I agree with what you wrote mostly but I think you are dismissing the criticism of sanitizing stories too easily. It’s a real phenomenon, and it is genuinely motivated by changing cultural precepts. And it is unfortunate, something about ourselves is lost in the process. Is it in the best interests of civilization? It may be. But not always.
I think that I couldn't disagree more with this point. Riffing and building on existing cultural artifacts does not erase them. Nobody's telling Hans Christian Andersen to shut up, and nobody's telling publishers to stop publishing him, and readership of The Snow Queen - the original version - is presumably much greater now than it was in 2012. My kids have specifically asked for it, while I wasn't even aware it existed as a child.
On the other hand, the implied message of people who complain about modern retellings is that they should not exist. (What else can it be?) And if they have their way, something absolutely would be lost: the ability of these stories to continue to participate in living culture.
A commercial decision to bury a set of works, made by the corporation that owns the exclusive rights to Dr. Seuss's creative output, falls into a completely different conceptual category, and bringing it up here is the kind of whataboutism that only serves to muddy the waters.
Or, to put it another way, invoking a concrete example of the kind of cultural loss that's an inevitable result of the ongoing erosion of the public domain does not actually function very well as a counterpoint to a defense of one of the primary virtues of having a vigorous public domain.
> falls into a completely different conceptual category, and bringing it up here is the kind of whataboutism that only serves to muddy the waters
Does it though? Seeing several comments in this vein of "it's fine to put your own spin on a classic because the classic still exists" but it's clear that publishers do in fact have the power to stop producing new copies of classics
What then? Is it still whataboutism if the publisher says "we're no longer publishing new copies of the original and will only make this new revised (read: sanitized) edition available"?
Because it's a fact that over time the originals in circulation will dwindle and it will eventually become a near forgotten work. And we in society will have lost something with it
The post you were responding to includes this sentence:
> I agree with what you wrote mostly but I think you are dismissing the criticism of sanitizing stories too easily.
Bringing up Dr. Seuss is not whataboutism, nor is it muddying any waters. It is directly relevant, your preference to focus more narrowly notwithstanding.
I don't think we really lose anything about ourselves unless we are going back and changing the original work. The Hans Christian Anderson version of The Little Mermaid is still readily available.
For thousands of years, stories, myths, and legends were handed down through oral tradition and changed radically over time. The key difference today is that anyone with basic literacy and access to a library or the internet can go back and see old "versions" of these stories.
