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Notes -
An update to a post I made after Christmas lamenting the state of children's books, and all their on the nose, "current year" agenda pushing nonsense. Specifically an update in reply to this comment.
Roald Dahl goes PC in a world where no one is 'fat' and the Oompa-Loompas are gender neutral
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You can read the litany of changes for yourself. I guess I missed the boat on stocking up on Roald Dahl children's books. As is feeling increasingly typical these days, there can be no escape from current year. Fuck me I guess.
Something that's striking about some of the rewrites is that they're not just striking ostensibly verboten words, but actually making the writing worse. The first example from the table that @buffy_bot helpfully provides below:
First, note the moronically pedantic nature of this change - you can picture the dweeb interjecting, "ackshually, not all extremely old people are delicate and weak". To a first approximation, all centenarians really are delicate and weak, with the best counterexamples still being people that don't have half the strength of their youth and that can suffer severe injuries from falling down. More importantly though, it changes the rhythm and feel of the sentence in a way that I can't quite articulate, and not for the better.
The removal of anything to do with "fat" is a good example of what we were talking about with regard to victories of fat activists yesterday. I don't think they've actually made any inroads on convincing people that there's nothing wrong with being fat, but they have convinced people that ever referencing fat negatively in writing is a sin that's just short of using a racial slur.
Again, notice that this is just plain worse. It's not just getting rid of something that's putatively offensive, it's scrapping the underlying content, making it flat and dull. The original sentence gives you a vivid image of how the hell the oompaloompas wound up there (and it's not a pretty image). The update says nothing meaningful. This is a theme across these, replacing well-crafted sentences that call to mind an image with some simple descriptor conveys only the sequence of events. Perhaps the sensitivity editors all suffer from aphantasia and lack the capacity to visualize a scene from a few words; I can't decide if this explanation would be more or less charitable to them.
Flow and tone matters. Some of these changes sound like adults “talking to kids” rather than “talking with kids”. It’s against the spirit of the stories.
It's called "condescension". The group who (claim to) hate it so much they invented another word for it are the people responsible for most of it.
And sure, the kids eventually pick up on it- nobody likes being treated as if they're beneath someone (which is partially why teen media is infamously edgy as well as the general trend of kids wanting to consume 'adult' media in general), but they're not even human beings so who gives a damn?
Plus, if you do it enough, you can even make some of them proud of this treatment so it's self-reinforcing after a while... exactly what one with power should want in order to retain that power forever.
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