you’d be pessimistic too if you lived under the tsardom and then the ussr. poor guys havent had good leadership in like 500 years.
Latin American literature: “they are killing us”
Theres a fun Russian Fairy Tale, Vasilisa, that has a young girl with an evil stepmother who does everything in her power to kill Vasilisa including sending her directly to the child-eating evil witches house with her talking human skeleton fence, 3 armored knight familiars, and 3 sets of severed hands. Nothing works and instead the stepmother and stepsisters die in a fire. Sometimes Vasilisa marry’s a king but that part of the story isn’t consistent.
Hey German fairy tales aren’t the only fucked up ones.
The weirdos that now roam the internet making furry fanfic and whatnot were the ones making up fairy tales in the past. Same fuck ups, different medium.
The brothers Grimm; original ao3 posters.
The brothers Grimm were more like guys on forums look at weird shit and going “Well ain’t this fucked up.” The brothers Grimm were simply anthropologists of their contemporary, also according to their research Odin is fucking everywhere and was still fucking with folks long after the Christian god took root mostly through the Wild Hunt.
Meanwhile Hungarian fairytales:
Most told versions are even more fucked up that the movie one
The Great Gasby: I’ll die for the freedom to fuck that guy’s wife.
Also a weird amount of Hebrew literature at least that which is contained in the Bible.
German literatur: “i will not die for my word lives on. I mearly sleep in the forest/mountain/rivers”
Russian “I will die for nothing”
Russian “We were all slowly dying anyway”
Chinese litterature: “Nobody dies ! And look, nobody is questioning it !”
More like, ‘I will die for my parents’ if we’re comparing literary classics.
Don’t forget “Obey the emperor and more importantly his imperial bureaucracy”
Journey to the West is the literal d**k-sucking to the Chinese emperor. Like the emperor dies in Journey to the West and in the afterlife, he is given special treatment and guided back to life, because he is the emperor. I stopped reading it after that.
Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin were also written in the same period (14th to 16th c.) and are also heavy-handed that way. Romance pushes Liu Bei as the perfect Confucianist ruler restoring the Han glory (the same one that ended ultra corrupt and lived in luxury while everyone was dying of starvation from taxes and disasters), while throwing as much shit as possible on Cao Cao the reformer and usurper of the Han, and Water Margin starts with the first half showing a whole bunch of characters suffering from imperial oppression building up a large rebel group, only to turn around and have them say “actually all we ever wanted was to be part of the imperial army, let us beat up that other rebel group led by an evil wicked wizard and die to prove it” in the second half (which is actually the more historical part of it…)
Those are 3 of the 4 greatest classics of Chinese literature.
Russian literature is somehow too life-like.
This reminds me of classic Everquest, in which some players argued that Ogre players were better because for a long time there was a bug compelling the guards of their own home city to try to kill them.
Well, at least the Italians lived… right?
Is this accurate?
Lithuanian literature: I killed a cat, now I’m sad about it.