Otter's Rock

I love this show, I really do, but there’s some hella problematic things in it. Here's one example.
Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods deals more explicitly with the wolf in Red Riding Hood being a metaphor for predatory sexual exploitation than most modern versions, and Johnny Depp made it even more creeptastic in the recent Disney version.

( Red and the Wolf ) She's pleasant enough when he first says hello, then he spends a song literally yanking her around to get her to pay attention to him, and telling her what she should be doing (that she doesn't want to do and is actively trying to get away from.) In the end, she smiles and says Okay! and picks some flowers that he showed her, at which point he stops hassling her. (And, of course, this shows why appeasing the creep is a dangerous course to take, because he uses her delay to go find her granny, eat her, and set up to eat Red Riding Hood too.)

Here's the video so you can watch the whole creeptastic scene:


So far, it's not problematic at all.  The wolf is a creep, and everyone knows it.  Yay!

Here's the problem.  Later on, when Red describes the whole thing to the Baker in “I Know Things Now,” she describes the wolf like this: “But he seemed so nice.”

I ask you, did the wolf seem “nice”? NO. He was not nice. He was, in fact, the creepiest creep to ever creep. And she knew it! She didn’t like his attention, she didn’t want his attention, she spends the entire song trying to get away from his attention! But a man is giving attention to a girl, she should be pleased, right? He's trying to give her things--flowers even--so she should appreciate it, right? The only way the wolf is "nice" is if you assume that any male attention to a female automatically is "nice" regardless of what kind of attention or whether she wants it or not.

But it's actually worse than that. Here's some context to that line:
"Mother said straight ahead
not to delay or be misled
I should have heeded her advice
but he seemed so nice.”

She tried to do the right thing. She did everything she possibly could to do what her mother told her and keep the wolf from misleading her. And now she’s blaming herself for the fact that he literally yanked her off the path.  And the show just kind of accepts this version, in which Red bears some of the blame for the wolf's "seduction" of her.  When, really, no, that's not what happened at all.

The whole song:




There’s actually some good and empowering stuff in the song, too, and I love it, but at the same time, eeeep!

If it actually reflected what had happened--if the wolf had been ambiguous and kinda nice, if Red had responded to him and chosen to go off the path with him, it would be a great song.  As it is, it's pretty failtastic.