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Topic : Re: Showing mass murder in a kid's book Galastel did a spin off question based on one of mine. Mortal danger in mid-grade literature. And hers has spurred a new one for me. This is an issue I've - selfpublishingguru.com

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Have you seen the scene in the cartoon adaptation of the Exodus Story, The Prince of Egypt showing the 10th Plague? I think it did a good job of showing the wide extent of the death while not making it disturbing for kids. God or the Angel of Death (I forget which character it is in the Bible) descends in the form of a white mist and enters the unmarked houses. We hear a gasp of the dying victim(s) and then the light leaves. There is one moment where a man enters his house, followed by the light, gasps and we hear his body fall and his arm slumps out as his bowl shatters and the contents fall out. I can't recall off the top of my head, but I think there are two Egyptian guards who die on screen and it's done by the light seemingly entering and leaving their bodies followed by the same gasp (could be some other cartoon I saw though).

After the light leaves, the next scene is the morning after where Pharaoh (Moses' Brother) has summoned Moses and is seen grieving over the body of his child, who is the only on screen child to be seen dead... all other deaths were adults if on screen...

This, to my mind, is not the most disturbing act of mass murder in the movie... that honor goes to the depiction of the the death of the Jewish children of Moses' age (infants when it happens). The opening scene depicts Moses' mother sending him off, but a later scene has an Adult Moses dream of a depiction of these events, done in an animated Egyptian painting style, culminating with soldiers throwing the stolen babies into Crocodile infested waters and the blue paint slowly turning red. Moses wakes and goes to find this painting exists in a hall of the palace... and that's when Pharaoh (Moses' Father) tells Moses that he did order the mass murder, but it's okay because they were only slaves. What makes this scene more frightening is that Pharaoh's voice actor is Patrick Stewart and he's not doing anything to mask his voice... It's delivered as if John Luc Picard was saying the same line.


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