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YMMV / The Little Match Girl

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  • Esoteric Happy Ending: While admittedly never meant to be "happy", per se, many people don't find the reassurance that the girl went to Heaven to be anything like the silver lining the narrative tries to make it.
  • Fair for Its Day: While nowadays this story is often accused of being "tragedy porn", it was also an early example of a tale denouncing child abuse and the harsh reality of many infants during that era, in a similar way to many Charles Dickens books.
  • Fridge Horror: And also Fridge Sadness; as this was written in the 19th century, matches in that time contained white phosphorus, which was toxic and can leave nasty effects to the jaws under prolonged exposure. Eating the head of the matchstick or lighting an entire set of matches would kill the person instantly, as done by the girl at the end of the story. It would be more tragic if the girl died of white phosphorus poisoning before hypothermia did.
  • Glurge: Most people tend to call it "tragedy porn" for this exact reason.
  • It Was His Sled: The girl freezing to death is the one thing most people know about this story.
  • Narm: The one remotely funny moment in the story happens when the girl hallucinates a roast goose standing up on its plate and walking over to her, fork and carving knife still in its breast.
  • The Woobie: The titular character, of course.


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