A New Yorker article titled ‘The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul Of “Thomas The Tank Engine & Friends”‘ has sent pretty much everyone who reads it into a childhood-obliterating tailspin.
In the article, published last Thursday, author Jia Tolentino goes down the rabbit hole of the surprisingly thoughtful and committed Thomas the Tank Engine fandom, members of which have been noting with increasing frequency the show’s alarmingly dark and twisted morality tales.
Take ‘The Sad Story Of Henry‘, for example, in which Henry, a train with self-image issue, refuses to emerge from a tunnel into the rain because it might ruin his lovely paint job.
The ever-present Fat Controller (imagined by Tolentino and others as a malevolent dictator) gives up trying to convince him to come out, and instead orders Henry bricked up inside the tunnel, never to emerge again.
For real. That’s what happens.
As one YouTube commenter aptly puts it, “What moral lesson are kids supposed to learn from this? Do as you’re told or you will be entombed forever in the darkness to die?”
Tolentino’s article is a highly readable and profoundly discomforting deep dive into the origins of Thomas & Friends, including a critical look at the series’ creator, an Anglican minister called Reverend Wilbert Awdry.
As Tolentino says, Awdry clearly “disliked change, venerated order, and craved the administration of punishment“, and his stories saw not only Henry imprisoned forever in an inhumane solitary confinement, but other trains and buses turned into generators, henhouses, or simply crushed or torn apart into little pieces.
It’s a gruesome, totalitarian picture of society painted by this glibly colourful children’s show about trains, and for former fans (or even casual viewers) of the show, the truth of these disturbing parables is, well, shookening.
This alt reading of Thomas the Tank Engine as dystopian fascist regime is wild and I love it https://t.co/HwtFfjWeYl
— Carl Franzen (@carlfranzen) September 28, 2017
I’m glad someone has written the definitive “Thomas the Tank Engine is a nightmarish repressive hellscape” takehttps://t.co/9vIk67TRhZ pic.twitter.com/AMfcNTVJIB
— Nick Horowitz (@ztiworoh) September 28, 2017
https://twitter.com/darudayu/status/914370117441437697
https://twitter.com/StuartSpooner/status/913406646059257856
Digging into Thomas, this is VERY common. A lying bus gets stuck under a bridge and is left to rot as a henhouse. Train: “Serves you right!”
— Tristan Cooper (@TristanACooper) September 28, 2017
Not only that, looking it up on youtube, it appears that they just left Smudger and he was alone so long the forest grew around him. WTF
— Macaluso Art (@Macaluso) September 28, 2017
Craving more dystopian social engineering nightmare content after bingeing on The Handmaid’s Tale? You know where to find it: on a railway track in the repressive regime of the fictional island of Sodor. May god have mercy on those trains.
