site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   4971 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 16, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I recently asked ChatGPT what the most recent global children's literature phenomenon before Harry Potter was. Surely someone must've written something since the Narnia books. It confidently said Matilda and refused to budge even when I told him I had no fucking clue who Matilda was.

Anyway, this Friday I found myself on a long bus trip with only a phone to keep me company and I decided to see what it was all about. And, oh boy, was I not impressed. Is everything by Roald Dahl as bad as Matilda? I wouldn't read this trash to my child if you paid me. The last book I inadvertently read that was equally terrible was The Girl that Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson.

Redwall, Chronicles of Prydain, and Dark is Rising have all been mentioned, so I'll say that The Great Brain series is also another good one for kids.

Weird, scrolling through the best-selling books list on Wikipedia Matilda is a fair amount behind both James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when it comes to Dahl books, not to mention the movie adaptations for the latter.

A couple other contenders post-WW2 are Charlotte's Web (1952) and Watership Down (1972). A lot of the bestsellers in the '80s and '90s seem to be series like Goosebumps, Nancy Drew, and such.

I enjoyed Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator as a child. It wasn't great literature, but it was funny.

There are so many Wings and Wongs in China that every time you Wing you get the Wong number.

haha

Don't know about global penetration, but John Marsden's Tomorrow Series was pretty big in Australian schools. There was enough of a gap between installments that people got hyped for the new ones but I doubt it was anywhere near as big as Harry Potter. Also AFAICT it didn't really make much of a dent outside Australia and maybe New Zealand.

I randomly stumbled across that series at the library as a kid and read at least the first couple books. It definitely would not get published today, just due to the premise being anathema to mainstream publishing houses. For context, the series is about a group of young Australians essentially engaging in guerilla warfare and sabotage against foreign invaders (from unspecified countries in Southeast Asia). Looking at the critical acclaim at the time is a fascinating window into the discourse in the '90s and early 2000s.

Edit: Just to be clear my recollection is that the author really tried to avoid racial and geopolitical issues to the point where I found it somewhat confusing and unrealistic. He mostly focused on the characters and their struggle to survive under occupation. The premise is what would make it unpublishable, not his execution of it.

Kind of like a Strayan Red Dawn?

The link in my post seems to agree:

While some comparisons with Red Dawn can be made, there are some significant differences to the story, such as its focus on Australia, character development and the more realistic story of young people surviving in a war zone. I always felt that the idea that Australia, with its relatively small population and relative isolation from Europe and America, could be invaded and completely conquered in such a short period is a lot more realistic than similar events occurring in America.

I always felt that the idea that Australia, with its relatively small population and relative isolation from Europe and America, could be invaded and completely conquered in such a short period

If innumerable games of Risk have taught me anything, it's this.

Adding another vote for the Redwall series. In my experience it seems to have been a big hit with the millennial homeschooler generation.

As for one that hasn't been mentioned yet, Chronicles of Prydain was a series I enjoyed immensely as a kid. And it seems to have gained some reputation as a great children's series per Wikipedia. It also got a little known (?) Disney adaptation of the first two books, named after the second book, The Black Cauldron. Which was a massive bomb, and pretty freaky for a kids film in my opinion. My recollection of the books is them being an excellent fantasy arc with some really great characters. Will have to read again with my kids and confirm.

I was really into both that and The Dark is Rising as a kid. Apparently Welsh mythology really appealed to me for some reason.

My favorite series as a child.

They made a movie that was so bad, Susan Cooper got kicked off the set for complaining.

ha! I've never seen the movie, I'll have to check that out sometime. It's been a very long time since I've read them so i hardly remember the plot at all.

That title sounds familiar. Welsh names just work perfectly for fantasy.

Chronicles of Prydain

You know, I was just talking about this series with a friend of mine. She's read it about a dozen times apparently, and is chomping at the bit to read it to her son. Assured me it's very appropriate for children, and it was written by a friend of Tolkien's specifically to be a more kid accessible fantasy series than LotR proper.

I don't know if that last part is true, but that's what she told me.

It's certainly accessible, and I can see the LotR comparison. Again my memory is failing me here but it's basically "plucky gang of heroes take down the dark lord" and the titular Black Cauldron could be something of a One Ring stand-in.

I haven’t read Matilda or any of his other children’s stuff, but his short stories are among the best I’ve read in English.

I always felt that Dahl was horrendously overrated. Sure, his writing was adequate, but it always screamed "so-called gifted kid still malding about adults not recognizing his talents" well past the point where it was dignified.

To answer your question more directly, Enid Blyton was to my mother's generation what JK Rowling was to mine. Many of her books were like the British equivalent of the American Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew novels, in which a group of intrepid children (the Famous Five, the Secret Seven) would go on adventures and solve mysteries together. She also wrote numerous standalone children's novels featuring anthropomorphic animals or kitchen-sink realism. Her books were very much products of their time, and like Dahl have been hit with the interminable woke debates over whether they're too "offensive" for modern children. (Oh no, a character is called "Fatty"! Burn the lot!)

Dahl's books struggle a lot with the limits of their medium, if you're looking for deep moral lessons. Matilda is supposed to have protected a bunch of fellow students from the Trenchbull, but there's good reason that most adaptations leave her with her powers and a general 'will try to help' personality at the end. The Witches and Big Friendly Giant are slightly better, albeit at the cost of being uncomfortable readers for adults.

I'll second erwgv3g34's list:

  • Goosebumps is a long series of mostly unconnected horror novellas released under the name 'R.L. Stine'. They're usually don't end well for the protagonist, tend to lean into gross horror, and are pretty highly varied in quality, but they were really popular with kids in the 8-12 year old range.
  • Animorphs is a single series of scifi books by K. A. Applegate, featuring a small group of teenagers who stumble upon an alien conspiracy to take over the earth and have to fight it using a different alien's tech that gave them magical shapeshifting. It's like Power Rangers, but except where Power Rangers has teenagers with attitude beating up monsters of the week with giant mechs, switch out 'attitude' for variants of shellshock, 'monsters of the week' with family or friends getting taken over by brainworms, and 'giant mechs' with Rachel turning into a bear. Good, but gets very dark. ('Here I go committing mass murder again!') Can be harder reads, though: advanced kids might be able to get them in the 10+ age range, but especially the later or large books would be difficult before 14 for most kids.
  • Redwall is a set of anthropomorphic novels set in a medieval fantasy world with a very clear division between good ('goodbeasts') and evil ('vermin') with very few exceptions. (imo, the weakest part of the series is its manicheanism). Most of the books are independent or only solely tied to each other (Martin the Warrior is a prequel to Mossflower, Mattimeo a sequel to Redwall), but they share the same world and individual locations or roles show up repeatedly. Longer stories, but relatively easy reads: ability to focus tends to be more important than vocabulary.

That said, I'll caveat that they're older works: Redwall and Animorphs were very much 90s-00s phenomena, and while Goosebumps is still in print it's not nearly as high-ranking as before. Goosebumps is also generally not a very moral work. From that era, I'd also add in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series (hidden world where select few can learn magic and must confront the Power of Entropy / Satan, heavily drenched in Christian religious theodicy), Dianna Wynne Jones Howl's Moving Castle and Dark Lord of Derkholme, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Terry Pratchett's entire output: Good Omens is the best-known because of the tv show and a joint work, and his last couple books went downhill, but I'd still give both The Witches and The Watch sides of the Discworld series as a good set of moral lessons. The Golden Compass is... worth being aware of, but messy: it's an aggressively anti-theist work by a bit of a prick and the denouement is trash, but it was very-well-known.

For recent phenomenon, your pickings are more mixed. A lot of stuff that's popular is just cruft: Captain Underpants was popular enough to get a movie, but I would consider it too simple for most 8-year-old readers. Dog Man is a little more advanced, but not much, and Percy Jackson is just a bastard child of Harry Potter and the paranormal detective world. There was a giant movement of Hunger Games-like slop in the late 2010s, and while they weren't necessarily all bad, none of them were really worth writing home about.

That said, I will point to the Erin Hunter group as somewhat interesting:

  • Warrior Cats follows a set of 'tribes' of feral cats trying to survive in a world with very weak magic. These get very dark (a named character getting crushed by a car isn't even the bloodiest death of one single book), but they're also very strongly moral books.
  • Wings of Fire is pretty similar but with dragons instead.

They're nothing terribly complicated, but they're decently written and have interesting takes.

Animorphs is a single series of scifi books by K. A. Applegate, featuring a small group of teenagers who stumble upon an alien conspiracy to take over the earth and have to fight it using a different alien's tech that gave them magical shapeshifting. It's like Power Rangers, but except where Power Rangers has teenagers with attitude beating up monsters of the week with giant mechs, switch out 'attitude' for variants of shellshock, 'monsters of the week' with family or friends getting taken over by brainworms, and 'giant mechs' with Rachel turning into a bear. Good, but gets very dark. ('Here I go committing mass murder again!') Can be harder reads, though: advanced kids might be able to get them in the 10+ age range, but especially the later or large books would be difficult before 14 for most kids.

For anybody who liked Animorphs as a kid, I strongly recommend r!Animorphs: The Reckoning, a rational reimagining of the series. It's even darker, the setting is tweaked to make more sense, and the characters are much smarter (especially Visser Three, because you can't give Frodo a lightsaber without giving Sauron the Death Star).

It's Animorphs for grownups.

In the interests of consistency, I believe some of the Animorphs books were also ghostwritten.

Good point. From my understanding, #25, #27-31, and #33-52, were ghostwritten, albeit with plot outlines and very heavy editing from Applegate. The ghostwritten works... vary heavily in quality. (skip 28).

I am an Astrid Lindgren fanboy, though that is a bit old fashioned/retro cool.

Roald Dahl is awesome and holds a deservedly esteemed place in the canon of British children's literature. I distinctly recall that one of the blurbs on my edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone observed that "comparisons to Dahl are, for once, justified" — on this side of the pond, comparing a children's writer to Dahl is like comparing a model of car to a Rolls-Royce. I'd hazard a guess that just about every British or Irish Millennial (or older) would have at least a passing familiarity with a few of Dahl's works and their iconic illustrations by Quentin Blake: these books are a true generational monocultural touchstone. I heartily recommend The Twits (my first encounter with the concepts of body positivity and gaslighting — no really); James and the Giant Peach; Fantastic Mr. Fox; Danny, the Champion of the World; The BFG and The Witches. (And, yes, I do think Matilda is great, and marginally superior to its transplanted American film adaptation, which I think holds up remarkably well.)

Interestingly, in addition to his career as a children's novelist, he also wrote delightfully wicked and macabre short stories for adults, many of which were published in outlets like Playboy and/or adapted as episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. One of these, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator", is alarmingly prescient in addition to being a cracking read.

I guess they just don't have enough penetration into the non-Anglo world, other than the chocolate factory one (and I would blame Gene Wilders and memes for that).

I'm genuinely surprised. Danny DeVito adapted Matilda for film, Henry Selick (of The Nightmare Before Christmas fame) adapted James and the Giant Peach, Wes Anderson directed multiple Dahl adaptations including Fantastic Mr. Fox, and no less than Steven Spielberg directed the most recent adaptation of The BFG. Just these four films made an inflation-adjusted 505 million dollars between them, and they're far from an exhaustive catalogue of all the various adaptations of Dahl's works. I appreciate that Dahl isn't as widely known in the states as in the UK and Ireland, but I assumed that the average Millennial or pre-Millennial American would be familiar with at least one of his non-Chocolate Factory works or its cinematic adaptation. The man was far from a one-hit-wonder.

FWIW I was born and raised in the Netherlands and I was read multiple Roald Dahl books by my parents as a kid and I'm pretty sure he is very well known around here. I distinctly remember liking the BFG as a kid, or rather 'de GVR', i.e. 'de Grote Vriendelijke Reus' as it gets rendered in Dutch.

I meant Anglo as in the core Anglosphere. You know, Five Eyes (and Ireland?).

Thank you, I misunderstood initially.

American

I think you're talking to a Russian.

Ah. I thought by "non-Anglo" he meant "non-English" as opposed to "non-Anglosphere". Makes sense.

Dahl’s stuff is popular with 10 year old kids because it’s irreverent of the pieties of adulthood (though fifty years out of date now). The fact that you wouldn’t read it to your child is part of the appeal.

I guess I just didn't like the book for the same reason I don't like Home Alone. Maybe it's okay to punish caricatures of pure evil in a book for children, but neither Kevin nor Matilda are making the world a better place by inflicting cruel and unusual punishments.

I can see that, and would probably agree with you if I had read any of his books after age 12 or so. I think that if you are mature enough to consider the morality involved, or its sociological implications, you are too old for the books. Dahl was so successful because he had the mind of a kid, and he famously didn't get on with adults.

Goosebumps? Animorphs? Redwall?

What are these?

Series (plural) of children's books that achieved popularity significant but much lower than Harry Potter's. Redwall even got an official video game shortly after the author's death.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats