Questions and answers from Quora/Reddit that I find amusing or insightful.
**Copied directly from the post itself, so if there's typos I didn't make them.
**Some questions have multiple answers.
**A crap ton of posts from Ethan James because I love...
The Book 'Coraline' Was Only Published Because A Girl Lied To Her Mother
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You may be familiar with the children's novel Coraline. Or more likely, you may be familiar with the 2009 movie adaptation of the same name. But whether put to book or screen, one thing remains the same.
Coraline is one of the scariest pieces of media to be marketed towards children of any generation.
Most kids in my class at school say that Coraline gave them some of their earliest nightmares, terrors, fears and irrational phobias that haunt them to this day. Everything from a haunted house, a lifelike doll and a creepy parallel universe where Coraline nearly gets buttons sewn onto her eyes.
The fact remains: Coraline is scary. Much too scary for the 6–10 year old audience the book and movie were marketed to. But originally, the book wasn't actually going to be marketed to such a young audience.
When author Neil Gaiman first sent Coraline to be published, his editor said the book was far too scary for children. Refusing to give up, Gaiman said to his editor something along the lines of this
"Read it to your daughter, see if she's scared"
And so, the editor for the publishing house read the book to her daughters. The young girl insisted she wasn't scared of the novel, and so it went to print, marketed to an audience of mainly children.
While that may have worked out on both a critical and commercial level, it also gave many kids nightmares, like I said.
And as it turns out, the 'testing' of the book with the editor's daughter turned out to be a fluke. Nobody can explain this next part better than the author himself. The following excerpt is taken from Neil Gaiman's official Tumblr page:
A decade later, at the Opening Night of the Coraline musical, I was sitting next to Morgan, Merilee's youngest daughter, and told her how her not being scared had made the book happen. And she said:
"I was terrified. But I needed to find out what happened next. So nobody knew."
So, to summarise, the entire publication, adaptation and success of the Coraline story wouldn't have happened if not for one young girl and her stubborn refusal to admit she was scared.
