5 Reasons Why Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom is Bad for Kids

If anyone reading this is unfamiliar with Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom, allow me to explain what it is; it’s a kids’ show usually aired on Nick Junior - if anyone outside the UK and the Netherlands gets that channel - and it revolves around elves and fairies that theoretically are the same size as the Minimoys, and they live in your back garden, or a park, probably. I dunno, they live in the grass and they’re invisible to the human eye. Ben in this show is an elf, and Holly is a fairy, except she’s not just any fairy, she’s the Fairy Princess of the Little Kingdom.

Now, as I was saying, this is a kids’ show. As an adult having had to watch the show because my niece - who is six years old at time of writing - loved that show, I have seen some God-awful subtext that the child viewers don’t quite understand. Here are a few examples.

Continued One-Upmanship

This is pretty much a bad move that keeps happening in every episode. There’s always some dispute over who is the better race; elves or fairies. The elves demonstrate why they’re better in any given situation, and the fairies demonstrate why they’re better in that situation. How about quit the quarrelling and team up to use each other’s strengths to your collective advantage? It would be like, for example, two soldiers, one’s a sniper, the other’s a close-range fighter, constantly trying to prove to the other why they’re better than them when what they should be doing is teaming up and the close-range guy does some hand combat to make the enemy an easy target for the sniper. Yes, fairies can fly and do magic. Yes, elves can run and lift heavy weights. Neither race is better than the other. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The End.

(Implied) Slavery

Fairies treat elves like second-class citizens, really - at least, the Royal Fairy Family do. All the other fairies are a bit less snobby about it, as far as I’ve seen. The Royal Fairy Family do nothing but order the elves around, like “we want this, this and this by this date. No arguments”. The elves are more considerate of nature so if Nanny Plum is out of flour and orders more, that one huge bag of flour takes a week to make. That’s not good enough for Nanny Plum so what does she do? She belittles the elves’ way of working and uses magic to speed up the process, which, by the way, goes horribly awry. Point is, these poor elves work night and day for those damn fairies and it’s not like they get paid, even in gratitude. Besides, where the hell are the Royal Elves? Slave labour, I’m telling you.

Disrespecting Others’ Traditions and Forced Integration

These ‘ere fairies think they can get way with anything, from the aforementioned rushing of the production of flour to cheating in games events they’re not included in. There was once an elf event, the Elf Games, like the Olympics, but for elves, and only elves. No fairies were allowed to participate, but that just went in one ear and out of the other for Nanny Plum. Princess Holly was actually the more mature and considerate one in this situation, she was protesting when Nanny Plum insisted that they “give Ben a helping hand” in winning the Elf Games, not knowing or caring that the use of magic would get him disqualified. And guess what, that Nanny Plum did get Ben disqualified by helping him using her magic. In the final event though, Ben doesn’t have a partner for the wheelbarrow race, so Holly volunteers herself to help him win, without magic, and they do indeed win. And because she’s Princess Holly Thistle, she got to ask - no, insist - the Wise Old Elf to add some extra sports for fairies to take part in and be good at, and thus the Elf Games became the Elf and Fairy Games. Forced integration much? These poor elves can’t have a single celebration to themselves, can they?

Discrimination (Ties In With One-Upmanship)

They basically go hand-in-hand because by proving their own race superior, they have to belittle the other race, kinda like a fairy saying “haha, I can fly and do magic, you can’t, I’m therefore better than you,” or an elf saying “haha, I can run faster than you, I’m therefore better than you”. Neither race gets away with this, it happens both ways. There’s not much more I can say about this, to be honest, except I remember seeing an episode in which Ben and Holly play hide and seek, while Holly was the seeker, Ben actually ran and hid somewhere, which made him pretty easy for Holly to find, and he explicitly said no flying and no magic. When it was Holly’s turn to hide, she didn’t actually hide per se; she made herself invisible, therefore blatantly ignoring Ben’s rules because she’s a fairy, no elf rules apply to fairies. Of course, this upsets Ben when he figures out that Holly cheated and used magic when she wasn’t supposed to, but because she’s his best friend, he forgives her and they try it again, and this time Holly agrees not to fly or use magic. Point is, Holly thought herself superior to Ben’s rules because she’s a fairy, and he’s an elf which is an obvious reminder of the heirarchy that goes on in the Little Kingdom. Also, Nanny Plum is the worst culprit with her arrogance, because she has an admirer in Captain Redbeard, an elf pirate who happens to be Ben’s uncle, I think. He fancies Nanny Plum and greets her romantically but she’s just like “ugh”. Yes, she was flattered at first but that quickly got old and now his flirting just creeps her out. Possibly because he’s an elf and there’s some unwritten law forbidding elf-fairy romances? Who knows.

The Education System

I’d like to stress the severe segregation that still goes on in the Little Kingdom, which possibly explains why fairies are so eager to crash an elf’s party at any given opportunity. The only time the elf kids and the fairy kids see each other is outside of school hours, because there is no integrated education in the Little Kingdom. Elf school teaches manual labour, while Fairy school teaches magic and nature. Elf schooling is taught by the Wise Old Elf, who is way past his retirement by now with a beard as long as Dumbledore’s. Fairy schooling is taught by none other than Nanny Plum, the Master of Messing Up. The fairy children have to learn to control their magic, and do spells correctly, which is something even Nanny Plum evidently still doesn’t know how to do yet, though she makes out that she knows all there is to know about using magic properly. In every single episode, you will see an example of a fairy kid trying to do a spell and messing it up, like that one time when Holly turned Ben into a frog, and tried to turn him human again, but ended up turning Nanny Plum into a frog too. So she tries to do multiple variations of the same spell to get him back in human - sorry, elf - form, and even the Wise Old Elf has to come in and lend a hand to turn Nanny Plum back into the fairy she is.

And even then, there are many examples of Nanny Plum trying to show off with her magic and it goes terribly awry - one of which I already mentioned, with the flour - and then there’s that bastard magic picnic basket. You’d think that these stupid fairies would learn to not ask for “more, more, more” jelly, but they do it, every time, and it results in a jelly flood, every time, so Nanny Plum has to use the Emergency Spell which cleans the jelly up, but then the fairies are magicless for the next 24 hours. Surely there’s a less drastic spell to clean up the jelly flood?

And despite all this, Ben Elf and Princess Holly Thistle are best friends.