thirteenth dance | video;

[quackery]

[When the video switches on, Ahiru is sitting on her bed flipping hurriedly through a book - Grimm's Fairy Tales. She'd had a few days of free time on her hands at the beginning of the week, and she's taken the opportunity to make a trip to the library. Once she had read the other books and started on this one, she had grown more and more dismayed

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[paysdelamour]

[Francis comes on with a weak little smile.] Unfortunately, mademoiselle, the original "fairy tales" were extremely dark and gruesome because, at the time, that is what people wanted to hear... it's only just recently that fairy tales have become happy and bloodless.

I was told the more gruesome versions of things, when I was a child. [... because he LIVED back then.]

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[quackery]

Why would people want to hear something like that?

Re: Permavideo

[paysdelamour]

It's hard to say... for one, life was more violent back then... wars were being fought constantly in those times. Second, may fairy tales were told to children to convince them to not do bad things, and therefore they were made much, much scarier... and of course time has a way of changing things. Stories get told and people add their own artistic flourishes as they tell the story and... well. You get the picture.

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[quackery]

If life was more violent, wouldn't they want happy things to distract them? And couldn't they convince children not to do bad things without scaring them?

[paysdelamour]

But you would expect something like that in those times. You'd expect a man to want to kill his brother out of jealousy, or a woman to leave her children to starve to save herself.

And some children are harder to teach than others. [A shrug.] Good children didn't have to be told those stories.

[quackery]

If your child was bad, you should show them the right way by example, not by scaring the into doing the right thing! Otherwise they wouldn't want to do the right thing, they'd just be too scared to do bad things.

[paysdelamour]

I never said they had all the right ideas, back then. [A gentle smile.] Mais, at least they got passed down to the stories you know today, oui?

[quackery]

... What do mais and oui mean?

[paysdelamour]

"Mais" is French for "but"... and "oui" is French for "yes".

[quackery]

French is a language, right?

[paysdelamour]

Oui, like English or Italian or German.

[quackery]

I don't know the first two, but I'm from Germany! Except it's a different Germany, I guess.

[paysdelamour]

A... different Germany, ma belle? [A blink.]

[quackery]

The Germany guy said my town doesn't exist.

[paysdelamour]

... Germany said so, mm? [He's a bit surprised.] Your world must be far different from my own, ma petite.

[quackery]

I don't think that's a bad thing, though! I mean, he said in his Germany, a war started in 1914, and that's the year it was back home, so...