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Why Chima is not the Big Bad Wolf

Story note · · 4 min read

An old picture book lying open on a wooden table, its page showing an enormous storybook wolf behind a small cottage, with a worn white work glove beside it for scale

The easiest version of this story is the one where the wolf is the wolf, the pigs are the pigs, and everybody plays their assigned part until the last page. We are not writing that one.

Chima inherits a name and a shelf of picture books. He does not inherit the afternoon. The distance between those two things is where the whole tale lives — and it is why the story ends in work, not a fight.

Whenever a scene starts to make him monstrous, we cut it. Whenever a scene lets him off the hook, we cut that too.

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