It's real cool how suspension of disbelief allows you to accept "gods are just here now" more readily than "brown people live here".

So what's the reasonable explanation for wizards and dragons?

Thing I Like Is Objectively Good

Thing I Dislike Is Objectively Bad

I Am A Very Smart Person

Yeah, it's all down hill from here. If you really want to solidify your feeling on that one, just like read a summary of the shit that happens so you can go "Wow, that sounds like dog shit" and never care about GoT again. Like most GoT fans. The finale was so bad it killed so many people's interest in the whole series.

>Point is, I feel like there has always been kid of a lack of a between "Kids stuff" and "Teens stuff" in media, and that "tween" over time, just started becoming an excuse to let 8 year old girls pretend they're teenagers.

LMAO that you're singling out girls. Beyond that though, your post - for all its effort - feels rather ignorant; the "tweenage" target audience has pretty much always been around, what corporate calls it shifts every few decades because marketing to children, more so than any other group, shifts radically with their social interests.

When you're making something for kids, basically everyone knows you have to stratify it more intensely than other age groups because the minds of pre-adolescent (or tween) children vs. a kid in the early and middle stages of childhood are vastly different. Shit like "Nanalan'" made for kids still going through early childhood, might appeal to someone still in the middle stages of child growth; but isn't likely to offer much to a preadolescent who, by then, is going to want something more directly stimulating and engaging to their mind.

And yes, it's largely just a naming scheme to better market to that specific group. What do you think does better in reaching their target audience? A TV block aimed at "preadolescent children" or "Hip Tweens"? And you get it in every age group, not just the tweens. A lot of teenage media is focused on treating the viewers how they want to be treated; with respect, like they're small adults capable of making their own decisions and that their parents are just boring and don't get them. That kind of shit flies way better than "cartoons for adolescents"

The in-between stage of development between childhood and adolescence is literally pre-adolescence, that 9-12 demographic who are at that point in their life where they do tend to be leaving their old toys and games behind and rushing towards more "adult" interests as their personality starts to shape and bodies and minds develop. When you complain that it's just "an excuse to let 8 year old girls pretend they're teenagers"; my dude, that's literally what most preadolescent kids want - to be older and treated like they're older because they're starting to feel like they're not a kid anymore, while simultaneously not quite being there yet. It's why media aimed at them tends to be soft ball versions of more "adult" media - sitcoms and the like.

It's going to blow your mind to find out we rename entire countries IRL isn't it?

The originals of the books still exist, previous editions exist, they've been edited before and likely will be edited again. This happens on a daily basis, and not just with books. We re-write and redesign maps all the time, a city can change whatever it wants pretty much whenever it wants.

I assure you, and anyone else worried about this, that it's not Roald Dahl and other precious classic authors that the big scary censorship monster would really come for. Historically, authoritarian censorship has been used to target political enemies, easily evidenced by the famous book burnings engaged in by the nazis which started with research and educational materials about sexual health and understanding - especially pertaining to LGBT+ people, who were unfortunate targets of the holocaust as well - which set back our understanding of that for decades to come.

Charlie's chocolate factory will be fine, no one's going to purge it from the earth, and without a doubt the publishing company will either recant this soon enough - or else take the bold route of printing an uncut edition in a few years to make more money off of people who want to feel like they achieved a victory over them.

Well, for a start, you'd have to be stupid to tell anyone you did it. So, just theoretically speaking, if anyone did this - you simply might not know because they didn't get caught.

>Like, sometimes your interpretation is just wrong.

Is it though? If someone can provide examples from the text that the feel supports their interpretation convincingly enough; then how is it wrong? That is the entire purpose of analysis and examination of art. If you disagree you're free to try and argue why that can't be the case; but simply pointing at the text and saying "the text doesn't literally say this" is quite possibly the worst way to go about it - after all, Animal Farm is famously an allegory for the russian revolution; but while it's been a good while since I've read it, I don't think it gets too literal with it. If someone were to talk about their interpretation, would you point to the book and say that since it doesn't literally feature tsarists and communists - that because it's just about animals - their interpretation is wrong and invalid?

What about if I say that Harry Potter is actually about a determinism and how nothing matters and everything is determined at the moment of your birth; and the world merely happens to you?

It's absolutely been wild seeing how it's gone, yeah. Personally: I think it's shaping up for the better - publishers, imo, didn't adapt well enough to the digital landscape and worked too hard to preserve their sort of gilded tower and closed gates policies which is why self publishing has taken off so well, while before it was basically only a bastion for the desperate and determined. Now anyone with like, a hundred bucks and a word processor can throw their stuff out into the void.

You're taking the text far too literally though, and kind of doing the opposite of critical thought. Like, even with a very basic surface level reading of Harry Potter: the main character literally would not be alive without the mysterious power of Love, therefore one can indeed come away with the read that love does indeed conquer evil in the end.

I would say 7 and 9 are debatable. There are definitely times and places where it isn't appropriate to whip out a book and start reading, or read aloud. I'd say one of them should be replaced with "The right to their own genuine interpretation of the text" and another with maybe "The right to understand" - which is to say that a reader should always have the right to learn the context and content of what they read and anyone who tries to tell them "no it's just a story, turn off your brain and stop thinking about it" is being a huge asshole.

Having a good relationship with a good editor is pretty hard though. A lot of people - fans especially - tend to view it as a solely adversarial thing. That like, the editor is a piece of shit because their job is to go in and ~butcher~ the art. And a lot of editors can easily fall into a mentality that they are, somehow, the gatekeeper of quality and the author is basically just an unhinged hosepipe and it's up to them to sculpt things into what they want heedless of what the author desires. And because usually the most famous dumpster fires get publicized while really good relationships that elevate the final product almost never get brought to light except in interviews and end notes where the author thanks their editor (seriously; read just how many authors will include a note thanking their "tireless editor" often "For dealing with all of this when you could have just quit and moved on to more profitable venues" or something similar) a lot of people, especially those on the outside or are just getting into either side of the industry get a really brutal image of it and kind of go in with a preconceived notion that it's supposed to be editor vs author. And sometimes all it takes is one shitty partner - on either side - to fuck up someone's whole career and perception life-long.

Self publishing is still in its wild-west sort of era; but much like youtubers as of late, I think before long any creator doing reasonably well will realize how much more efficient and effective they'll be by hiring editors to help cut their own labor in half, basically, and we'll have a boom in independent editors for independent authors.

He was; in that it wasn't happening enough. The entire fox news crew was very outspoken about school lunches back when those were the hot button issue and their take was, as you could expect, that kids shouldn't eat lunch unless they could pay for it.

Family Guy is still going?

The western comparison is one that pops up a lot, and I've made it myself, but the conditions are nowhere near the same, honestly. Not that it can't happen - but a lot of people who make it don't entirely understand how and why the western died and thus it often gets reduced to "there were too many of them and people got tired of them". Which doesn't quite capture the scope of it.

For a start, while we've had super hero movies as arguably the dominant film mainstay for like twenty years now; westerns were dominant for eighty. But not just that, but there were a lot of them. People complain about getting a handful of super hero movies from like, two different megacorps every year - imagine if every movie studio was still releasing their own super hero movie like they very briefly started to back when marvel first really took off. Imagine the world where that never stopped, where we not only had a million adaptations, but companies just started greenlighting every jackass who walked into the office going "I HAVE AN IDEA SIR IT'S CALLED STRONG MAN, AND IT'S ABOUT A MAN WHO'S REALLY STRONG" or some shit. Because that's basically how it was with westerns, especially after the first thirty year period of dominance and other genres (like musicals) started to take the stage; they just began to mass make as much shit as they could to save any vestige of that waning popularity they could. There was so much shit, the sheer volume of westerns outpaced every other genre combined.

But, funny enough, there's a simple reason why that won't happen with super hero movies - and it's the exact reason why so many people hate them. The big box office marvel and DC shit? Those cost a lot of money to make. Money and time. It's hard for any jackass to make one of their own, and a bad one hurts the company's bottom line and they don't like that. A western, on the other hand? Access to a rocky location, some sunny weather, and a prop department willing to look through second hand stores until you find enough battered, dusty, jeans, vests, and hats to fit the cast and you've got about 80% of the movie right there for cheap. They were relatively cheap, fast, and easy to produce for most studios, basically, and given that; they had a pretty safe return on profit which meant more would be made more often. You simply can't do that with the marvel mega films.

I wouldn't even really call it depressing and dark, tbh. I watched it because someone told me it was "similar to true detective" and I felt kind of like It'd been lied to; the show's mystery was easily predicted, and the cast of characters didn't really have much charisma about them. Not that the acting isn't good or anything - it's just a show about people who suck. Everyone's shit. And sometimes that's a good watch, but I bounced right off of it because of it.

Because she's a woman in the public sphere, that means everything is her fault.

Because capitalism exists on the promise of perpetual and infinite growth, most capitalist entities consider something breaking even to be a waste of resources. Toy sales matter because they're an avenue of profit. If they aren't meeting whatever arbitrary number is set as the acceptable amount to signify growth, then it's a failure. Welcome to capitalism.

Maybe everyone else was busy and someone realized you need to hire someone else eventually because Skarsgard can't star in literally every TV show.

Hasn't every show he's ever worked on had massive issues with this that he keeps just going "What? Noooo that's a you problem"?

You would be amazed at how many rapey and SA or abuse adjacent tropes have been incredibly normalized in society to the point where it can be so deeply tied into romance and romantic fiction that it gets kind of gross.

imo way more people should just admit they want to read some really hard smut.

Alright.