#banned books nuance

[sing-you-fools]

hot take on the banned book issue

i think it hurts the cause that we have actually entirely reasonable concerns on the micro level lumped in with the greater "banned books" subject

every time i read a list of banned books, there's always one that has me like, what? who would ban that? and then when i read further about it, i see that it was assigned to third graders, in which case, actually, yeah, parents rightfully brought up that it wasn't an appropriate book for a class-wide reading assignment and had the syllabus for one particular third grade class changed

i feel like that should be a different category than banned and challenged books. there needs to be a side list. situations where a teacher needed to be reminded of basic common sense? i don't care what it's called. it should be different and i think it hurts the cause that these entirely reasonable concerns are lumped in with the whole book banning conversation.

i think the situation as a whole deserves more nuance. i think there's a difference between cis people screaming that "this book has trans people! inappropriate!" and trans people saying "it would be nice if the world respected us enough that schools didn't assign harry potter" but if we actually say that it's banning books and bad! i don't wanna ban any books, i want schools to not make new little bigots! i'm not saying people can't have them or stores can't sell them or the library can't carry them, it would just be nice if out society weren't constantly platforming a terf.

like, sometimes i see absolute horseshit like this really adorable picture book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star, which was banned simply for having Asian characters. that's it. and i'm furious. and then i see that someone assigned To Kill a Mockingbird to little kids, and someone else assigned harry potter, and some high school teacher assigned a book that has a really graphic SA scene, and i'm like... okay. yeah. i approve of these "bans," actually. because they're not actually bans. don't actually ban them. but we shouldn't be making the kids read them, either. that's weird. they can if they want to, because free access to books is so so so so so important, but making these particular kids read these particular books is, for whatever reason, super weird.

please don't eviscerate me over this. in fact, if i'm wildly incorrect and someone can explain it - i would honestly be just as happy to understand why it's all grouped together like that. i'm open to the idea that i'm missing something and it's done like this on purpose. i am just confused.

[wizardysseus]

it's hard for me to describe the dread i feel about my job as a librarian—a job i love, which brings me so much joy—because people perceive book banning as a local issue, or an issue of certain states, but it operates on a much broader level, too. if you love your library, you should know what's happening in libraries and how much worse it could get.

yes, on the local level, it matters that you know who is on your library board and what they stand for, even though you might have only indirect control over who those people are. (my library board, for instance, is not voted in but appointed by the mayor, a position that doesn't technically run on partisan lines but in practice absolutely does.) your library board is probably who makes the final call when a book is challenged about whether to remove it from the hands of the people. and if the board is not committed to serving the community the library serves, they can take the freedom to read and access certain information away from people. which is, as you probably know, fascist.

and if you care about your local library, you should care about preventing conservatives from taking positions of power at every level, obviously including the national level. project 2025 explicitly seeks to shut down public institutions and criminalize librarians who distribute "pornographic" material — that is, queer and especially trans books. we have also seen a push to destroy works by authors of color banned for "teaching critical race theory," which means speaking to racism at all.

maybe there's no guarantee that a democrat being president means your local library won't be gutted. but there is every sign that if trump is reelected, public schools and libraries will be defunded, queer literature will be classed as pornography, and librarians will registered as sex offenders. that affects me as a librarian and a queer person, but i'm white and present female in a field that is still overwhelmingly white and female. we have no shortage of work to do within libraries to change that, but punishing queer librarians and librarians of color will only set us back and make librarianship more hostile, if it remains a viable profession at all. and all of this rebounds for the worst on our most marginalized communities.

i care about our rights, and i care whether you vote.

i recommend book riot's literary activism newsletter to learn more.

[anachilles]

[📚🏈]

oh i know teacher!au!bucky loves the fuck outta tim walz and his vibes.

as an educator, as someone who's voted democrat ever since becoming politically engaged despite his home state being largely rural and mostly leaning republican, as a fellow football coach, as a gay man who was once an athletic gay teenager who felt adrift in school and needed guidance + acceptance...

like they're based in illinois now, but he'd maybe drag gale for a weekend trip up home to manitowoc if there's news of a walz rally in wisconsin, as a battleground state.

[thoughtsofthegirlwiththecurl]

Don't make me tap the "Lumping all WOC authors into YA regardless of what they actually write and then defending an all-white, all-male literary canon from the same WOC authors' claims of racism based off 2 out-of-context twitter screenshots is NOT a good look" sign!

[80roxy08]

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundred of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word ? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "Good" for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well - better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not.

[...]

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, whith its meaning rigidly defined and all subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten."

Syme to Winston, "1984" by Georges Orwell - Part 1

”pdf file” “unalived” “grape” “corn” what if i killed myself right here right now

[theatrebooknerd56]

I have very strong opinions about banning books because I have always been a big reader and I basically was allowed to read whatever I wanted as a kid. My parents never screened or limited what I read.

I think parents that try to ban books don't realize their kid is going to be exposed to things they don't like eventually. Your kids are going to become their OWN person and form their OWN opinions and world view at some point.

I also think that age isn't as much a factor in what's appropriate for kids to be reading as reading level is. If a kid can understand the themes and complex characters and situations the book is appropriate for them. Kids shouldn't be forced to read less mature books that are below their level because parents want to control them.

[sweatermuppet]

*reasonable restrictions are ones you consider fair for your own safety or wellbeing, especially for things like graphic depictions of violence in relation to your age at the time (i.e. "you can read this when you're older")

not sure if books you read were banned? here is a archive of the top 10 most banned/challenged books from 2001-2022, hosted by the American Library Association

as well as the Wikipedia page for the Most Commonly Challenged Books in the United States

Wikipedia page for Books Banned by the Government, organized by region/country

[nerves-nebula]

this gonna be a bitchy post lacking in nuance but who cares. im annoyed.

child predators and abusers will use literally whatever is most effective to groom someone, that's kind of the whole fuckin point. pointing out that they can use certain media to groom kids is like pointing out that you can drink liquids. like yea you sure can. you can groom a kid through their interest in sesame street. you can groom a kid with adventure time. you can twist even the most harmless story book with a Nice Upstanding Moral at the end into whatever you want.

when i was in high school I basically fell in love with any teacher that gave me food cuz i was fucking starving and that's a way more effective way to gain my trust than like, idk, sketchy fandom porn. (which i also loved as a kid/teen but I never really talked to people online or in person about it cuz i didnt wanna get adults in trouble!) and if someone online was weird to me back then i just ghosted them cuz i didn't have to exist in meat space with them if they made me uncomfortable.

anyway back to my point: should we ban granola bars cuz they were a way to fast-track the trust of food insecure kids? the way some of y'all talk about abuse, and grooming in specific is so frustrating, like, what are you fuckin talking about. grooming is a series of actions a person chooses to take to get what they want, it's manipulation, what they use to groom people with is entirely situational and moreover irrelevant.

should we all just sit in 5 x 5 cubes and paint neutral faces on a canvas till we die or should we try to have systems in place to prevent adults from gaining so much control over kids just by being kind of nice to them. and that's not even getting into how censorship literally never works the way you might want it to. it's impossible to create censorship that isn't inherently bigoted and useless because the only people with the power to properly censor are the people with the most power in general. and they do not like the rest of us. and they are also often on the side of abusers, if not abusers themselves!

yall will gives thousands of notes to posts that basically say they want the haze code back cuz you're too dumb and reactionary to think about fucking anything other than "child abuse bad so i guess i agree." then go patting yourselves on the back without having helped a single child.

yall love to feel vindicated more than you care about victims. don't act like anything you do is for the survivors if your focus is always on retribution or censorship against the abusers. you don't care about us. you don't remember we even exist half the time. none of you have looked into what actually helps us, none of you internalize our complicated feelings, none of you are willing to ease up on your christian ideas of sex and sexuality unless we explain our entire traumatic backstories to you. and then you say we're broken and need help, as if what we don't really need is for you to back us up or leave us the fuck alone.

none of you care. you just wanna find acceptable targets for your anger so you can feel good about destroying the Bad Person. dont piss me off

[lucienne-thee-librarian]

Funnily enough these same people suddenly have absolutely no trouble comprehending the idea that how you EXCLUSIVELY repeatedly write your only characters from a certain demographic can say something about how you view that demographic irl...when it comes to characters who are queer/trans/female/neurodivergent/disabled like them.

post: the way you write certain characters can reveal certain things about yourself and the way you view the world. for example, the way you treat your characters of color can correlate to how you view Black and brown people in real life.

addition: nope! stop fandom police! kill the cop inside your head! stop demonizing dark fiction! acab includes fandom police!

[serregon]

what annoys me most about the silm fandom is the tendency to take opinions on controversial characters to one extreme side or the other, brushing all nuance and complexity aside. Fëanor is either an abusive father who never loved his sons and a genocidal fascist, or he’s the world’s greatest hero and every single death at his hands was fully justifiable and actually someone else’s fault. Thingol is either an abusive father and a cartoonish caricature of a conservative racist and misogynist who committed cultural genocide by banning Quenya, or he’s the holiest king ever who never made any short-sighted decisions and actually never played an antagonistic role in B&L and asking for a silmaril was actually the smartest political move ever

like idk man if you hate ambiguities and complexities that create multifaceted characters with both flaws and virtues then why are you reading the ambiguities and complexities book

[bonefall]

while i do agree with the sentiment that bloodclan should be more nuanced as an entity i still believe it is wrong to portray them as the necessary "response" to clan injustice (haven't read the books in years but i am pretty sure that bloodclan started with no connection to the clans) / an opposition to the clan's flaws. some of the thing scourge did was out of selfishness and bloodclan isn't the other colour of the black and white debacle with the clans. the clans are heavily flawed yes, but it isn't realistic to completely say that their structure had no redeeming qualities altogether and that all outsider groups is fundamentally better than the clans.

all clans and groups are flawed in their own way and i believe we shouldnt brush past the things that other groups (the sisters and what they do with their toms *cough cough*) did solely to be able to degrade the clans and their culture.

Buddy, you're setting up a strawman. I promise you that if you look into the reduxes I've made of BloodClan, Guardians, The Sisters, and the Tribe, you will see that I don't make any of them a "flawless" alternative to Clan life.

Nor do I say that the Clans have no redeeming qualities. In fact, you can browse the "Clan Culture" tag to see the various expansions I've made to show how these traditions, values, and technological advances make Clan life so alluring.

The overarching theme of BB is that the nature of culture is change. For better AND for worse.

With respect, I think there's something insidious in the wording of "the things the other groups did." We're talking about fan responses to a work that consistently demonizes and degrades foreigners to make the Clans look like the "best way to live," justifying xenophobia. These are not real groups, they are writing choices.

In the franchise with some pretty extreme examples of misogyny, the authors said "What if bizarro world where women rule and have no men... woag..." and only includes a single Clan-alligned member of this culture, with a BAD opinion of them, who can't even do his diplomatic job because he HATES them so much.

In the same franchise that shows Fireheart getting bullied, facing prejudice, and fighting a murderous tyrant who publically executes a mixed-race character, their endgame villain is an outsider, like him, but this one IS a godless heathen who HATES love and friendship and banned families.

In the VERY same franchise which made its first non-malicious group barely able to get through an arc without needing to be saved by Clan cats, totally unable to defend themselves, framed as "whiny" for not wanting their clearly 'inferior' culture to be forcefully changed.

And I'm re-stating all this because, again, no offense to you in particular Anon, but I've been seeing a few people with a sentiment like yours lately. Complaints into a vacuum that don't make targeted critique of anyone's fanworks, gesturing at this broad "woobification" which is apparently out there somewhere over the rainbow, saying things like "well Scourge is selfish" or "well Moonlight abandoned her 13 year old" as if we haven't BEEN knew.

As if we're not all directly responding to these choices. As if I haven't written ESSAYS on this topic.

Since this was about BloodClan in particular though, and you admit you haven't read the books in years, please go back and actually read Rise of Scourge before trying to make critique of the ways fanon rewrites its origin. It's EXPLICITLY a response to the Clans, in the text, that the Erins wrote, it is canon that fanon is working with.

And you want people to take that out and approach it a different way... why? Because it's so incredulous to you that a nation forms in response to a threatening neighbor? That a common enemy through invasions is a way that people might choose to unite, and encourage their new culture to value brutality? Because you don't like the idea of Clan Culture's XENOPHOBIC BATTLE CULTURE affecting surrounding communities??

Could YOU, maybe, be doing this "woobification" thing I keep hearing about? Can I play this stupid game too? What's our stupid prize? Can it be a lollipop? Do we get stickers

TL;DR, ok.

[unamazing-sheep21]

The Daroga is actually an extremely important character to the themes of Phantom of the Opera

Many people might not know this but living as a Muslim/brown person in the west ( especially France… see: burqab ban, burkini ban, hijab ban, etc) is extremely difficult for some. Not to mention in a world post 9/11. Not to mention ( probably) in the 1890’s like in Phantom of the Opera where orientalist art and inaccurate and often dehumanising portrayals of the Middle East and it’s people ( muslims, arabs, Persians etc) were common and were used to justify colonialism.

In classic literature there’s only like, ONE character who is brown and is treated like an actual human being by the narrative and is presented as a central cast member to boot: and that’s the Daroga/ The Persian in Phantom of the Opera. And even then, every adaptation after either replaces him with a white person or has an incredibly disingenuous and inaccurate portrayal of him and his ethnicity/religion. Heck, in the Phantom Susan Kay book he’s given the surname “Khan” which isn’t even Persian it’s a PAKISTANI name.

Every other presumably brown/POC character are written animalistically and antagonistically. E.g Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and Bertha from Jane Eyre. Bertha especially who is just used as an obstical/metaphor instead of an actual genuine character who deserves her own nuance and voice.

Now, back to the tittle, why do I think The Persian’s mere existence and especially with him being Persian/Muslim is inexplicably tied to the themes of POTO? Because he’s just like Erik and completely unlike Erik at the same time. In the book he’s constantly described as wearing as astrakhan cap/ a fez. Something quintessentially Middle Eastern and exposes him as ethnic right away to the eyes of the then European public. Both Erik and The Persian have sides of them that the society they live in at large shuns/dehumanises/condemns. For Erik it’s his face, and for The Persian it’s his culture/ religion/ race. But unlike Erik, The Persian has the choice to “ take it off” or assimilate more into society. He can, and it was better for him if he wore, a top hat but he CHOOSES to wear a fez. And he never takes it off. While he CAN and he has the chance to be more accepted in society than he already is.

But Erik can’t “take it off”, he can’t take off his face.

Though we don’t know much about the Persians’ beliefs, it’s safe to assume he was probably Muslim since Persia has been a Muslim country for a long time ( ignore the one we have now lmao). And I like to think that even in France he doesn’t give up this one part of him. He could just convert to whatever the majority religion in France was at the time and he would be more assimilated into French society, but he doesn’t . He actively chooses to keep parts of who he is even though they put him at a disadvantage. In contrast, Erik would give anything and does try everything ( even to phycotic lengths ) to be considered “ Normal” in society.

And throughout all of Erik’s efforts the only one who was ever really there for him was The Persian. But Erik dismisses him constantly.

I like to think that The Persian stayed because he understands Erik to a certain degree, and I like to think that Erik resents him because he doesn’t use every chance he gets to assimilate into society. To be considered normal. Sometimes Erik quite literally would kill for. Instead hanging onto every part that makes him who he is even when it only isolates him further.

[duckprintspress]

Banned Books Week 2024

Banned Books Week starts today, September 22nd, and runs through September 28th. With the current political climate in the US and beyond, it's a sad truth that the books most often challenged and banned in the US are queer stories, and so we wanted to take this week to shout out these books. Seven of the ten have been challenged because of LGBTQIA+ content.

The ten most challenged books of 2023 are:

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson

This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Flamer by Mike Curato

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

Tricks by Ellen Hopkins

Let's Talk About It by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan

Sold by Patricia McCormick

I've personally only read 2 - Gender Queer and Flamer - and both were excellent. I definitely need to get on reading more though.

[isnt-it-pretty]

I've been reflecting a lot recently on my reaction to the news stories I often see about the dangers of technology and social media, laws banning of cell phones during school hours, school divisions banning technology, the rise of teenage depression as a result of social media, etc. I've always felt defensive over technology when I see these stories, and I think I've realized why.

As a disabled person, my relationship with technology is different than a lot of people's. I use an ereader, for example, because I have low vision and find the font in physical books too small to read. I use the notes app on my phone instead of hand writing things because it's easier on my joints. I keep my cross stitch patterns as PDFs because I can zoom in to see the stitches I need, which I can't do when it's printed out. Even in high school I brought my personal laptop to type out essays because there was a 20% grade difference in essays I typed vs wrote by hand, and whenever I see classrooms banning all technology, I think about that. I write thousands of words for creative writing on my phone because I'm too fatigued to get out of bed. I learned to read because of audiobooks taken out as CDs from the library, something I now have access to in an app. As somebody who is housebound, my entire social life is on my phone. It's how survive, how I create.

If you were to take technology from me, I would be bereft, and not because of an addiction. Technology is simply something I use to navigate the world. Disabled people just like me have lived and loved and created (and still do!) without it, but that doesn't change that I rely on technology to do things I couldn't otherwise do. I never would have learned to read beyond maybe a middle school level without audiobooks. I never would have learned to write without word processors, both of which are a major part of my identity.

Technology, to me, is accessibility, and sometimes that feels forgotten in the sweeping condemnation of it. My defensiveness can sometimes make me overlook the real issues it causes for others, just like for others the problems it causes can make them overlook how necessary it is for some of us. I can't help but think about all I gain from it and where I would be now if I hadn't had access to what I did as a child. I see the harm technology can cause children and even still I wonder, as we condemn parents for ipads and schools for over relying on computers, how many others there are like me who don't even know what they need to ask for.

It's a complicated topic, and like most complicated topics, it gets broken dowm into bite sized pieces. The nuance gets lost.

[ave-immaculata]

Do you think the reason that people are against trans women competing in women's sports, drag performances, inappropriate books in schools and abortion is... to improve their material circumstances and reduce their bills?

Banning trans people from sports will not improve your quality of life.

Banning drag will not improve your quality of life.

Banning books from schools will not improve your quality of life.

Banning abortion will not improve your quality of life.

Your material conditions will not improve. Your rent will still be too damn high. Your car bill, your light bill, your insurance, all of it will continue to be too damn high.

You gain nothing. Instead, you lose integrity.

[steelthroat]

Guys can we all agree that if a politician wants to ban/censor 1984 it's a huge red flag? Cuz i was having a discussion w a friend of mine and we both agreed it was but we disagree on how red it is.