Have children changed so much that they now have to be protected from fictional characters' mortality?
It's not that children have changed per se, but that the (developed) world has changed. When The Hobbit was published in the mid-1930s, I believe it was 1 out of 20 kids who wouldn't survive to adulthood. (Which was a huge improvement over previous decades, but still not great.) Pretty much every child would've seen a friend or schoolmate--or even a brother or sister--die at a young age. In that context, the idea of sanitizing children's entertainment by scrubbing all the death out of it would've been absurd.
Of course, you're absolutely right that fiction is the perfect way to teach children about death; they're still going to experience the death of a loved one eventually, after all. But declining child mortality rates have helped create an environment in which certain adults have the luxury of believing--rather deludedly--that children don't need to and shouldn't worry about death.
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It's not that children have changed per se, but that the (developed) world has changed. When The Hobbit was published in the mid-1930s, I believe it was 1 out of 20 kids who wouldn't survive to adulthood. (Which was a huge improvement over previous decades, but still not great.) Pretty much every child would've seen a friend or schoolmate--or even a brother or sister--die at a young age. In that context, the idea of sanitizing children's entertainment by scrubbing all the death out of it would've been absurd.
Of course, you're absolutely right that fiction is the perfect way to teach children about death; they're still going to experience the death of a loved one eventually, after all. But declining child mortality rates have helped create an environment in which certain adults have the luxury of believing--rather deludedly--that children don't need to and shouldn't worry about death.