him, “I’m going to put you back where I found you!”

And he does. He puts all seven of these dead guys, who were probably up there for a reason, back on the gallows. Ah...okay, kiddo. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

And the next day he goes on, unsatisfied, because he didn’t learn to shiver. He goes travelling for a while with this waggoner. And presumably this waggoner has had to hear some really weird stuff during this trip. They end up staying in this town and someone is like, “Hey guys, did you know there’s a haunted castle here? Would anybody like to stay there?”

Of course, our boy is like, “Boy would I! Maybe I’ll learn to shudder!”

(And everybody else is thinking, “Yeah, if this doesn’t work, we don’t know what to do with you.”)

Come to find out, there was this king who really wanted to stay there. But he really couldn’t, because that castle was super haunted. And, y’know, you can’t really do your day-to-day king stuff when you’ve got shrieking and moaning and chains-dragging-down-the-hall going on. It’s kind of distracting, keeps interrupting the budget meetings. And once you’ve figured out that the shrieking and moaning isn’t the people trapped in the budget meetings, then you gotta call the fairytale equivalent of the Ghostbusters.

In this particular case, because it’s an old fairytale with...less than stellar social situations for some people...calling the Ghostbusters looks like the king saying “Anybody who clears out this castle can marry my daughter. She’s super pretty, by the way. And you’d get to rule my kingdom.”

Dude. You really want to screen people a little better than that. At least have some minimum qualifications, come on. You could get some kind of Ghostbuster Prince, or you could get a weirdo out for power, or you could get Luigi in yet another haunted mansion. I mean, if that’s what you’re looking for in a son-in-law okay, you do you, but the point is: you don’t know what you’re going to get when you basically put the princess’s hand up for auction like that. I’m just saying.

So, the boy doesn’t seem like he’s really got an interest in marrying the princess. All he wants to do is learn to shudder and go on his adventures. And he’s like, “Alright, I’ll stay the three nights in your haunted castle.”

And the king says, “You can take three non-living items with you.”

I don’t know why he made this rule. Maybe this was his attempt at screening some of the would-be son-in-laws coming through? It’s entirely arbitrary, most of these things are. So the kid asks for a tinder set to make a fire, a lathe, and a cutting board that comes with a knife. Okay, technically that’s probably four or five items, but the king allows it.

The boy sets up camp, and to be fair, he’s by himself in a large, drafty castle at night. Nobody’s keeping the place warm, and there’s no central heating. So fire and flint was a good choice. He gets set up and the first night he’s there he hears these voices wailing and crying about how cold they are.

His reaction is to yell something along the lines of, “I have a fire right here you nitwits! Just come warm yourselves!”

No concept of fear, and apparently not much for patience, either.

Out of the shadows jump these giant black cats. Now, I don’t know if they’re ghost cats, or some kind of cat sidhe, but either way they were probably up to no good in that particular castle. The cats come up to the fire and propose a card game.

If talking animals come up to you and say, “Hey, do you wanna play cards with us?”, there is probably an ulterior motive and you should probably be suspicious.

So, they start playing, and a couple turns in the kid realizes that the cats are cheating. This bothers him more than the fact that talking animals who don’t have opposable thumbs are holding cards and playing with a human. Animals behaving wildly out of character is apparently a-okay, but by golly they’d best not cheat at cards! Go figure.

He uses the knife and cutting board to somehow trap the cats’ paws. I think he may have said something about filing their claws, but unless there was some kind of clamp or something on the board to hold food down, I don’t know how one goes about trapping something with a cutting board.

In one version I’ve seen, he proceeds to throw the cats out the window, which is cruel even if they might’ve been planning to eat him or whatever ghostly card-cheat cats do in their spare time. In another version, he just chucked them out the chamber door and into the night to sulk, which I prefer because let’s not have our fairytale protagonist engaging in animal cruelty. Absolute no-thank-you.

Things get a little hairy after that, pretty much every shadow in the room comes to life and takes the shape of a giant black dog or cat that’s trying to scratch out his fire and tear him to pieces. This time, I’d say his actions are a little more justified, because he’s just defending himself. He picks up the knife and cutting board and fights off all the animals doing their darndest to kill him, and the results are rather gruesome and gory despite the fact that these things seem to be shadows that came to life rather than actual animals.

Despite how horrible all this was, the boy just kind of thinks, “Well, that sure was a thing,” and decides to go to sleep. He gets in bed, and the thing takes a page from Beauty and the Beast and goes marching off with him still atop it, which actually sounds kind of fun. Then it tips over and attempts to crush him, which is less fun. And that’s the end of Night One.

Well, the second night comes around, and as he’s setting up his fire, an actual human torso falls down the chimney. Most people, if confronted with a torso falling down a chimney, would probably either react like someone in a horror movie and peer up the chimney (thereby pretty much guaranteeing that they’ll be the next to go), or else run screaming from the room. Running away from Unexpected Trespassing Torsos is a perfectly valid response.

This guy looks up the chimney and yells, “Hey! You’re missing a piece! Where’s the other half?!”

Obligingly, whatever ghost is up there throws the other half down. Which then puts itself together and steals the kid’s seat by the fire. He is rather annoyed about this. And then all these other bones and body parts start falling down, all these various pieces, and they form into several other kind of dead guys who set up a game of ninepins with human bones and skulls.

This does not faze the kid. He’s all, “I want in on this!” and he takes his lathe to smooth the skulls out, because a skull as a bowling ball isn’t really going to roll all that well. And the probably-dead guys are somewhat appreciative of their new and improved bowling-skulls, so they let the kid join the game. He loses some money to the dead guys who can dismember themselves and throw themselves up and down chimneys. The former part of that sentence probably bothered him more than the latter part. And that’s the end of Night Two.

Now we get to the third night. On the third night, the door opens up, and these six guys come in. Now mind you, there have been no people in the castle thus far. Just the kid, some ghost animal things, and the dismembering ninepin party. But now six guys come in, holding a coffin. And inexplicably, this kid comes to the conclusion that this is his cousin who has died, and he’s very distressed and pulls off the lid of the coffin to wail and hug this corpse.

Okay, I’d like to point out two things:

First, that coffin lid was closed, so I don’t know why he’d assume it was his cousin. Maybe the guy was doing poorly before he left home, I don’t know, but why would they bring the body to the castle?

Secondly, let’s consider how the kid has reacted to dead people thus far. Does he...does he even understand the concept of death? Or is he just thinking “I’ll warm up my cold cousin with a hug!”

Actually, that might be the point of the story, what with him having no fear. It might be a story about someone who lacks fear because he has absolutely no concept of his own mortality. Maybe because a lot of fears are rooted in the idea of death?

Anyway, the dead guy does wake up, because this is a very haunted castle. And he’s understandably confused about this strange man hugging him and crying, and threatens to strangle him if he doesn’t let go. This seems a little drastic, but to be honest, if I woke up to a random guy hugging me, I wouldn’t be thrilled either.

So then the boy is kind of upset by this, he doesn’t really want to be strangled, thanks, and he kind of closes up the coffin and steps back like “okay, you can take this away now.”

The only other thing that really happens that night is that this random old man comes in. Why is he there? We don’t know. How did he get in? We don’t know that either, unless he’s a ghost. And for some reason, because the kid reacts violently towards a lot of things, he traps this guy’s beard in an anvil, and beats him up! WHY?! I can remember no reason for this! Why would you do that?!

But he does, and he’s passed the three nights in the haunted castle at this point. The king says, “Oh, okay, did you happen to get rid of the ghosts?”

“I don’t know about ghosts,” says the kid, “You’ve got some weird people in there, though. The old guy I beat up with an anvil showed me where all this treasure was in there though, so that was cool.”

The king is probably thinking, “Uh...okay, that was, that was my treasure, actually….since I, y’know, lived there...but okay I guess?”

So the boy marries the princess. That’s the way it goes in a lot of stories: the princess isn’t so much a character as a prize at the end of the journey. “And they all live happily ever after.” Blech.

In this case, however, it’s a little different.

First of all, nobody ever seems to stop and think about the fact that this is a guy with zero qualifications for this job who has just been told, “here, have a kingdom and a wife. Mind you don’t go wandering anymore! Now you are required to learn some administrative skills, because you’re in charge of an entire kingdom! Have fun, kiddo!”

I mean, I wouldn’t want to be that guy.

So not only is he married to a complete stranger now, but he can’t go wandering and looking for the shudders anymore, because now he has to learn things like politics and budgeting. Compare this with a similar tale from England with a female protagonist: her story ended with her getting paid a heck ton of money for beating up a zombie with a stick, and she gets to go back home and do whatever the heck she wants with her life, because now she’s filthy rich.

I think the girl protagonist got the better deal, guys.

And that’s not even mentioning the princess, here. She gets a little tired of hearing her new husband moan and groan about never having learned to shudder. And she decides to Take Steps about it. This is the kind of princess who, if she’s annoyed enough with her husband, goes and gets a bucket of ice cold water and fills it with gudgeon. Which are apparently a kind of small, bottom-dwelling fish. Live gudgeon. In a bucket of ice cold water.

She takes this bucket into his room at night and goes, “You wanted to learn what it’s like when your skin crawls?” and throws living fish on him.

And he, presumably, was like “GAH!” and then thanks his wife for teaching him what shuddering feels like. And that’s how his story ends: stuck in a castle, learning politics, and married to a woman who will, in fact, put live fish in his bed if he angers her. H-happily ever after?

And he never does actually learn what fear is, in the end.