It's not fair!
TurquoiseTastic
Shipmate
in Heaven
I think we may have had a thread recently about this but I can't find it so here's a new one...
You know who I feel sorry for? Rumplestiltskin! HE was the one who spun the **** straw into the **** gold and what thanks does he get? He gets cheated out of his pay and is so upset that he stamps himself to death... and guess what, everyone cheers and says "Hurray, the nasty little man is DEAD!"
What other fictional characters do you feel have a raw deal?
You know who I feel sorry for? Rumplestiltskin! HE was the one who spun the **** straw into the **** gold and what thanks does he get? He gets cheated out of his pay and is so upset that he stamps himself to death... and guess what, everyone cheers and says "Hurray, the nasty little man is DEAD!"
What other fictional characters do you feel have a raw deal?
Comments
Not to be murdered, perhaps. But she was a ruthless child-beater! And battered her husband, if memory serves?
Don’t recall her battering Joe and wonder whether Pip was thrashed any more than any other child of the time
Wackford Squeers she wasn’t
Couldn't they have allowed him just once to have caught that annoying roadrunner and bitten its bloody head off?
Coyotes have to be Nature's most undeservedly bullied creature.
YES
The people who showed up late to the vineyard for work and got the same pay.
Barnaby Fitzpatrick, the original whipping boy.
Lady Mary Grey. Bad enough to have tudor blood in the reign of Elizabeth I, worse still to be a dwarf as well.
Getting on the bad side of Bald Lizzie ( or any of her dreadful family) would have been far worse
Lucky, the Lucky Charms leprechaun who's always getting his cereal stolen. And the Trix rabbit, who's never allowed to have any cereal at all.
What MiL didn't know was that the family lovingly referred to her as Hyacinth, precisely because she was so like the TV character.
By the same count, the Leadbetters in the Good Life. Living next door to Tom and Barbara would be a nightmare: in particular, Tom is a sexist bully.
Those on the side of the dragon might enjoy U A Fanthorpe's Not My Best Side (link). It's also about the Uccello painting, found in the National Gallery, which is shown in the link
Or there's The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (slow loading pdf facsimile) where the poor wolf just had this really bad cold.
E.g.
"This week, I placed the responsibility for my plan's success in the hands of Beast-Man and Evil-Lynn. They seemed so competent and efficient, I was sure they would succeed! But no, they messed up again. The moral is, kids, you can't rely on your friends! The only person you can really rely on is... yourself!!!"
(Roll credits)
Thanks for the link to the U A Fanthorpe, I really only know her Christmas poems.
Have you read "Troll Bridge" by Terry Pratchett, a Discworld short story which gives a different slant on the troll under the bridge cliche? It comes in a book of his short stories.
I would say that the author was clear in presenting her as unusually - almost irrationally - vicious, frequently beating a young child with a cane and verbally abusing him all his life - quite out of proportion to what would've been reasonable. So while corporal punishment was much more normal in those times, it seems that Pip certainly did get more contact with Tickler than would've been considered okay by normal standards.
However, you're right to correct me on Joe. He was only verbally abused.
As I said, I agree she didn't deserve to be murdered. Of course not. And perhaps she even had her own sadness. But Dickens quite obviously thought a child-abuser of her calibre was not worth very much sympathy by disposing of her in that fashion. Nasty things do sometimes seem to happen to the people who beat up or menace 'his' child characters!
Great observation.
I'm not sure about this. I always remember Johnson's advice to Boswell, who was defending a schoolmaster against a charge of cruelty. Johnson - who is not normally considered a brute - said that there was obviously no case to answer, since the child had not been permanently maimed, and that even if he had been the teacher would have been well within his rights.
Dickens' writes Mrs Joe, clearly, as violent and abusive. There is nothing in his presentation of Mrs Joe's treatment of Pip that leads you to think 'oh, that's normal for the time, so I'm okay with that.' The reader was not meant to be okay with that. When she is badly injured by Orlick, she is left in a pitiable state, but Dickens has already made her sufficiently nasty enough for the reader not to pity her overmuch, even when she dies. In that way he's leaving the reader free to enjoy Joe's good fortune in having Biddy for a wife, without feeling guilty about Mrs Joe's demise. But that's just what I take from it!
I just figured Jerome was too tall. Friendly and Rusty were waaay up high, weren't they?
Granted, I guess that didn't bug me as a kid, because I didn't really think about it, but as an adult with a keen sense of nostalgia and a fetish for verisimilitude, it irks me as much as anything that's been off the air for forty years can.
By the way, I wonder if anyone else has watched the YouTube clips of the original Friendly Giant from Wisconsin PBS. It's pretty similar to the Canadian version, except that Early One Morning sounds like it's being played for some low-budget local US kids show.
And Neil Gaiman does an immensely poignant version as well of troll bridge. https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/2014/07/neil-gaiman-troll-bridge.html
(Two of my three favourite authors in this post- send a link MT - I might complete the triad.)
Yes, the Non-Prodigal Son has gotten a lot of sympathy here over the years.
I once started a Hell Thread titled "Jesus's Worst Parables" and the vineyard one was Exhibit A (though a surprising number of people defended it). I also mentioned the Wise and Foolish Virgins, but simply because I found the title unintentionally funny (bringing up an image of the Foolish Virgins giggling nonstop and banging their heads on things).
Although in his case I suppose "it's not fair" is almost the whole driver of the strip.
I found the ending one of the most unfair things EVER. I have since wondered whether "Shrek" was a deliberate attempt to efface its memory.
It always surprised me that the DA himself tried the cases -- not one of his underlings. In a county as large as Los Angeles County, even in those days, surely he had a staff at his disposal.
And setting police work aside, what kind of trial preparation did that staff of his do? Law and Order, it seems to me, paints a much more realistic picture of what goes on in the office of the District Attorney of a large county.
(So inquires a former Tubist.)
Now Tubby has always wanted a melody of his own but finds that he is expected to hand Celeste over to the strings section. So he protests that he wants to dance with her.
And now this is the dreadful bit - one of the the senior instruments says: "Fine then Tubby! You dance with her right now!". And of course it is all ghastly and embarrassing. And Tubby has to say: "I'm sorry, I was a foolish tuba. Go to Prince Farquaad, I mean Prince Cello, you ought to dance with him!"
The frog does eventually find a jolly little melody for Tubby to play, one more fitted to his station in life. KNOW YOUR PLACE LOW-CLASS TUBA.
By the 1970s, fortunately, KNOW YOUR PLACE LOW-CLASS TUBA was already outdated, at least among professional musicians. Vaughn-Williams wrote his famous Tuba Concerto
(the Middle Movement is often transcribed for Cello) in the '50s, about a decade after Tubby was composed, and things snowballed from there.