Okay, so, I remember maybe a year ago or so I made a thread where I mentioned my attraction to books intended for children in even my adult age, for reasons even beyond simple nostalgia. Beverly Cleary was a terrific author, for example, and I was happy to rediscover her works in the last few years and pore through all the great memories of my reading hobby as a kid.


That said, I asked my cousin Jenny if her 9 year-old daughter Maddy was fond of reading, as it would give me an idea of what to get Maddy as a Christmas present. The sort of slice-of-life books aimed at pre-teens that Beverly Cleary was known for was said to be Maddy's thing, so I found this book I thought she might like about some girl named Anastasia and her wacky life hijinks. Now I know Maddy's pretty mature for her age, but, hell, I don't know about this.

Taking a break from house chores just now I thought I would take a gander at this book, and seriously, on the third page, where Ana is bored and wiling away the time acting out death scenes from fiction, like Romeo and Juliet's, this happened:

"GROAN," roared Anastasia. Then she went on, dramatically, I have clasped an asp to my bosom."

(Now, this isn't the problem. Just using the term bosom. We can be adults about this, even people Maddy's age.)

"Must have been a big disappointment for the asp," her mother returned. "You hardly even have a bosom."



.... Uhhhh, yeah. Someone please tell me if you sincerely think I'm overreacting here, but, in any world inside of a kid's book, do mother's really flat-out say to their 12 year-old daughters that they have no breasts? Is that really a thing?

I don't know, sometimes just the insertion of a seemingly inappropriate moment that doesn't belong in a piece of fiction really gets my goat.

There are so many examples. Like, did you ever see the movie Little Monsters with Fred Savage from his Wonder Years age? It was a PG movie that I assume was meant for kids, but, in this one scene, a monster seriously clasps both of his hands around a child's head and pulls it off of his shoulders, then takes a doll's head and plops it down backwards on his neck to replace it. Granted this was bloodless and obviously some kind of gag since the child actually ran off, totally alive and breathing, wordlessly with the doll's head still on backwards. But still, in essence, it was a child decapitation. WHAT THE HELL? I'm surprised that didn't give me nightmares as a kid. I was very prone to that kind of thing.

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So, possible topic of discussion. What are some things you've seen, read, or games you've played where something just mildly to disturbingly inappropriate happened that just didn't fit at all with the overall tone of the whole story?

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I'm sure someone out there mentions their daughter's bosoms. It's around that time they start developing, anyway.

But yeah, the 80s were messed up for this kind of thing. It was awesome!