#The Grimm Variations season one review | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

loretranscripts · 5 years

Text

Lore Episode 24: A Stranger Among Us (Transcript) - 28th December 2015

tw: death, gore, death of children, disease

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

Folklore is a living thing. In many ways, the stories we tell and the lessons we pass on are like a tree - the branches reach out into generations and cultures, sometimes in obvious ways, and other times reaching surprising new places. One good example of this would be of the folklore surrounding small fairy people that we’ve discussed here before. Pukwudgies, trolls, goblins, puka and dozens of similar variations are scattered across the world with amazing consistency and reach. How or why is something we’ll probably never fully understand, but it shows us how folklore can spread, how it can migrate, and how it can build upon the past. At the same time, though, folklore has roots, and they run deeper than we might expect. Some stories that we still whisper about in the dark today have crossed the lips of people for centuries, and in some cases, millennia. When I hear a story for the first time or discover a new collection of tales that have been widely distributed, I often stop and ask myself the same questions: where did it come from? What lies at the bottom of the narrative? What are its roots? Outside of Halloween, there is no other time of the year (at least for European cultures, that is) where folklore rushes to the forefront of everyone’s lives with such significance, such power, and such ease as the Christmas season, and rightly so. There is so much there to unpack and explore: the tree, the gifts, the food, and the nocturnal visit from a stranger, one who has seemingly stalked our lives all year long, and yet we blindly welcome into our home. And if there’s one lesson that folklore has taught us over the centuries, it’s to beware of strangers – they aren’t always who they seem to be. I’m Aaron Mahnke and this is Lore.

When we think of coal in our stockings and food and drink left out for a visitor, we rarely pair those ideas with the image of a woman flying through the air on a broomstick, but in Italy there are those who still tell the story of La Befana. Befana’s story has been told since at least the 13th century, originally connected with the Christian feast of the Epiphany. But while many people have never heard of her, the details of her story are eerily familiar. During her visit, Befana was said to enter homes through the chimney. She’s typically depicted carrying a basket or bag full of gifts, but is also known to leave behind a lump of coal or a single stick for children who fail to behave during the year. Before leaving each home, Befana would sweep the floor with her broom, something scholars see as a metaphor for sweeping away the deeds of the previous year, and then she would eat the food left out for her – oftentimes sausage and broccoli. Side note: cookies and milk sound so much better, don’t they? Interestingly enough, Befana is not the only Christmas legend with a passing resemblance to a witch. In the German Alps, there have been stories of another female figure dating back to the 10th century. Some call her Perchta or Berchta, or later Bertha. Jacob Grimm, while researching his Deutsche Mythologie, theorised that she was one of the ancient Germanic mother goddesses. She and her sisters were said to have taught humanity the arts of agriculture, spinning wool and cooking. Over time, though, her legend began to integrate with parts of the Christmas season. Because of her role in teaching humanity the basics of home management, Perchta’s meaning began to shift over the centuries, turning her into the punisher of those who worked during the holidays, failed to feast properly and, much later, hunting down the lazy, and what better time for her to conduct an end of year review, so to speak, than Christmas? Just how did Perchta dish out her punishment on the people of Germany? Well, a hint can be found in her other popular title: the belly-slitter. During the 12 days of Christmas, she would travel through the towns and inspect the people’s behaviour. If they had followed the rules and done right in her eyes, they were rewarded. If they had not been good, though, she was known to have a very nasty side. Anyone disobedient enough to warrant punishment, adult or child alike, would have their stomachs ripped open. Perchta would scoop out whatever might still be inside, pull out the full length of their intestines, and then stuff the victim’s belly with garbage, straw and rocks. While a stomach full of refuse might seem… a little over the top, that distinction actually goes to another ancient female in folklore.

While stories of Grýla, the mythical giant goddess, are far outside the common narrative of Christmas for many of us, for the people of Iceland she is still a whispered source of dread among children. One of the earliest mentions of Grýla dates back to the 13th century collection of Icelandic mythology known as the Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson. According to the many stories told about her over the centuries, Grýla possesses the ability to locate disobedient children. She can do this year-round, so they say, and because of that she was often used as a parental tool to coerce children into doing what they were told. It was in the Christmas season, though, that Grýla became even more monstrous. That was when she was said to climb out of her home in the mountain and make her way toward the towns. She would hunt far and wide for all the naughty children and then take them back to her cave. Once there, she would cut them up, place them in her stew, and devour them. And, according to the legend, she never ran out of food.

There have been other stories of strangers told throughout the centuries, but not all have happy endings. In fact, there is often more loss than gain when it comes to the visits of some of those legends. In the northern Alps, stories have been told for generations about the travelling stranger known as Belsnickel. Considered to be one of the helpers of Saint Nicholas, Belsnickel travels ahead of the big, red man and dispenses his own form of Christmas cheer – with physical abuse. Descriptions of Belsnickel liken him to the wild men of old, with torn and dirty clothes fashioned from animal skins and furs, and a face that is covered in a snarled, filthy beard. Some stories report that he wears a mask with a long tongue protruding from the mouth. According to the legend, which spans centuries in both Germany and the American state of Pennsylvania, Belsnickel would enter the home of a family and scatter nuts and sweets on the floor for the children to collect. And then, with their backs to him, he would lash out with a switch made of hazel or birch, whipping their backs and leaving red marks. And Belsnickel isn’t alone – another travelling stranger from the same region, one who has seen a rise in popularity around the globe, is a creature known as Krampus. At first blush, Krampus sounds similar in many ways to the other strangers in European folklore, but what sets him apart is truly frightening. It is said that Krampus visits the homes of children during the Christmas season, but he doesn’t have a dual nature – there is no reward or special treat when he comes to town. No, his sole purpose and passion in life is to dole out punishment on children who have failed to obey and do their work. Like Belsnickel, he too carries a switch, but in most stories there are more than one. Apparently, he beats so many children that he needs a few spare branches, so he carries them in a bundle. In addition, he is often depicted wearing chains and some form of large sack or cart because ultimately, Krampus isn’t as interested in beating children as he is in taking them. When he arrives in each legend, we are greeted by the appearance of a wild, demonic creature with long horns, cloven feet and a twisted face. After beating the disobedient children, Krampus chains them up and tosses them into his sack before vanishing as quickly as he came, taking the children with him back to hell.

The origins of Krampus are still unclear, but some scholars think that the legend predates Christianity. Instead, they believe that the story has roots in an ancient alpine myth of a horned god of the witches. Even the switch, his weapon of choice, might have been a carry-over from the initiation rites of witches, where the novices were beaten. Far from forgotten, festivals are held throughout Europe to this day that feature many of these legends; events like Krampusnacht in Germany and the Befana festival in Urbania attract tens of thousands, who dress in masks and dance and celebrate. Like Halloween, these are instances where monsters and strangers have been embraced and elevated to something of a children’s story, which is ironic when you understand the roots. Stripping away the detail, Krampus has (from a 30-thousand-foot view) more than a passing resemblance to Pan, the Greek horned god of nature, shepherds, flocks, and mountains. Along with his musical flute, Pan is often known for robbing the innocence from people, usually through sexual means. In a culture that saw the threshold between childhood and adulthood as the loss of virginity, Pan figuratively stole people’s children, and when you think of it that way, it’s more than easy to see similarities, not only between Krampus and Pan, but also between Pan and a character that Disney has helped us all fall in love with: Peter Pan. While he might be able to fly, has no horns and is missing the cloven feet that Pan sports in every image and statue, Peter Pan fulfils the role perfectly. He arrives at night, he carries a flute and lures our children away to another place. It’s a modern story with a familiar ending, but it was far from the first of its kind. That honour, according to some, falls to a small German village in 1284. You might already know the story, but the truth beneath it is far worse than you’d ever expect. In 1284, the German village of Hamlin was struggling with an infestation of rats. Now, I’ve only seen a few rats myself over years, but I also don’t live in a densely populated urban area like New York City or London. But in medieval Europe, from what I can gather, rats were as abundant as squirrels, only bigger and more disease-ridden. It’s hard to imagine the impact that an infestation of rats could have on a town today. If we found a half-eaten bag of flour in the cupboard, there’s a grocery store down the street where we could get more, year-round. But in the Middle Ages, food was grown locally and used throughout the year. If rats ate and ruined the food supplies, there was little a town could do - rats meant death in many instances. According to the story that has been passed down through the centuries since then, a stranger entered Hamelin in the Spring of 1284. He was dressed in colourful clothing, possessed what we might call today as a “silver tongue”, and claimed to have a very unusual, although also very timely, skill – he was a rat catcher. As a profession, rat catching dates back centuries, but it’s rarely seen as a safe and sanitary job. The risk of being bitten or contracting some disease carried by the rats has always been a hazard of the job, and while the exact nature of their involvement has been up for debate for decades, most scholars agree that rats have been key players in the spread of plague - particularly the Black Death of the 14th century, and there were few truly effective tools at their disposal, which made the job that much more difficult. Some rat catchers used a special breed of terrier while others made use of traps, but the most effective tool for centuries was also the most minimal and inexpensive of them all, bare hands - and seeing as how most rats prefer to stay hidden inside dark places, this was a risky technique. The motivation for it all, though, was the meritocracy of it; the more you caught, the more you earned, and while there’s no documented proof of this rumour, it’s been whispered for centuries that rat catchers would sometimes raise their own rats in captivity and then turn them in as part of the job, inflating their numbers and then their pay. This allowed them to pad their pay checks when business was slow, and it also earned them a shady reputation. As a side note, one of the most famous rat catchers in London’s history was a man named Jack Black, who claimed that his black-tan terrier was the father of all the black-tan terriers in London, and who pioneered the art of breeding rats and keeping them as pets. He even wore an outfit made entirely of scarlet cloth, with a big, wide sash across his chest that had two cast iron rats on it. He was probably also a riot at parties, but I can’t confirm that – just a hunch.

The man who walked into Hamelin that June wasn’t any less of a character, if the legends are to be believed. He wore an outrageous outfit, although his was reportedly one of multicoloured fabric that was known back then as “pied” (which was typically a sort of blotchy pattern), and he carried a tool that no other rat catcher claimed to use - a flute - and the mayor of Hamelin trusted the man. Maybe it was the not-so-subtle allusion his appearance made to the ancient stories of the god Pan, a deity who tended flocks of animals and played a flute; maybe it was the man’s marketing ability, that silver tongue and outrageous outfit; perhaps he overpromised and won the mayor’s approval - whatever the reason, this stranger was said to have struck a deal. He would catch all the rats in town, he told the mayor. He would lead them out of the town and away from their lives and he would do this, he said, with his musical instrument, a pipe that he claimed would lure them away. Now, I don’t know about you, but I would have been sceptical. The mayor, though, was desperate. Sure, they haggled over the price, but in the end the stranger won. The exact amount of money differs from version to version of the story, but in all of them it’s an exorbitant sum, and that’s the point. Hamelin was so desperate that they were willing to overpay for a solution, and then he got to work. According to all the stories, and even the children’s tales we were raised on, the piper picked up his flute and began to play. As if driven by some magical force, all of the rats in Hamelin scuttled out of their hiding places and began to crowd around him; streams of them, thousands of them, all writhing in a mass at his feet. Then, when it seemed like they had all come out, he marched out of town and down to the Vesser river. The stories say that he was beyond successful. Most accounts say that all but one of the rats drowned in the river that day. Hamelin’s troubles were over, for a while. You see, the piper returned later to collect his money - he had done the job they had hired him to perform, the rats were gone, but for some unknown reason, the mayor refused to pay him. Now, the stories don’t say why, but we can speculate. Maybe it was because the stranger didn’t return with any bodies to show for his work, as was the custom for a rat catcher. How could the town pay him per head when there were no heads to count? At any rate, the mayor turned the stranger away and the man, clearly taken advantage of, stormed out of the village, but not before turning to face the people of Hamelin and proclaim a curse on them. He would return one day, he said, and when he did, he would have his revenge. Remember, this is a story that has been passed down for 800 years - most of what we know about the real events is pure legend, based loosely on scattered reports of a stained-glass window in the church there, in Hamelin. The window itself was lost in 1660, but there a drawings of it that predate the destruction as far back as the 14th century, and the earliest mention of these events is a 1384 entry in the Hamelin town records. The events were recorded, of course, because the stranger did return. According to the story, though, he changed clothing, trading in his colourful robes for the uniform of a hunter. Gone was the salesman; the stranger was returning for vengeance. While the adults were in church on June 26th, the stranger strode into town and began to play his flute again. This time, rather than crowds of writhing rats, it was the children who clambered out of the houses. They flooded the streets, gathering around the strange visitor, and then, when they were all present, he marched them out of town, never to be seen again. There are, of course, a number of morals to this story, but the one that has stuck with us for centuries remains ever-true: never trust a stranger.

Folklore is full of strangers. In many stories, it’s flat-out amazing just how much freedom we have given them in our lives. Even stories of someone as benign as Santa Claus have an element of danger when you view them from outside cultural fishbowl. Here’s the story of a strange man who stalks our children year-round, noting their behaviour and secret desires, who then breaks into our homes, eats our food, and leaves a few presents to prove that he was there. For the people of Hamelin, though, that stranger cost them far more than a plate of cookies. Their ill treatment of the man who came to town led to the loss of their children, and as difficult as it is to believe, the story of Hamelin is true – part of it, at least. Scholars are in agreement that the rats were a later addition to the tale, showing up about 300 years after the events were said to have taken place. But as far back as the records go, there has always been a stranger, a visitor from the outside, who leaves with the children, and although it’s taken a very long time to figure out why, some historians think they have the answer. To understand the truth, they say, we first have to understand the political culture that Hamelin found itself in. In 1227, about 50 years prior to the events of Hamelin, a battle took place on the border between what was then the Holy Roman Empire and Denmark, pushing the Danish border north of modern-day Germany. As a result, a whole new territory opened up that needed colonists. Men called “locators” were assigned to travel the land and find volunteers to populate this new territory, who often wore colourful clothing. They were eloquent speakers. They were, in a sense, a lot like today’s door-to-door salesmen. The empire needed farmers and craftsmen and soldiers to protect these new lands, but it was hard to find people willing to uproot their lives and travel north, especially when that new land was alongside a contested, military-heavy border. It was a hard sell, and so when the locators came knocking, rather than shipping off a handful of adult volunteers, townsfolk would sometimes get creative. Instead of paying with their own lives, they would sell their children to these men. The proof, it turns out, is in the phonebook, and on Google maps. Many town names along a line between Hamelin and Poland bear a striking resemblance to town names from medieval Germany, oftentimes even showing up more than once. Even more compelling, surnames from the 1284 Hamelin town records still show up in phonebooks in Pomerania, a region of Poland along the Baltic sea. The folklore, you see, tells a colourful story, one that’s as easy for children to swallow as a spoonful of honey, but the truth that the story hides turns out to be far less palatable. An entire town, desperate for a solution to their economic and social challenges, actually sold their children off to recruiters hoping to colonise new lands. It’s a plot reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, in that these people constructed a fantasy around certain events, and then passed that lie on to later generations in order to justify their actions and avoid questions. In the end, an outsider did indeed come to Hamelin that day, but he wasn’t the one who took the children. No, it turns out that the true monsters were already there, living in the house next door, shopping in the market, farming the fields. The most dangerous stranger, it seems, isn’t the outsider – it’s the one that hides among us.

[Closing statements]

#lore podcast #podcast transcripts #aaron mahnke #christmas #krampus #pied piper of hamelin #folklore #italy #iceland #germany #transcripts #24

8 notes · View notes

feministdisney · 6 years

Text

Consent in Animated Shows & Movies

Since the issue of consent has been at the top of conversations lately, I thought it might be interesting to link this back to kids’ media. I think in some scenes (like the Gaston one below) it’s really easy to see how responses like “but she never said no, so it’s on her if something happens!!” are just not cutting it. This is not meant to be an exhaustive review, since there are hundreds of movies and shows to consider, so feel free to chime in.

(note: since this is discussing movies, there may obviously be spoilers.)

May We? Asking is a Great Start:

Frozen’s kiss scene at the end was a good example of consent. He makes a verbal request to make sure it would be desired on her end, and I’d guess he would have stopped if she hadn’t said “no” but also looked disgusted by the request. Because: consent is a multi-step, dimensional, ongoing process, not a piece of paper swapped across desks in class that says “will you consent? please circle yes or no.” and then you never think about it again.

As far as other Disney movies go, I was fairly pleased that most of the kissing scenes I reviewed (with the obvious exceptions below) seemed to show the idea of enthusiastic consent. It would be great to see both verbal and non-verbal consent shown together more frequently so that people stop seeing it as some dramatic, silly thing that only takes place on comedy skits about over-the-top feminism, but rather, a great tool to have, especially if you don’t know a person that well and may misread one or the other.

(if I missed any obvious bad moments in movies, though, let me know, since there’s a lot of them!)

Saying No Without Saying “No”:

youtube

The Gaston Proposal scene in Beauty in the Beast (Youtube link) is a great example of what consent DOESN’T look like, the sort of behaviors women do to “softly” say they’re not interested, and what qualifies as a coercive tactic. It’s worth stating that Beauty never says “no” to Gaston - she doesn’t even really say a variation of it. In fact, she says things that could be interpreted positively, on the surface; “Gaston; what a pleasant surprise.”

Would any person really watch this scene and believe she’s “leading him on” or that she’s “into it” though? That her not immediately running upstairs should be taken as a sign that she wants to be in the room with him? Every time he proposes something, she attempts to de-escalate the situation with her joking comments and by taking a few steps away from him. Gaston, meanwhile, continues to follow her around the room (even though she’s obviously moving away from him) and when he doesn’t get the response he wants, instead of leaving, he continues to escalate his body language and get closer to her until he’s got her pinned against the door.

Trust Can Be Used to Manipulate; This is Not Enthusiastic Consent:

Several people referred me to Steven Universe Season 2 Ep 11 and I could see why - it really does hit on the concept of consent and manipulating people into giving a “yes.” Pearl tricks Garnet into being Sardonyx with her (they combine powers... I haven’t watched much of this show so sorry if I get the terminology wrong haha). I think the show does a good job of conveying how Garnet feels and had lines like “I just wanted to share a few more victories with you.” (to justify the trickery)

“Those weren’t victories!”

“We’re so much weaker than you...fusing with you is our one chance to feel stronger!” (justification given by Amethyst for trickery)

The point is clear that even if your goal is something that would normally feel good for both parties, manipulating people in order to get it does not result in a nice, “shared” moment. Whether you intentionally get someone drunk to lower their guard and make them more likely to say “yes” when they’re originally saying “no,” and/or ignore multiple verbal/non-verbal cues that they’re not ready or interested in moving forward because you think more pushing will eventually result in a yes, you are responsible for creating a situation where consent has not been enthusiastically given.

And since Pearl and Garnet have an ongoing friendship, the point is also clear: in this type of situation, you are using someone’s trust in you as a tool to manipulate them.

The Best Plots Don’t Ignore Consent:

People often get very upset over the idea that the scene presented in Sleeping Beauty is completely non-consensual. They forget this is a fictional storyline, in which “he HAS to kiss her to save her” is not an excuse, if that requirement itself has been made up.

From a prior consent-related note I have posted, about Sleeping Beauty:

Sleeping Beauty only works as a positive romance because we know how it’s supposed to end. Handsome nice prince rescues the lovely sleeping princess. He kisses her to wake her even though this is an action she can’t consent to.

This doesn’t mean the prince is a bad person- it means consent wasn’t considered important enough when they made this movie, that it would alter that scene more from the original.

Consent wasn’t considered a “big deal” because we KNOW she likes him from that one scene where she did, and we presume she wouldn’t disagree with him (which is often used to excuse actual crimes, rather than happy-ending story plots)… because kissing is romantic and that trumps making sure a movie’s plot is fully consensual.

Worth noting, the actual story of Sleeping Beauty (though it exists in several forms and variants, as many fairytales do) is really disturbing:

The version of Sleeping Beauty with its chaste, true-love kiss that most of us remember from Disney or the Brothers Grimm derives from a 17th-century Italian tale called Sun, Moon, and Talia by Giambattista Basile, based on folk legends dating from the 14th century. In these early versions, the sleeping princess is raped and impregnated by a passing king – but it all ends well because after she wakes and recovers from the initial shock of finding she has twins, he returns and marries her.

Via The Guardian. You might find this article enlightening

Snow White experiences a similar tale.

The Loss of Consent - Betrayal:

Maleficent goes back into examining consent with the loss of Maleficent’s wings. Stefan drugs her and rips her wings off her body. While this scene is brutal, it is successful in conveying, through metaphor, what sexual assault can be like as an experience. Her pain isn’t just the literal pain of having this done; it’s the betrayal of a friend that causes much of the long-lasting sorrow that follows her through the rest of the film.

To quote my review linked above:

Later in the movie, Maleficent brings Phillip to Aurora for the sake of kissing her, because none of them watched Frozen and realized it could be Maleficent. His lines are pretty much everything anyone’s pointed out about that film from a critical feminist perspective.

“It wouldn’t feel right,” he says as the fairies urge him, chanting KISS HER! in unison.

“But I’ve only met her once,” he hesitates again. And finally, another pause, “What was that about the curse?” (dialogue should be pretty close but might have errors since I accidentally wrote it on top of other notes I took)

Finally, he does kiss her, but I think his hesitation was important for what it established about the questionable nature of the scene. His hesitation, and the way the scene is set up, makes the kiss and the premise behind it seem questionable to us – a call-to-awareness that is missing from the first film.

And it’s also important to note that, in this retelling, his kiss isn’t rewarded with her waking up. (Note: though Maleficent also kisses her, it’s on the forehead, which I think has a somewhat different connotation esp. when the prince had previously expressed a desire to get to know her better, and Maleficent’s kiss is performed without expectation).

But anyway, please let me know your thoughts! This is not meant to be the end-all, just a jumping point.

#disney #consent #feminism

501 notes · View notes