Upsetting Day: Masks for Children

Ok, I'm about to declare something, and it will be controversial. I think we should ban children from masks. This is not satirical. This is a real opinion that I hold, and nothing will change it, not even a movie about a shy child with a heart of gold learning to come out of their shell with the help of an enchanted Mickey Rooney mask. Wait, it’s also not about Covid. We’re talking non-prescription masks for children. You would think that adults wearing masks would be more frightening to me, but for some reason, my brain says the small person in a mask is worse. Small person in a mask is stealthy; you can't beat up a small person in a mask. You just have to let them menace you.

For a long time, I've wanted to cover a children's mask crafting book, but it's impossible for several reasons, the first of which is that they are all equally horrific to me. I can't choose one that stands out. It's like choosing a dinosaur to french kiss; no matter what I pick, I'm getting mauled. Also, none of them have any chill. They are all maximum deranged. The cover of this book is always preceded by the phrase "promise me you won't scream," and followed by "you promised!"

I have a pretty good idea why this book was withdrawn from. . . I'm going to assume a library but also, hopefully, existence. We joke about things being cursed, but this thing has real "seven days" energy. Everything about that cover is off putting. That pose is going for "inviting" but hitting "inviting you into my dimly lit cavern, hurry child, hurry."

The two sets of hair, the visible teeth, all red flags that send my body into fight or fight. That's not a typo; if this is you, I'm attacking. The worst thing about How to make a Mask (WITHDRAWN) is that if you find it, your child will know how to make that mask. It isn't even a book about how to create multiple masks. It would be more accurately titled How To Make This Specific Mask, The One On The Cover, But Why Would You Want To Do That?

Why would you want to give a child that knowledge? How could you even tell a child that owns this mask to do anything? You can't tell a living nightmare to take a nap. Your life will be chaos the instant your child dons the mask. When you open the cover, the clown has its hands up in the international symbol for whoops I've committed a crime!

And that's a typical cover to one of these books. There's no person insane enough to write a children's mask crafting book who is mentally sound enough to make the cover even a little normal. Every single author said, "You know what would best represent the content of my project? A clearly unhappy child and a half finished mask locked in a forever scream. I'm speaking, of course, about CREATIVE CRAFTS MASKS: A step-by-step introduction.

"Oh, Lydia, perhaps you've misjudged these books," you might be thinking if you enjoy being terribly wrong. That forever scream mask probably looks just fine once it's all done. "Don't judge a book by its cover," you, an idiot, might think. To which I reply, look, I'm covering this topic once, and then we'll never speak of this again. If you ever ask me about this article, I won't know what you're talking about because I'm going full Severance with it the moment I turn it in. Also, the completed version of the forever scream mask looks like the Babadook with jazz hands:

Yeah, I didn't want to have to show you that either. I bet that's the last time you hypothetically disagree with me, jerks! This book was written in 1989, which means it predicted the coming of the Babadook twenty-five years early. Children's craft books should not herald new monsters into our world. That's a fun opinion that I have.

Never before have I decried an entire genre of books. Normally I would cover each individual book in painstaking detail, but I can't handle the idea of discovering more of these. I saw one, and then suddenly, they were everywhere. The books are finding me now, and I want it to stop. Here's another one I hate.

Again, I have to point out that giving this book to a child would give them the ability to hover over you at night wearing this mask. Do you want to wake up to that? Why would you give a person with an underdeveloped sense of empathy and no impulse control who lives in your home a chance to do that to you?

Some of these absolute rubes are out here making books specifically to inform children that masks exist and what they are for. The wonderful thing about kids is they're a blank slate. They don't know about masks until you want them to! It's fully within your control to not explain masks to your child until they are forty-seven years old, and yet some people are out here publishing crap like this.

Then they go out of their way to find the dirtiest, creepiest masks possible to use as an example. Go wild, kids! No one will know it's you. Masks hide all sin.

Why do they want the children to hide their faces so bad? It's a book called masks, that is just dozens of pictures of children in masks labeled X type of masks hide faces as if that's vital information that must be delivered to children at large. They don't need to know about the masks!

There are some mask designs that are…I won't say good, but at the very least, they're chaotic neutral, mainly because they're so low effort. When these mask freaks run out of ideas, they'll literally glue anything to a child's head and say, "wow, it's a mask!"

This was obviously made by a newly divorced dad who didn't know his kid was supposed to bring a mask to school. I like how the child can't see out of those cookie holes. A blinded child is instantly less of a threat, but I also have to worry about how comfortable that is. That thin coating of chocolate combined with body heat for more than five minutes is going to melt and smear all over the inside of those tights, further blinding the child when they get chocolate in their eyeballs. I can't stress enough how someone put cookies on this child's eyes like a gingerbread man being sent across the River Styx and then mummified them in pantyhose.

The book describes this look as a "great mystery character with glaring eyes." I guess the mystery is what character it could be. I've never seen a mask look more like a crime in progress than this poor kid with biscuits stuck to their head. They look like they died trying to rob Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. They look like the inside of the shorts of a lactose intolerant Hooters waitress. Oh no, did I write this entire article as an excuse to roast traumatized children? I do enjoy watching kids fall down, and a lot of these masks are basically machines designed to make kids bump into stuff.

We should all question the logic of empowering a child to build something that may send them stumbling into traffic. I'm never going to write a children's book about crafting masks because I'm still clinging to lucidity, but if I did someday teach a child to craft a mask, I would make sure they could see out of it.

There are two basic requirements for masks. Number one, which you may be familiar with, is that masks hide faces. Number two is that you should be able to see well enough in them to maneuver around without injuring yourself. If you have to say don't wear this mask without supervision, that's a bad mask. Although I don't know if the most dangerous time to wear this "body mask" is when you're walking along a busy road, because if I saw this thing coming at me on a completely deserted road at night, guess what? I'm aiming for it.

These masks are threatening enough to me without the added fear that they might harm the child wearing them. The only way these could get scarier is if the person in them were also holding a gun. Yes, there is a mask model with a gun option available. Which is still less menacing than the cover of How To Make A Mask.

And yet still, that is not the most menacing mask. I found a mask made of bones. The bones of what? Not specified. It's just bones, you know, the regular kind, like how everyone has bones lying around that they can glue to a chopping board and make a mask Leatherface would be envious of.

"Hey, kids? Do you have too many tiny bones? I can help you get rid of your small bones!" The author of this book said and was still somehow welcomed into public libraries. That's the power of mask craft. I've found the real Illuminati. This is what they do with their immense power. There isn’t even a face anywhere in that mask. It’s just a pile of bones. Jeffrey Dahmer would call that mask mid.

I sincerely hope I don’t see another mask crafting book for the rest of my life. If I never write another article, know that the masks came for me. I’ll be leaving behind my dogs and a large number of books on how to craft masks for children that may or may not be haunted but are definitely cursed.

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