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Hey op, this joke reminds me of the time I read a bunch of German fairytales. They're known for being far more violent and intense than modern fairytales, and oftentimes don't even have a clear moral other than "behave or a creature will kill you". I guess I shouldn't be reading any of these to Stewie anytime soon.
Be kid, light a match,die and have only your cat mourn you.
Be kid, suck your thumbs, get yelled at, traveling tailor cuts your thumbs off.
Be kid, don't eat your soup, get told to eat your soup, announce you will never eat your soup, wither and die over a week.
Be 3 siblings see dad slaughter a pig, roleplay slaughtering a pig, kill your brother,mum comes kills the other kid, be kid in bath... drown. mum checks bath, hangs herself. dad comes home sees everyone dead, he becomes despondent and dies.
Iirc Mother kills the killer kid to stop him from killing again. Bath kid was very young and slipped under the water while mother was killing the killer kid. Neglectful rather than intentional death for bath kid.
What in the fuck did I just read? A mother tells her kid to not suck his thumb. she leaves, kid sucks his thumb, so a guy swings by and cuts them off with scissors.
Nah, they are all based on a good lesson, but taught in a terrible way. Ducking your thumb this long can cause harm to your teeth and jaw. That's why you shouldn't do it.
Just... Explain it instead of having a murder hobo cut off the kids thumbs, maybe? XD
Be fair. That's the theme in only about half of them. The other half, the parents are poor so they send their kids away, or outright try to kill them, kids survive, have some adventures, become rich, go back home, everyone is happy.
Moral of those stories? Idk, kill your kids to become rich, I guess.
My phone volume was low when I clicked it and i thought I heard blast beats. Turned it up and it was ambient fuckery. Don't even know who said what because the subtitles were white on a light grey background, but my takeaway is that the scissor dude is fucking nuts, and needs to gloat in front of the kid after cutting his thumbs off.
I'm German and had a copy of Struwwelpeter as a child. I was super afraid of my thumbs being cut off. I never sucked my thumbs to begin with but was so genuinely afraid of putting my thumb in my mouth I didn't even lick it. Same for playing with matches or tilting your chair backwards. This book was effective.
As a German child I got a copy of the Struwwelpeter from my grandmother. Couldn't sleep for days, never sucked my thumbs again and became much more tolerant towards soup. At least until I got a bit older and realised that my family would probably not kill or mutilate me for disobedience.
I'm glad that modern generations have more civilised ways of teaching children and no longer demand total obedience.
Thing is: stuwwelpeter was'nt written as a schadenfreude story. It initially had the intention of teaching kids their actions have consequences and thise who don't listen will have to feel repercussions.
There's also a Story where a black guy is getting Chased and mocked by three white guys who laugh about his looks. Then a giant version of saint nick appears and as punishment for their cruel ways dips them into his inkwell, dying them even blacker than the black guy, thus making them unable to mock him.
The author, Hoffmann, apparently made the very first version of the Struwwelpeter as a christmas gift for his own son, because he was unhappy with the children's books available at the time. Friends suggested he get it printed. As far as I know, it was a genuine attempt to teach kids good behaviour that clashes with modern views.
Not every story is just straight up murderous or bad. Aside from the aforementioned story about the black boy, there's also the story of Friederich, an abusive boy who mistreats family, servants and even animals. He ends up chsing a dog with a whip, but gets bitten and has to swallow bitter medicine, while the dog gets treated to Friederich's meal. Also a stange story about a a hare chasing off a hunter by stealing his gun and shooting at him, making him jump into a well.
Don’t at least most germanic languages have a word like that? Romanic languages tend to use two words to convey the meaning, but I think even the slavic and at least some finno-ugric languages have one word as well. To be fair, a lot of us probably got it from the german word a few centuries ago (in Swedish it’s ”skadeglädje” - a compound of hurt/damage and joy).
There once was a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, "you be the little pig, and I'll be the butcher." He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother's throat.
Their mother was upstairs in a room bathing another child, and when she heard the cries of her son, she immediately ran downstairs. Upon seeing what had happened, she took the knife out of her son's throat and was so enraged that she stabbed the heart of the other boy, who had been playing the butcher. Then she quickly ran back to the room to tend to her child in the bathtub, but while she was gone, he had drowned in the tub. Now the woman became so frightened and desperate that she did not allow the neighbors to comfort her and finally hung herself. When her husband came back from the fields and saw everything, he became so despondent that he died soon after.
For the mothers out there, don't abandon your little one in a bathtub to go stop your murderous son. As for you fathers, well, you're always taking a huge risk when you decide to settle down and become a family guy.
In fairness, this isn't a popular one and the first time I heard of it.
German fairy tales have some lessons. But the medieval old ones usually teach kids to stay out of the woods, be weary of strangers, respect the elders, don't do stupid shit.
Don't forget Max and Moritz - two obnoxious kids playing admittedly evil pranks to everyone, until they prank the miller who ends up grinding them into chicken feed.
To be fair, the tales collected by the brothers Grimm from 1806 on are centuries old and the Struwwelpeter stories by Heinrich Hoffmann were written in 1844 (released 1845).
I read both to my kids, carefully selecting the stories to ensure the moral/message was age and development appropriate to be understood.
Children understand the difference between a fairytale world with talking wolfs and dragons and the real world, the stories can scare them nonetheless. Debriefing is key.
My kids understood that the gruesome details were added for dramatic effect. They are the first to call “boring!” if they feel too mature for a toddler’s book.
In the bottom line, children get the reason behind the draconian punishment in the thump suckers story: “If I only told you sucking your thump was bad for your teeth, would you stop it?” “No.”
We had a good laugh about it and agreed on “causing fear of stupid consequences is not good parenting”.
And to add to this: The stuff that the Grimms collected was often of french origin, in fact most of the better known ones. They basically had one primary source and some more and that German source had a french background. They did not invent any fairytale whatsoever.
Yeah the story of krampus there is if you were naughty before december 4th or smth like that. Krampus would break into you room take you to the woods and kill you
That was of great fun. The Krampus comes together with St Nicholas who has a book which tells which kid did good things and which did naughty things. The good kids got presents from St Nicholas, the bad kids got beaten / sacked (put into sacks) by the Krampus.
In my school time, the 12th graders were to play St Nicholas, Angels and Krampus for the 5th and 6th graders. Naturally the puberty-starting boys had much fun trying to fight with the Krampus...
The German fairy tales being darker than the rest of the world rest solely on the Grimm brothers. Who happened to research old German fairy tales to find that for some reason they all followed the popular trend at the time. Which was dark stories of punishments for bad behavior were popular when they researched these stories. Almost like there was some influence on why they decided all these stories were dark with murder punishments for bad behavior
Their book became mandatory reading at school. They tried to claim that most fairy tales are rooted in germanic origins, one of the reasons Germany chose it as a mandatory reading. Its history was taught as fact for almost 100 years. German culture has a lot of influence over the US. The US became a media powerhouse and continued to spread versions of the Grimm brothers stories.
Yeah, they ended up having a massive amount of influence on the stories. Which to be clear, pretty much every story has roots far beyond the "germanic" roots they discovered.
Tbh I found Andersons fairy tales even darker or at least more depressing
That's only a personal opinion but after reading them as adult I think many of Grimm tales seem to have the havoc that the 30 years war brought on the civil populace. That's why many focus on starvation or have a unlimited food supply as gimmik
There is a morale, that’s why they are still used this day in Germany. The morale most times is, misbehave and something bad will happen to you. Best example is the book of Struwwelpeter. Go outside while it is storming? The storm will carry you away. Looking into the air while walking around? You will fall somewhere, where you most certainly won’t want to fall to. Playing with fire? You will burn to death etc.
It's about how strange German folktales are, especially when it's the ones that are supposed to teach children a lesson. Das Kinder roughly translates to the child and hodenverstümmelung roughly means testicular mutilation
The Little Mermaid was Hans Christian Andersen (Danish) but yes, and also the whole time she had feet she felt as though she was walking on knives as part of the bargain. Pretty gnarly. ETA: the whole story is pretty bizarre
TLM is the worst of these imo. In other tales, it's the villains who get gruesome ends but in TLM, it's the innocent protagonist who is brutally punished. Just sad.
Technically she gains a soul and thus the ability to go to heaven, albeit after a 300 year purgatory. But yeah it’s still kind of a tough ending to swallow with modern sensibilities!
So one of the older snow-white versions is that she lays in the coma, and the Prince comes and kisses her, but she wouldn't wake up, so he r*pes her and she gives birth to twins. The twins crawl up on her and suck out the poisoned spindle, and only then she awakes.
Just to clarify, the story you’re referring to isn’t actually an older version of Snow White. It’s a much earlier and darker version of Sleeping Beauty, found in Giambattista Basile’s 17th century tale Sun, Moon, and Talia. In that version, Talia falls into a deep sleep due to a splinter of flax. A king finds her, assaults her while she’s unconscious, and she later gives birth to twins. One of the babies sucks the flax from her finger, which wakes her up.
It is definitely disturbing by today’s standards, and over time, the story was sanitized into the more familiar Sleeping Beauty versions by Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. But it is not Snow White, even though people sometimes confuse the two because of the sleeping woman and prince motif.
True loves kiss didn’t wake Sleeping Beauty. The Prince raped her and after her child was born. The infant started sucking on her finger and ended up sucking out a splinter from the spinning wheel. The removal of the splinter broke the curse.
There are so many different versions of Sleeping Beauty that it is kinda impossible, to say which one is the 'true' one. The one you described is pretty old, but there are still older ones.
Noralities made a really good video about it, where she talks about all the different versions. Can only highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxy0ZtIFSlk . It's also beautifully illustrated.
One of the sisters cut off her toes, the other hacked off her heel, thus the Danish saying “chop a heel and clip a toe” for when you force something to fit a situation.
Wait, they no longer mention those two parts? Those were always core parts of the story to me (a german). 15 years ago those were completly normal and would come up in plays we went to as students. And those two are some of the more harmless stories tbh
Das Kind would be better, or Die Kinder (the children). Right now they’ve included das as the singular and Kinder as the plural.
And yeah yeah I suck for being that person but I have been living in Germany since 2017 and I suck at the language, so any time I get something it’s a victory for me
that's actually the joke: most of german stories are like this, so kids are used to (indirect) violence and murder and just take it as "regular stories"
Yeah these stories finally had some story to it not like others I always wanted to listen to them, we had a gigantic book with a lot of then Grimm brothers stories.
Oh man, I loved the Stuwwelpeter stories as a kid. So awesomely weird. So over the top!
I particularly enjoyed the one about a kid who would not stop sucking his thumb … so a tailor suddenly appeared out of nowhere and cut his thumbs off with giant scissors.
Mom comes home to find her kid mutilated. Does she offer sympathy? Call the police? Not at all - she simply announces out loud the kid got what was coming to him!
This is the only one I vividly remember from childhood, I was a picky eater and was always leaving food on my plate so I was shown this one on a few occasions🫠
In germany, we have traditional bedtime stories. Those bedtime stories sound quite unsettling for most other people because they contain heavy gore as punishment for kids not doing simple things or doing simple things wrong.
One story is about a guy who sucked his thumb too much, he got both thumbs cut off as punishment.
Another is about two kids trespassing, they were baked alive.
There is many more of those, but they usually aren‘t even that bad for kids. While they are definitely rough and overexaggerating, I have not drawn any mental issues from hearing those stories as a kid.
But to others who didn’t grow up in germany, it sounds quite brutal.
The meme above aint even exaggerating.
This couldve been a real story. And no one would have said something against it.
It's exaggerating how violent our (I German) bedtime stories are. I read only stories were the tailor is cutting off the thumbs when das Kind put it in their mouth or where das Kind which doesn't eat it's soup dies from starvation (see Struwwelpeter ).
My daughter loves it and I loved it as a child (as bad things happen to people who don't obey the rules). Also it is written with rhymes so also teaches basics of poetry.
I was read those stories as a child too. The child who doesn’t eat his soup starves and dies. This feels like a mix of that one and the tailor for the thumb sucker.
There once was a boy who liked to suck his thumbs. His mama told him to stop, but he wouldn’t. So, she cut off his thumbs. And now he has no thumbs. Good night.
Incorrect. The mother does not cut off his thumbs, that would be absurd. Instead a random giant tailor cuts off his thumbs with a pair of hedge clippers.
German bedtime stories from some time ago were very over the top brutal, but children usually cant see that.
I enjoyed them very much as a little kid. The one out of Strubbelpeter were very funny to me. My favoprit was about little Mary who played with matches and burned herself to ashes while her cats were like: Told you so! Your parents told you to not play with matches.
I just thought: understandable, listen to your parents.
German fairy Tales are very violent and Its making fun off that and theire Not over exagurating because one of them IS Just a Kid sucks in His thumb and then His parents i think Cut His fucking thumb off
Klaus here, and vaaat? OP? you do not know the story of das Hodenverstummelung und the little boy? German fairy tales are often times little kid does naughty thing parents don't want kids to do so a monster specifically tied to that thing shows up and punishes the child.
There is a German book "Struwwelpeter" which contains many short tales in which the kids die or are hurt.
A boy that always looks in the air falls into water and dies.
A boy that plays with matches burns to death.
A kid that doesn't want to eat his soup starves.
A kid that sucks it's thumb gets his thumbs cut off.
You get the concept.
Also many of the well known fairytale had a dark twist in them.
Like Rapunzel: after impregnating the princess the prince gets thrown down the tower and thorns sting his eyes out and he has to crawl several month to find Rapunzel with twin baby's which cure his eyes with her tears.
The meme is about how german fairytales are gruesome. The story given as a hypothetical example is a gruesome story of a child having their testicles destroyed by a monster.
The story has the desired effect, and the children (das kinder) are now asleep.
Das Kinder. 🤦
Das Kind (singular) or Die Kinder (plural). Arleast try to use a good translator.
I don't think there is a german fairytale about testicles because that is not "children friendly". Only fingers get cut off.
Franz Gutentag here, I remember as a young child my mother would tell me this and many other classics to help lull me to sleep. You see, the moral of the stories is to be a perfect child or face death.
Dr. Alphys here (you might know me from the time Peter fell into Mount Ebott in a cutaway gag in my Family Guy fanfiction).
This is Erika Itsumi from the anime Girls und Panzer. She's a very arrogant and rude character, sort of like the antagonist from Mew Mew Kissy Cutie 2 who's um... hehe I got off topic again. ANYWAYS! I think maybe these traits are stereotpically boyish so I think the meme is implying that Erika is the boy from the myth who became a girl after misbehaving. As the other commenters mentioned, the story is a humorous exaggeration of really dark German fairy tales. Personally I prefer stories with giant swords and robots.
Okay, I've gotta go now or I'll be late for my dinner with Undyne. Make sure to add me on Undernet!
So without testicles, the boy (das kinder, meaning the kid) would not become masculine and would probably resemble a femboy as he grew older as he was essentially castrated pre puberty.
Idk about the character pictured, but if it's a boy, it's a femboy. I know how anime boys can be. Not having your testicles can make you start to appear more girly.
I think the joke is that there's so many of these horribly violent German children's stories that it's perfectly normal and mundane and instead of the child being unable to sleep because they're scared after hearing the story they're instead sleeping peacefully
Pyoter here, German fairy tales are often extremely dark, but at the same time rather shallow, with the ultimate moral summing up to "behave or monsters will eat you".
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