February shitposting, day 5
Today's randomly chosen theme is: inside a whale
This brings to mind three things: the story of Jonah (which I very vaguely remember from when I was a small child), Monstruo from Disney's Pinocchio (which utterly terrified me when I saw it in theaters as a small child), and Rudyard Kipling's "How the Whale Got His Throat" from Just So Stories (which I first read as a small child -- are you seeing a theme here? -- and is now one of my go-to stories to read aloud to kids).
The thing about Kipling is that he's a British imperialist with all the attendant failings, but damn the man could write. The Just So Stories are also specifically designed to be read aloud, with hand gestures -- they're implicitly written in, though not in an annoying way -- and they are a joy to work with. They're also really easy to adapt into being less sexist by just swapping some of the animals over to female, which I tend to do. So when I read the whale story, the 'Stute Fish is always female, I make the Bi-Colored Python Rock Snake female when I do "How the Elephant Got His Trunk," and so on.
(This is, of course, why when I wrote a Kipling pastiche of my own, the main character is an adult woman taking the role of the more usual semi-magical wise non-European man.)
On another tangent, have you ever seen an underside view of a sperm whale's mouth? Their lower jaws are like toothpicks. Very spiky toothpicks, to be sure, but still. There is no width to them at all; their only purpose is to pin prey in place. Of course that doesn't make for nearly as viscerally terrifying/useful a visual image as a whale with a properly wide maw, so nobody ever draws them that way in whale-swallows-stuff stories. *wry*
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This brings to mind three things: the story of Jonah (which I very vaguely remember from when I was a small child), Monstruo from Disney's Pinocchio (which utterly terrified me when I saw it in theaters as a small child), and Rudyard Kipling's "How the Whale Got His Throat" from Just So Stories (which I first read as a small child -- are you seeing a theme here? -- and is now one of my go-to stories to read aloud to kids).
The thing about Kipling is that he's a British imperialist with all the attendant failings, but damn the man could write. The Just So Stories are also specifically designed to be read aloud, with hand gestures -- they're implicitly written in, though not in an annoying way -- and they are a joy to work with. They're also really easy to adapt into being less sexist by just swapping some of the animals over to female, which I tend to do. So when I read the whale story, the 'Stute Fish is always female, I make the Bi-Colored Python Rock Snake female when I do "How the Elephant Got His Trunk," and so on.
(This is, of course, why when I wrote a Kipling pastiche of my own, the main character is an adult woman taking the role of the more usual semi-magical wise non-European man.)
On another tangent, have you ever seen an underside view of a sperm whale's mouth? Their lower jaws are like toothpicks. Very spiky toothpicks, to be sure, but still. There is no width to them at all; their only purpose is to pin prey in place. Of course that doesn't make for nearly as viscerally terrifying/useful a visual image as a whale with a properly wide maw, so nobody ever draws them that way in whale-swallows-stuff stories. *wry*
If you want to comment on this post, you can do so over here on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)