The Most Hated Children's Book

another media analysis banger. I honestly feel like sometimes authors can write really dense interesting work from some instinctive place that they can’t then parse into the most coherent or interesting reads of said work

Holy hell, that was good. I watched this at an interesting time for me. Ive been trying to show my father things about the fascism of America today and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and things like that and his reaction is very much that of a centrist. Not support for evil but not approval of change either and it often makes me think of how Dr. King describes his experience with the white moderate during the civil rights movement but after watching this video, just one day after once again hearing him voice his desire to hear no evil, for peace and quiet, A negative peace, I can't help but compare him to a child doing everything possible to protect his own naivety. Such a good video, absolutely incredible work. Nearly brought me to tears with how it touched me.

Thanks for this, excellent video. I read the book as a young half Jewish boy, who'd at this point been too sheltered to the realities of the holocaust, so did not notice these issues at the time. I find it pretty upsetting how the author talked about reactions to his book and will definitely not be giving it to my children. Btw, I read your caption after - I didn't notice the music really, so that probably meant the volume was fine!

When I was ten or eleven my father fell and suffered a very serious concussion. This happened in front of myself and my younger brother and was quite a horrible and traumatizing event. That weekend my grandmother visited to watch us so that my mother could deal with everything surrounding my father's injury. On the first night she arrived, she decided to have my brother and I watch the film adaptation of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. There's not really a point to this story, I just have always hated that story as a result but I've never known if it was justified as I've been unwilling to revisit it, and I'm glad to have my hatred justified.

Don’t know if you saw it but the zone of interest is kind of the perfect counterpoint to this story. A movie about the normal everyday lives of the family of a Nazi officer living beside auschwitz but the evidence is unavoidable. Every scene has screaming or gunshots or both in the background, they literally try to paint over the concentration camp walls that fence in their yard. It’s kinda like if someone set out to write your interpretation of Boy in the striped pjs

Wonderful video Joel. I feel like this showcases so much about what appeals to me about your work more broadly. Appreciate your commitment to taking bodies of work on their own terms separate from their apparent intent.

Brilliant video. Loved the literary analysis and the animation. The denial you described is sadly still prevalent in the world today

This is a great reading, and what death of the author/separating art from the artist should look like, in practice. If anything, it's more resonant to Boyne's whole project and that of the people who worshiped this book when it came out. I also think this ties in really well with your videos on Israel's ongoing genocide.

Only 8 minutes in but I'm reminded of something that has made me annoyed at Boyne. He says the book shouldn't be used as an introduction to the Holocaust, when the use of "Fury" and "Outwith" makes it clear that is the *main* point of the book! It was used like that for me in primary school, where I had never heard of the Holocaust before and the details the book parcels out are meant to be intriguing and mysterious to the intended audience of 8-10 year olds. And you might say that Boyne doesn't approve of this way of teaching except for the fact that HE LITERALLY CAME TO THE SCHOOL AFTER TO TALK TO THE CLASS ABOUT THE BOOK!! Maybe he has since "matured" on this based on what the Auschwitz museum told him but you really don't get the impression he has ever admitted fault from his interviews if so

I think the story could be seen as a fable or allegory where Bruno stands in for the "good Germans" who treated the Holocaust as just a normal political state. Kind of like many Americans are doing presently. The idea of evil triumphing where good people do nothing is also coming up for me here maybe because I just watched Boondock Saints.

This is incredible literary analysis. Loved it

Loved the video. However, I have to admit I was surprised when you played clips from the movie, and Bruno's family was British. Do we think Bruno's father was a member of the short lived British Union of Fascists and Hitler admired him enough to allow him to run Auschwitz. What did his wife think of this odd series of events if she didn't know about the holocaust?

It feels like many holocaust deniers only education about the holocaust is a half a memory of this movie.

Audio levels are good. Nice work

I am convinced that when Boyne sees this he will say to himself: “Yes. People are starting to understand….” When he says ‘*I say* it’s a story about friendship.’ perhaps he is being coy and sardonic; fully honest in that he actually feels this cynically about friendship, inspired by the darkness of the Holocaust, and saw in the society of Nazi Germany personalities that would maintain such a solipsistic reverence for “The Fury”, as such. The Fury, being exactly what adult Nazis felt in Hitler, but only miniaturized as The Fury by translation through the child’s simplicity. “Out With” also suggests that even in the ignorant, unfiltered mind of the Nazi child, the groping for resolution is still biased, on a Freudian level, toward the, at least, expulsionary impulse of the society. He is comfortable with whatever meaning he thinks “Out with” entails. He is receiving the adult Nazi vibes by osmosis, but doesn’t have the full context. Perhaps the book is about the true stakes of friendship, where you’re keenly aware of the soul-level axioms that you both have, and whether they agree or differ. They would be friends, but they actually differ—the boy is actually a Nazi, even in his innocence and ignorance. As the book seems more about the perspective of the Nazi child, as it might have to be if it were like a recounting, Schmule cannot be perceived by him as anything more than the distant descriptor of The Boy With The Striped Pajamas. Even feeding them may have been a more complicated event than it seems. Or, Boyne is himself the Nazi Child and is unconsciously describing in great detail his own mental gymnastics toward intentionally misunderstanding the context of the Holocaust. I think this is analogous to what you think the book actually is, but I genuinely think this is less plausible than that Boyne is secretly based and psychologically subtle.

really liked this video! the art complements your narration very well

John Boyne went on to write a sequel, All the Broken Places, which is apparently even more sympathethic to Nazis. There's actually a video of John Boyne here (https://youtu.be/yfmtv2FMpjc?si=oeS8K9kRHzYA9Ig3) where he claims he "read widely" on the Holocaust for two decades. He's either lying or trafficking in Holocaust denial. Also, no discussion of Boyne would be complete without the lore where he googled a recipe for dye and pasted the result into his historical fiction book. Not only is the writing awful but the search result was from Legend of Zelda, resulting in this passage: "The dyes that I used in my dressmaking were composed from various ingredients, depending on the colour required, but almost all required nightshade, sapphire, keese wing, the leaves of the silent princess plant, Octorok eyeball, swift violet, thistle and hightail lizard. In addition, for the red I had used for Abrila's dress, I employed spicy pepper, the tail of the red lizalfos and four Hylian shrooms."

This video is like the serious video essay version of why the AI Nostalgic Critic called the movie “one sided” when OneyPlays prompted it for a Nostalgia Critic review.

Fantastic vid! I love your approach to literary criticism.

This analysis was incredibly compelling. I wonder whether Boyne himself was in denial about the message of the book while writing it, or if after its publication he changed his tune to appeal more to a broad audience

this is a very small point but i find it erroneous at best to call John Boyne's open support and public association with JK Rowling, who is by all accounts the face of transphobia in the UK, "trans critical" instead of "transphobic". i don't think we should stop calling a spade a spade because six years ago it made a lukewarm defense of people abstractly identifying as transgender (while defending the right of bigots to be transphobic as long as they supported gay people in the past). the word choice of "critical" would be particularly problematic considering that many transphobes' preferred term is "gender critical", with which they shield their bigotry as feminism. i hope you change that because, even though it's a very small section of the video, it does feel a bit bad.

I was surprised you didn't mention how deliberately misleading Boyne's point about "not using it as a teaching book" was. "It's not a textbook, but it could be an ancillary book" - John, that's exactly the context in which your book is being criticized, and I think you know that. The idea that anyone is saying its use is problematic in the context of being a textbook is a complete strawman.

I took a Gender and War class in college as a history major, and a lot of the class was analyzing media about 20th century wars. I had never seen The Boy in the Striped Pajamas before. I was FLOORED when a classmate critiqued this movie for class. It was so jarring to see Auschwitz be the backdrop of what's basically a Hallmark movie. People take movies and novels as fact, which is absolutely terrifying to think about when you see some of the media put out into the world.

What if instead of the boy in striped pajamas it was the boy who drank red stripe and it was just about a chill ass kid

From the title I thought this would be about The Giving Tree

First! Excited to watch :)