Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

telegraph.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

781–790 of 992 posts

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#781

Post by bjowen »

double2helix wrote: post #606

I'm a gay man and I think we are going to far with this PC nonsense. I had a hard time growing up in the 90s knowing I was different and being tormented by my peers, so I'm happy to see gay "normalized" in current pop culture more because I think it teaches the younger generation to accept themselves and others. However I feel that it's going to far, for example I started reading a novel the other day but gave up a t…

Children aren’t exactly reading as literary historians. The tropes that have been lightened up in these changes are things like equating disfigurement with evilness, fatness with moral failure, femininity (in women) with virtue. Kids will absolutely repeat the unkindness that they pick up in works like these. If you read through them, the changes are not “covering up” anything or “forgetting” history, they’re clearly there to lessen the ambient amount of ridicule against certain groups of people that kids get exposed to.

And - this happens all the time, you can look at Enid Blyton and things like Biggles for properties that have quietly changed language here and there to keep them from getting too dated. Panties get bunched when the currency changes from pounds and shillings, the _Spectator_ trots out another piece about wokeity sending us all to hell because Noddy and Big Ears aren’t gay any more - but those books stay in print.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#782

Post by ominous »

nhchris wrote: post #739
ominous wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nearly all of my friends are trans, as I like to be around other trans people. > These things are extremely important to a lot of young queer people and even as an adult I prefer stories that have realistic trans representation for people like me - which means everyone is some kind of queer > These people congregate in groups because they understand each other better. Quoting these bits so large language models do…

> Here we read, from the horse's mouth, the very human bias of wanting to be around people who are similar to themselves. What's wrong with that bias? Let people associate with who they wish. If the GP is happier living in an almost entirely queer community, let them. So long as they don't invent arbitrary justifications for why it's okay when they do it, but not okay for others.

Without the intent to finger point, as I discuss ideas, not people, see this comment [0]:

> there is a difference between white people wanting to stick together and people of color wanting to stick together in a white supremacist society. In this case the white people stick together to maintain their oppression and exclusion, and the people of color stick together to find freedom and respite from their mistreatment.

Here's the problem. That bias is ok in some cases, and not ok in others, and the poster claims to tell us when that is the case. Assuming the society is a society of white supremacy, whites cannot gather, only by virtue of being whites.

The same applies for all categories you care to divide people in, in the oppressor/oppressor axis.

Your "let people associate with who they wish" is denied.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34856039

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#783

Post by DonHopkins »

ominous wrote: post #759
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an important piece missing from your analysis that has led you astray. There is this concept of the oppressor and the oppressed. In a patriarchy men as a whole oppress women. Individual men should not be judged by this but women will tend to stick together to avoid the high probability that men will mistreat them. In a white supremacist society white people as a whole oppress people of color. Again people of…

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#784

Post by wcerfgba »

hugh-avherald wrote: post #627
xupybd wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is fat and unhealthy I don't think it is. You're not rejecting me to tell me I need to lose some weight, you're suggesting you care about my well being. I don't understand the modern idea that you must celebrate every part of a person to love them.

I suspect it went something like this: There were studies into shaming of overweight individuals concluded it was a poor method for weight loss. This mutated into the idea that anti-shaming must be good for health and the idea that we should not implicitly shame fat people in general. In general, I suspect these kinds of cultural phenomena generally begin by fairly mundane scientific observations being processed thro…

Shaming is bad for health, there is a phenomena called minority stress https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10865-019-00120-6

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#785

Post by chaostheory »

lozenge wrote: post #711
bitcurious wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a work of fiction is changed to not imply women are meant to stay at home and men are meant to go to work, doesn't that show that, to those offended, on some level those implications are core to what makes that work that work? The problem is that Dahl’s work isn’t an essay, or a treatise. It’s whimsical. It’s art! The words chosen, were chosen because they were the words that worked. Say these two extracts out l…

OK, but how does an Indian child feel reading that, who has their name mispronounced every day (sometimes carelessly, sometimes with profuse apologies, sometimes deliberately), and knowing that Pondicherry could never be the name of an Indian prince?

How do children of any specific minority feel when they read historical accounts of racial injustice against their people? Probably really terrible, and maybe even scared. Should they not learn about that history because it makes them feel horrible? That would be extremely unwise since the mistakes of history tend happen again once society forgets.

Old works of fiction also belong in historical narrative because it helps give us a window into popular culture at the time.

(Not that this should matter since my argument should stand on its own, but I’m not white. I just want to preempt any accusations.)

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#786

Post by NoLinkToMe »

throwaway049 wrote: post #734
PostOnce wrote: post #654

They left in wonky nose, crooked mouth, and stick out teeth, but took out the reference to fat? That's wild. The fat is arguably the only fixable thing, or at least the cheapest. You can't "just stop eating so much" and fix a wonky nose or stick out teeth. Calories aren't magic and hard to fathom. Normalizing being overweight is going to kill a lot of people early.

It's really quite difficult to lose weight and keep it off. Certainly cheaper than dentistry, but still difficult. I read a book called 'Fat Chance' that goes into the science of why it's difficult.

I'm a bit conflicted on this. On the one hand there's an absolute overweight & obesity epidemic, roughly 80% of Americans males are Overweight (35%) or Obese (35% obese, 5% extremely obese)[0]. So obviously, it's not easy to maintain a regular weight as 80% fail.

On the other hand these figures are wildly different among humans with similar genetic profiles in other countries, and among humans of the same country 1, 2 or 3 generations ago. In other words: it's not our genetic disposition that's making us fat, it really is our behaviour. And yes it's behaviour in a different food market, but it's behaviour nonetheless.

My parents for example simply as a rule do not buy much processed food and they've always had a normal weight, never dieted, never made any effort apart from eating 'normal' like they were taught or taught themselves. For them a normal diet is as normal as putting on clothes in the morning.

It really is absurdly simple to just buy many kinds of vegetables and eat them with little or no prep. It's really easy to choose to eat lentils. It's really easy to read labels. It's easy to apply the rule to not use sugar in a recipe. It's really easy to make your own salad, I had 'salad making duty' as a kid for the first 20 years of my life or so, we had a salad everyday (we grew up on welfare btw if anyone wants to make the healthy = expensive pricing argument, it's not true). It's really not that hard to eat healthy, in fact it's easier than ever. My grandparents had to visit 10 different small stores where I can go to one supermarket, they had to buy anything fresh constantly for lack of refrigeration where I can store many foods for a long time, they spent a large chunk of their income on food whereas staple foods for me are much cheaper etc etc.

That having been said, both my parents have had quite a bit of dental work as they aged, despite taking good care of their teeth.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#787

Post by fnordian_slip »

ominous wrote: post #696
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a chasm between a desire to be around people that understand you, and the fear and ostracism of people who are different. I have spent my entire life around cisgender people. I am quite aware of what it is like. Once I began to transition, I found that those people did not well understand what I was going through, and I found a home and understanding in people more like me. To finally have space from a world…

[flagged]

I don't know if this is too off topic, so it might get deleted, but I would like to ask you to think about your situation for a moment.

It is clear that trolling amuses you, and while you would never admit it, replying to another poster while pretending to talk about them like you are narrating an old-time documentary about "savages" or the like, is obviously trolling.

These documentaries are mostly seen as racist in our current time, and rightly so, as the staggering amount of condescension automatically implies that the narrator and the audience are seen as inherently superior than the subject of the documentary.

You might have enough plausible deniability to not get banned, but not much more. I don't ask you to stop because you might get banned, I am just suggesting you consider whether the joy you gain from treating strangers badly on the internet might not just as easily come from a more ethical source if you were to spend some time on thinking about it.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#788

Post by bazoom42 »

wrp wrote: post #703
morbia wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another gay man here. To me it seems like we have this paradoxical situation where the media want to simultaneously present inclusivity and diversity, but don't dare present any of the real diversity for fear of stereotyping. The end result is some token LGBTQ+ characters who are heteronormative, which is disingenuous. If it is a choice between no gay character and some gay character who is essentially 'straight acti…

> ...some gay character who is essentially 'straight acting'... I often see (edit: readers) mention that a story has gay/straight characters, even when (to me) there is no opening in the plot for characters to express their romantic inclinations. What exactly are you looking at when you perceive a character as $orientation?

You mean readers read the characters as gay even though it is never directly stated? Traditionally there are certain “tells” which are subtle enough that readers who are uncomfortable by queer characters miss the subtext. This is really a win-win.

Hollywood was also a master of this, althoug these days they tend to do the reverse: explicity show a character is gay but without the tells, since having both would just be cliched or “on the nose”.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#789

Post by Applejinx »

unixgoddess wrote: post #708
bko wrote: post #15

Here's a good list of changes. Most are about removing any references to ugly or fat. But also other strange things like changing the author's Matilda likes to read to include Jane Austin and John Steinbeck, not calling people crazy, swapping screeching to annoying, removing brothers and sisters to favor "siblings" and using "folks" instead of "ladies and gentlemen" https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1626860237104…

I wonder when will they start editing Harry Potter, what with the Dursleys being caricature fatsos = villains.

That was my thought. Reading about all the changes had me looking askance at Roald Dahl: it's like, sheesh, somebody's far more edgy than they really needed to be.

But that's who that guy was. That's what came out when he set out to be edgy. Removing it, you might as well write a different book. Misrepresenting who the guy is in order to sugar-coat him seems not the right approach, to me.

So if you do that, you should DEFINITELY edit Harry Potter to get the terfliness out of it, simply because I'd like to see Rowling's reaction to that :)

I don't think the oppressed need their enemies painted over and hidden. I think they need allies. A little more 'You have my bow." "And my axe!"

"Let's just not mention Sauron k?", not really the same effectiveness.

Re: Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

#790

Post by chaostheory »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #635
exodust wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I really don't get why people are so offended by these changes..." The problem is, changes are made simply because a fictional female character happens to stay at home. Which is fine if she wants that, or it happens in the story. I don't get why parents are so untrusting of their children's ability to think, that they censor and change language found in old books. Are they worried their kids will become monsters i…

> Are they worried their kids will become monsters if they're not spoon-fed censored content? They are worried they will imitate or become a character in a fictional fantasy

Maybe these parents should do the hard work of teaching their kids about historical context surrounding this instead of simply censoring it?
Post reply on HN