#to google peter hirsch's biography

[fictionadventurer]

It sounds like Joe and Ken focused on telling stories, stories that being stories focused on the world and characters they knew. While Pete's were more focused on delivering a message with story flavored wrapping.

This is very much the case, but the difference seems to go even deeper than that, to a fundamental difference in worldviews that affect how they approach story.

Episodes written by Joe Fallon and Ken Scarborough respect children as people. Children have been shaped by their experiences and have unique personalities. Children are curious and have brains--they are driven to explore new things and can draw conclusions from what they see and do. Children are already people who deserve respect, and like all of us, they're growing into different people as they learn new things and have more experiences. The child characters can thus be the drivers of their own stories and come to learn lessons for themselves. The child audience can relate to those characters, be drawn into the story, and learn what it's trying to teach without having every detail explicitly spelled out.

Episodes written by Peter Hirsch seem to approach children as people-in-training. They might have one or two personality traits, but instead of coming from and interacting with other elements of their background, they're just pasted on, like a sticker you can put on your Generic Child Prototype. These blank-slate children need to have knowledge poured into them so they can become Properly Educated Adults. So in his episodes, these child characters will go through their story with a question, and the adults--the real people--will tell them the information in great detail so these characters--and the watching audience--can go off into the world knowing what the writer has decided they need to know.

In Joe and Ken's episodes, flaws are funny, and can create funny conflicts that will teach the children better ways to approach problems. In Pete's episodes, flaws are horrible things that need to be pointed out, labeled, and sanded away, so these children can grow up into the perfect model of what a Good Adult should be. The first approach is engaging, and celebrates diversity of personality in a community, while the other becomes bland in the interests of shaping all the members of a community into the desired mold.

Comparing the two approaches provides a shockingly thorough lesson in how one should and should not approach writing and education. Story and character and message are all intertwined. Trying to force the message onto the story and characters makes for something bland and generic and unrealistic. Letting the characters shape the story and letting the story bring out the message makes for something much more unique, organic, engaging, and real. And yes, maybe I've come to this conclusion by spending far too much time thinking way too deeply about a bunch of shows for elementary-aged chlidren, but that doesn't mean it's not fascinating to see how, even within the same show, an writer's personality and approach to the audience can make such a vast difference in the quality of a story.

#answered asks #arthur #curious george #it has gotten to the point that i inspired the brother i usually talk to about these things #to google peter hirsch's biography #he couldn't find it #but we thought there has to be *some* explanation for why his work is the way it is #has he ever been outside a city? #has he ever left the east coast? #i didn't even get into the different approaches to class between the writers #joe and ken write episodes that happen in a world with working-class people #francine's family can't afford things the other kids can for instance #whereas in later arthur those real-world concerns are erased in favor of upper-middle-class discourse #i don't think i would have descended to this level of analysis except seeing all these people write for multiple shows #is really making it clear which elements come from the writer's personality regardless of the show #oh also the main post wasn't the place to mention this #but it's fascinating to see this message vs story thing applied to completely secular issues #because it drives home that it's not just the religion that makes some christian fiction so awkward #but how they approach it #message needs to come from story no matter what the message is #and you can have cringy preachy content even in completely secular works