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

telegraph.co.uk

971–980 of 992 posts

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

#971

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Look at the 1619 project. Historical revisionism is exactly what that is all about.

Revisionism tries to change facts. 1619 is another interpretation of history that can coexist with others. No one stops you from teaching or believing the traditional narrative. From Forbes: Jonathan Zimmerman, an educational historian at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that teaching “The 1619 Project” alongside other interpretations of history “represents a huge opportunity to teach students what history ac…

You don’t get to decide the definitions of terms. Historical revisionism is BY DEFINITION the reinterpretation of history. Which as you have admitted, is exactly what 1619 is doing. Therefore 1619 is historical revisionism.

If you dare to say that 1619 is wrong, you get tagged with the “racist” term like you just did to me. Even though I’m a liberal that calls out bullshit when I see it.

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

#972
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…

I'm the opposite; and I think that there are way more overly dramatic feminine gay characters in media today than gay guys who are just regular dudes. When we were written as a joke we were written overly femmy cause it was "funny". Now gay writers are writing characters a lot of the time they're also the stereotype/femmy gay. As a short gay boi who is hella gay but is into tech & electronics & has never watched an e…

I think you're sort of misinterpretting what I'm asking for, and I suspect our views actually align pretty well. I was not implying that we need more camp queens to represent gay men, I was referring more to presenting LGBTQ+ people in a heteronormative light which just comes across as totally unrealistic to those of us who are a member of the community.

Perhaps a concrete example would clarify my point. There is a character in Stranger Things who is a lesbian. Throughout the final series, she has a crush on another character. They have a scene at the end of the series where they are talking, the other character says they're lesbian/bisexual (I don't recall which now) and they hit it off.

The idea of your school crush happening to also have a same sex attraction, and also likes you, makes it such a vanishingly small probability that something like this could ever happen. It came across as a straight writer shoe-horning in a weak straight romance plot point, only replaced a man with a woman for LGBTQ+ brownie points.

If they wanted to cover this properly, why not show us how lesbians in the 80s really met? I assume though gay bars, being neither a lesbian nor around in the 80s I don't know and I am curious to find out. What I can say is that that scene was not a fair resprentation.

So my point is, be it dating, love, family or any other fact of LGBTQ+ life, there are statistically significant deviations from the average cis-gendered heterosexual experience. If you choose to cover LGBTQ+ life in your media of choice, do so authentically. Yes, I appreciate there is a fine line between this and stereotyping, but presenting gays as straights with one gender swapped is so unrealistic.

To use an analogy, representing all your female characters as good housewives who are subservient to men is enforcing a poor stereotype, analogous to the gay camp stereotype. Representing all your female characters as behaving precisely like men however is not the solution to the problem. You should represent women like women.

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

#973

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Every Sunday, I cook a large portion of something healthy, and store it in containers to eat throughout the week. This past week, it was chili with beans. The week before, chicken vegetable brown rice soup. The week before, chunky vegetable spaghetti sauce with whole wheat noodles. I've become pretty good at cooking, so it's always tasty, good food. I always get at least six large servings from what I cook, a…

I can’t stand to eat the same meal every day though. That’s the issue I’ve always had when trying meal prep. By Friday I’m ready to hang myself.

Yeah I've never had that problem, and I think it's because I cook my food exactly the way I want it: extra spicy (as in spices), but also extra spicy (as in capsaicin).

Every bite is better than restaurant-quality to me because it's exactly how I like it.

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

#974
post #937

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34849710 and marked it off topic.

Is it off topic? It's a direct commentary on the precise changes being made? What constitutes off topic in this case? I mean... it's weird that they (the publishers, or possibly the estate) think it's okay to retroactively edit these books at all, but the specific edits they have made make it all the more bizarre . It's really very strange to take a view that weight is sacred, but teeth, noses, and other aspects of g…

This type of moderation is always a response to the subthread (i.e. root comment plus all descendants), not the root comment alone.

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

#975
post #974

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it off topic? It's a direct commentary on the precise changes being made? What constitutes off topic in this case? I mean... it's weird that they (the publishers, or possibly the estate) think it's okay to retroactively edit these books at all, but the specific edits they have made make it all the more bizarre . It's really very strange to take a view that weight is sacred, but teeth, noses, and other aspects of g…

This type of moderation is always a response to the subthread (i.e. root comment plus all descendants), not the root comment alone.

Thanks for explaining; that makes sense, it did descend into a bit of a culture war and become detached from the point.

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

#976

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I started reading a novel the other day but gave up a third of the way through because every character was some form of LGBT or interracial or something. It made the story seem fake and unrealistic. Sounds like a great book. Nearly all of my friends are trans, as I like to be around other trans people. It’s nice to be understood without constant questions. I’m an adult and I live in a very queer area. For younger q…

> 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…

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN, regardless of how strongly you feel about something. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: actually, I've banned this account because you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future, specifically the ones about flamewar, ideological battle, and name-calling.

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

#977
post #974

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of moderation is always a response to the subthread (i.e. root comment plus all descendants), not the root comment alone.

Thanks for explaining; that makes sense, it did descend into a bit of a culture war and become detached from the point.

Thanks for getting it! It's a bit of a subtle point.

Actually it took us years to begin thinking this way but once we figured it out as a principle it changed a ton about how we moderate HN threads.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

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

#978
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…

> using "folks" instead of "ladies and gentlemen"

For anyone curious to why the word "folks" is chosen, here's great explanation:

https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-folks/

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

#979

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, you know, ladies and gentleman

I would guess the change was made because they felt ladies and gentlemen does not account for non-binary genders

they forgot the queers so it should have been "folx" in double-non-binary

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

#980

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read grimm and andersen when I was young and did not find them especially creepy or scary. If anything, I now feel more keenly the emotional intensity of some of andersen's stories (like the little mermaid and the little match girl).

Well, I had soldier figurines made of lead growing up... :) Anyways, I wouldn't be able to go into details in this answer as there are many, and many to explain. I found this summary which you may find interesting: https://www.abebooks.com/books/the-gruesome-origins-of-class... One that particularly stroke me as exceptionally sadistic is the Bluebeard by Charles Perrault (a contemporary of H. C. Andersen and with sim…

Well ... lead is dangerous for completely different reasons. And anderson's toy soldier was of tin!

I read perrault too, including bluebeard, and enjoyed it. The only book I can remember being really scared of was an illustrated version of 'the spider and the fly', which is not a fairy tale at all (though it is rather lovely). Movies tended to be scarier ('wallace and gromit' comes to mind), likely on account of the more vivid imagery. And we see now how dangerous video can be, especially for small children, in the form of youtube and tiktok; worrying about how scary a story is seems like trifling nonsense when the real danger and harm take a completely different form.

That said, my little sister seems to have been much more sensitive to scary things than I, at a given age. At ~10, she gave up partway through both the lord of the rings and harry potter, despite being rather taken with both (whereas, I read lord of the rings at ~5 and harry potter at ~12 with no problem). So I don't know; maybe I was unique. n=2; draw your own conclusions :)

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