When I was a kid - let's say, probably aged around 7-11 or so - I used to get a huge thrill from certain visual artefacts (album covers, comics, book covers, and so on) that I thought were definitely Not For Kids My Age. Not because of sexual content, because at that age like most boys my view of girls could be accurately summarised as "Urghhhh". But because they managed to combine two things: they were obviously for teenagers or grown-ups, but at the same time they still had great appeal to the imaginative child. For a kid of my age in those days, most of the things that grown-ups seemed to be interested in (like
Bullseye, Radio 4, Woody Allen films, Penguin paperbacks, newspapers, art galleries, the 10 o'clock news,
Inspector Morse, etc.) were unutterably, unfathomably boring. But there were certain things that somehow weren't: they were definitely for people who were older than I was - maybe not definitely adults but at least teenagers - yet at the same time my childish brain could understand their appeal almost viscerally.
I'm talking about:
Is there a word to describe this quality - of being Not Really For Kids But Really Appealing To Kids? I don't think so. NRFKBRATK doesn't quite have the right ring to it, somehow.
Whatever you call it, this quality is responsible for a lot. I think part of the reason why I still like fantasy and SF so much is that I'm still able to look at that cover of
Gate of Ivrel or Kieth Parkinson's
Rifts piece and remember the excitement of seeing that kind of thing aged 9 and knowing that I was possibly a bit too young for it but didn't care. It's probably in fact precisely the feeling that caused me to start picking up
Fighting Fantasy and
Lone Wolf books in my local library at that age and never being quite the same person since.
I understand; my love of largely terrible 80's horror movies was in no small part incubated by poring over the lurid covers of the VHS boxes in our local video shop, long before I was old enough to watch the actual films.
ReplyDeleteAt least in America, I think most boys have had the experience at some point of witnessing a particularly violent scene from a Rated-R movie and coming away from it with a bizarre mixture of revulsion and fascination.
DeleteI think it's at least partly because those scenes typically involve using guns/swords/explosives, which you're already familiar with and have been taught are rad from cartoons/etc., but have only seen being used to shake at other people menacingly, or shoot near the feet of the bad guys. When you see uncensored violence you get a new horrible perspective that you have to rationalize with your love of "clean violence", typically by just embracing it.
Yes! The films at rental shops almost never lived up to my imaginings of what was inside those amazing covers. This is also why I greatly lament hand-painted movie posters. Modern photoshop spectaculars have none of the wild, exciting liveliness.
DeletePulpy?
ReplyDeleteIt was different stuff for me but I totally get what you mean.
RuneQuest epitomised this phenomenon for me. I got into it at primary school, via a friend who'd got into it through the inevitable older brother. What made it so appealing was the way that the text didn't talk down to you in the slightest. Other RPGs tended to do a bit of that. But RuneQuest, with its brisk prose and tip-of-the-iceberg references to Glorantha and its myths, was much more alluring.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was quite a bit younger, the Tolkien Bestiary was another instance. The spectacular and rather scary Ian Miller illustrations gave it a not-for-kids vibe that was irresistible.
Oddly enough, I only recently discovered Gates of Ivrel - but detected some intriguing gaming influences in it:
https://hobgoblinry.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-qhal-and-slann-or-did-cj-cherryh.html
I have just finished reading Gates of Ivrel for the first time and plan to write a post about it - its cover just really struck me as something that at age 9 I would have been riveted by.
DeleteI know exactly what you mean by this post. We experienced the same sensation. It's still my favorite thing, and agreed - it's definitely part of why I love fantasy and sci-fi stuff still.
ReplyDeleteI think this frisson of the forbidden is what OSR kids (me included) try to capture in their more egregious delves into edgelordship. What once was deliciously forbidden is decades-deep in familiarity making it necessary to engage in the creative equivalent of auto-erotic asphyxiation to get the same kind of release.
ReplyDeleteLOL
DeleteDefinitely. Then at some point you come full circle and start thinking that it would be great to do a RPG about Totoro.
DeleteInteresting... I do know what you mean, but for me the quality you describe absolutely was bound up with a sense of emergent sexuality. (I found girls fascinating at 9-11. Can't really remember very clearly before that.) In retrospect, fantasy fiction, with its sorceresses and temptressess and warrior women and whatnot, was clearly one of the ways in which I began, as a child, to get to grips with the meanings of adult sexuality.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, for me it was Dragon Warriors and Point Horror novels and lurid paperback covers and, yes, the occasional Fighting Fantasy book. The lurid scenes of torture and body horror in 'House of Hell' and 'Beneath Nightmare Castle' made quite an impression on me at the age of ten.
(Incidentally, NRFKBRATK is big part of the marketing strategy for young adult fiction. If you're aiming for a 10-12 year old audience, you need to pretend that your books are for 13-15 year olds. If you're aiming for 13-15 year old readers, you need to pretend they're for 16-18 year olds. And so on.)
You are probably right - I used to love the girl in the Red Box Basic Set mini intro adventure thing.
DeleteAleena the Cleric, right? I think there's a whole generation of D&D players out there who never got over her murder by Bargle.
DeleteI’d just say: the grotesque. Which, for kids, would include porny sex stuff like the Rifts cover.
ReplyDeleteLord of the Rings, the adult (well, OK, adolescent) sequel to The Hobbit, made a huge impression on me when I was 10 or so and thereafter I could not get enough of anything in that genre.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you kid yourself that sexual themes are not present in entertainment for kids, you have no idea how much Wonder Woman, Isis, Catwoman, and Lois Lane in distress lit up my pre-adolescence.
I know what you mean about Lois Lane (particularly Teri Hatcher) and all the rest, but you didn't understand it as sexual, right? Certainly not when 8 or 9 or so? It's more like a weird fascination kind of thing that you don't really understand and certainly doesn't extend to girls you actually know, who are "Eww". That's how I remember it anyway.
DeleteAs a late teen I ran a campaign where the players decided on their own that Bargle was the big bad and every week that summer they would cry out, “Let’s Kill Bargle!!”
ReplyDeleteI think the campaign wound down before they did.
For a slightly older crowd: the comics of Vaughn Bode, the hot rod cartoons of Ed Roth, the "Mars Attacks" bubblegum cards -- and pretty much the raison d'etre of the rock group KISS.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. That sort of stuff never appealed to me. Still doesn't though I can appreciate the artistic skill and technique of these pieces.
ReplyDeleteThis may [partially] explain why D&D and other games and books in its genre (or related genres) never really interested me. I am an artist myself and I get inspired by visuals more than anything else. The visuals that inspired me (and still do - boy, I am using a lot of parenthesis today) are cleaner, brighter, bolder, and more Science-Fiction oriented.
I believe they call it Metal.
ReplyDelete