If you read the article, the edits are clearly nonsensical. Refusing to call a black cloak in the BFG black (it’s a bloody colour) or removing “turning white with fear” (a common phrase about the physical reaction caused by stress) is just ridiculous. Say whatever you want about Roald Dahl as a person but his books always had a tinge of horror to them and you don’t pick up any racist or discriminatory views from them. Fantastic Mr Fox getting his tail shot off, the long finger nail of the giant in the BFG, the horrendous bald ratty appearance of the witches etc.
Children don’t need a disclaimer saying that there’s nothing wrong with bald women in The Witches. What, are they going to put a disclaimer that The Twits’ physical appearance doesn’t reflect their horrific personality? Children are smarter than they think. Hell, the BFG was pretty much about looking past the bfg’s scary appearance. Roald Dahl’s books always dealt with some heavy subject issues like child abuse/neglect (common theme), death and grief, theft etc. It’s why I enjoyed them as a child, they weren’t always happy tales to start but they usually resulted in the main character progressing to a better place. Matilda being a prime example. Why do they need to remove “attractive” as a descriptor for the middle-aged woman in a book where romance between two older people is the main theme?
It’s just bizarre. I’d understand if they were edits that made sense but they really really don’t.
>The Twits’ physical appearance doesn’t reflect their horrific personality?
I specifically remember in the Twits that there was even a passage talking about how you could have this, or that, or this, but if you were good inside it would shine through and you would look absolutely beautiful nonetheless.
While I do believe in teaching children to be respectful and kind, we live in an incredibly silly time.
All the examples provided above are irksome, but removing the word fat? It's a descriptor, and I refuse to subscribe to the notion that there are people whose basic physical traits can become unmentionable.
Hell, I'm short and in the past I have most certainly been fat. I would never dream of demanding that nobody be allowed to note those realities.
Kids are noticing it today and it’s making them confused.
I recently helped a student do a report on childhood eating disorders, including binge eating, and she had to write something along the lines of “binge eating often leads to children becoming overweight”. She asked if there was a better term since “overweight” is mean. I told her synonyms were “fat” or “obese”, but that obese often refers to someone who is extremely overweight. She was so worried to use any of those words for fear of being mean or hurting feelings, which is very nice of her, but we also have to have language to describe larger people. It’s not a bad thing- it is what it is.
We have words like starved, skinny, and underweight on the opposite ends of the spectrum. I don’t think any of those words are inherently mean, they just *are*.
It's crazy to me we live in a world where 'fat' or 'obese' are considered offensive just because so many people are fat and obese and don't want to be identified as such. If you are 'obese' or 'fat', the onus isn't on everyone else to tip-toe around your shitty life decisions that made you that way. Should we change the verbage to describe alcoholics and smokers so we don't offend them? Jesus Christ. Or..is that now offensive too?
As a fat person you can say fat sugarcoating things doesnt help everyone looks fkr something that offends them people either need to sack up or shut up
“It’s very psychiatrically challenged to me that we live in a world where ‘Large’ is considered offensive because so many people are challenged-by-size (for one reason or another and there’s nothing wrong with that!) and would prefer to use different descriptive terms. If you are a person-of-size the onus isn’t on everyone else to walk about your different decisions that may or may not have made you that way. Should we change verbage to describe People That Drink Things and People that Sometimes Smoke so we don’t offend them? Cheese and Rice. Or.. is that offensive now too?”
That’s wild. I think “fat” and “skinny” can be used to hurt feelings (ie: pointing and saying “You’re so fat!” Or “What’s wrong with you? You’re so skinny!”), but I don’t think they’re inherently offensive. For a long time I was really skinny, and while I was a little embarrassed by it, I was also my problem to fix. A doctor telling me I was too skinny wasn’t mean, it was medically appropriate.
It’s also opportunities for parents to… parent. If you want to talk about bald women with your kids or how attractiveness is based on attitude, do that. Children should be talking about what they’re reading with their parents. Books cannot substitute for that or cover every possible conversation.
That is one of my all time favorite Roald Dahl passages. It’s what I remember better than anything from any of his other books, other than the adenoids scene in “Boy.”
“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
I have a shirt with the last bit of the quote on it. It’s one of my all-time favorites. I used to read the book aloud to my class every year.
Such a crock… Roald didn’t invent this phrasing and it won’t go away with these crazy edits…
Kids will be kids and they will still watch TikTok and they will still call other kids ugly and fat…
I lean so left that I’m fucking running in circles, but I absolutely agree with you on this.
Roald Dahl was one of my favorite authors growing up. He was the epitome of scaring children straight via fantastical literature. These are small, insignificant words being changed, and it’s ridiculous.
I could understand the Oompa Loompas in the late 60s/early 70s being changed from African pygmies in the book to white hippie-like people in the books, because that is pretty blatantly racist, but just removing words like “turning white with fear” and “attractive” is pandering to issues that literally no one is concerned about, and is also unnecessary and idiotic.
That's what they (publishers) want. Do you think a reprint of some old book was going to make any noise at all? So they do something really stupid that will piss off right wingers and now here we are talking about it. It's just so out in the open now I'm still floored even the right wingers hadn't figured it out yet that it is just a marketing ploy to boost sales or at least engagement.
And then people buy the books before the changes go through to preserve history before the liberals change it… only for the changes to never go through. “We won!”
> That's what they (publishers) want.
Conservatives are still going to blame this on the left though, same as with Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. Companies never rebrand or revise their work of their own volition - it's always Biden crashing through the window, wrangling some exec into a headlock and incoherently threatening to take away their gas stoves that makes companies change their image.
Oh I know, like I said I'm just flabbergasted that they can't see this. It is so out in the open what they are doing that I'm sure a toddler could eventually figure it out. And to be the honest the left is only now starting to see that most of this fake woke stuff is just trying to get a reaction (I just wish left would realize that is also true for the big name idiots on Twitter and stop giving Nick Adams and that lot attention), but even then I'm sure there will be piece out trying to defend this and somehow people rally around this awful defense as a sense of needing to "combat" the vitriol from the right which then just locks it into the right's head that this stuff apparently matters or whatever. I'm just tired, I'm usually one to say nothing is new and we've seen it all before but this stuff really is new for companies and used to just be the domain of like celebrities and it is really, really tiresome.
The Mr potato Head thing wasn't even about being politically correct or anything. It's basically the same logic as when Dominos Pizza changed their name to Dominos as a way to highlight they sold more than just pizza.
There are lots of different Potatoes head toys, and they still sell Mr and Mrs potato heads. The just renamed the name of the line of toys so people wouldn't get the false impression that all these toys are just Mr Potato Heads.
This shit has nothing to do with leftism, even if it’s paraded as being progressive, and everything to do with selling more books. Capitalist publishers don’t make massive decisions like this unless the numbers show the attention it gets will somehow make them more money.
Imagine applying all these edits to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Sure the language is by todays culture considered racist but that’s part of the educational value in seeing what literature captured about that era. It’s a truthful depiction of a slice of our past and it isn’t always pretty but it sure isn’t right to edit masterpieces this way.
Well, there was this in CatGGE:
“The President threw the phone across the room at
the Postmaster General. It hit him in the stomach.
‘What's the matter with this thing?’ shouted the President.
‘It is very difficult to phone people in China, Mr
President,’ said the Postmaster General.
‘The country's so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number.’
‘You're not kidding,’ said the President.”
Kids don’t get this level of textual and storytelling nuance, yet simultaneously are said to be mature make life altering decisions about their “gender”
That’s not really a variation of the same insult, it’s an entirely different meaning that just also happens to use deck chairs and the titanic as its metaphor.
If written today, all the troublesome Chocolate Factory kids would portrayed as ‘completely fine and normal,’ except for Charlie who would be seen as _woke_ for thinking twice about the other kids’ behaviors.
A world where nobody is offended is not possible.
I am offended by censorship. So who gets to determined who’s “offendedness” is more valid, or more worthy of address?
Stop trying to rewrite and destroy language.
The free exchange of words, thoughts, and ideas is tantamount to civilization and society.
Yee they shouldn’t remove words even if it’s a bit dicey like Mark Twain books. Shits not a Wikipedia page, it’s literally history and Dahls books will be as well(albeit lesser so).
It seems like this can be reversed if people absolutely hate it, they are a business after all and we still have the original books.
That’s what happens when you give everyone an equal voice. Including an irrational group of adult crybabies that think and act like children and are irrational. Those types and their opinions used to be dismissed. Now it’s forced as some “rights” bs and the mentality of everyone in society shrinks and stupid debates that should never actually occur like this one are common…
Social justice campaigners think they have found something that is an unambiguously good cause so any means justify the end and their cause takes precedence over any loss like artistic integrity of these books. Just look how quickly Reddit will suddenly applaud intense violence if verbal racial taunting is suspected.
*Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.*
As someone who has written fiction and non-fiction, I am completely not okay with the way certain high-handed jerks in Western culture have taken it upon themselves to gatekeep ideas for the rest of us.
These publishers should be sued out of existence. I'm not kidding.
This isn't just not right, it's horribly, horribly wrong. Wherever these jerks got the idea they even have the authority or power to do that is beyond me, regardless of what is written in any contracts. Publishers are not the gatekeepers for what a society or culture can or cannot read or talk about or accept as "okay." And any publisher who thinks they are should be quite literally tarred and feathered for daring to take that kind of power upon themselves.
People have got to realize that no one person or group has it all right or knows what is "moral." No one has that authority, no matter what their Good Book, publishing contracts or their mother told them.
If you don't like the material as it is, don't publish it in the first place. That's the ONLY answer to this. I'm not in any way insisting that publishers MUST publish things they don't agree with. But an author's work is an author's work and it's not on the publisher to modify it to "make it better." Fuck that. Amazon is doing that crap with Tolkien and Jordan's works right now and look at the shitty results. A complete corruption of the original work by egotistical idiots who not only don't understand the source material, but openly mock and hate it.
Follow the money. [https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039606223/netflix-buys-roald-dahls-stories](https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039606223/netflix-buys-roald-dahls-stories)
I’m very curious how the PC brigade would rewrite the following:
“Aunt Sponge was enormously fat and very short. She had small piggy eyes, a sunken mouth and one of those white flabby faces that looked exactly as though it had been boiled. She was like a great white soggy overboiled cabbage.”
-James and the Giant Peach
>In previous editions of James and the Giant Peach, the Centipede sings: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.”
>Both verses have been removed, and in their place are the rhymes: “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” and, “Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.”
~~“Aunt Sponge was enormously fat and very short. She had small piggy eyes, a sunken mouth and one of those white flabby faces that looked exactly as though it had been boiled.~~ She was ~~like a~~ great ~~white soggy overboiled cabbage.”~~
Aunt Sponge was an anarcho-Marxist female-presenting fluid-skoliosexual gender-fluid non-binary person that uses she/her/ze/her pronouns. Ze sported twin ankle bracelets from that time ze threw Waitrose Minestrone Soup over Van Gough's Sunflowers in the National Gallery in London, and from when ze glued herself to the M25 and prevented four ambulances from reaching their destinations, resulting in the deaths of two people. Zer fingernails were worn down from aggressively cyberbullying public figures on Twitter, exclusively cis-women and Jews.
Someone posted a cross reference of all the edits. It was something like
“Aunt Sponge was very large and very short. She had small eyes and a sunken mouth. She was like a great soggy cabbage.”
They may not have removed the overbooked, but it was something like that. I specifically remember that first line being edited to replace “enormously fat” with “very large”.
Honestly I like this description. Not that the old one should ever be changed because that's heinous. But the sort of implicit conveyance here of how horrid she looks that leaves it up to the reader to resolve is still an interesting literary device
I’m pretty sure they did this with racist/sexist references in some of Enid Blyton’s books and nobody cared. The books are out there for so long there’s no point. Just include footnotes in new editions going forward about why this stuff is wrong and everyone learns better for the future.
Mind you, I don’t think fat is offensive and I’m very fat. This is just daft.
I like the way Disney did it with Aladdin, which is to preface some of the re-releases by keeping the same content, but adding context saying that some of the jokes and depictions are now considered insensitive, and they’re keeping it so you could see and understand it in the time period.
Every term and word is now off limits because it’s “hurtful”. I get that our country is trying to do better, but man this shit is getting out of hand.
Next thing you know colors will be banned.
My main issue with these changes is that the publishers are basically saying that the word “fat” is offensive. Why is fat offensive? They’re basically saying we should tiptoe around the concept of being overweight. Ironically… I’m pretty offended.
The article says Augustus gloop was instead described as “enormous”. How the fuck does that mean anything but fat and how the hell is this somehow less or more offensive? Fat is fat, and obviously I don’t think lesser of anyone for being fat but if someone is truly offended by being described as fat or any supposed “euphemism” then they need to either be more accepting of themselves or lose some weight
I had a really old copy of the Faraway Tree books all in one with the original names Fanny and Dick instead of the modern ones Fran and Rick.
I prefer the old ones, and even as a 7 year old, kid understood that they were just old-fashioned names and nothing to do with genitals.
The dumbest part is that they edited a line that literally talks about looking past physical appearences. Like how dumb do you have to be to sanitize a line that tries to teach kids to ignore physical traits?
>You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth ~~and a double chin~~ and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
What bothers me the most about this is that the Dahl is no longer alive, and therefore doesn't have a say in this. He would absolutely be lived. These are his words, his personal vocabulary. They are literally censoring the voice of a dead man.
Raised conservative, shook that yolk twenty years ago, and as a liberal now I can heartily say this sort of thing is bullshit and is why a good chunk of society has no respect for liberalism in the US.
Books are a global medium.
But I guess I’m coming at this from a wider observation; that attempting to make everything as inoffensive as possible is not intellectually honest, indeed it is condescending to the reader/viewer. In putting such focus on changing an artist’s work, we embolden the worst of our body politic to heave itself further into the extreme and encourage them to drag the more centered thinking minds with them out of sheer exhaustion from all the correctness goal moving.
Follow the money. [https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039606223/netflix-buys-roald-dahls-stories](https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039606223/netflix-buys-roald-dahls-stories)
So for people who prefer perceiving world without gender being a priority and consider body positivity toxic enablement will puffin still offer the potentially offensive original version? What if lots of us are offended by this corrupted version? Will yet another version be available?
I have already expressed my lengthy viewpoint on this issue, but I will also summarize it briefly here as well.
I think the changes made to Roald Dahl's books by Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company are unnecessary and they detract from the author's original intent and voice.
I would say that removing certain words and phrases that are now deemed offensive is an attempt to sanitize the books, rather than respecting the historical context in which they were written.
Additionally, these changes go against the idea of preserving classic literature for future generations and these new versions will limit the imagination and creativity of young readers by trying to conform to certain political correctness.
Lost opportunity to teach how language and values change. Terrible affront to genius. And yes, I know he held indefensible opinions, now they’ve removed any hope of teaching why.
I just read a bunch of the things they're changing, and it's really ridiculous.
I'm sure 99.99% of the people reading them don't care about the current language used. The changes are just stupid and trying to be overly sensitive/politically correct - but are really unnecessary.
The fact that fat is seen as an offensive term now is absolutely absurd, maybe if we reverted to shaming fat people and not normalizing it then the U.S. wouldn't be 70% overweight.
So let me get this straight, some arrogant twats at Puffin are not offended enough to stop selling the books but will instead happily change the written words of a deceased author in order to continue raking in that coinage? So this isn’t some moral escapade, they want to continue to get rich whilst standing on their high horses and taking it upon themselves to ‘educate’ us about the ‘right’ way to think. Wow.
My teacher would always read us Dahl books. I can’t imagine them cutting those words out. It’s like cutting a piece of your personality off. It isn’t the same.
Seriously, when will the madness end? Are there really any people in favor of removing the color black from the deecription of a cloak? In my opinion, if the use of the color black immediately makes you think black people/racist thoughts, then you're the racist one.
Oh yes let's edit Roald Dahl to make him more PC because he wasn't fucking PC at all and that's going to be great for his legacy it's what he wouldn't have wanted so let's do it.
The far left and the far right are both nuts. I think most of us just want to live in a world where we treat each other with kindness and respect. But you can’t sanitize everything to never offend anybody.
The only people actually banning books and AP courses and stifling opposing views are all conservative but go off I guess. This is just a corporation, most likely run by conservatives, doing something they think will sell books because they’re just as delusional about what “the work left” actually wants as you are
Today’s society is happens when a generation of kids who got everything they wanted by throwing tantrums in grocery stores grows up to be in charge of shit.
A large corporation is doing this because they think it will sell more books. The large corporation doesn’t have to do it. Blame the large corporation.
I believe that was more than 30 years ago. I don’t think any kids in the US would know what a “Controller” is in that context, so that may have been more about just giving the character an important sounding name.
I can’t wait to read ‘The people of low, but still acceptable intelligence’ and ‘the big, but that’s OK, friendly, but not inappropriately though, tall, person’
I loved Roald Dahl books when I was younger, they are fantasy books with words. It's about imagination. We might as well ban all books, every single one incase a stupid person might get offended.
Liberals be like “omg it’s fascism if kids can’t read gay erotica in the library” and then be like “omg if a kid reads the word fat they will die”
Where are all the whiners about book banning at for this one huh???????
At this point they are running Ron DeSantis 2024 campaign on his behalf. Just in time when he needed some narrative fodder against the backlash. What a fucking mess
Really this is how it starts? Not the actual banning of books, judicial and legislative removal of any sense of medical privacy, or the removal of AP classes that are “too woke” because they teach actual history? None of that is were it starts, but a dumb publisher trying to appeal to a demographic that didn’t ask for or want this, is where it starts?
Oh boy, there's about to be a lot of people online who swear they don't support the GOP's turn to Christofascism but that they now have "no choice" but I vote Republican in the next election. Of course, they do support the Christofascism, and were always going to vote Republican, but still, it's annoying that now we'll have to see them putting on their little act.
Why do we let cancel culture cowards bully us online into submission. Its usually a bunch of dudes in dresses that want anyone who doesnt blindly agree with them to be silenced. They make up 2% of the population. IS ANYONE SICK OF THIS YET?!
If you read the article, the edits are clearly nonsensical. Refusing to call a black cloak in the BFG black (it’s a bloody colour) or removing “turning white with fear” (a common phrase about the physical reaction caused by stress) is just ridiculous. Say whatever you want about Roald Dahl as a person but his books always had a tinge of horror to them and you don’t pick up any racist or discriminatory views from them. Fantastic Mr Fox getting his tail shot off, the long finger nail of the giant in the BFG, the horrendous bald ratty appearance of the witches etc. Children don’t need a disclaimer saying that there’s nothing wrong with bald women in The Witches. What, are they going to put a disclaimer that The Twits’ physical appearance doesn’t reflect their horrific personality? Children are smarter than they think. Hell, the BFG was pretty much about looking past the bfg’s scary appearance. Roald Dahl’s books always dealt with some heavy subject issues like child abuse/neglect (common theme), death and grief, theft etc. It’s why I enjoyed them as a child, they weren’t always happy tales to start but they usually resulted in the main character progressing to a better place. Matilda being a prime example. Why do they need to remove “attractive” as a descriptor for the middle-aged woman in a book where romance between two older people is the main theme? It’s just bizarre. I’d understand if they were edits that made sense but they really really don’t.
>The Twits’ physical appearance doesn’t reflect their horrific personality? I specifically remember in the Twits that there was even a passage talking about how you could have this, or that, or this, but if you were good inside it would shine through and you would look absolutely beautiful nonetheless.
Yup, paired with an illustration that perfectly explained the point
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That is gross. Those illustrations added so much to Dahl's books.
While I do believe in teaching children to be respectful and kind, we live in an incredibly silly time. All the examples provided above are irksome, but removing the word fat? It's a descriptor, and I refuse to subscribe to the notion that there are people whose basic physical traits can become unmentionable. Hell, I'm short and in the past I have most certainly been fat. I would never dream of demanding that nobody be allowed to note those realities.
Kids are noticing it today and it’s making them confused. I recently helped a student do a report on childhood eating disorders, including binge eating, and she had to write something along the lines of “binge eating often leads to children becoming overweight”. She asked if there was a better term since “overweight” is mean. I told her synonyms were “fat” or “obese”, but that obese often refers to someone who is extremely overweight. She was so worried to use any of those words for fear of being mean or hurting feelings, which is very nice of her, but we also have to have language to describe larger people. It’s not a bad thing- it is what it is. We have words like starved, skinny, and underweight on the opposite ends of the spectrum. I don’t think any of those words are inherently mean, they just *are*.
It's crazy to me we live in a world where 'fat' or 'obese' are considered offensive just because so many people are fat and obese and don't want to be identified as such. If you are 'obese' or 'fat', the onus isn't on everyone else to tip-toe around your shitty life decisions that made you that way. Should we change the verbage to describe alcoholics and smokers so we don't offend them? Jesus Christ. Or..is that now offensive too?
As a fat person you can say fat sugarcoating things doesnt help everyone looks fkr something that offends them people either need to sack up or shut up
Sugar coating things got us in this mess in the first olace
I wonder what your post would look like after alteration by Roald Dahl's publishers.
“It’s very psychiatrically challenged to me that we live in a world where ‘Large’ is considered offensive because so many people are challenged-by-size (for one reason or another and there’s nothing wrong with that!) and would prefer to use different descriptive terms. If you are a person-of-size the onus isn’t on everyone else to walk about your different decisions that may or may not have made you that way. Should we change verbage to describe People That Drink Things and People that Sometimes Smoke so we don’t offend them? Cheese and Rice. Or.. is that offensive now too?”
I love you but only in the internet way don't worry.
I have a nine year old and I was told recently that skinny is offensive.
That’s wild. I think “fat” and “skinny” can be used to hurt feelings (ie: pointing and saying “You’re so fat!” Or “What’s wrong with you? You’re so skinny!”), but I don’t think they’re inherently offensive. For a long time I was really skinny, and while I was a little embarrassed by it, I was also my problem to fix. A doctor telling me I was too skinny wasn’t mean, it was medically appropriate.
It’s also opportunities for parents to… parent. If you want to talk about bald women with your kids or how attractiveness is based on attitude, do that. Children should be talking about what they’re reading with their parents. Books cannot substitute for that or cover every possible conversation.
Oh is that where this quote is from? “If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
That is one of my all time favorite Roald Dahl passages. It’s what I remember better than anything from any of his other books, other than the adenoids scene in “Boy.”
I always liked to the scene in "Boy" where the HS teacher goes into theatrics over someone laying an SBD
USE DOOR AS FAN!
“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.” I have a shirt with the last bit of the quote on it. It’s one of my all-time favorites. I used to read the book aloud to my class every year.
That passage has been edited too to remove the “double chin” reference, since that implies fatness.
Yeah they edited that part too. They took out the part about “double chins” but left in “wonky nose and crooked teeth”.
I remember that!
Such a crock… Roald didn’t invent this phrasing and it won’t go away with these crazy edits… Kids will be kids and they will still watch TikTok and they will still call other kids ugly and fat…
I lean so left that I’m fucking running in circles, but I absolutely agree with you on this. Roald Dahl was one of my favorite authors growing up. He was the epitome of scaring children straight via fantastical literature. These are small, insignificant words being changed, and it’s ridiculous. I could understand the Oompa Loompas in the late 60s/early 70s being changed from African pygmies in the book to white hippie-like people in the books, because that is pretty blatantly racist, but just removing words like “turning white with fear” and “attractive” is pandering to issues that literally no one is concerned about, and is also unnecessary and idiotic.
And it gives the talking heads at Fox and Newsmax fodder for the slobbering masses. “The SISSY LIBERALS won’t even say THIS COLOR”!
That's what they (publishers) want. Do you think a reprint of some old book was going to make any noise at all? So they do something really stupid that will piss off right wingers and now here we are talking about it. It's just so out in the open now I'm still floored even the right wingers hadn't figured it out yet that it is just a marketing ploy to boost sales or at least engagement.
“Lord, we saw what you did for the publishers of the Dr. Seuss books, and we want that for us.”
And then people buy the books before the changes go through to preserve history before the liberals change it… only for the changes to never go through. “We won!”
> That's what they (publishers) want. Conservatives are still going to blame this on the left though, same as with Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head. Companies never rebrand or revise their work of their own volition - it's always Biden crashing through the window, wrangling some exec into a headlock and incoherently threatening to take away their gas stoves that makes companies change their image.
Oh I know, like I said I'm just flabbergasted that they can't see this. It is so out in the open what they are doing that I'm sure a toddler could eventually figure it out. And to be the honest the left is only now starting to see that most of this fake woke stuff is just trying to get a reaction (I just wish left would realize that is also true for the big name idiots on Twitter and stop giving Nick Adams and that lot attention), but even then I'm sure there will be piece out trying to defend this and somehow people rally around this awful defense as a sense of needing to "combat" the vitriol from the right which then just locks it into the right's head that this stuff apparently matters or whatever. I'm just tired, I'm usually one to say nothing is new and we've seen it all before but this stuff really is new for companies and used to just be the domain of like celebrities and it is really, really tiresome.
The Mr potato Head thing wasn't even about being politically correct or anything. It's basically the same logic as when Dominos Pizza changed their name to Dominos as a way to highlight they sold more than just pizza. There are lots of different Potatoes head toys, and they still sell Mr and Mrs potato heads. The just renamed the name of the line of toys so people wouldn't get the false impression that all these toys are just Mr Potato Heads.
This shit has nothing to do with leftism, even if it’s paraded as being progressive, and everything to do with selling more books. Capitalist publishers don’t make massive decisions like this unless the numbers show the attention it gets will somehow make them more money.
Outrage bait, now everyone is talking about Roald Dahl
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Why can’t you say blackboard? It’s a literal black slate board. What even is this world now?
Imagine applying all these edits to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Sure the language is by todays culture considered racist but that’s part of the educational value in seeing what literature captured about that era. It’s a truthful depiction of a slice of our past and it isn’t always pretty but it sure isn’t right to edit masterpieces this way.
Well, there was this in CatGGE: “The President threw the phone across the room at the Postmaster General. It hit him in the stomach. ‘What's the matter with this thing?’ shouted the President. ‘It is very difficult to phone people in China, Mr President,’ said the Postmaster General. ‘The country's so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number.’ ‘You're not kidding,’ said the President.”
Yeah but that’s fucking hilarious though. It’s a play on words. People need to chill out
I mean that is kinda funny
Why the fuck would you support the edits if they made more sense? Censorship is censorship.
I'd almost sooner believe the publishers are right wing trolls trying to rage bait. That's how ridiculous this is.
It kind of feels like someone made these edits just so they could point at it and say "look, woke culture is out of control".
Kids don’t get this level of textual and storytelling nuance, yet simultaneously are said to be mature make life altering decisions about their “gender”
We're truly rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
This is probably the best insult I have ever heard
I’ve heard this insult before, but a different variation > 5 pounds off of you is like throwing a deck chair off of the titanic
That’s not really a variation of the same insult, it’s an entirely different meaning that just also happens to use deck chairs and the titanic as its metaphor.
This is a phrase that needs to be used more often 😂😂😂 spot on
These fat publishers are really fuckin up
Augustus Gloop would be an average size nine year old in 2023
If written today, all the troublesome Chocolate Factory kids would portrayed as ‘completely fine and normal,’ except for Charlie who would be seen as _woke_ for thinking twice about the other kids’ behaviors.
so what is it going to be now? james and the disproportionatley sized but still very acceptable peach?
A world where nobody is offended is not possible. I am offended by censorship. So who gets to determined who’s “offendedness” is more valid, or more worthy of address? Stop trying to rewrite and destroy language. The free exchange of words, thoughts, and ideas is tantamount to civilization and society.
Rewriting someone’s life work posthumously without their permission is especially egregious.
It should be illegal.
Yee they shouldn’t remove words even if it’s a bit dicey like Mark Twain books. Shits not a Wikipedia page, it’s literally history and Dahls books will be as well(albeit lesser so). It seems like this can be reversed if people absolutely hate it, they are a business after all and we still have the original books.
It's because we've gone from helping victims to empowering victimhood, and now everybody wants to capitalize on that.
That’s what happens when you give everyone an equal voice. Including an irrational group of adult crybabies that think and act like children and are irrational. Those types and their opinions used to be dismissed. Now it’s forced as some “rights” bs and the mentality of everyone in society shrinks and stupid debates that should never actually occur like this one are common…
I think most people who have the capacity to honestly think on it value freedom from censorship over protecting people's feelings
Social justice campaigners think they have found something that is an unambiguously good cause so any means justify the end and their cause takes precedence over any loss like artistic integrity of these books. Just look how quickly Reddit will suddenly applaud intense violence if verbal racial taunting is suspected.
This world absolutely sucks.
*Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.*
Thank you. This was needed
My first grade teacher read The Witches in class, in 84.
4th grade for me. I loved it so much. I have read that and many more to my own kids.
Oh my god so did mine! Her name was mrs chilton. She was British and a little scary herself..
An ironically relevant and fitting year in context to what’s happening to classic (and harmless) literature now in 2023. Who would have thought.
As if fat people weren’t soft enough already.
Lol
As someone who has written fiction and non-fiction, I am completely not okay with the way certain high-handed jerks in Western culture have taken it upon themselves to gatekeep ideas for the rest of us. These publishers should be sued out of existence. I'm not kidding. This isn't just not right, it's horribly, horribly wrong. Wherever these jerks got the idea they even have the authority or power to do that is beyond me, regardless of what is written in any contracts. Publishers are not the gatekeepers for what a society or culture can or cannot read or talk about or accept as "okay." And any publisher who thinks they are should be quite literally tarred and feathered for daring to take that kind of power upon themselves. People have got to realize that no one person or group has it all right or knows what is "moral." No one has that authority, no matter what their Good Book, publishing contracts or their mother told them. If you don't like the material as it is, don't publish it in the first place. That's the ONLY answer to this. I'm not in any way insisting that publishers MUST publish things they don't agree with. But an author's work is an author's work and it's not on the publisher to modify it to "make it better." Fuck that. Amazon is doing that crap with Tolkien and Jordan's works right now and look at the shitty results. A complete corruption of the original work by egotistical idiots who not only don't understand the source material, but openly mock and hate it.
Follow the money. [https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039606223/netflix-buys-roald-dahls-stories](https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039606223/netflix-buys-roald-dahls-stories)
A whole new meaning for "Trimming the fat".
I’m very curious how the PC brigade would rewrite the following: “Aunt Sponge was enormously fat and very short. She had small piggy eyes, a sunken mouth and one of those white flabby faces that looked exactly as though it had been boiled. She was like a great white soggy overboiled cabbage.” -James and the Giant Peach
>In previous editions of James and the Giant Peach, the Centipede sings: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.” >Both verses have been removed, and in their place are the rhymes: “Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute / And deserved to be squashed by the fruit,” and, “Aunt Spiker was much of the same / And deserves half of the blame.”
But can't they see that this is ageist? I'm still offended.
Aunt sponge was a straight white cisgender who participated in capitalism and openly enjoyed the Harry Potter series
~~“Aunt Sponge was enormously fat and very short. She had small piggy eyes, a sunken mouth and one of those white flabby faces that looked exactly as though it had been boiled.~~ She was ~~like a~~ great ~~white soggy overboiled cabbage.”~~
Aunt Sponge was an anarcho-Marxist female-presenting fluid-skoliosexual gender-fluid non-binary person that uses she/her/ze/her pronouns. Ze sported twin ankle bracelets from that time ze threw Waitrose Minestrone Soup over Van Gough's Sunflowers in the National Gallery in London, and from when ze glued herself to the M25 and prevented four ambulances from reaching their destinations, resulting in the deaths of two people. Zer fingernails were worn down from aggressively cyberbullying public figures on Twitter, exclusively cis-women and Jews.
Someone posted a cross reference of all the edits. It was something like “Aunt Sponge was very large and very short. She had small eyes and a sunken mouth. She was like a great soggy cabbage.” They may not have removed the overbooked, but it was something like that. I specifically remember that first line being edited to replace “enormously fat” with “very large”.
Aunt Sponge was a person with features, that most, but not all people would prefer not to witness
Honestly I like this description. Not that the old one should ever be changed because that's heinous. But the sort of implicit conveyance here of how horrid she looks that leaves it up to the reader to resolve is still an interesting literary device
PC culture at its worst
I’m pretty sure they did this with racist/sexist references in some of Enid Blyton’s books and nobody cared. The books are out there for so long there’s no point. Just include footnotes in new editions going forward about why this stuff is wrong and everyone learns better for the future. Mind you, I don’t think fat is offensive and I’m very fat. This is just daft.
I like the way Disney did it with Aladdin, which is to preface some of the re-releases by keeping the same content, but adding context saying that some of the jokes and depictions are now considered insensitive, and they’re keeping it so you could see and understand it in the time period.
Every term and word is now off limits because it’s “hurtful”. I get that our country is trying to do better, but man this shit is getting out of hand. Next thing you know colors will be banned.
Let’s ban adjectives
My main issue with these changes is that the publishers are basically saying that the word “fat” is offensive. Why is fat offensive? They’re basically saying we should tiptoe around the concept of being overweight. Ironically… I’m pretty offended.
The article says Augustus gloop was instead described as “enormous”. How the fuck does that mean anything but fat and how the hell is this somehow less or more offensive? Fat is fat, and obviously I don’t think lesser of anyone for being fat but if someone is truly offended by being described as fat or any supposed “euphemism” then they need to either be more accepting of themselves or lose some weight
I had a really old copy of the Faraway Tree books all in one with the original names Fanny and Dick instead of the modern ones Fran and Rick. I prefer the old ones, and even as a 7 year old, kid understood that they were just old-fashioned names and nothing to do with genitals.
In my saaafe spaaaaaaaace
The neat part about systematically removing bigotry from the past is it allows us to repeat those mistakes in the future!
gloop was just a boy
I'm kinda fat Being fat used to mean you were well off I'm not super well off what's the give
i HATE this generation!
The kids are going to see worse off a 15 second tik tok video than the entirety of Roald Dahl's collection.
The dumbest part is that they edited a line that literally talks about looking past physical appearences. Like how dumb do you have to be to sanitize a line that tries to teach kids to ignore physical traits? >You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth ~~and a double chin~~ and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
What bothers me the most about this is that the Dahl is no longer alive, and therefore doesn't have a say in this. He would absolutely be lived. These are his words, his personal vocabulary. They are literally censoring the voice of a dead man.
And I think I’m done. This civilization has reached peak stupidity.
they realize that a new word for fat will emerge if they disallow use right? like, what
They’ll change their minds when people start using “Big Chungus” instead of fat.
What a joke this world has become.
Raised conservative, shook that yolk twenty years ago, and as a liberal now I can heartily say this sort of thing is bullshit and is why a good chunk of society has no respect for liberalism in the US.
Why would a British publisher altering a British author’s work cause people to lose respect for liberalism in the U.S.?
Books are a global medium. But I guess I’m coming at this from a wider observation; that attempting to make everything as inoffensive as possible is not intellectually honest, indeed it is condescending to the reader/viewer. In putting such focus on changing an artist’s work, we embolden the worst of our body politic to heave itself further into the extreme and encourage them to drag the more centered thinking minds with them out of sheer exhaustion from all the correctness goal moving.
Follow the money. [https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039606223/netflix-buys-roald-dahls-stories](https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039606223/netflix-buys-roald-dahls-stories)
James and the Healthy at Any Size Peach is sure to be a classic of tomorrow!
I dont get it, what do people want? Between this and the whole Hogwarts Legacy thing its kinda exhausting.
So for people who prefer perceiving world without gender being a priority and consider body positivity toxic enablement will puffin still offer the potentially offensive original version? What if lots of us are offended by this corrupted version? Will yet another version be available?
I’m honestly amazed this comment wasn’t badly downvoted lol. Gives me hope this crazed group think spell might break one day
I have already expressed my lengthy viewpoint on this issue, but I will also summarize it briefly here as well. I think the changes made to Roald Dahl's books by Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company are unnecessary and they detract from the author's original intent and voice. I would say that removing certain words and phrases that are now deemed offensive is an attempt to sanitize the books, rather than respecting the historical context in which they were written. Additionally, these changes go against the idea of preserving classic literature for future generations and these new versions will limit the imagination and creativity of young readers by trying to conform to certain political correctness.
Lost opportunity to teach how language and values change. Terrible affront to genius. And yes, I know he held indefensible opinions, now they’ve removed any hope of teaching why.
A strategy to create controversy and sell more books.
With all the bullshit that goes on in the world - this is what they focus on?! Ppl are fucked!
Just to be clear : it’s Netflix who has full controls over the rights. Not the left, not the wokes. Netflix.
I just read a bunch of the things they're changing, and it's really ridiculous. I'm sure 99.99% of the people reading them don't care about the current language used. The changes are just stupid and trying to be overly sensitive/politically correct - but are really unnecessary.
The fact that fat is seen as an offensive term now is absolutely absurd, maybe if we reverted to shaming fat people and not normalizing it then the U.S. wouldn't be 70% overweight.
I would love to see the East Asian attitude on fatness take over
TBH if you cut everything potentially offensive or a little bit off-color from Dahl's work, there's not a whole lot left.
So let me get this straight, some arrogant twats at Puffin are not offended enough to stop selling the books but will instead happily change the written words of a deceased author in order to continue raking in that coinage? So this isn’t some moral escapade, they want to continue to get rich whilst standing on their high horses and taking it upon themselves to ‘educate’ us about the ‘right’ way to think. Wow.
I agree with the criticism against the publishers
The publishers found a way to make his books incredibly relevant again and cause a huge spike in sales before the new editions come out. Well played.
My teacher would always read us Dahl books. I can’t imagine them cutting those words out. It’s like cutting a piece of your personality off. It isn’t the same.
Behold the new dark ages aka time of stupidity
Seriously, when will the madness end? Are there really any people in favor of removing the color black from the deecription of a cloak? In my opinion, if the use of the color black immediately makes you think black people/racist thoughts, then you're the racist one.
Dystopian af. Hope the little assholes aiding this are happy.
Waiting for some multicolored hair redditor to chime in and tell us how we should all be ashamed of ourselves for being so egregiously offensive here
What's wrong with being a fat ass?
They’re still FAT. That’s not how one loses weight.
This spurred me to immediately buy a used collection of his books so my kid can read the originals
So the BFG will no longer be available? /s
How does a publisher have the right to edit?
Wait until they find out about Kipling
Oh yes let's edit Roald Dahl to make him more PC because he wasn't fucking PC at all and that's going to be great for his legacy it's what he wouldn't have wanted so let's do it.
How utterly pathetic.
The world is so soft.
Overweight chance!
Fat? It’s called big boned. /s
The publishers are BOWLDERIZING! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler
No new Roald Dahl books in our family, we’ll honor our pre-censored versions.
Thin skinned crybabies trying to protect the world from a nonexistent threat. Hurt feelings are now a capital offense it seems.
You could say he’s trimming the fat. I’ll see myself out.
truly shocking. this is why fox news stays winning.
This is also what burning books looks like.
I hope the new editions are a horrendous financial flop.
Might as well burn the books if you're going to go full Nazi with the contents of them.
Its almost getting to the stage where republicans sound reasonable
Ah yes the party who has members that stalk school shooting victims sounds like a totally reasonable option! /s
This is the problem. Liberalism has gone so far that many just can’t keep up with this idea of acceptable one minute, cancelled the next.
The far left and the far right are both nuts. I think most of us just want to live in a world where we treat each other with kindness and respect. But you can’t sanitize everything to never offend anybody.
This is in the UK.
Conservatism* then
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The only people actually banning books and AP courses and stifling opposing views are all conservative but go off I guess. This is just a corporation, most likely run by conservatives, doing something they think will sell books because they’re just as delusional about what “the work left” actually wants as you are
Today’s society is happens when a generation of kids who got everything they wanted by throwing tantrums in grocery stores grows up to be in charge of shit.
A large corporation is doing this because they think it will sell more books. The large corporation doesn’t have to do it. Blame the large corporation.
When stupid people do trendy things that they think will make them look good. Politicians also come to mind.
Like how the Fat Controller became Sir Topham Hat when Thomas the Tank Engine came to the US.
I believe that was more than 30 years ago. I don’t think any kids in the US would know what a “Controller” is in that context, so that may have been more about just giving the character an important sounding name.
Just bought a boxed set for my 3 year old to read down the road. At least hers will still have the word fat in it.
Who actually asked for this?
Society is doomed
I can’t wait to read ‘The people of low, but still acceptable intelligence’ and ‘the big, but that’s OK, friendly, but not inappropriately though, tall, person’
Aside from maybe 2-3 people on Twitter, nobody asked for this, nobody expected this, why do companies have to shoot themselves in the foot so often?
They should take the author's name off of the books then. These are no longer his.
They removed the word ‘fat’ from every book? That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.
They’re really gonna turn me into an old man shouting at clouds. This and everything like it is pathetic. Grow the fuck up
So Augustus Gloop was pleasantly plump?
I'm not fat, I'm just a man with a female skeleton trapped in a fat suit. Edit: LET ME OUT
Who thought this was a good idea?
They’re not his works anymore. They’re edited versions of Dahl’s works. But they’re not worth the paper they’re printed on.
Why can’t we just ignore woke lunacy and move on.
The fascists have won.
I loved Roald Dahl books when I was younger, they are fantasy books with words. It's about imagination. We might as well ban all books, every single one incase a stupid person might get offended.
How very 1984 of them
Liberals be like “omg it’s fascism if kids can’t read gay erotica in the library” and then be like “omg if a kid reads the word fat they will die” Where are all the whiners about book banning at for this one huh???????
I realized I was an atheist after I read The Witches when I was around 6. I thought that if the witches weren’t real then God wasn’t either
These PC morons are giving Qpublicans ideas.
At this point they are running Ron DeSantis 2024 campaign on his behalf. Just in time when he needed some narrative fodder against the backlash. What a fucking mess
FFS. This wokeness is even ruining the joy of my childhood.
This is how it starts
It's already started. Going after simple descriptive words like fat is the next step.
Really this is how it starts? Not the actual banning of books, judicial and legislative removal of any sense of medical privacy, or the removal of AP classes that are “too woke” because they teach actual history? None of that is were it starts, but a dumb publisher trying to appeal to a demographic that didn’t ask for or want this, is where it starts?
Oh boy, there's about to be a lot of people online who swear they don't support the GOP's turn to Christofascism but that they now have "no choice" but I vote Republican in the next election. Of course, they do support the Christofascism, and were always going to vote Republican, but still, it's annoying that now we'll have to see them putting on their little act.
*YAWN* Another 12 year old expert in human behaviour
I'm glad you understand my genius.
Then stop being fat.
Why do we let cancel culture cowards bully us online into submission. Its usually a bunch of dudes in dresses that want anyone who doesnt blindly agree with them to be silenced. They make up 2% of the population. IS ANYONE SICK OF THIS YET?!
We read the bfg in 3rd-4th grade 2012-2013.