R.L. Stine accuses publisher of censoring Goosebumps books without permission
nationalreview.com
nationalreview.com
But it’s things like this that give me pause. Why not just not read the books you don’t like??
I love to re-read books I like every few years.
Similarly If someone said that people should accept the fine ladies from the local gentleman’s clubs coming over to teach an 8 year old kid about their lives - everyone would be up in arms.
Instead why not allow the fine ladies from the gentleman’s club to teach their 8 year old kid these things at home and then the local butcher can teach their 8 year old kid about their lives and principles at their home also? Shouldn’t classrooms be for the basics?
And I (as a 58 year old black man) loved the original little mermaid! I remember going to see it with my girlfriend decades ago - was a magical day.
Instead of changing the original story and characters, why not do something original instead?
See how all of this stuff does not make sense anymore?
Now because my eyes are going bad I listen to audible. Will I have to listen to a changed version of these books instead?
The world has gone mad.
Bruh.
It’s also kind of bullshit that like Italians got their own new content and original characters (Rocky, etc.) and everyone else has to settle for being ret-conned into existing content.
I appreciated the note, the thought that went into it, and, of course, that I got to watch the movie exactly as I had years earlier.
Changing 'plump' to 'cheerful' without any note to the reader about the alteration feels disingenuous.
There’s this Community episode that has “black face” (a character paints himself black to be a dark elf) and was called out for doing a hate crime by everyone in the room; this episode was pulled off of Netflix and I don’t understand why. It’s not like it was portraying it as something okay to do. In fact, it was very clear that it’s something you shouldn’t.
> Weight references such as having “at least six chins,” resembling “a bowling ball,” and having “squirrel cheeks” have been stripped from the novels.
> “A real nut” is now “a real wild one” and “nutcase” is “weirdo.”
> Scholastic told The Times that it had made the changes to “keep the language current and avoid imagery that could negatively impact a young person’s view of themselves today, with a particular focus on mental health.”
I know people hate being called snowflakes but if this isn't it then I don't know what to call it.
Milquetoast books exist for the people who want them. Why do this.
might be a way to trade some short-term public outrage into revenue.
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It's literally Scholastic middle management editors making busy work for themselves and to justify Scholastic taking a percentage on Yet Another Edition Release.
There's a long history of publishers kicking popular works down the road again and again to keep extracting $$$'s and "cleaning up" potentially offensive language is just another manufactured reason to pretend to be brushing up and fettling old works as new again.
By all means do please link to the lobby campaign demanding changes to R.L.Stine.
ftfy. they need something to protest as well, as an occupation
But what happens any time you have a whole department built around a new process? Some exec tries to start using it in new places.
Thankfully, performing sensitivity edits to reprinted classics seems to be producing its own scandals and — since the whole thing is about avoiding scandals (to the publisher) - hopefully it won’t last.
I don't have specific examples, but I would be completely unsurprised if there was similar grifts 20 years ago with religious sensitivity readers or further back for people reviewing comics and music for "unacceptable" content.
The result was less pressure on the publishing industry to censor books. When Christian activists came knocking, the publishing industry could say, "Look, you guys have an entire section of the bookstore filled with books that cater to your morals. So leave Twilight alone."
I think it's probably time to create a similar genre for leftist activists. A "safe fiction" genre would allow for books that have been stripped of all things leftist activists find offensive. No body shaming, homophobia, mental health related slurs, etc. Having designated "safe fiction" books might have a similar effect of relieving the pressure to make all books "safe" in the eyes of left activists.
Of course, there remains the barrier that most individuals in the publishing industry are hard-core leftists that fervently follow the whims of leftist activists. It's standard these days for books to be edited by "sensitivity readers", who point out all potentially offensive things from a left-wing activist viewpoint, before publishing is permitted. (Source: am deeply involved in the writing and publishing community, and have had many friends go through the sensitivity reading process.)
Shifting away from this mentality is going to take a major push by the reading public, who will need to make it clear that they are not okay with a small minority enforcing their worldview through censorship, regardless of whether the censorship is coming from the right or left wing.
What happens if an author disagrees with some or all of the sensitivity readers' corrections?
There seems to be little rhyme or reason behind how strictly the edits are enforced. (e.g.: One friend got to keep a very crude weight-related joke that a sensitivity reader wanted to remove, because she convincingly argued that it was needed to show-case the character's dark side. Another friend was aggressively forced to remove her teen protagonist's insecurity over having freckles, because it "encouraged low self-esteem and depression" and would be "damaging" to the audience.)
The difficulty with disagreeing with edits of any sort is that publishing is a reputation based industry. So if you put up a huge fuss and escalate issues up the chain of command, and possibly even involve the public, there is a chance you can resist even the most aggressive attempts to edit your work. But you will absolutely ruin your chances of another book deal.
For this reason, it's frustrating to hear the typical retort of, "Well no one's actually forcing authors to change anything, and they have the ability to protest, so it can't be censorship." This is like telling a junior engineer at a large company, "Well no one forced you to write that code. You had the chance to disagree with the design and write the program differently." Sure, no one physically forced them to write the code, but did they really have the option to balk at the design handed down from senior engineers and management? Of course not. It would be career suicide.
Ultimately, the publisher wants to maximize the profit from this back catalog, whether by stoking controversy , or by making the product more appealing to a 21st century audience, or by avoiding negative publicity. I don’t have the data to speculate.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Is this debate over that they're "tamer" rather than that books change?
Let's not use the wiggle room for correcting typos or translating from middle to modern English as an excuse to change the meaning of the written words while passing it off as the same book by the same author (and hiding behind "Nth edition" to deceive readers that the changes are insignificant).
And in as much as that falsification has been happening forever, it was just as wrong then as what is happening now.
Editions frequently include new or updated information on the topic, not just corrections.
This is a disingenuous argument and I suspect you know it.
This is exactly the kind of excuse I was talking about. An honest translator tries to preserve meaning as much as possible. A dishonest one uses translation as an excuse to tweak meaning to their liking, and accuses objectors that it's either that, or a "nonsensical, word-for-word literal translation".
The originals weren’t meant to be offensive, now they are to some. Publishers don’t want that. We’re talking childrens books here… people just won’t buy them if they think it will negatively impact a child.
Its culture war propaganda plain and simple. Nobody is dying on a hill over a character’s description in an old Goosebumps rag. I doubt anyone even remembers the character if the character was plump or cheerful, they remember the part about the ghost and the werewolf.
When you notice people making an such efforts to divide and distract, best check your wallet is secure.
In as much as they change more than minor spelling or punctuation mistakes, absolutely yes. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Soviet_Union...
> Is someone taking all the old copies from the used book store and destroying them?
"We haven't yet falsified everything, and there are still non-falsified copies remaining, so why worry?" - original versions in some dusty corner of an old book store are no good if the great majority of people is only exposed to fakes, and one in ten people who read those fakes eventually, possibly years later, learns their version was altered in unspecified ways.
I’m simply not convinced that a few edits to pop culture novels will lead to the downfall of free human society.
Of course not. This is just one nudge, one of many, not towards downfall, but towards change, in whatever average direction those in positions that create or edit culture push. It's just your history, slightly altered, one little lie at a time. So slowly you won't even notice. They used to make new works for this purpose, but now they've moved on to editing old ones. The slippery slope is a fallacy only until a trend line emerges from the data.
[W]e’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’” - https://www.themarysue.com/steven-moffat-on-doctor-who-diver...
But this is stupid and I do not support this type of re editing of history.
Even all the most progressive parts of Twitter agree its dumb (as was the Roald Dahl stuff).
This isn't progressive, this is corporations cargo culting inclusivity for profit.
Like when Corporations change their logo colors to support $month?
Like when Coporations put out special edition flavors or color sways for $month?
Like when Corporations trot out their diversity / EEO hires for an $month ad?
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Corporations and shareholders care about one thing and that's insane growth / short term profit at all cost, fuck everything else.
Look. I led with a very high level summary of my other perspectives to signal that someone can hold all the above thoughts and still believe that the re-editing of existing books without the consent of their author is blatantly not OK. That it is not a contradiction or a "Woke SJW vs Free Speech Patriot" issue.
I am not interested in a debate on the rest of the positions. Rest assured, I do not agree with you.
Pride is important. Corporations showing that they support pride and LGBTQ customers and employees is important. Especially in reference to the corporations that deliberately show that they do NOT care about those things.
Diversity is important. And while tokenism is bad, highlighting your commitments to diversity is also important. Now, if your corporation's response at the first sign of a tech downturn is to go "DEI was a zero interest rate phenomenon" (as many have), sure, it's hypocritical.
But DEI, Pride, and LGBTQ support make financial sense because most people are supportive of these concepts. Most people are NOT supportive of Roald Dahl and R.L. Stein being re-edited.
Sorry but the current DEI wave is built on tokenism. Intersectionality indeed virtually demands it. E.g. our vice president who was appointed to represent black people and Asians, despite having little support in either community, because she appealed to white people. She’s a manifestation of modern Macaulayism:
> We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.
Kamala Harris is an excellent example of this. Her intersecting identities means that neither black people nor Indian people embraced her. She would’ve been a political non-entity if a white person hadn’t put her in a position of representing both black people and Indians.
What you're saying seems to reinforce that case, not rebut it.
Put differently, the dominant group asserting its power to address perceived problems within those groups—according to the dominant group’s view of justice and order—necessarily disempowers those groups. And it does so in a particularly gross way, by co-opting those groups’ identities and installing representatives those groups wouldn’t have selected for themselves. You can’t meaningfully empower minority groups as groups if white post-Christians retain overarching authority to enforce their view of how those groups should operate.
As an aside, while I love to rag on Kamala Harris, Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley have the nearly identical problem—their conversion to Christianity. The difference is that conservatives don’t play identity politics so neither Haley nor Jindal purport to “represent” anyone.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wait-its-all-ohio-always-has-...
Hackernews is the only place where cons consistently and reliably think that it's a reference to me being a communist. Or even that being progressive on social issues makes one a communist. (Have you....heard what it was like to be gay or jewish in the USSR??)
The left censor by rewriting books.
I'm guessing the main motivation for both the changes to R.L Stine and Roald Dahl's works to keep selling them to a new generation of children more than fight the 'culture war'
They make modern versions of the Canterbury Tales https://www.amazon.com/Canterbury-Tales-Version-English-Clas...
It's decently hard to find examples due to the discussion of Roald Dahls work. I just seriously doubt Scholastic is doing this for any other reason than making sure their books are never found to be objectionable.