Maybe in todays society, but since the game took on 50's traditions, they were bred alot tougher then, not coddled like today. Kids back then were wearing army helmets and chasing each other around with toy guns. Today, if your neighbors saw that they would call the cops and social services would remove your kids from your care.

Oh sure, parents in the 1950's read violent books to their toddlers all the time and *never* tried to get anything banned that they found offensive...probably because they weren't offended by anything...ever..... *tongue in cheek*

Have you ever actually *read* books written for small children in the 1950's? Parents were in an uproar over books over "shocking" things like a white rabbit and a black rabbit *getting married* or mixed race human children simply playing together. Most of us would find the things that heavily offended them back then pretty laughable nowadays. Very tame by our standards.

Sure people will always have something to be offended about. Staying with this story, I don't believe it was about race at all, anyone can be "red", more to not trust strangers. "Better dead than red" as Liberty Prime would say. I just thought that with the mentality of western society back then was to fear communism and to defeat it where it existed. It seemed the norm to hate communism, hence why I said that I didn't think people with that mind set would find the story offensive as it was what the majority thought of anyways.

Regardless of what it's about, do you find it is something age-appropriate to read to a very small child knowing beforehand that it has an ultra-violent twist with mass killings at the end?

My point though was that I found the squirrel series humorous (in a dark way) not because of communism, racism, or any other -ism, or whether or not people find it offensive, but simply *because* it starts out as a happy children's story with cute, fluffy squirrels, is read by the narrator in a Mr. Rogers-like tone which suggests it is for children, and then at the end it has this completely unexpected and violent twist that is horrific. That's the humor for me and that's why I thought it was great as it fit in well with all the other quirky things Bethesda adds to their games. What it is or isn't about is secondary, but seems it's much deeper than it originally appears on the surface.

Yup, kind of a shame though that you had to explain the joke.

Death is a part of life, no sense hiding from it.

So I guess you would have no qualms allowing your small children to watch No Russian in Modern Warfare 2? After all, death is a part of life.

When I was a kid I would always sneak out to watch the Sunday Horrors (regular show on TV), didn't ruin me

Perhaps you were an exception when you were 4 or 5 years old, but most young children probably aren't going to handle mass death scenes of either humans or animals very well.

Sure, I mean its just a game, right? Though I could just put the news on and see it for real. I would also like to think that I taught my child properly and they know right from wrong, and not blame a video game for their actions. In the sense of the lore of this game. The story makes perfect sense and the way it is conveyed so a child would understand it. The world was gripped by the eminent threat of nuclear war and rightly so.

Seriously? Okay, I"m done with this conversation. It's gotten far too extreme.

Before 1990, in USSR and in many countries of the Eastern Block, it was a part of life to have Russian movies about WWII on TV. There were only 1 or 2 channels to watch and such movies were aired in prime time a couple of times a week. If a family would sit for dinner and have the TV on, chances were that they would see a couple of such movies a week. Such movies aimed to show the horrors of the war, the brutality of the enemy, and the heroism of the Red Army. They were full of screams of agony, death, hunger, and concentration camps.

As for deaths of animals, just a century ago the majority of the population lived on farms, where animals were a resource and animal death was part of daily routine to affect children in any way.

LOL - that was a great find. My face on the third part of the tale.

What would you prefer the ET 'moral of the story' Never trust your parents and don't do what they tell you? I think it is a great lesson for my kids! Do what the freak I tell you or you will die. For the sarcasm challenged amoung you, I was joking

Pretty much this lol, that ending was the embodiment of the phrase "That escalated quickly".