#Engaging kids with stories

[playfulsparksp]

How to Find the Best Stories for Your Kids: Easy Guide

In today’s digital age, the abundance of children’s best stories can be overwhelming for parents seeking the best content for their kids. With countless options available across various mediums, from books to podcasts to streaming services, how can parents navigate this vast landscape to find stories that are not only entertaining but also educational and enriching? In this comprehensive guide,…

[moodlesmain]

I am THIS close to going full conspiracy board trying to piece together the components of my favourite genre "spooky, mystery solving, coming of age adventures that involve a clash of the mundane and the supernatural"

EDIT: I went full conspiracy board mode

[puppyeared]

mascot

[rustchild]

one of the wild things about people’s stubborn insistence on misunderstanding The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is that the narrator anticipates an audience that won’t engage with the text, just in the opposite direction. Throughout the story are little asides asking what the reader is willing to believe in. Can you believe in a utopia? What if I told you this? What about this? Can you believe in the festivals? The towers by the sea? Can we believe that they have no king? Can we believe that they are joyful? Does your utopia have technology, luxury, sex, temples, drugs? The story is consulting you as it’s being told, framed as a dialogue. It literally asks you directly: do you only believe joy is possible with suffering? And, implicitly, why?

the question isn’t just “what would you personally do about the kid.” It isn’t just an intricate trolley problem. It’s an interrogation of the limits of imagination. How do we make suffering compulsory? Why? What futures (or pasts) are we capable of imagining? How do we rationalize suffering as necessary? And so on. In all of the conversations I’ve seen or had about this story, no one has mentioned the fact that it’s actively breaking the fourth wall. The narrator is building a world in front of your eyes and challenging you to participate. “I would free the kid” and then what? What does the Omelas you’ve constructed look like, and why? And what does that say about the worlds you’re building in real life?

[intermundia]

the eternal tension of being a star wars fan is like, could one write a history book of the prequel era? yes, easily, i'm working on one. is that the right way to engage the text? it's sure a fun way, but there's definitely a more profound one hiding behind the smoke and mirrors of plot. have i have read articles by constitutional scholars about the jedi? yes, several. they're fantastic and fun. but do they also miss the point of the saga in an important way? imho yes

[jewfrogs]

it’s wild to me that people act like the bad kids were baselessly paranoid and rude to the rat grinders as if kipperlilly wasn’t weird and hostile in her introduction. and as if the girl who had a baseless one-sided grudge against them before she was infected with preternatural rage was gonna go ‘nevermind’ and give up her evil plot if the bad kids were perfectly niceys. Okay

[swordscleric]

I am failing to ignore twitter but I did not realise the kipperlily crew were losing their mind as much as they are with brennan's interview on screenrant and the idea that kipperlily was not a good person and forced that onto the other rat grinders

[kindlespark]

god i'm so grateful that i find tumblr's reblogging system so insufferable that i'm not even tempted to engage with the people completely missing my point rn

[vaugarde]

okay so as a gen 5 stan who does adore the story in bw and bw2, and now that gen 5 has experienced both a vicious hatedom that wouldnt hear a single positive thing about the games, and now a super protective fandom that insists they were perfect and had zero flaws... can we admit now that the bw1 story at least was. a little mid.

[tariah23]

I rly don’t see how ppl be 20+ shipping kids anymore tbh… like, it’s so rampant and I don’t see the appeal to it anymore being as tho I’m in my late 20’s.

[puppyeared]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[janamensch]

I’ve been reading the Neverending Story to my sisters as a bedtime story, and I still love this book so so much!! Trying to figure out what I want their designs to look like, because I do want to draw more stuff from this book

[daydreamerwonderkid]

Idk how we got here, but I genuinely remember a time when going to the comments on a Webtoon was a fun experience and not an endless wall of vitriolic misogyny.

[primus-why]

I secretly hope B127 gets his throat ripped out in the movie cuz I just think making Bumblebee silent in such a brutal (but kinda sick/cool) way is just neat for his character... but alas they likely paid a lot for the VA to be there ahhshsjdjd

[thelediz]

Spoiler warning: I write happy endings

So I’ve been reading this fic series which is actually just one very long story that for some reason the author has decided to break into separate stories EVEN THOUGH you cannot feasibly read one without context. Believe me, I have tried to skip stories only to end up confused because I have clearly missed a plot point. Seriously, why is this a thing people do, it's so frustrating and -

I have been reading this fic series.

It’s really good, and I really enjoy the author’s writing style. I find it super easy to read, and I want to know how the story ends. But each time I read a chapter story, I walk away feeling low-key annoyed, anxious, or upset. And I find myself wondering, this morning, why am I doing this? I am not actually enjoying this story, so why am I still reading?

When I interrogate myself about it, I realise I’m falling into the same trap I often do with fiction: I want to know how the story ends, so I’m tolerating lots of things I don’t like in the HOPE it will end well.

This is actually why I like spoilers. Because if I know how a story ends, and I know the character motivations, then I know whether the journey to get there is going to be worth the pain.

At the moment, with this fic, I don’t. Because it’s told entirely from the perspective of a very unreliable narrator, and this particular author has never written from any point of view except this character’s. So I don’t even have context clues to tell me what this author thinks of the other characters and their motivations. And as the story goes on, while I am becoming increasingly certain that we’re not supposed to trust this character’s perspective, it’s just a constant slow build of tension, all from this one character, who I increasingly dislike.

Now, the story can be saved, I think, if something happens and the narrator is forced to confront the things I’m not liking about them. If the other main character can be rounded out and properly seen. But that’s not going to happen until a climax that I keep waiting for and not getting. Right now, I'm not even sure the things I dislike are supposed to be bad things! Sometimes I think I'm supposed to feel sorry for the poor baby! (I don't and will not)

I don’t personally write fanfic about characters I don’t like, and I wouldn’t want to write a story about a character or relationship that’s objectively doomed. Doomed by their personal perspective, maybe, (get loved Alastor) but I just really personally dislike unhappy endings.

That’s what the real world is for. Entertainment is supposed to entertain and comfort and give me hope.

I don’t read or watch things that I know won’t end well, even if I know they’re amazing works of art. Which is unfortunate, because it means I miss out on a lot of the zeitgeist, but it makes me a happier and more hopeful person.

So I read spoilers, so that I know, in the end, there is going to be a happy ending, and these are the characters I should be rooting for. If I have to engage with something I won’t enjoy, I can quietly disengage and disassociate and let it wash past.

But here I am, with this story series that I’m not enjoying, waiting for a happy ending I’m currently pretty sure won’t come.

I need to break up with this thing and it is so much easier said than done.

Harrumph.

So for those who read my stories, here is a blanket spoiler: I believe in happy endings. It may take a while to get there, whether literally or figuratively, but I always believe in happy endings. So please, judge my silly fics purely on the characterisation, the dialogue, and my incredibly poor proof reading, because it’s always going to end with someone smiling somewhere.

I hope that’s a comfort to someone.

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

You know, I'm glad that some of us take the step to embrace things that we like even if they're "cringe" or "objectively bad"

But perhaps we could take the next step forward and embrace the idea of reading into books/shows/movies/etc even if they don't seem deep. Perhaps we could understand that the two kinds of media aren't either "shallow and meaningless so you're weird and brainrotted to read into it" or "incredibly and profoundly deep in every way so if you don't analyze every single angle of the thing then you're brainrotted". Some media is deeper than others, but all I propose is that no matter how deep it seems it's acceptable to dig into the thing and take the media seriously instead of just assuming that because of ____ thing (such as target audience or how cringe it is) the media not deep and will never be deep and everything good about it happened on accident.