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YMMV / The Velveteen Rabbit

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  • Aluminum Christmas Trees: It really was true that almost everything associated with a scarlet fever infection was burned. They don't do this anymore.
  • Esoteric Happy Ending: Yes, the rabbit becomes real and is saved, yay! All the boy's other toys that could talk to one another, now. To add on, now that the rabbit is real, he will have to deal with real struggles living in the wild, which includes evading predatory animals.
  • Fridge Horror: So, the Rabbit is real now... but that also means he's mortal.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The conflict of the book: the boy gets scarlet fever. Try being a small child (unaware of the concept of antibiotics or the fact that the disease is now rare and treatable, etc.) hearing or reading the story and finding out that a character around your age has a disease, it is possibly fatal and afterwards his toys are burned. If your kid gets scarlet fever and their only knowledge of scarlet fever is this book, be prepared to reassure them that this doesn't happen these days.
  • Tear Jerker:
    • The fate of the Skin Horse, the Rabbit's only friend, who has been stuck in that room for God knows how long. The Skin Horse is also Real (he too was once loved in much the same way the Rabbit was, by the Boy's uncle, and he is the one who establishes that once a toy is Real the process can never be undone) but it will likely be a very long time before he becomes Real in truth the way the Rabbit does, as he's no longer played with very often and thus it will be a long time before he reaches the end of his "life" as a toy.
    • The ending is both Sweet Dreams Fuel and a Tear Jerker at once. The Rabbit is happy to be Real and has new rabbit friends to play with, but will never play with the Boy again, while the Boy is left to think his favorite toy was burned.

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