#88 🏷️ What’s in a NAME, and procrastinatory ditties of the mind 🎼
Fear of the word itself
I watched Deadpool with my son Neko the other day. It’s a movie that sits at the tail end of years of haggling between Neko and me over what movies are age-appropriate, and to what degree the official movie ratings apply to him. I was conservative about movie ratings to start with, because of what happened with the final audiobook of A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Neko, an avid listener, became engrossed in A Series of Unfortunate Events when he was around 9. I listened to some of the early ones with him, and they seemed acceptable. Dark, but not too scary. But who’s to know what might constitute “scary” from one person to the next? What terrified Neko about the final book was the poisonous mushrooms. The villain intended, as I understand, to murder his targets with the deadly spores.
Cue years of mushroom phobia. The mere mention of a mushroom was enough to get Neko worked up. He would check his bed for mushrooms before settling down. It was best not to mention a wild mushroom we might encounter on a bush walk, unless we wanted to backtrack and find another route. I had no inkling that this detail would captivate his wee imagination in such a terrible way. At age 9, Neko was generally a bold, fearless kid. But with one distinctly fungal weakness.
It felt so arbitrary that of all the things he might be afraid of it was this. I wondered: why bother screening books and movies at all? Because who knew what might trip another avalanche of existential angst.
Neko is now about to turn 14. Earlier this year while we were out for breakfast, I dared him to tried a cooked mushroom, which he did. This signalled a definitive endpoint.
To date, Neko has watched a bunch of Marvel movies, most rated M, and thus argued passionately that Deadpool – a franchise I’d previously said no to, due to what I assumed was a step up in violence – was little different. Eventually he wore me down.
At the beginning of the movie, in addition to the usual notes about age and gratuitous violence, was another prominent warning. It read:
“Contains depictions of tobacco.”
This... cracked me up, I’ve gotta say.