Category: UPSETTING DAY

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UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: You Wouldn’t Want to be a Sailor On a 19th Century Sailing Vessel! 🌭

Not every Upsetting Day will be about accursed children’s books, but a lot of them will be, since nobody hates the playful innocence of the young like the people who write books for them. In descending order, here are the top three creatures who are most harmed by the pure giggle of a toddler:

3.) Vorgeth Lightsbane, Devourer of Innocence and Archduke of the Scorching Sands of Hell, Tenth Ascension of the Screaming Plane, The Orphanmaker, He Whose Sword Is Never Sated

2.) Betsy DeVos

1.)The fine folks at Salariya Books

A lot of Salariya’s offerings are pretty standard fare. They hate children in a superficial, almost charming way. Their books are mostly about kids making Cursed Monkey’s Paw-style wishes that teach them to appreciate zinc.

Billy: “Gee, without windows to keep out mosquitoes malaria sure did kill everyone I love, Giggly the Glass Sprite. You’re right, we can’t live without glass! But my little brother just broke his arm falling out of a tree. I bet we could live without those!”

Billy: *painful suffocating gasps*

Salariya did not invent this cruel game, they merely enjoy it. Every other educational film strip made before 2006 was about some dipshit kid finding a genie and indulging in some inexplicable grudge against sodium. Salariya truly takes their disdain to the next level in their “You Wouldn’t Want To Be” series. 

Now, admittedly the idea behind these books is that they’re a bit on the darker side. They’re meant to appeal to the weird kid who always finds some excuse not to stand up for a while after dissecting his frog. But Salariya is very clear that these books are still meant for young children. Specifically, ages 7-12. 

I want you to keep that age group in mind as we delve into You Wouldn’t Want To Be A Sailor On A 19th Century Whaling Vessel. Already I have questions: Which unsuspecting child is this in the face of, Salariya? There’s no rash of second graders pestering their borderline alcoholic teacher about their wish to travel back in time so they can stab whales. This must be a very specific, personal vendetta. This is clearly just a thin excuse to drag a piece of glass across one particular kid’s soul, and boy howdy, does Salariya know how to gouge.

The book is written in second person, framed like a Choose Your Own Adventure story where every choice is wrong and they’re all made for you, which, to be fair, is a pretty accurate representation of a child’s life in the 19th century.

And yes, all of the art is like this: It’s clearly meant to be in the Mad-magazine style, but taken to some crazy extreme where every single character is some sort of inbred monkey beast who looks like they’ve just discovered that some holes are for fucking and they’re eager to test the others.

This is the second paragraph:

If a children’s book tries to warn you of the horrors to come, you better listen. That’s like Leatherface breaking character to tell you to run — this mercy is not often given, and the only thing that’s certain is that if you ignore it, you will find out what a tongue feels like on exposed muscle.

Why, that last cabin boy layed for the captain for two straight years and he barely made enough to afford a new prosthetic wooden asshole. I swear I’m not trying to force the dark jokes in here — there’s a lot of weird sub/dom implications between ‘you’ and the captain. 

Listen, if you don’t want to take the assless overalls and powdered wig from him, that’s fine. He actually likes it best when you’re smelly.

This is like 50 Shades of Gray for the 19th century whaling scene. Maybe I am seeing things that aren’t there, but it doesn’t help that every single character is drawn like they’re actively imagining the smell coming off the vat of acid they’re going to dissolve you in when you’re “cashed.”

After exploring the complicated sexuality of every bosun on board, we finally get to the whaling itself, and it’s pretty visceral.

“Chimney’s afire! Haha, y’see? Fer all the blood geysering into the air? Ah, ye got tae make your own fun out here on the sea. Oi, listen boyo, what do y’say ye check out the inside of this vat for me, eh?”

Yes, this book goes into very deep detail about the process of utterly demolishing what most 7 year-olds only know as ‘Pearl Krabs.’

Seriously, they go full Hellraiser on this poor whale. Not only am I not exaggerating, I now think 19th century whaling diagrams were the aesthetic inspiration for the Cenobites. Look at this shit:

Your Second Grader definitely needs to know how to peel a whale like an orange. Ignore the tears; tell him again where the chains attach. This world is a harsh place and he will never thrive if he doesn’t understand exactly how you skin majesty.

And this complete whale inversion isn’t even where the dark turn comes in. If lil’ Suzy thought she might never sleep again after you taught her what ‘horse pieces’ are, slip that bitch some pickled ginger because she’s going to need a palate cleanser for all the new horrors she’s about to taste.

Oh no! The last time the captain called you into his cabin, did you accidentally cry out “I need a boyfriend who won’t take it easy on me!” in whalese?! 

Halfway through this book about whaling, your ship sinks and you become stranded on the high seas. Don’t worry: We gloss over nothing.

“Hey Terry, did you write that wacky caption about corpse decomposition?”

“Sure did, Jim! Now what say we head on down to Chuck E. Cheese and piss in the ballpit?”

“Ah, the ol’ Jersey Cereal Bowl. You got yourself a date!”

Yes, in this book intended for 7-12 year olds (13 is too old! They will be jaded by then! The psychic wounds may heal without scarring!) you wind up eating your dead. The silly Mad cartoons just fail to capture the existential horror of that moment when you first see your friends as food.

Like here: Owen is displaying a Scooby-Doo level of scared, when we need him at least at a Hereditary.

At some point, the Little League team you coach is going to learn about sucking the marrow from the bones of their friends. If it’s not from you, it’s from the street. Do you really want them learning the grisly details of cannibalism from some pervert? What if he doesn’t even do the marrow slorping noises right? That’s a risk you can’t afford to take!

Look how mystified those two are — like they just can’t believe a little cousin-eating is society’s line. 

“Did ye explain about tonguing the marrow, Young Tom?”

“Of course, cap’n! Like licking a jagged honeycomb, I told ‘em.”

“And still they shun us? This world has gone soft, boy.”

“Mayhaps it’s your hand in my back pocket they find disconcerting, sir.”

“Back pockets haven’t been invented yet, Young Tom.”

“…”

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: A Doris Sanford Special Feature 🌭

Doris Sanford wrote illustrated children’s books for every conceivable trauma a child might go through. She wrote a book on being a loser, one about making friends with the Japanese soldiers guarding you in a prison camp ,and one on the struggles of getting rubbed with chicken in a Satanic pre-school. Ha ha, what funny joke concepts, right? Those are real. Those are faithful summaries of actual books she wrote. So get the fuck ready because it’s UPSETTING DAY at 1-900-HOTDOG and Doris Sanford is an abusive clown riding a molested elephant through a shit-your-pants-in-class circus.

Let’s look at two of her books from the HURTS OF CHILDHOOD SERIES, because a week of reviewing products from the wrong dimension has already left me unable to feel the pain from just one devastatingly illustrated tale of childhood anguish. We’ll start with Something Must Be Wrong With Me: A Boy’s Book About Sexual Abuse, and it’s worse than it sounds. If a Costco factory chicken had anything like a beak left on its featherless, shit-covered head, it would describe Something Must Be Wrong With Me as “a bit too sad for me.”

Normally, Doris Sanford likes to write a lot of details about her main characters before she traumatizes them. We get to know the children, and maybe learn about their hobbies a bit before they get abducted by a human centipede scientist or pulled apart by robots. Something Must Be Wrong With Me moves a little faster than her other books. It’s about a boy named Dino who loved bask– Dino’s basketball coach takes nude pictures of them together in the showers. Sorry, that’s how fast this anguish unfolds. We know Dino for exactly six sentences before Coach Tom is rubbing him in the shower. This is the second page of the book:

Doris usually works with an illustrator named Graci Evans who has a gift, or maybe a curse, for drawing intense, longing stares. Whenever two of her subjects are looking at each other, there is a palpable sexual magnetism and it is never appropriate. This woman is obviously a romance cover specialist, but her career ended up taking this path and now she draws wet molesters staring into the eyes of little boys. Dino should look afraid or confused, but Graci’s colored pencils can only render one thing– unrestrained desire. I am not comfortable explaining any of this, and any number of people in the publishing process could have stepped in and said, “Proofs look great, Graci. One note, though: Can you make it so every single character doesn’t look like they’re quivering in anticipation of true love’s kiss?”

Another strange thing Doris likes to write into her books are talking animals. The main character, even if they have parents, therapists, or any other kind of loving support system, will run off to be alone with their trauma and get visited by a wise animal. The artistic intent of this isn’t is clear as Graci’s illustrations insisting every character is about to fuck. Is it magical realism? Hallucinations? Each of these books seem so delicately designed to be used as bibliotherapy for one very, very specific trauma, so it seems irresponsible to throw in something as batshit crazy as, for instance, a sexual abuse advice pigeon.

The “amazing” sexual abuse advice bird who visits Dino at night to tell him which touches are good or bad is named LOVE-DOVE (capital letters theirs). He’s not named Your Body Your Choice Dove or It’s Not Your Fault Bird. He’s named LOVE-DOVE. It’s weird, right? It’s like telling a kid his parents died in a drunk driving accident and leaving him in a room with the amazing BEER-DEER. I just think a bird speaking in the tongue of man is the last thing this kid needs to help wrap his head around the concept of love. And speaking of love, here’s how Graci drew LOVE-DOVE and Dino’s last goodbye.

People search their whole lives for someone who will look at them like a little boy and bird look at each other in a Graci Evans illustration. How did she make the bird look so horny? You can’t train this. There are no aviary anatomy books on how to draw yearning in the red eyes of a dove. It’s something Graci has in her soul. She couldn’t draw a sexually uninterested bird if you held a gun to her head and said, “If the pigeon wants to fuck I pull the trigger.” That’s not a LOVE-DOVE, that is a THIS HOTEL ROOM WILL NEVER BE CLEAN AGAIN-DOVE.

It’s nice to think all this incoherent narrative illustrated by longing gazes between a boy and his sex bird helped some kids. I can’t speak for the others, but my copy was previously owned by a community center library in Whitehall, Michigan where it was only checked out one time. So I hope the woman named Narngry Illegible didn’t find it as uselessly ridiculous as I did.

For Your Own Good, A Child’s Book About Living in a Foster Home is upsetting for a few reasons. One, the main characters, Jerome and Jamin live a terrible life of neglect and abuse before being taken by the state and placed in foster care. Two, it’s a sad tale of mostly nothing. And three, Doris is not exactly equipped to write black characters. I’m sure she would be quite surprised to discover this, and have a few objections, but it’s pretty racist.

At first the racism is subtle. The main character be narratin’ without ever endin’ any verbs with a “g.” This may not seem like much, and it isn’t, but I have the library of a madman, so I own all 20ish of Doris and Graci’s books. This is the only one with this type of narrative voice. Suspiciously, it’s also the only one with an African American lead. She was right not to pull the trigger and go full, what was called in 1993, “Ebonics” but what she certainly would have called “Jive,” but her decision to have Jerome narratin’ his struggles like ‘dis is a tough thing to look at.

Before they meet, of course, a talking dog, Jerome and Jamin have a tough time adjusting to life in the foster home. For instance, they don’t like to wear or seem to understand clothes, and Jamin instantly destroys the shirts he’s given for school. Look, I’m not saying that the only black people Doris had ever seen were on National Geographic and Def Comedy Jam, but it would explain why the other things her black characters couldn’t wrap their heads around were “how to use the silverware at dinner,” and “how to do things on time.”

The story is a nightmare. Jerome and Jamin are bumbling fish-out-of-water fuckups in every situation and their deadbeat mother doesn’t bother to show up to their scheduled visitations. And look, as a white with a country upbringing and at least 73 untreated concussions, I’m not immune to racism. For instance, when I meet an Asian stand-up comedian I say, “Based on the two things I know about you, 10 minutes of your act is screaming in your mother’s accent.” And every Asian stand-up comedian I have or will ever meet thinks I’m Sherlock Holmes. Also, I am barely kidding when I say if I was a black crime fighter my superhero name would be Karate Ivory Wayans. So yeah, I get not getting it, ethnics. I so wholeheartedly don’t get it that when Starbucks writes “Let’s talk about race” on my cup, I do. And I always ask why I’m not allowed to say it. Always. So if you’re writing a kid’s book about foster homes and I, the man who typed this paragraph, say, “Hold up, this shit is racist,” you fucked up.

Luckily, not many illustrations called for characters to look into each other’s eyes, so Graci Evans kept her colored pencils in her pants for most of the book. I say most of the book because it does end with this picture of Jerome and Jamin with their foster dad sniffing them like he wants their scent to be his everything. SNIFFFFF…

I started tellin’ Bob “I love you… ‘Dad,'” but all he said in return was “SNIFFFFFFFFFF.”

Jamin was gazin’ into his beard the whole time. Just fallin’ in love like a straight up sex pigeon. “SNNNNFFFFFF,” Bob continued.

“SNIFF. SNIIIIIIIIIFFFFFF.”

I tried breakin’ the silence. “We should be gettin’ go–“

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” Bob interrupted with a 40 minute sigh before starting again. “SNIFFFFFFF...” The nearby animals were ordinary, non-talking ones. No one was comin’ to help us.

INSPIRED BY DORIS SANFORD AND GRACI EVANS with apologies to, I guess, everyone else

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Fanfiction Showcase: My Little Pony – Cupcakes

When our generous, wise, only slightly acidic sponsors over at PoxCo (Spread the Pox!™) first assigned me the fanfiction beat, I immediately tried to commit ritual suicide. The knife penetrated, I saw the blood, felt the pain, but there was no sweet release of death. The wounds sealed shut before my very eyes. The head HR mantis, Vexxox, informed me of three things: that death simply does not work that way in the Wrong Dimension, that instead of my life I had actually just cost myself the ability to feel one human emotion, and that my first assignment would be Cupcakes, a My Little Pony fanfiction by Sergent Sprinkles. I would say that’s an adorable name, but apparently it was the ability to find things cute that I lost. Is that even a human emotion? I always thought ‘finding things cute’ would be categorized under ‘love.’ Have I lost the ability to love altogether? Let’s find out! 

Okay, you know where this is going. All fan fiction starts like this: We’re going to enjoy a lovely snippet of normalcy that could come straight out of the show, and then Harry Potter poofs in, waves his wand around and says “Ponium Pantieus Vanishera!” Cut to one masturbation session later and boom! — you can feel shame again. We’ll skip through the next section, which is just about Rainbow Dash, who looks like this:

Hurrying to meet Pinkie Pie in her bakery:

Man, you almost can’t blame the Deep Nerds from jacking it to this stuff. Those are halfway to pornstar names, and the artists gave the ponies makeup. Listen, I’m not saying it’s right to want to fuck a cartoon horse, but I am saying that if you slap a miniskirt on one you lose the right to be surprised when a 34 year-old anime enthusiast puts it on a bodypillow. 

So here, they meet up in the bakery and…

Right. Exactly as expected. I’m certainly not going to blame the victim in this scenario, but if somebody invites you in and insists you eat something, then gets super coy when you ask why, you were actually already roofied from touching the doorknob and I’m sorry I could not get this warning to you earlier. 

All right, well, here we go. I guess we’re doing this. Let me just check real quick to make sure suicide doesn’t work and nope — still here. Think I just lost the ability to feel sunshine on my face which, again, I wasn’t aware was an emotion. Is that under ‘happiness’? Did I just lose all happiness? 

Yep, it was all happiness.

Look, fine, I’m going to unzip, but I’m not going to be happy about it. I literally can’t.

Wait, what? What in the unholy scrabbling fuck? I thought I was prepared for this. I was prepared for such terrible sights, but not in the Hellraiser sense. I never thought I’d be disappointed that a cartoon pony is getting out of this scenario with its hymen intact, but here we are. You’ve taken another thing from me, Internet.

Hold on, I need to know whether or not this is…

Yes, this is several thousand intricate words of My Little Pony torture porn. 

That last sentence should not be. It reads like a thesis written by an AI to justify its eradication of the human race. I never thought I would type those words in that order, but I also thought I would be an astronaut, when the closest I’ve ever gotten to drifting aimlessly in the void is right here, right now, reading this:

Solid comedy bit, Pinkie Pie. Do we really need to take a torture break to try out riffs from your Seinfeld spec script? Many is the time I’ve wished for physical maiming instead of having to attend a friend’s improv class, but I never thought it would be inflicted upon innocent ponies instead. Truly this monkey’s paw has curled down three fingers and left me with the middle one.

I write horror for a living and I am finding this My Little Pony story to be a bit much. I will say: good job on channeling a basic injury we can all relate to — the torn hangnail — and incorporating a hardcore version of it into this children’s story meant for little girls (and boys still figuring some things out). I thought MLP was already about as polluted as a fanpool could get, since a grown man in a My Little Pony shirt is how nature signals you to shut down your genitals, but this is worse. 

I’m not going to subject you to the thousands more words there are of this, so hopefully what you’ve seen so far has been enough foreplay and the recap alone will help you finish:

Pinkie Pie cuts pieces off of Rainbow Dash, then makes her eat herself, drives hot nails into her hooves and then runs an electric current through them, and finally guts Dash, all while running her tight five minute comedy routine because an audience is an audience. There’s way too much loving description and needless urination here to say this is entirely non-sexual, but if you do find yourself aroused just know that this is the step between killing small animals and hunting prostitutes on a private island. 

Take us out, Pinkie Pie. 

Honestly, there’s no surprise here. This was the only way to close Pinkie’s arc. Taxidermying her pony-friend is just basic storytelling structure. Like Tom Joad marching off to change the world, there was no other way this story could end. And until Eli Roth finally signs on to the Care Bears remake, this is going to have to tide you over, anthropomorphized cartoon animal torture fetishists. 

As for me, I’m pretty sure I can still be exploded or incinerated, so it’s not like I don’t have hope. 

Oh, no — turns out I cannot be exploded, and I have quite literally lost ‘hope.’