Talk:The Children Found a Flower/@comment-31077845-20170227015055

Eh, I guess there's only so many ways to end a story like this, and it wasn't like I expected the kids to say, after watching the thing devour a stick like a damned wood chipper, say "This is clearly a dangerous object and we'd be severely endangering our welfare by continuing toying with something so obviously capable of maiming or killing us!" then turn around and leaving, someone was getting eaten, but being a fictional story and all it's not like it couldn't be set up differently, as even for children this seemed to involve a moderately severe case of HSIR (horror story induced retardation. I've got my family using that term now, and I'll be damned if I don't see it in popular use before I die). Why not maybe have the thing burrow underground to grab him before he can get away rather than having the kid, ruptured eardrums or not, stand like a idiot while the horrifying tongue-teeth-eye thing moved ever closer? Maybe this is my classical education in biology, but one would assume the organism was purely carniverous, and there are a number of carniverous plants out there (although they aren't purely carniverous, they just rely on non-plant organisms for certain nutrients, and they're usually limited to things like venus flytraps and, at largest, pot plants that can sometimes maybe nab a mouse if they're really lucky) and as such would have to have some method of consistently luring and/or grabbing prey. The chances of small children finding a randomly disappearing fleshy flower thing, then throwing rocks at the thing until it was alerted to their presence, then one of them standing stupidly while the thing slowly eats it, are really slim. It would have to be far more aggressive and clever to capture anything, even non-idiot children.

And the "AND THEN IT, AND ALL THE EVIDENCE SOMETHING FREAKIN' INSANE HAPPENED, DISAPPEARED!" thing is just super duper level cliche and isn't really necessary being as the story ends with them running away. There's no need for the cliche seeing as the only reason it exists is to easily and quickly handwave away any questions about "...so what happens when everyone else shows up?". You could probably leave that up to the reader's imagination.