There’s not much to say about the actual text of Woah, Woah, Windigo. After all, it’s a twenty-page book for preschoolers. There’s only one sentence on each page. I wish I’d read it more than once, if I had I could probably recite the entire thing here.
It tells the story of an earth-pony filly who’s been picked on by her pegasus friend for not being able to fly. After going to bed, she awakes to see a windigo outside her window. It offers to let her ride on it, and show her around the sky. She agrees, but soon gets cold and tired, eventually asking to go home. The next day, she tells her friend she prefers the comfort of the ground.
The book, being for children, is naturally very simplistic. However, I find the moral to be good for children- some ponies can do different things than you, but you have your own comfort area and interests in which to thrive. That said, it’s perhaps not presented fairly well. The filly really enjoys flying until she suddenly gets cold, undermining the final idea. I think it’s a good story, but a flawed one.
In fact, there’s substantial evidence that the story was may have been perfunctory. The author, Sky Seer, was an artist by trade, and never wrote anything else. A few of the pages also appear, in slightly modified forms, in her other collections, scraps, and galleries. I theorize that Woah, Woah, Windigo was initially an art book with a bit of a story running through the pictures, and Sky Seer chose to add a few more drawing and text to make it a complete narrative. I’m no art critic, but the drawings were beautiful, especially the ones of the sky at night, with the filly and the windigo flying through them.
But none of those things are what Woah, Woah, Windigo is known for. About forty years ago, a parental group subjected Woah, Woah, Windigo to one of the largest and most extensive book burnings in Equestrian history.
The controversy centered around two main points, the first being the filly’s disappearance. Shortly after the book’s publishing, there was a widely publicized case where a filly in Canterlot disappeared from her home. She was thought to have been kidnapped. Authorities later found her in Las Pegasus, having apparently snuck out at night and hopped a train, attempting to visit her older brother. Regardless of how well things turned out, the event caused widespread panic among parental groups, who advocated that children be cautious of strangers. The group decided that Woah, Woah, Windigo taught poor messages to children, saying that a “decent” story would have the filly refuse to go with the windigo.
The second issue was the actual windigo. While nopony has seen one in over a thousand years, their role in the story of Equestria’s formation still makes the creatures very threatening to some. One father said of the book, “It might as well have told my daughter to play chess with a manticore.” Sky Seer’s statement on why she used a windigo hardly helped matters- “They’re just beautiful creatures. A little scary, maybe. But really pretty.” Parents took this to mean that not only were windigos dangerous, they were enticing. The windigo’s inherently threatening nature, doubtless, added fuel to the parents’ first problem; not only is it a stranger appearing at her window, it’s an incredibly suspicious and dangerous stranger.
The more the book was discussed, the more ponies started believing the book was deliberately trying to teach children poor lessons, though I’ve yet to see any statements that adequately explain Sky Seer’s theoretical motivation for doing so. Things continued growing worse until a group named Parents for the Safety of Foals bought or stole every known copy of the book, piled them in front of Sky Seer’s home, and burned them.
Despite calling it “the scariest night of her life,” Sky Seer is known for her surprisingly good humor about the event. My personal favorite of her quotes- “Once I realized they weren’t going to burn down the house, I debated busting out the marshmallows.” She also is apparently not too distraught at the destruction of her books, saying “Yeah, it kinda sucks. But do you know how many pony’s bought copies just to burn them? Loads! Book made me way more cash as kindling than it ever did as a story. I ate great for years.” Sky Seer continued her art career, mostly unaffected by her work’s public shaming and destruction.
While I try hard to see where the parents were coming from, I can’t condone book burning under any circumstances. Surely it would be more productive to discuss the book’s ideas with your child, even the ideas you disagree with. Then again, I’m not a parent, so I’m not sure I can judge. Still, I don’t think anything can make me approve.
The library’s copy seems to have survived the burning by being misplaced. I found it misfiled under “non-fiction,” in a section reserved for biographies. Part of the shame of the event surrounding Woah, Woah, Windigo is that I doubt if any copies are found they will actually be read. The book’s destruction was so public that any survivors will simply become collector’s items. But even that’s theoretical, since there’s no record of any more surviving copies.
I was actually considering handing the library’s copy to a publisher, to create a second run of the book, before the library was destroyed. I guess Tirek succeeded where overprotective parents failed.