Sensitivities over Dahl’s stories were heightened when a 2020 Hollywood version of The Witches led to a backlash over its depiction of the Grand Witch, played by Anne Hathaway, with fingers missing from each hand.
Warner Bros was forced to make an apology after Paralympians and charities said it was offensive to the limb difference community.
References to physical appearance have been heavily edited. The word “fat” has been removed from every book - Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory may still look like a ball of dough, but can now only be described as “enormous”.
In the same story, the Oompa-Loompas are no longer “tiny”, “titchy” or “no higher than my knee” but merely small. And where once they were “small men”, they are now “small people”.
Passages not written by Dahl have also been added. In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
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 underwhelming 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.”
Fantastic Mr Fox’s three sons have become daughters.
Matilda reads Jane Austen rather than Rudyard Kipling, and a witch posing as “a cashier in a supermarket” now works as “a top scientist”.
One of Dahl’s most popular lines from The Twits is: “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.” It has been edited to take out the “double chin”.
So they even removed the pro-fat line...seems fatphobic
A mention in Esio Trot of tortoises being “backward” - the joke behind the book’s title - has been excised.
The words “black” and “white” have been removed: characters no longer turn “white with fear” and the Big Friendly Giant in The BFG cannot wear a black cloak.
The changes were made by the publisher, Puffin, and the Roald Dahl Story Company, now owned by Netflix, with sensitivity readers hired to scrutinise the text.
If I recall correctly (and it's literally been many decades), only (the first?) part of The Jungle Book is about Mowgli and his bullshit. The rest of it is basically animal fables, which girls like, too.
Fuck Jane Austen and whatever boring crap she wrote.
Oh, that’s… That’s not why they’re cancelling Kipling, my dude…
The guy was much more than The Jungle Book…
Though how much of that was featured in Matilda, vis a vis simply replacing one “conservative male author” with a “progressive (for her time) feminist author”, I do not know…
Kipling was like… The antithesis of modern “wokie” literature… Hence his erasure, lol…
I've read Jane Austen's oeuvre pretty much entirely. I would be seriously hesitant to describe her as a progressive. She does a pretty good job of refraining from making any actual opinion and mostly just pokes fun at the sensibilities of the upper-class of late 1700's England. Each book ends in a wedding, happily ever after style, and it's pretty clear that the ideas of the upper-class are justified once more after she's teased them a little. It's pure literary comedy in the classical sense.
Fair enough. I more meant that she was a woman, not writing under a pseudonym, in that time period…
Her actual work may not be all that “progressive” by today’s standards, but she was still a massive outlier for the time…
Like Mary Shelley, or the Bronte sisters, et al…
That’s why liberals today (or whatever we want to call the ones doing the censoring) look up to her so much, rather than anything to do with a) her own written words, or b) whatever her actual beliefs and views on things may have been…
Her actual work may not be all that “progressive” by today’s standards
Her actual work was often satire calling out how pants on head retarded certain cultural expectation were. That's the entire point of 'Pride and Prejudice' and yet there are legion of women who take the book at face value and then wonder why IRL doesn't have rich bachelors walking across fields in the rain to woo them.
I'll have to look that up. I always thought that literature was one of the places where chicks do a pretty good job. The only major chick that wrote under a male synonym that I can think of is George Elliot -- and that was only because her writing was explicitly feminist, and she thought that men wouldn't stand for such whining from a chick.
Alexandra Strick, a co-founder of Inclusive Minds, said they “aim to ensure authentic representation, by working closely with the book world and with those who have lived experience of any facet of diversity”.
We can all agree that modern readers would only truly feel validated when all the characters in every book were body positive Black muslim neurodivergent transwomen of color.
Yet you're doing nothing. Why? At some intuitive level, you understand that getting yourself killed, accomplishing nothing but inviting a further backlash and crackdown on the rest of us who will unmercifully still be alive, is not going to do much.
I don't pretend to know what the solution is. But I sure as hell know that the glowfags don't.
The biggest insult is that they still stamp his name on the books. Decades after you are dead they will take your creative works, sanitize them, and claim you wrote it.
I see the same translators doing anime.. are now doing the same shit to native english material lol. Adding and changing shit to suit their BS. Practically stealing other peoples work and glory for themselves so they can feel good.
God help us all
Nobody tell them about the original Assassins Creed
But what if I want to stop the show instead?
the books are not yours to alter.
So they even removed the pro-fat line...seems fatphobic
now owned by Netflix
now owned by Netflix
now owned by Netflix
If I recall correctly (and it's literally been many decades), only (the first?) part of The Jungle Book is about Mowgli and his bullshit. The rest of it is basically animal fables, which girls like, too.
Fuck Jane Austen and whatever boring crap she wrote.
Oh, that’s… That’s not why they’re cancelling Kipling, my dude…
The guy was much more than The Jungle Book…
Though how much of that was featured in Matilda, vis a vis simply replacing one “conservative male author” with a “progressive (for her time) feminist author”, I do not know…
Kipling was like… The antithesis of modern “wokie” literature… Hence his erasure, lol…
I've read Jane Austen's oeuvre pretty much entirely. I would be seriously hesitant to describe her as a progressive. She does a pretty good job of refraining from making any actual opinion and mostly just pokes fun at the sensibilities of the upper-class of late 1700's England. Each book ends in a wedding, happily ever after style, and it's pretty clear that the ideas of the upper-class are justified once more after she's teased them a little. It's pure literary comedy in the classical sense.
Fair enough. I more meant that she was a woman, not writing under a pseudonym, in that time period…
Her actual work may not be all that “progressive” by today’s standards, but she was still a massive outlier for the time…
Like Mary Shelley, or the Bronte sisters, et al…
That’s why liberals today (or whatever we want to call the ones doing the censoring) look up to her so much, rather than anything to do with a) her own written words, or b) whatever her actual beliefs and views on things may have been…
Her actual work was often satire calling out how pants on head retarded certain cultural expectation were. That's the entire point of 'Pride and Prejudice' and yet there are legion of women who take the book at face value and then wonder why IRL doesn't have rich bachelors walking across fields in the rain to woo them.
Vis a vis Kipling who, while obviously a great writer, was pretty much “Upper Class British male imperialist” personified…
No wonder they don’t like him, lol…
I'll have to look that up. I always thought that literature was one of the places where chicks do a pretty good job. The only major chick that wrote under a male synonym that I can think of is George Elliot -- and that was only because her writing was explicitly feminist, and she thought that men wouldn't stand for such whining from a chick.
In fairness to the first one, female Gen-Z leftists really have gotten to the point where “enormous” is more correct than “fat.”
Here's what the Guardian says:
The monster's Twitter account
At this point, its almost always a woman at the head of this or overseeing this.
We can all agree that modern readers would only truly feel validated when all the characters in every book were body positive Black muslim neurodivergent transwomen of color.
I hate communists so fucking much it's unreal.
They are literally burning down our culture. What’s the appropriate response to such aggression?
Traditional electoral politics.
By other means.
Yet you're doing nothing. Why? At some intuitive level, you understand that getting yourself killed, accomplishing nothing but inviting a further backlash and crackdown on the rest of us who will unmercifully still be alive, is not going to do much.
I don't pretend to know what the solution is. But I sure as hell know that the glowfags don't.
Speaking as an autistic that has worked with retarded people:
That's retarded.
When you literally control the narrative, you control the culture…
I don’t think we should underestimate just how scary this is, or how deleterious this will be for future generations of readers…
Absolutely insane that this is happening. Vile…
It’s fiction, you bastards! Fucking leave it alone!
Cultural vandalism, etc…
This is some 1984 shit right here.
None of these edits should ever again be bought.
The biggest insult is that they still stamp his name on the books. Decades after you are dead they will take your creative works, sanitize them, and claim you wrote it.
The man wrote some classics. What are “sensitivity readers” anyway
Communists basically
They love mutilation.
Authors are going to have to amend their wills and contracts to prevent evil nonsense like this.
And this is why they are going up in flames in a time when people are reading books and listening to audiobooks at an astronomical rate.
I see the same translators doing anime.. are now doing the same shit to native english material lol. Adding and changing shit to suit their BS. Practically stealing other peoples work and glory for themselves so they can feel good.
What a strange day to read this right after watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
If that were the case you wouldn't have had sensitivity readers to begin with.
It was too much trouble to burn the books.
“Passages added”
Let me guess, they all come directly from the Communist Manifesto? Or is it highlights from Robin D’Angelo’s “work”?