Blog:Should “Bye Bye Baby: A Sad Story With A Happy Ending” Be On This Wikia?

Introduction
This is a children’s book written by Allan Ahlberg. However, this story achieves something that children’s books NORMALLY don’t achieve, the story is dark and it’s not dark with some light moments or starts light then gets dark or starts dark, then gets light…. IT’S ALL DARK. If you saw the cover and if I gave you the synopsis, you’ll think otherwise….

So, what is the synopsis anyways? “The story of a baby who is sad and sets off one day in search of a mummy. He meets a cat, a teddy, a clockwork hen and an uncle who all refuse to be his mummy but offer to help him in his search. They find a lady who has no baby and she agrees to be the baby's mummy. They all have tea together and uncle reads a story about a baby who had no daddy and this leads to another search until finally a daddy is found too!”

Okay, sounds interesting does it? A nice little story about an orphan finding his forever family, may sound light…. Look at Annie! Well, wrong, interesting story, just VERY DARK. In fact, it’s so dark some parents even questioned whether or not the content was suitable for their children and even feared the book might even seem….. upsetting to them.

But, how is it so dark? What makes it dark?

How Is This Seemingly “Lighthearted” Tale So Dark?

 * When you think of the main character, he’s orphan. And he leaves his place to find a family. We know that he’s not a child, capable of realizing that other children have parents and he doesn’t. But, he’s actually an infant.
 * If he’s just a baby, how did he decide or even go to find a family? Well, you’d think he’s running away from abusive or neglectful parents or an orphanage where the headmaster is literally Satan and the children are treated like prisoners and face cruel treatment. No, he’s simply alone, caring for himself. I know it’s hard to wrap your head around it but let me put it this way, the baby is like Stewie from Family Guy except he’s not evil. He can speak in full sentences and clearly has the mentality of a 6 year old. Like, he already knows he should have parents because he says he’s “too young” to be caring for himself and he doesn’t have morality down, which I’ll get to in a little bit. Anyway, if a story starts like this, you know it’s dark. The baby has to do EVERYTHING for himself, this page speaks for itself.
 * The protagonist, just like all the other characters don’t have names, so they’re called what they are e.g., the baby simply being, Baby, the cat simply being Cat, etc.
 * He sets off to find a mother but meets a cat and sentient toys first, a teddy bear and a windup hen toy. This is where it gets haunting…. You’ll notice one thing, these things have no owners present. You’d think a worried owner would be searching for their cat or even get upset with a baby who talk taking their cat. And children, especially very young ones can get very selfish when it comes to their toys. You’d think the kid who got their toys “taken” by the baby will probably throw a fit and demand to have their toys back. But, nope, they don’t have owners and they don’t even mention their PREVIOUS owners at all. They just say that they want the baby or his future mother to own them, in their own wacky way like the teddy wants be the baby’s adoptive brother (he wants his mother to be HIS TOO) and Cluckwork Hen, in her own tongue (she speaks in clucks) says that “a hen is a mummy’s best friend.” so she wants the baby’s mother to own her too.
 * After the toys, Baby finally meets an actual human, an elderly who owns an orange book with the Penguin Publishing logo on the cover (either the old man is Allan’s self insert but the character embodies him or it’s breaking the 4th wall). Just like the other characters, he asks the old man if he can be his mother. But he says he can “be [his] uncle.” Yep, the old man is an uncle despite not mentioning having nieces and nephews. This will be the trend with all the humans, the woman who adopts being Baby is called “Mummy” and her newfound partner is called “Daddy”, I’m starting to think this book takes place in a world where the human race is wiped out and Baby is like an adult because he’s created in a lab and Old Uncle, Mummy, Daddy, and Baby are the remaining humans on Earth and have to repopulate Earth. Think about it, Cat, Teddy, and the Clockwork Hen are just laying around and there’s no evidence that humans are actually around. Like, if there, they would have owners and a police officer may find Baby and question why there’s a baby roaming around the streets asking people if they can be his mother, they may even pick him up, put him in the police department and think he’s a missing child or think he neglectful parents who left him there. And animal control would’ve picked Cat up and Mummy would probably get reported (I’ll get to this later but there’s evidence that Mummy is actually mentally ill) and standerbys would probably call the police if they heard Old Uncle say that he can be Baby’s uncle and good souls will probably report Baby because seeing a baby wandering around unattended, you’d might want to report the parents to CPS because they were dumb enough to let their baby toddle off God knows where. But, nope, that didn’t happen, so this is probably a world where humans have either been abducted by Aliens or wiped off the face of the Earth. The buildings shown in the background don’t seem to have wear and tear, like this illustration shows a neighborhood, the houses, wall, and car look intact, they don’t look like this city at all. If humans really did disappear, the car would be rusted, the houses will look like they’re breaking down, the foliage would be overgrown and taking over the houses, the wall would be crumbling, etc. Another hint, Cat isn’t very slim and dirty, neglected animals are very hard to look at, unless Cat’s a feral cat then she’d just live off small animals that she caught (cats hunt, they either bring their owner what they caught or they’d eat the animal, saw my cats eating a live bird multiple times) and Teddy and the Clockwork Hen don’t look dirty and worn out. So, either humans have just disappeared but not long enough for nature to over the once populated town or they have been gone, but seeing buildings crumbling to ruins, a starving cat with dirty matted fur, and rotting teddy bear and wind-up hen may scare children (this is a children’s book, seeing Baby roaming a post apocalyptic world where nature took over, buildings have crumbled down to nothing but ruins, houses with rotted wood as termites eat and thrive, plants covering the once intact building, a car that has rusted over the illustrator just doesn’t want to scare the children, I don’t blame them, the book is already dark and adding crumbling ruins may just make it scary, a really small child can’t handle a book with the setting of a PG-13 or R-Rated horror movie. But if humans disappeared, why is Daddy still doing his job being a farmer? Like, Mummy literally STOLE lots of vegetables from him. He may be farming just to survive. However, if it’s humans really disappeared then how was Mummy tea, ginger biscuits, and milk, and how was Teddy able to have a full blown picnic by himself? Probably cartoon logic where nothing makes sense or humans disappeared recently but not recent enough for the food in grocery stores to rot or it goes back to “not scaring the children”, if they were the only surviving humans, they’d be eating crops they grew and they’d be killing the animals for meat, showing hunting and blood may scare the children so everyone lives like we do now.
 * The Old Uncle seems scary within himself, sure he’s just a bookworm who needs sleep and has a good heart but most pedophiles tend to be old men, in fact, parents questioned this character the most because an old man telling a minor (the main character is a baby) that he can the minor’s uncle sounds like something a pedophile would say. But then maybe it’s breaking stereotypes because not all old men are pedophiles. But then Baby hasn’t had enough experience to know when to run from danger and we’re lucky he wasn’t kidnapped, killed, or ran over by a car. Also, this is a children’s book and having a pedo is just not appropriate for the target audience.
 * After meeting Old Uncle, everyone falls and Baby cries and screams “I WANT MY MUMMY!” that’s when a woman pushing an empty baby stroller comes and Baby asks her if she can be his mother and she says “Yes”. I just want to talk about her because she’s the most suspicious of the characters. Like, you can tell there’s something VERY wrong with her, she looks like she’s mentally ill and insane. Like, she pushes around an empty baby stroller and has baby care items in her house despite not having a baby, I’m sorry but typical people just DON’T DO THAT (this illustration shows it, she has baby toys and she just got the kid, they were collecting dust until he came along). I understand if you’re a collector and you’re a diehard fan of a franchise and the franchise is on baby things, you’d collect it (heck, there’s a Winnie the Pooh collector) but people don’t buy pet supplies and children care items when they don’t have a pet or a baby themselves because all it does is just collect dust and make your house look messy, it’s not normal, you only buy the things if you’re getting a pet or know that you’re pregnant or are adopting a child but if you’re alone and you just buy things, then there’s something wrong with you, there’s no use for those things. Also, the fact that she came to Baby’s yells for a mother, without asking comforting the child or I don’t know, calling the police or trying to call the child’s mother because it’s the right thing to do, this woman thinks Baby is calling for her, which proves that this woman is insane. Yep, she clearly has psychological issues and owns and carries things around for someone she didn’t have a child to begin with. Like, if you saw a woman pushing around an empty baby stroller, your first thought would be that she’s homeless or you’d be weirded out because people don’t do that in public. So, Mummy is legally classified as insane and probably should’ve gotten therapy or at least have her things given to Goodwill. Also, why is she living alone, if she really does have psychological issues, she may need help with care, like making sure she has her medications. Maybe she has schizophrenia and she thinks she has a baby when she really doesn’t do this whole time she’s caring for a hallucination and people think she’s insane for caring for her “imaginary baby”. Or she’s not insane, she just wants to have a child so bad that she goes ramped, buys baby things and waits for the opportunity instead of, I don’t know, trying to get pregnant or meeting someone or adopting a child (people just don’t drop a baby off on your doorstep too often, this is very rare). But, still her owning baby things prior to adopting Baby is just not normal.
 * LOL Cat is dark minded and likes sad stories.
 * That’s when things get more questionable, Old Uncle reads a story about a single mother with a baby and that prompts Baby to play matchmaker and find the perfect partner for Mummy, love just don’t work that way, this is forgivable because he’s an infant and Mummy was insane enough to join, so she’s just as naive as Baby. Also, single parent families do very well, I can think of lots of stories where single parents do well raising a child on their own and this is what I don’t like about this story because they’re literally painting single parent families as a bad thing and it’s wrong to miss one. Well, yeah, while children should have both mom and dad in their lives, there are some children who just don’t have both parents, some are raised by one or by relatives or have a family with two parents but one parent is too messed up to raise the child, e.g. like dad is actually a terrible person and goes off to work, drink in bars, and comes home and is hostile towards his wife and kids or is just not the parent he’s supposed to be. Sure, it negatively impacts family but no family is perfect. I get it, the Alberg is probably not supportive of single parent families but he shouldn’t demonize them like that.
 * Then Baby meets a man and asks him to be his father and he says “yes” and the story ends, it’s unknown if they get married or just live together and have babies. But, yeah, not good to just fall in love with a man you just met, I know this is a children’s book but Daddy could actually be a bad person, he may end up hating Mummy, he could plot to murder them or be so different from Mummy that things have to just be separate or he’s a sociopath or he’s like Cyclops from Marvel and cheats on Mummy and is never there for Baby and Mummy. But still, the book is using Disney logic.

Conclusion
So, yeah, even though it’s a dark story and anti-single parent family, it still has a good story and beautiful illustrations. Anyway, you want to see the book for yourself, you can watch the read aloud on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/TFkahitXkgg

The book is also nonsensical and one sentence can’t summarize it, it warrants a paragraph or an essay to explain. (It looks like a fever dream actually) Even though it’s dark, I don’t if it should be on this wikia, it’s a more obscure children’s book and like I said, it’s story is too good for the wikia, it’s just dark.

Additional Thoughts

 * This book, despite it’s dark nature, it would make a good movie, heck, even a cartoon. A creative mind can easily build off this world.

I am an art student and plan to get into animation one day. And heck, if I made a movie based off the book, I’ll make the story even more dark, I will make setting take place in far future where humans are going extinct and the Earth is being repopulated by animal people (like Zootopia or Sing) or humanoid aliens (they’ll be like the gems from Steven Universe where they look discolored humans except they have human needs and can reproduce and are like marsupials where the females carry their young in pouches until they’re old enough to go to school and they chose Earth because their planet got destroyed by an asteroid. I’m going with that, sounds more original) and the town Baby is roaming a utopia with crumbling buildings left behind and the utopia is being built for the new species that is repopulating. Baby is actually an experiment that this species is creating, they are trying to create the “perfect human” where humans are like reptiles at birth where they don’t need to be raised but are like adults their whole lives. The scientists collected sperm cells, egg cells, and DNA from the corpses of the fallen humans or from humans they’ve kidnapped before they became extinct (they literally take ALL the egg cells out of a woman) and they grew many infants and studied them to see if they can create an independent one, Baby is one of the prototypes and his real name is Experiment Z129, however, these scientists are immoral and if their experiment fails, they kill the infant and work harder in the lab. When Z129 was born, they knew they succeeded. The house Z129 is put in is actually a chamber at the research facility to look like a house and there’s surveillance cameras put in studying him and the scientists resupply the house with necessities needed for Z129. However, one day, when Z129 accidentally sees the research facility, he sees one of the scientists with her children, he saw how much she loves her children and decides he needs a mother too (he knew because he heard the scientist say “Let mommy clean that up for you.” to the baby in her pouch). One night, when the scientists go home except for the ones on the night shift, he runs off when he thinks he’s not being monitored to find a mother, however, little does he know that he’s being chased by a mage who wants him dead because she’s against the experiments the scientists are running and wants humans COMPLETELY wiped out and he’s also being followed by a tiny bat who is like Jiminy Cricket except she less involved with Baby and follows from a distance. Cat originally belonged to a family who was one of the many humans who were wiped from the face of the Earth, Cat wants milk because it’s an indulgence, she knows it’s bad for her but she wants it anyways (it’s like wanting to drink alcohol), Teddy originally belonged to a little girl that got taken away at a young age by the scientists to get her egg cells and blood harvested (which killed her), Clockwork Hen to a little boy who also got killed when humans got wiped out, Old Uncle lost his whole family when humans went extinct and is one of the last surviving humans on Earth, his book is really all the literature and archives humans left behind after becoming extinct, the aliens are chasing him down, wanting to burn the book and archives because they don’t want to be reminded that humans once lived on Earth, Mummy was actually insemenated by the scientists, she grew to love her unborn child (which she found out was a boy) she later escaped the laboratory, however, shortly after, she had a miscarriage, leaving her emotionally devestated and she developed PTSD and mental illnesses. Even though she never got pregnant again, she bought baby care items and pushed around a baby stroller because it’s the only thing that kept her at peace and she hears voices that aren’t there, mainly the voices of a little boy calling for her, and Daddy got kidnapped as a teen by the scientists, he later escaped but got captured in thrown in prison, he escaped then had a wife and a daughter, the wife later died of a heart attack and the daughter is still around but he’s bitter and distant and hides out in the country.