The Emperor's New Clothes/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Why would anyone want clothing that let stupid people see you naked?
  • What I want to know is why they always leave off the last part of the story, where the laughing crowd are rounded up and put to death, changing the Aesop from the far more sensible "Do not laugh at the man in control of the military industrial complex lest you meet an unpleasant end" to some guff about gullibility.
    • Whoa, really? I do have vague memories of really hating that story when I was a kid, but I guess I must have repressed that.
    • Because the modifed Aesop is more useful in modern societies with elected leadership?
    • Sorry, but the story is a Hans Christian Andersen original, and the original version doesn't say anything about the crowd getting massacred. Any emperor who tried to do something like that would quickly find himself with a 0% Approval Rating--and sheer logistics ensures that such an attempt would be a disaster anyway.
    • Discworld had (I believe) the death/punishment of the boy and telling everyone to forget it ever happened.
      • IIRC, the boy was beaten by his father for "being rude to royalty" in the Discworld version, and the guards rounded everyone else up and told them that it never happened.
      • And then the rest of the empire saw the benefits of the new clothes, started playing games on the beach with large, inflatable, multicolor balls, and all but died outin an influenza epidemic. The point was that the story, and therefore the aesop, changes completely based on how much and what of it you tell.
    • I'd be fearing for those tailors. They were pawing that emperor's naked body for hours, pretending to be tailors making him a suit, making him think he had empirical evidence that he was a fool, they probably even pricked him with needles to make it more authentic, and he probably paid them a lot. And they did this to the emperor. Emperor is one level above king, and implies an empire, so they can't even run. Nor can they shame him into keeping it quiet, because he was humiliated before a massive crowd.
      • Maybe they wanted to touch the king's naked body?
    • I prefer the modern version, because of the moral I myself see in it, which isn't quite the same one everyone else takes away from it: that children are, despite what most people are taught to think, sometimes in their own way wiser than adults, because they have not had their heads filled with as much bullshit as they eventually probably will. A child is fully capable of calling a spade a spade because they haven't been inculturated yet with all the "complexities" that render up down and black white in the minds of older people. They're incapable of understanding things that...well, do not really contain anything to understand, because they're just codswallop. The kind of nonsense that reaches its peak when the child is, say, a philosophy major in college evading your refutations by asking you what the keyword of every sentence out of your mouth "means" whenever you're challenging any nonsense they're spouting. This wonderful parable illustrates the principle better than any other metaphor I can think of: all the adults, I think, have taught themselves, to some tiny degree, to believe on some level that the emperor is wearing clothes, because that's what everyone else is saying and that's what they're supposed to believe as well. Only the little kid who hasn't yet risen in the ranks of horseshit knows better.
      • The above is a perfect example of why I dislike the story. Why are children held in such respect for their 'innocence' which is really just a non-understanding of the way the world works? Captain Planet is a perfect example of 'childhood innocence' - pollution is bad because it is destroying all the nice plants and animals so we must stop all the nasty polluters. And whatever idiocies may have been committed in the name of philosophy, the very nature of enquiring what you mean by words and notions at least shows us that we are often taking for granting a whole number of concepts. Try and form a society that is 'fair' or 'just' for example without stopping to consider what those notions really mean.
      • But surely the child is not to be praised for its "innocence" but for its honesty and courage? The entire grown-up world is knowingly playing along with the invisible-clothes-thing because they fear for their reputation and are prone to self-doubt, lying to one another to save face and thus feeding the lie. In that world, in a public place and before every last citizen, ONE child raises its voice and speaks the truth: there are no clothes (and you are all cowards who believes the words of others but not you own two eyes). The child is the needle of brutal honesty which breaks the bubble. Speaking a truth which everyone around you fear to aknowledge is BRAVE.
      • But the child is only brave because that is the way the story is written, it's obvious that the emperor is naked. The problem is when people try and extrapolate this story into real life. "Hey everyone, you're all saying Citizen Kane is a good film. Well I'm saying it isn't - the emperor has no clothes" "Hey everyone you're all saying that Darwin is right, I'm saying he isn't, the emperor has no clothes". It may be that everyone is too scared to acknowledge a truth. But it may also be that everyone is agreeing on a something BECAUSE it's true and the one person who goes against is not being brave but quite simply is wrong. Perhaps I shouldn't say I dislike the story itself but dislike it when it's used to try and extrapolate some real world moral.
      • (On the other hand, the emperor and his staff shows a kind of bravery as well. Double Aesop? No, wait. They ignore the truth to save face – just like everyone did from the very beginning. Now I hate the people (and the court+personnel) for embarrassing a person with no means of escape, when they were equally decieved until moments ago. The emperor has been encouraged along the way; now that everyone realises the mistake, they still allow him to go on display to carry the burden of everyone's shame. And they pretend not to (the servants still carry the non-existent train of his non-existent clothes). Will someone please lend him a shirt! And bring him back home and serve him hot chocolate with lots of whipped cream!)
  • Or you can say the moral of the story was more straightforward, that intuition and savy work outside of our "systems"
  • Wouldn't he at least sense the clothing in some way? Wouldn't he be feeling a breeze, some weight? What kind of tailor makes the underwear and the suit in one shot, or are we talking about the classical "nude" where you still have underwear?
    • This troper recalls a version where the fabric's magic meant it could also only be felt by the wise as well as that the tailors spent several days making several different pieces of clothing for him to wear.
  • If there really was a fabric that stupid people or those unfit for their position can't see, surely it'd have a lot better uses than clothing? You could ask all your employees and vassals what color a piece of it is, then demote the ones who get it wrong.
    • He was vain, he didn't want it for practicality, he wanted it because it was supposedly the most magnificent fabric in the world, made even more magnificent because only the worthy could perceive it.
    • In Hans Christian Anderson's original, the Emperor does think of exactly that:

“That must be wonderful cloth,” thought the emperor. “If I were to be dressed in a suit made of this cloth I should be able to find out which men in my empire were unfit for their places, and I could distinguish the clever from the stupid."

  • The tailors' scheme is more of a Xanatos Roulette than a reasonable con-game. What if the Emperor had shown a bit more Genre Savvy, and ordered them to demonstrate the fabric's properties in some way that proved its tangibility? For instance, insisting that they show how strong their special cloth was, by stretching it out like a trampoline and dropping rocks onto it. If he's Genre Savvy and nasty, he could've even ordered the tailors to lie down underneath the "cloth" during the testing process: if they're feeding him bullshit, they get pelted with rocks, and serves them right.
    • One of the points of the story is that the Emperor isn't exactly the sharpest tool in the shed.
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