What was the first piece of media you consumed which 'had killing in it'?
I ask because a certain girl I happen to know has recently been reading the Warriors or Warrior Cats series at bedtime. For those who don't know it - and I should stress I know almost nothing about it - it seems to be a sort of cross between Redwall, Harry Potter and Rainbow Magic. A coterie of authors writes the novels and they involve, well, warrior cats doing, er, warrior cat things. There are clans to which the characters all seem to belong, and the plot of the first book appears to involve a Muggle housecat who runs away from home and finds a new one with his wizard warrior compadres. There is not, I should make clear, a 'sorting collar' and the clans are not called Gryffinpuss, Slithermiaow, Hufflepurr, or Kittyclaw.
Readers familiar with the books will be able to tell me if they are dreadful doggerel or surprisingly good, or somewhere in between. But what this post really occasioned was my daughter's remark, made to me last night, that she feels the books are very advanced because they 'have killing in them'.
I took this to mean that violent death is a feature of the books. And I reflected that she was probably right. There is 'killing' in Harry Potter. But most of the material she will have read up to this point, including things like Dork Diaries, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Lottie Brooks etc., will have been fairly milquetoast. There won't have been a lot of jeopardy or high drama.
This set me off reminiscing about being a child. I think I too had this conception in my mind that there was a distinction to be drawn between kids' entertainment and that for adults, with 'having killing in' being an important aspect of the difference. The type of books I was reading at the local library aged 7 or 8 or so would not I think have had killing in them. But then I got onto The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, the Fighting Fantasy books, and so on, and this felt like a major watershed moment. Suddenly I was reading books in which people killed each other. I was a big boy, now.
What is curious about this is that the young child appears to have in his or her mind, even from toddlership, an idea that 'having killing in it' is a distinct category from fairy tale death. Fairy tales have death in. Admittedly many fairy tales are Bowdlerised these days to an absurd degree - the three little pigs befriend the wolf and teach him how to be a vegetarian, etc. - but you can still find versions in which characters are eaten, drowned, burned and so on. Yet children appear to be able to separate fairy tale death from acts of actual killing in their minds. It is only when one graduates to books that have killing in them that one has move beyond the fairy tale, which concerns death and yet which at the same time somehow doesn't.
I can't remember the exact moment I first encountered a book with killing in it, but I am fairly sure that it was The Hobbit, and I can vaguely remember the thrill it gave me when I realised that the cartoon violence with which I was familiar had been superseded by something much more serious and grand. This the point in a life in which one puts away childish things and starts reading The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. A Rubicon has been crossed and there is no going back.
Bambi
ReplyDeleteHow could I forget Bambi!?!
DeleteIt would be The Three Musketeers or Howard Pyle's Robin Hood, both of which I read when I was 8.
ReplyDeleteThe Three Musketeers is one of those classics I have never read. I'll get around to it someday.
DeleteLike you say, I read a lot of fairy tales with killing but the first book that shocked me with its killing and left a real impression on me was Redwall, especially the rats being boiled alive.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good call. I am pretty sure I read The Hobbit before Redwall. But Redwall was definitely one of the first.
DeleteAnother datum for Redwall (of which, i think I read Martin the Warrior first) at approx age 9.
DeleteI probably saw animated films “with killing” prior, but i think my child brain put those in the same category as fairytales—not “real” in some way. Reading a text where a character with recognizable interiority (even if a villain and/or a talking rodent) kills another character forces a certain realness via the imagination.
Probably the first book i read where a human kills a human would be Lord of the Flies, approx age 11. Coming on the heels of Gary Paulson’s Hatchet, i found Lord of the Flies largely disappointing, due to the lack of cool survival tactics. My 11 year old brain would then draw the further distinction between what is now called YA, and actual Adult books which were mired in allegory and being “about something”. Boring!
Star Wars: A New Hope in the movie theater back in the seventies. I said something about how the people were stunned in the fighting at the beginning by the guns and my best friend's older sister said "No, they're DEAD."
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Redwall---ugh, mildly entertaining at first but got annoying fast. My nephew had the whole series and I got too annoyed to finish it.
The Heretic
As the Silver Age was moving into the Bronze Age, people started to die in comics. Not stupid, fake comic book death, but actual death. That was the first media that I read that "had killing in it". TV shows had killing in them around the same time.
ReplyDeleteThe Land Before Time, possibly. Mother Longneck succumbs to injuries she received from Sharptooth, which we saw her receive during the fight. I guess the issue here is whether predation is considered to "count". Sharptooth never speaks, after all. Is that "killing" in the weightful sense we presumably intend here? It's more a force of nature responsible for the death of a character than one character killing another. The Animals of Farthing Wood animated series is another contender -- but those deaths that involve killing (like Pheasant getting shot or Scarface spitefully hunting Farthing Wood creatures) are again a little murky in terms of our question here, since they are either humans killing animal characters in a naturalistic way (the animals are sapient but only among themselves, if that makes sense; the humans are just shooting "normal" animals) or predators hunting, even if personal agendas are shaping the hunt. Hmm, I suppose Adder killing Scarface is a straight-up murder. So Adder from Animals of Farthing Wood might be my first "killer" character, probably (noteworthy that she's an antihero, not an antagonist). Literarily speaking, I started reading Animorphs early, which of course is a full on war story with all sorts of battles, assassinations, hospital-kids-being-thrown-down-elevator-shafts, biowarfare genocides, and cannibalism, so by that point the notion wouldn't have been very shocking.
ReplyDeleteRemember this rubicon not through reading, but through writing. Having characters kill is a moral line that they cross actually says something about their character.
ReplyDeleteThere's a stark difference between a character fighting to incapacitate or disarming to fighting and downright killing their foe. When applied to kid characters turns boy adventurers off on adventures into child soldiers or prepubescence murderers. Though how you spin it affects how the action and character is seen, i.e. the kid had no choice in defending themselves or this kid is psychotic are widely different in tone.
Apparently, back in the by gone past, librarians did not get this, and even today mature books about dark subject matter are shelved in the children's section because they have child protagonists in it. Perhaps that was one of the reasons, YA was established (as a categorical marketing term) so parents wouldn't have their little Larry reading IT.
Star Wars novelization. Vader chokes a guy out in the first few pages. Perhaps different because I'd seen the movie and knew it was coming.
ReplyDelete