Coltan Scrivner

Well, that sounds silly, right?

If I asked you, like, do you think Little Red Riding Hood teaches anyone anything?

You're gonna be like, no, not really.

Maybe don't go in the woods.

Maybe that's the lesson.

But if you think, okay, if you're a kid living 1000 years ago, right, somewhere in medieval Europe, you can't read.

There's no writing anyway, I guess, but can't read.

You don't have internet, you don't have television, you don't have picture books, nothing like that.

How do you know what a wolf looks like?

How do you know you should even avoid one?

Of course, the way you learn that as a kid is you hear a story about a wolf.

Kids are really afraid of things like that.

So if you just tell them a story about a wolf and all the terrible things it's gonna do, that's probably just gonna scare them.

And like, it's not really, they're not gonna be that interested in it.

So what you do is you soften it a little bit

You make it a story that's a little more engaging where the protagonist is someone who is like the kid, a naive young child who's wandering through the forest alone.

Exactly the kind of person who would be prey to a wolf.

And then you describe what the wolf is like by describing the antagonist.

When she goes to meet her grandmother, who's the wolf, of course, dressed in sheep's clothing or whatever.

Spoiler alert if you have not read Little Red Riding Hood.