YMMV / Malheurs de Sophie

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The books were adapted into an animated series, which did not shy away from translating the sometimes harsh themes into harsh visuals. However, the series happened to run on the Tiji channel, which was aimed at children under 7.
• Fair for Its Day: The books stress the importance of children's obedience to their parents and guardians, but they also model a kind approach to raising children that is quite child-centered for its time.
• Nightmare Fuel: From Sophie being attacked by a wolf in the first book, through her recounting the sea storm that killed her mother, aunt and uncle, and the hellish physical and emotional abuse that she suffered at the hands of her stepmother. The books don't shy away from talking about other examples of injury, illness and death, and the real-life consequences of these.
• Values Dissonance: There are passages that would seem racist today; for example, when Sophie and Paul look forward to going to America near the end of the first book, Paul imagines that there will be "black, yellow and red savages" and Sophie expresses fear that they will be eaten by them. Later, however, she promises Camille and Madeleine to "bring back a little savage, if someone was willing to sell her one." (Nevertheless, in the third book, we learn that M. de Rosbourg and Paul made friends with the natives when marooned in America).
  • One of the signs Sophie is a naughty child is that she keeps her hair short. Naturally, in modern adaptations and illustrations, she's sporting a cute pixie cut. The animated series got around this by giving Sophie long hair, and having her stepmother chop it off, almost making her look ill, to humiliate her.
• Values Resonance: De Ségur advocates a loving and firm but reasonable approach to child rearing, much closer to modern ideas than to the rather authoritarian ones we commonly associate with the past.

---