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  • Adaptation Displacement:
    • Little House on the Prairie is the catchall name for the franchise these days, despite it being only one of many books with different titles.
    • The pilot for the series was a more-or-less straightforward adaptation of the book Little House on the Prairie. The series itself began with the setting and stories of On the Banks of Plum Creek. Things like Mary's blindness, Miss Wilder teaching school, and Laura's marriage are from the post-Plum Creek books, which all took place in De Smet, in what would later become South Dakota.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Nellie Oleson may be a Spoiled Brat, but there is massive evidence to suggest the television version of Laura is actually worse, both as a child and an adult. Examples:
    • She becomes angry that her newborn brother is taking Pa's attention, and rather than owning up to it, she prays for his death. Granted, this does not cause the baby to die, but it makes you feel less sympathetic toward her when she runs away as a result.
    • As a matter of fact, Laura can be bratty any time someone seems to "steal" Pa's affection from her. For one, she reacts pretty badly to Albert after his adoption and journey to Walnut Grove.
    • Laura covets a music box from Oleson's store, steals it, and lies about it. Nellie then blackmails Laura, which includes forcing her to participate in cruelty toward Anna, a friend who has a stutter. Nellie is justly punished, but Laura is never punished for stealing, ostensibly because she had nightmares due to her guilt. It's unlikely many 1800s parents, and even modern ones, would respond this way.
    • During Part 1 of "I'll Be Waving as You Drive Away," Laura becomes angry with Mary and says she hates her because allegedly, Mary "stole" her boyfriend (an older boy who only liked Laura as a friend). Later, Laura puts up a fuss when Caroline asks her to mop up a broken lamp (Mary had moved it too close to a book because of her failing eyes, and a chair had caught fire). Let us emphasize: Laura did not focus on the fire, nor did she even ask if Mary was okay. She also never seemed to put together that Mary might be unwell or going through severe stress. At the time, Laura is at least 12 and old enough to act more mature.
    • During "Enchanted Cottage," Mary discovers she can distinguish between light and dark. An eye doctor appointment reveals she can't; she's responding to the heat of sun and indoor lights. Laura is understandably shaken, but focuses on her own emotions more than Mary's. Mary ends up comforting and reassuring Laura, who again never seems to put together that she might be suffering emotionally.
    • As an adult, Laura comes to believe Nellie is trying to steal Almanzo. Her first response is to sabotage a dinner she cooks for Nellie and Almanzo (with Nellie taking the credit), then later, after Nellie gets revenge by in turn sabotaging Laura's efforts to pass a teaching exam, Laura's reaction is to get into a knock-down, hair-pulling fight with her rival in a mud pit. This is a grown woman we are talking about. Then again, this is Nellie we're talking about, and Nellie delighted in egging Laura on up to that point just to antagonize her and make her believe that Almanzo and she had something going on. Arguably, Laura's fight with a woman in "Divorce, Walnut Grove Style" is much, much worse because she is now sixteen and married and developed Irrational Hatred toward someone she only suspected was moving in on Almanzo.
    • Laura's run as as a sixteen- to seventeen-year-old teacher at the Walnut Grove schoolhouse is pretty rough. She seems to struggle with the demands of her role as an authority figure, often failing to maintain order in her classroom or find an appropriate professional balance in relationships that predated her employment. We mostly see her giving lectures in which she expects the class to already know what she is going to say, then bullying them if they can't finish her sentences for her. Of all the teachers we see in Walnut Grove, only Mr. Applewood and Mrs. Oleson have less successful stints in the job, and then only because their inherently unsuitable personalities are the clear theme of those episodes.
    • During the season 9 opener, Laura finds out she will be raising her niece Jenny, because Jenny's father is dying. Jenny responds by asking Rev. Alden about Heaven and attempting to drown herself so she can go there to be with her parents. Laura is understandably anguished, but does not attempt to comfort Jenny at all. Instead, she yells at and lectures her, forgetting that one, this child is depressed and suicidal and two, she probably does not understand the implications of her actions.
      • In short, Laura Ingalls may be an innocent, wholesome protagonist—or she may be a brat with a hot temper and who can't stand to have any important man in her life, not just her father, show kindness toward another female.
  • Base-Breaking Character: Albert. He is credited with being used as the show's first use of artificial extension to force out new stories by due to his role as their first Cousin Oliver (Season 5 was sort of a Post-Script Season when Michael Landon was unsure if his show would go past Season 4) in the wake of Mary becoming all grown up and on the way to being married due to the events of Season 4's finale. However, some find him a compelling addition to the cast and a good character in his own right, especially compared to following new children who didn't get enough screentime to leave an impact.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Mr. Edwards is easily one of the most popular characters, between his larger-than-life persona, Hidden Depths and balancing between comedic and dramatic moments.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: Some fans ignore the three TV movies which conclude the story, due to some events considered contradictory (Albert having a terminal disease even though the end of one episode informed he'd return to Walnut Grove as a doctor, the town being destroyed a few years after the final season despite other episodes implying otherwise and the fact that the real Walnut Grove still exists to this day).
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The show was huge in France, Spain, Mexico, and Japan. For the latter, Little House was credited with a quilting craze among the Japanese, not to mention it was the inspiration for an anime series - Sōgen no Shōjo Rōra - in 1975.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Laura did not pray for the good health of her newborn baby brother, and he died very soon after. When Laura had a baby boy of her own, he died, too! And so fast that she didn't get to name her child! Perhaps a bit of Laser-Guided Karma, for her wishing ill on her infant brother Charles Jr. in season one?
    • Watching Mary run down the hill during the opening credits doesn't seem so lighthearted anymore after she went blind in the Season 4 episode"I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away.
    • Jeremy Quinn, Albert's biological father, turning up in Season 6 when Albert wants to be legally adopted. Jeremy just wants him on as a hand at his farm to help him out around the place, not interested in being much of a father at this point in life, wifeless and all. When Albert has a hand in a very tragic fire at the blind school, he runs away from Walnut Grove out of grief, going to Jeremy as the last person he can turn to. When Albert stumbles upon his farm, he finds it eerily quiet... then stumbles upon a freshly-dug grave... Jeremy's. It's implied he worked himself to death on his own, someone found him keeled over, and then quietly buried him.
    • Any time Isaiah quietly pulls out the moonshine after getting married to Grace or she catches him operating a still. Their marriage collapsed in Season 8 because he couldn't knock the bottle.
    • Right before the end of Season 9, the last season, Laura is gifted a gorgeous estate by a dying widow who wants hers and her husband's dream home to be kept alive. Come The Last Farewell, not three stories later, and the Grand Finale of the series, She and Almanzo decide to blow it up- because they realize it's going to fall into the seedy hands of a land baron no matter what they do and the best thing for it is to let the dream die mercifully. Guess you're going to be haunted by their angry ghosts!!
    • In the season one episode "Circus Man", Mr. Hanson is suffering from terrible headaches, for which nothing seems to work. After taking O'Hara's miracle cure (which of course isn't really one), his headaches go away but Doc Baker warns him that the underlying condition hasn't been found or really treated. Come several seasons later, he suffers a massive stroke which leads to his eventual death.
    • In the Season 3 episode "The Collection", Dr. Baker is talking to Caleb Hodgkiss, played by Johnny Cash, about a character's husband who passed away recently and she was doing her best to catch up with him. Fast forward to 2003, June Carter Cash, who also guest starred in this episode as Johnny Cash's character's wife died, and Johnny Cash died months later and people believe he died because he was depressed and broken hearted without his wife by his side.
    • In Season 4, Mr. and Mrs. Garvey go through a rough patch and go as far as initiating divorce proceedings. Alice's blasé stubbornness when Caroline tries to talk her out of the divorce certainly reads differently two years later when we discover that, unbeknownst to Jonathan, she was already an experienced divorcée at the time.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Jason Bateman debuts here as the adoptive son of Charles Ingalls, whose actor's Star-Making Role was I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Bateman's breakout role in film would also be as a teenage lycantrope.
  • Ho Yay: Dr. Baker and Lars Hanson are awfully close to each other, with a Like an Old Married Couple dynamic. When Doc Baker is enamorated with a much younger woman, Mr. Hanson is the most critical to their relationship, and Baker understands that his engagement is spoiling their quality time. Also, when the town goes bankrupt and everyone leaves, Dr. Baker is the only citizen to stay by and tend for Hanson when the latter falls gravely ill.
  • Informed Wrongness:
    • The controversy at the Grange convention in "Times of Change" hinges on whether it's better to rely on government-imposed regulations or private entrepreneurial negotiations; we're expected to passionately agree with Charles that the former is not just better for business, but morally superior. Then again, given the private entrepeneural side that dominated had shown to be corrupted and tried to bribe Charles, so it's possible that he simply decided to vote against them rather for any particular sympathy for the other option.
    • It comes to light in Season 6 that Mrs. Garvey has had a previous marriage that ended in divorce and a surviving ex-husband, all of which she has hidden from her current husband for all these years. When the truth comes out, Jonathan is portrayed as a monster for losing significant trust in her and wondering what else, particularly about her sexual history, she has been lying about.
  • It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: "Someone Please Love Me" is a lazy, almost completely word-for-word Xerox of an episode of Bonanza, with slightly altered dialogue and the actors putting on even less convincing performances than the original. Because the acting is ripping off that story, it comes off as wooden and stilted as well as totally unoriginal. On top of that, the actress playing the daughter (Kyle Richards) is the exact same one used to play Alicia, Isaiah's adoptive daughter.
  • Les Yay: Laura and Nellie, whose rivalry defined much of their youth. In a later ep., when mellowed, married Nellie visits (and deals with her clone Nancy, see below), Nellie jokes with Laura about getting into a fistfight. In a musical version, Nellie sings mournfully about her life 'Without An Enemy' once Laura leaves to teach.
  • Like You Would Really Do It: Jenny. She's not a Littlest Cancer Patient, but the writers seemed bent on killing her for some sadistic reason. Every time they got close, though, she survived.
  • Narm: A lot of episodes are drowning with Melodrama. Seems like every other story somebody dies/already has a dead parent to milk the sympathy card, someone loses their source of income through a freak development beyond their control, a heavy-handed message gets thwacked over someone's head, or Laura runs off to cry. Sometimes all within the course of the same episode.
    • Probably best seen in part two of "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not". Almanzo has overworked himself trying to make money to help pay for renting a courthouse for Adam and Mary to start up a new location for the blind school. He gets sick and contracts pneumonia. As he passes out from sickness and refusal to go see a doctor, he falls down the stairs to the tune... of a slide whistle. This is absolutely inappropriate for the scene, given that Almanzo's sickness was played completely seriously, and the effect was totally cartoony. Extra points for Houston the caretaker still butchering Almanzo's given name as "Almanzy".
  • Narm Charm: To many modern viewers, one of the only reasons to watch. The other being Michael Landon's perm. Or Mr. Edwards.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • For a show supposedly purporting wholesome family values, this one had a lot of it. Dead children and babies, fires, rapists, gunfire, rampaging packs of feral dogs, drug addiction and withdrawal, disease...they spared the audience nothing about the harshness of life back then.
    • Laura's nightmares in "The Music Box." The middle one in particular, where she's starving in prison while Nellie laughs maniacally and chomps on a chicken leg in front of her, is downright creepy.
    • The notorious two part "Sylvia" episode tops them all. It's shot like a slasher movie.
    • Almanzo blowing up the first house in The Last Farewell- the one he and Laura got as a gift. Dramatic ominous music leading up to the moment he pushes down on the detonator. It's shot in slow motion and it erupts like one of those nuclear experiment houses in the 1940s. Also, Laura smashing out the windows in a fit of rage.
  • Replacement Scrappy: Nancy for Nellie. However, she's designed to be that way. Much worse than Nellie ever was, yet showered with love and spoiled rotten by Harriet anyway.
  • Retroactive Recognition:
    • Queenie Smith (who played Mrs. Whipple in several episodes) and Hope Summers (who played Addie Bjornesen) in Season 3's opening episode would later find much more acclaim for their appearance in Foul Play as one scene wonders Elsie and Ethel, the two old women who were playing a profane game of Scrabble.
    • Matthew Labyorteaux (Albert Quinn Ingalls and young Charles Ingalls) would later be know as Jaden Yuki.
    • Andy Garvey became a Navy lawyer, although you might know him better as Ram.
    • Jason Bateman and Shannen Doherty also appeared in the later seasons.
    • Melissa Francis, if you watched Fox News or its sister network, Fox Business, starred in two seasons (7 and 8).
    • A young Sean Penn appears among the schoolchildren in Season 1.
  • Seasonal Rot: Season 7, just by itself. It was full of some really crummy episodes, including the opener itself, which was dragged down by the minimal fanfare given to Almanzo and Laura's wedding and the Bittersweet Ending where Eliza Jane learned she misread the signals of an engaged man and abandoned her homestead and teaching job just to keep the soon-to-be newlyweds together. Then Season 8 brings an hour-long story where Laura was The Chew Toy of an Apron Matron and Eliza Jane carried the Idiot Ball very hard about Laura's warnings her new beau was a two-timer (Eliza's luck with men is not so good!), the season 7 finale which pulled a double dose of Cousin Oliver (although the two-parter itself was quite engaging).
    • Season 9. While interest in the show had been decaying, the Ingalls' departure was the final blow to the ratings, causing the plans to a 10th season to be overruled, and the show cancelled, relying on three TV movies to finish its story.
  • Strawman Has a Point:
    • In Season 1's "School Mom," Mrs. Oleson is very harsh and even cruel when she humiliates Abel, undoing all the educational progress Caroline has made with him. But as the parent of a significant percentage of the student body and a member of the school board, she is right to object when a temporary substitute teacher unilaterally decides to put the curriculum serving a dozen students over several grade levels on indefinite hold so that everyone can devote multiple entire school days to remediating a single student who had voluntarily opted out of the opportunities available to him until effectively an adult himself.
    • Mr. Mears in "Be My Friend" is convinced that he must keep his teenaged daughter Anna secluded from the world in order to prevent her from following in her mother's footsteps by having an affair outside of marriage. Of course ... unbeknownst to him, she had already had an affair outside of marriage before it occurred to him to keep her secluded from the world.
    • Part of Mr. Webb's impossibly controlling parenting towards Sylvia in Season 7 is that he always thinks she is lying to him. The trouble is that we do see her lying to him, both by omission and commission, multiple times over the course of the two episodes in which they appear, and he doesn't even always catch her. The viewer eventually has to wonder how long this pattern has been in place and whether he has simply learned the hard way to take the stories she constantly "swears" to with a grain of salt.
  • They Copied It, So It Sucks!: This applies towards Michael Landon's tendency to rip scripts directly from Bonanza in general, having written and directed a few himself. "Someone Please Love Me" was remarkably Egregious, because it made absolutely no attempt to hide the fact it was repeating the events of the episode blow for blow.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • The Aesop veers back and forth between modern values and prairie values being heralded as superior.
    • Albert sleeping in the same bedroom with Laura (with only a thin sheet separating their sleeping areas) would raise some eyebrows nowadays. They weren't pubescent quite yet, but weren't far from it, and although the family did adopt him, he was not biologically her brother.
    • Charles not wearing a shirt to bed in the season one episode where they left Isaiah in charge of the household and both he and Caroline were all by themselves.
    • Some of the kids' interactions with adults would raise red flags. The Ingalls girls are often left alone with male strangers, some of them have no qualms about complimenting on their appearance or getting too close for comfort, in ways that, while meant to be innocuous and innocent, can sometimes scream "stranger danger".
    • The boys spying on a changing Sylvia in the eponymous episode is treated as a perfectly normal thing for “curious” boys to do. Being curious about the other sex is perfectly normal; spying on someone as they undress is not.
  • The Woobie: Mary. And Sylvia.

     Book Series 
  • Alternative Character Interpretation: In These Happy Golden Years, while Mrs. Brewster comes off as an ultra bitch that unjustifiably takes her resentment out on Laura Ingalls herself, historical resources and speculation suggests that she was just very homesick and likely suffered from depression. After all, in those days, women were often expected to defer to their husbands.
    • Pa is seemingly perfect in the books, always knowing the right thing to say or do, able to win over the entire town to his point of view several times, wins the spelling bee, just has a gut feeling about the upcoming hard winter, and so forth. However some who re-read the books as adults notice other things about him which paints him in a different light, making him seem like an irresponsible man who constantly fails at different jobs and endeavours, is unable to provide for his family, constantly dragging them from place to place (in real life Charles Ingalls once picked up and left in the middle of the night to avoid having to pay his bills). He and Ma put a lot of financial responsibility on Laura even in her early teenage years, relying on her working as a seamstress or a teacher (neither one a job she enjoyed) to make ends meet. Then there's the Long Winter when the family is starving yet Pa holds off on slaughtering the heifer for weeks on end, and ends up going to Almanzo and pouring some of his wheat into a bucket over Almanzo's protests rather than slaughtering the heifer. While it is mentioned that slaughtering the animal will set them back for next year, none of that will matter anyway if they starve to death during the winter, and at least one of his daughters seems to have had problems for years afterward due to the malnutrition she suffered. Some readers argue that he held off for far too long, letting his children be malnourished for weeks even though he had a fresh source of meat at his disposal. He also eats a large meal of pancakes and pork at the Wilder boys' home on more than one occasion, then goes back to his family and takes the largest portion of their meagre dinner, rather than letting his starving children eat a bigger meal that day. In all likelihood the real Charles Ingalls was somewhere in-between the near-perfect man Laura seemed to view him as, and the reckless, selfish, and incompetent man some modern day readers view him as.
    • It can be argued that Pa moving his family from Wisconsin to the Midwest would have been a normal thing at that time because of The Homestead Act promoted by the government and many families, even the more established and well-off Wilder family, took this opportunity.
      • Let's face it, the Big Woods in Wisconsin isn't an idyllic place to raise children either because of the bears and panthers abound. It's also worth noting that Charles Ingalls isn't the only one to move as the rest of the Ingalls also packed up from Wisconsin (possibly after Grandpa and Grandma Ingalls died) and moved West.
    • Although, some details in the manuscripts didn't make it to the final print of "The Long Winter" such as the Wilder brothers leaving spare hay to the Ingalls family and sometimes inviting them over for pancakes and bacon. So it could possibly be that Pa might have a reason to hold off butchering their cow and heifer as they get help from the Wilders.
    • Regarding Laura helping her parents, it is probably due to the societal norm at that time that once a child becomes old enough to work, they are expected to help their parents make ends meet (which is why in "Farmer Boy", Father Wilder mentioned to Mother that they can legally keep Royal to work in their farm until he's 21 when Royal can be deemed as an independent adult and can legally file for a homestead of his own).
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Most of Farmer Boy is sad in hindsight. The book goes on for pages and pages about the Wilder family farm and its prosperity; by the time the series was written, the farm and the family money were gone due to a disastrous business decision. There's also a personal version in Almanzo: while he's strong enough to spend entire days plowing fields as an eight/nine year old boy, his health was broken by diphtheria as an adult and he needed a cane to walk. While he and Laura eventually did found a successful farm, it never came up to the glory days of Farmer Boy.
  • But it could be due to lack of sons to help with the farm and worth noting that the Wilders' got affected by the Great Depression.
    • The end of These Happy Golden Years can become this, after reading The First Four Years. Caroline frets about Laura deciding to get married in her new black cashmere dress because it invites bad luck. The Wilders are initially quite optimistic about their future, but the first years of their marriage turn out to be one almost-unmitigated disaster. Drought causes their crops to continually fail, they both come down with diphtheria (which gives Almanzo a stroke, leaving him dependent on a cane for the rest of his life), their infant son dies, and then their house burns down and they subsequently lose both claims. If it weren't based on real events, in which Laura and Almanzo managed to build a new life after moving to Missouri, it would be a complete Shoot the Shaggy Dog story. Even then, Laura had been happy to live on the claim because it meant she was close to her beloved family, and after moving she was only able to visit her family once more before her darling Pa dies.
    • Laura and Almanzo end up not being as able to have more children as the Boasts suggested they would be. They do have a second child, but he dies a few days later, before they even decide on his name, and never have any more children. In Little Farm in the Ozarks, Rose is invited to dinner by her friend Alva, who has a big family with several brothers and sisters. When she asks Laura later why she doesn't have more brothers or sisters, Laura explains to her that she and Almanzo prayed for another baby, but after what happened to Rose's brother, she came to believe that when she and Almanzo had diphtheria, God decided that one was enough for them. Laura muses in a later book how much harder life on the farm has been for Rose, given that she and Almanzo both had many siblings to play with and divide the workload, but Rose has always been alone.
    • In Farmer Boy, Royal teases Alice for whistling, saying to her “Whistling girls and crowing hens always come to some bad ends.” The real Alice died fairly young at 39 after moving to Florida with her husband, where the hot climate negatively affected her health and ultimately lead to her death.
    • The quick line "sugar never hurt anybody" during the maple candy event in Little House in the Big Woods becomes harsher upon the realization that three of the four Ingalls sisters note  died of complications of diabetes.
  • Hollywood Homely:
    • Laura's rather critical of and dissatisfied with her own appearance; she envies Nellie Oleson her blonde hair and tall, willowy figure, as she herself is quite short, plump and brunette. In reality, she was a very pretty girl.
    • Runs in the family. In the Rose Years, when Rose is watching her mother get dressed up to see the banker about the farm they want to buy, she muses to herself that Laura is considered the prettiest of her sisters. And when Caroline saw a mirror after a long trip, she wondered why anyone could call her a pretty girl.
    • In "Little Town in the Ozarks" 13 yr. old Rose feels plain-looking and later in her teens admits to herself about how she hated her chubby cheeks.
  • Ho Yay: Almanzo and Cap, for some.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Mostly in the form of the ridiculously varied and unpredictable dangers of living on the unsettled prairie. The whole family bedridden with malaria at the same time with no one around to help until the nearest neighbors happen to check on them; all the times anyone gets stranded out in a blizzard and nearly doesn't make it back (or actually doesn't, in some secondhand stories), especially when it's made clear just how close someone could be to shelter and not even know it; the tornadoes, the fire, and most of all the "grasshopper weather." And although there's an almost oppressively civilized, Victorian tone to a lot of the social interaction in the books, The Wild West creeps in here and there: the railroad workers in By the Shores of Silver Lake, particularly the mob that nearly attacks Pa; the story of a homesteader who left his farm briefly and came back to find a squatter there who shot him dead; and even Mrs. Brewster, the wife in the family Laura stays with when she's teaching school, who is so homesick and stir-crazy from isolation (and she's possibly bipolar, from the description) that she's become dysfunctional and abusive to her husband and threatens him with a butcher knife one night ("If I can't go home one way, I can another").
  • Realism-Induced Horror: Prairie life was no cakewalk for adults or children.
    • After grasshoppers devour what was supposed to be a plentiful crop, Pa has to walk 200 miles for a job. He's gone for weeks, and when they don't receive a letter from him, they worry that something may have happened to him. Fortunately they do eventually receive a letter, and he returns safely, but the thought of your parent, spouse, and family breadwinner perishing and leaving you with an uncertain future and loss of the family patriarch during those times was terrifying.
    • Pa goes to town right before a blizzard hits, and the girls are stuck snowed in, anxiously waiting his return and worrying that he may have gotten caught in the blizzard and froze to death. Thankfully, he returns safely then, too.
    • Before the blizzard itself hits, Pa mentions a story about parents who went into town and got trapped by a blizzard, with their children left back home. When they returned, they found that their children had burned the furniture to stay warm but had died of hypothermia anyway.
    • In Farmer Boy, the story of the robbers who broke in, tied the family up, and beat the father nearly to death. Especially since it nearly happened to the Wilder family themselves.
    • In By the Shores of Silver Lake, baby sister Grace gets lost on the prairie. To child readers, it's a somewhat tense scene. For grown-ups with children of their own, it's absolutely horrifying. Grace is found, in a perfect circle of violets. Laura is certain that it's a fairy ring, but grabs her little sister despite being creeped out. It turns out to be a buffalo wallow; the way buffalos roll in the dirt breaks up the prairie grass and aerates the soil perfectly to encourage the violets to grow.
  • Ship Tease: There were some hints that Cap Garland had an interest in Laura and that the feeling might have been mutual.
    • There were actually notes in the manuscript from one of the Little House books where Laura felt something special for Cap. Whether this potential pairing ended before it started when they paired up with other people or that Cap never made a move to pursue the romance is up to anyone's guess.
  • Squick:
    • The leeches in Plum Creek.
    • Mice chew off some of Pa's hair as he sleeps.
    • The grasshoppers, especially when they crawl over baby Carrie.
  • Tear Jerker: Has its own page.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: By the Shores of Silver Lake starts by briefing the reader about how, since the end of On the Banks of Plum Creek, Grace has been born, the family has survived a potentially-fatal simultaneous bout of scarlet fever, and Mary has gone blind. (Not to mention that the Baby Freddy saga and the time things got so bad that a local lady almost adopted Laura to help out also would fall into that Time Skip if Laura had chosen to write about them.) The story that DOES get told in this book? Yet another occasion when Pa decided to uproot the family to go unsuccessfully seek his fortune somewhere new.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The majority of The Long Winter consists of the Ingalls sitting around at home, snowed in, bored, clinically depressed, unable to heat the house to a comfortable degree, subsisting on a few slices a day of of "coarse brown bread" they're all sick to death of, without even their usual pleasure of Pa playing the fiddle because his body is so damaged from doing daily chores in the extreme weather that he's physically unable to play ... and then the umpteenth week-long blizzard hits. The same cycle can only repeat so many times before the drama gets old and stops being compelling. In a shocking twist at the end, spring eventually arrives, bringing warmer weather, and life in De Smet goes back to normal.
  • Values Dissonance: Laura's youth at the beginning of her and Almanzo's courtship wasn't at all unusual in the 1880s. (She was 15 and he 25, which would garner a visit from Chris Hansen in today's world, but back then many, many women were married before the age of 20; if you were still single at 25 odds are people called you a spinster. The blunt truth is that Laura was, in fact, of marrying age in those days, regardless of modern views on the matter — not that this helps some people.) Fridge Logic can hit that with a potential case of being surprisingly creepy, though, when you consider he first met her when she was thirteen, and wonder just how much of a conscious Jail Bait Wait went on there. Laura failed her spot check when he first started courting her, but Ma definitely wasn't happy about it, precisely because Laura was only fifteen. Fortunately for Almanzo, Pa didn't seem to have any problem with it, but read from an adult 21st century perspective (especially a parental perspective), it can seem unintentionally creepy.
    • Alison Arngrim herself lampshaded this in her memoir, telling a story about the producers trying to pay off the kid extras with bubblegum. In context, it's some greedy producers trying to screw the actors out of well-earned pay (which is already bad enough). She acknowledged though that this would absolutely been seen as a grooming tactic nowadays. Thankfully, she said Michael Landon firmly put a stop to it, bellowing, "How about you actually pay these kids so they can buy them own damn bubblegum?!"
    • To be fair with Almanzo, the Little House books and even the historical sources described him as a dashing, low-key, hard working gentleman farmer from a well-off family and during his time in De Smet, owned two homesteads and the best team of horses. For a frontier town of less than 100 people at that time, this would have ranked him amongst (if we also count his brother, Royal), if not the most, eligible bachelor any parent would want to set up their daughters with. Plus, he's also a friend of Pa so Pa must have known that Almanzo is a financially independent good guy. On top of that he is also the one-half of the Big Damn Heroes who saved their town from starvation during the Long Winter and he didn't even bragged nor charged a cent for it!
      • Almanzo also courted Laura for three years before he asked her to marry him, which would have been considered a snail's pace in those days. To put things in perspective, Laura's friend Ida gets engaged to her beau Elmer after only courting for a few months. It's likely that it was because of Laura's age that Almanzo decided to take things as slow as he did.
      • Or could it be that there was an off-scene agreement between Pa and Almanzo that Laura doesn't know? Hmmmm...
      • Some recent research showed evidence that he may had been born in 1859 instead, which makes him only 8 years her senior, the same age gap of their characters in the TV adaption. A case of Truth in Television or Age Is Relative?
    • The blackface minstrel show — complete with jaunty assurance that "These darkies can't be beat!" — in Little Town on the Prairie, in which Pa takes part. Not precisely intentional; while the real Laura's experience with actual people of colour was severely limited, it seems to have been amicable. Back in that era, one didn't need to be overtly racist to find that kind of thing hilarious.
    • On a lighter note, the parenting styles on display in both the Ingalls and Wilder families, with their extreme emphasis on self-discipline and frequent reference to whippings, are liable to strike modern readers as serious overkill. Laura is reminded constantly that adults — 'ladies' especially — do not allow their emotions to show in public. And when little Almanzo gets too close to a hole during ice-cutting and nearly drowns, he is told immediately post-rescue that he deserves severe punishment for his carelessness, though the punishment does not follow. Pa also whips a 5-year-old Laura as punishment.
      • See particularly both Ma and Pa's response to Laura's kerfuffle with Eliza Jane Wilder during Miss Wilder's stint as Laura's schoolteacher in Little Town on the Prairie. Miss Wilder's treatment of Laura, and especially her harrassment of Laura's little sister Carrie, is unprofessional, patently unfair, and in Carrie's case borderline abusive; nevertheless, both parents chastise Laura for acting out in protest, and Ma tells Laura point-blank that she should never criticize her teacher. (Though for what it's worth, they hear out her side of the story and admit it wasn't her fault. Pa's only advice is to be careful with what she says to other people, because gossip can spread like wildfire.)
      • At one point in Little House On The Prairie, Pa gives Mary and Laura a stern lecture for even thinking about disobeying him (though they didn't actually do so). Although, to be fair, in that case it might have gotten their dog killed. A couple of Native men had gone into the house looking for food and supplies. Pa had told them not to untie Jack, who hated strangers. If Jack had bitten one of the strange men, they would have killed Jack and caused MANY more problems.
    • See also the Wilder parents' horror when Royal decides he's sick of the whole 'get up at 5am and work until sundown' gig and wants to become a storekeeper, instead of a 'free and independent' farmer.
      • It may have been because as the eldest son, his parents, particularly Father Wilder, expected that he'll take over the family farming business as many families with a large business expect their kids (particularly the default heirs aka eldest sons) to do.
    • The eponymous Little House on the Prairie was built in the middle of Injun Country: Pa basically found a spot he liked and started building his house. The Native Americans whose land this was are less than pleased, and feel they have a right to come in and take anything they want. This is shown as being a terrible thing to have happened — not wholly unreasonably at the time, since the Ingalls have put a lot of work into their claim but in modern hindsight, that Pa is squatting on their land is a lot more evocative.
    • Although, to be fair to Pa, if you were told by someone in the government that you can settle in a mainly undeveloped territory on the promise that the land will be given to you, you'd probably jump on the opportunity.
    • One early edition of Little House on the Prairie described the local Native Americans, then ended with "There were no people. Only Indians lived there." Upon receiving a letter that this implied the Native Americans were not people, Laura and Rose wrote back to the publisher that was certainly not meant to be the implication, and the sentence was changed to "There were no settlers." Notable, this complaint was raised almost as soon as the book was published...in 1935.
    • Similar to the above, the series' portrayal of Native Americans is problematic by modern standards, to say the least. As mentioned, the Ingalls are knowingly illegally squatting in Indian Territory, and Pa does this feeling sure that the government will simply make the Native Americans "move on." He tells Laura as much, insinuating that the white settlers had more of a right to the land than the Native Americans this land was set aside for; the Ingalls eventually move on because the government doesn't do that, but he's pretty peeved about it. The Ingalls build their cabin right next to a well-known Osage road, but their interactions with the Native Americans are seen as intrusive and unnecessary. Ma is openly terrified and bigoted towards them, saying "the only good Indian is a dead Indian," and transferring the fear onto the girls. Pa has more interactions with them and says there's nothing to be afraid of, but it doesn't stop him from hoping the different tribes will go to war amongst themselves and kill each other off. Laura's observations of the Native Americans are supposed to be innocent and child-like, but her descriptions continually contrast them with the "civilized" white settlers and are animalistic in nature. Near the end of book, the Native Americans migrate, and walk past the Ingalls homestead. Laura becomes enamored with a Native American baby she sees, as one would become enamored with a doll, and throws a tantrum, becoming inconsolable when Pa refuses to give in to her demands to "get it for her."
    • Pa's obsession with moving in general. At the beginning of Little House on the Prairie, the reason given for the move from the Big Woods is that it's gotten too crowded — the definition of "too crowded" being that the Ingallses sometimes, without trying, encounter people they are not related to. After multiple moves and much traveling, Pa's attitude doesn't change, and Laura clearly demonstrates that it's hereditary. The only thing keeping them in place once they hit De Smet is that Charles long ago promised Caroline that he'd ensure their kids got a proper education.
    • Women's rights comes up a couple of times near the end of the series. Laura-the-Author never quite passes judgment on the idea, although Laura-the-character says she doesn't want to vote, she's just independent and not comfortable vowing to obey her husband against her better judgment. So Laura demands to be treated as a free-thinking individual by her husband, yes, but is still content as a housewife and stay-at-home mom— though she did, historically, work outside the home in different ways throughout her marriage— as a dressmaker, loan officer, bookkeeper, and writer, at different points in time.
    • There's also the case of Ida Brown, one of Laura's friends as a teenager. Ida is the adopted child of the local preacher and his wife, and some of her dialogue implies a...not-so-nice home life: "Since I'm only an adopted child, you see, I can't have fun with you all after school and instead must go right home and do [insert large amount of difficult housework here]." She says this more than once, and her friends all admire her for it. A more modern reader will cringe at her apparently very low opinion of herself, along with how much it sounds like she's just parroting something she's been told many times, probably by her adopted parents themselves. Which of course leads one to uncomfortably wonder what her life at home with them must be like, especially when Reverend Brown is demonstrated to be a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher whose sermons make the Ingalls family so uncomfortable that they decline to attend the rest of his revival meetings...


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