A Sock for Christmas

[cyberghostface]

 

This comes from The Vault of Horror #29.

In a royal kingdom, the prince is spoiled rotten by his family and is an all-out brat. He pushes the prime minister into the moat and the man tells the king that he should whip his son for discipline.



The king tells the boy's father that his son is to be the prince's royal companion and will have a better life there than he would at home. The father protests but the king has the final say. He promises to let the boy return for Christmas.

At the castle, the boy becomes the prince's whipping boy; that is, he is to be punished whenever the prince does something wrong. As you can imagine, the whipping-boy's life is pretty miserable as the prince acts out constantly.



When he returns home to his family, the boy tells them what the prince said about Santa.  They promise him that he will receive lots of gifts from Santa, even though they are poor. The father decides to visit the king and ask him to fill the stocking for their son and his response is as expected:

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Well, that was unexpected! For Epiphany, the whipping boy gets to see his father hanged in the public square! Huzzah!

[captainbellman]

You underestimate the power of a nice strong fireplace to help bring about a Happily Ever After.

[cainofdreaming]

Human remains are notoriously hard to burn. Cremation requires humongous amounts of heat, for an extended time.

But then again, a shovel and a brisk walk into the woods after dark will deal with it as well.

[fungo_squiggly]

Holy crap. So Santa actually murdered Bad King Irving and stuffed his dismembered corpse in Melvin's stocking?

Yeah, you'd damn well BETTER be good, for goodness' sake...

[icon_uk]

Maybe it was Krampus?

[glprime]

Oh grief, I had blocked out all foul memories of The Whipping Boy until just now. Curse you, Vault of Horror!

[cypherfdp]

So what, the bratty prince gets off scot-free?

Also, wow, I can't believe I only just noticed where Scott Free comes from.

[icon_uk]

Aside from knowing that his father, the one who was really protecting him, had been hacked up to pay for HIS misdeeds... I suppose.

But yeah, other than that, I can only imagine the vengeance that the new King would unleash upon the poor kid's family on St Stephen's Day.

[cypherfdp]

Just seems to me like a little bit of odd retribution that the King should be killed, while the prince, who was the source of all the problems anyway, is now the King with hell to pay on his whipping boy and his famly.

[captainbellman]

Yeah...I was expecting the story would end with the sympathetic servants quietly conspiring to make the whipping-boy King after the original King's death in a kind of forced-prince-and-the-pauper dealie.

[cainofdreaming]

That was also what I was thinking. Seeing that the whipping boy was the one that took all the lessons, so he'd be the one who actually knows a thing about ruling.

[silicondream]

And we are told that everyone lived "happily ever after." So I'm guessing that the people went "Yay, our king kind of sucked." The prince was reformed into a well-mannered though passive little boy by his mom now that she had a free hand, and the whipping boy became the power behind the throne. And no one ever thought to blame the whipping boy's dad, since it seemed unlikely that one elderly peasant could abduct the king from a well-guarded palace in the first place.

The character names in this story are awesome.

[icon_uk]

As Roald Dahl put it, when referring to Verucca Salt in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory";

But now, my dears, we think you might
Be wondering–is it really right
That every single bit of blame
And all the scolding and the shame
Should fall upon Veruca Salt?
Is she the only one at fault?
For though she's spoiled, and dreadfully so,
A girl can't spoil herself, you know.
Who spoiled her, then? Ah, who indeed?
Who pandered to her every need?
Who turned her into such a brat?
Who are the culprits? Who did that?
Alas! You needen't look so far
To find out who these sinners are.
They are (and this is very sad)
Her loving parents, MUM and DAD.

[full_metal_ox]

Honey Boo-Boo's shenanigans bring that verse irresistibly to mind.

[janegray]

But the source of all problems was not the prince, it was the king. They explicitly say that the prince is a spoiled brat because the king spoiled him and always refused to punish him. The king is also the one who came up with the brilliant idea of having an innocent child punished instead of his son (yeah, the prince took glee in that, but the whole point of a "whipping boy" is that he serves as a scapegoat).

If the king hadn't been a shitty father, the prince most likely wouldn't have been a shitty son.

[blackruzsa]

Well I get the impression it's trying to say that a bratty child becomes bratty as a result of bad parenthood. The mom was obviously all for good discipline but the king was the reason the prince turned out that way.

I dunno. I wanted the prince to get punished too, but between him and the king, I definitely would have gone with the king.

[crinos]

I dunno, if I woke up and found my dad had been dismembered by old St. Nick I would probably make it a point to NEVER DO ANYTHING TO PISS HIM OFF EVER AGAIN.

I mean Santa just demonstrated he can come into your home at night, mess you up, AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP HIM.

Besides which, we don't really see what happens to the snotty prince. Maybe Santa took care of him off panel.

[cyberghostface]

Well EC rarely had kids killed in their stories.

[icon_uk]

Interestingly, if disturbingly, the role of whipping boy was a genuine one (I'd heard the term, but never read up on it), created because of the "Divine right of Kings" made it hard to discipline a prince since only the King was held to be of sufficient authority to do so, and he often wasn't around.

Unlike the above case though, the prince and whipping boy (who was often of noble blood himself) were encouraged to become close friends (Stockholm Syndrome if nothing else I suppose)

So, provided the prince wasn't a complete brat/psychopath, there was a marked element of success in modifying behaviour because the prince would feel guilty that an innocent party, and friend, was being punished for his own misdeeds.

Weird....

[kamino_neko]

It was a crappy job, but I actually suspect it probably worked better for getting the Prince to behave than beating him would have, given the general lack of success of corporal punishment.

(Not that I'd suggest bringing it back, of course, since it's a terrible thing to do to the poor whipping boy.)

[janegray]

That role was a plot point in one of my favourite childhood books (which, sadly, was never translated into English).

A princess is miserable because she feels lonely and her teacher is an asshole, so she misbehaves, and the teacher can't hit her because she is the princess. So, the teacher comes up with a fantastic idea: whenever the princess refuses to obey, a little servant girl is brought in, and the princess is forced to watch as the little girl is beaten.

Since the princess in this book is a nice girl, of course she feels horrible about it and stops misbehaving. But the guilt and frustration end up making her even more miserable, and she ends up becoming the chronically depressed "smile-less princess."

(The story has a happy ending because the princess ends up befriending the heroine, who saves her).

[protogarrett]

And then the father was framed for murder by Santa. The end.

[janegray]

It does say "after that christmas, everybody in the kingdom lived happily ever after."

Assuming they didn't kill the father that very same day (extremely unlikely: it would take time to look for the culprit, interrogate/torture him to figure out how the hell an old man was able to get past the guards twice and carrying a body the second time, and fix a public execution; plus, I doubt the child would feel happy the day after his father was killed), what most likely happened is that the father buried the corpse somewhere and got away with it.

[janegray]

One thing that always bothers me about these stories: the punishment for bad children is always a beating. If you don't want to hit your child, you are letting them get away scot-free and spoiling them rotten and you are a bad parent.

Dude. What about sending them to bed with no dinner, taking their favourite toys away, or any of the other disciplinary measures?

[espanolbot]

A story called "Naughty Step Boy" wouldn't have been as snappy, presumably.

[espanolbot]

Well to paraphrase Terry Pratchett, being horribly murdered IS dying of natural causes for kings in this kind of story...

[jlroberson]

This story is an example of why I think people miss about Kamen that he was utterly aware of how friendly and sedate his style seemed. And that's what made his stories often kick you right in the head at the end; you never see the horrible thing coming. He was the David Lynch of EC. The "normalcy" only makes his stories more disturbing, at their best. "The Halloween Game" being the best example of his specific strengths.