Dragging the age: one story for every child in the house
The same idea, printed at two and at seven, becomes two different books with the same cover. Here is how the age dial works.
✦ Design
Endings: what we do when a child can't say how it ends
Most children can name a hero and a problem. Very few can tell you how it ends. That gap is where MirthTale has to be most careful.
Ask a four-year-old who is in the story and you will get an answer. Ask what goes wrong and you will usually get one. Ask how it ends and you will often get silence, a shrug, or "I don't know." This is not a failure. Endings are the hardest part of a story, and children this age are still learning that stories have them.
The rule
If a child can articulate an ending, it is kept exactly and it is theirs. If they can't or won't, MirthTale's AI writes one. Once. Without asking again. We never press a child for details, because a child who feels tested stops offering anything at all.
What a MirthTale ending is
Gentle. Resolved. Small. The moon is found. The biscuit is shared. Nobody is punished and nobody wins at someone else's expense. At younger age settings, an ending is never frightening. The child's hero always ends the story better off than they started, and usually at home.
Why endings get argued with
A MirthTale ending is written to be disagreed with. Children who couldn't give an ending before the book will very often give one after it, usually by telling you the printed one is wrong. That is the best possible outcome. It is a conversational turn, it is the child articulating something they couldn't an hour ago, and it is tomorrow's book.
Hard stories
Some stories don't have endings yet, because the child doesn't know them. Nana is still in hospital. The move hasn't happened. In those cases MirthTale writes an ending that is honest about the present and hopeful about the next page, and leaves the rest to the adult in the room. We wrote more about this in books about hard things.