Bowdlerise / Literature

• The Bible:
  • During Prohibition, there was a move to edit the Bible to remove all references to alcohol. Except, of course, the ones that discouraged overindulgence. Yes, they literally wanted Jesus to turn water into grape juice. The strangest part of this is that the Bowdlerizers reasoned that the translation must be wrong, since Jesus would never drink alcohol. And without modern sanitation and refrigeration, you simply can't keep freshly pressed grape juice from fermenting. Grape skins are coated in yeast. There are individuals who to this day maintain that when Jesus refuses οἶνος mixed with myrrh, or when Paul commands that a deacon be not given οἶνος, the word οἶνος means "wine"; but when Jesus changes water into οἶνος, or when Paul (only two chapters after the previous reference) tells his friend Timothy to avoid drinking water but use a little οἶνος for his stomach's sake, the word οἶνος means "unfermented grape juice".
  • In the King James Version, the first of which being in the sixteenth century, the translators deliberately replaced the tetragrammaton, four Hebrew letters frequently translated to either YHWH (Yahweh) or JHVH (Jehovah), with the all capital, LORD. In the foreword for some translations the reason is given that, after the second century, the spoken name of God was bad luck. Which gives us the reason why no one can agree on the true translation. That said, replacing God's name with a word meaning "Lord" is much older than KJV; the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate did the same thing ("Kyrios" and "Dominus", respectively), and so did (and still do) the Jews (replacing it with "Adonai", although nowadays even that name tends to be replaced with a euphemism); God's name was considered so sacred that only the High Priest was allowed to say it. "Jehovah" is believed to have originated from combining the consonants of God's name with the vowels of "Adonai"; "Yahweh" is a modern reconstruction of the pronunciation.
  • The Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, is perhaps the raciest book in The Bible. However, even this version may have been Bowdlerized from the original, For instance, in the selection where the lover describes his beloved, he says that her waist is like a heap of wheat. Given that this breaks the order of the narrative, many Biblical scholars believe that the original translation referred to a different part of the female anatomy.
  • There was an interesting variation on removing certain parts of the Bible: the Wicked Bible. The word in question was "not", which gave us this rendition of the seventh commandment: "Thou shalt commit adultery."
• Discworld:
  • Terry Pratchett canceled plans for a movie of Mort when the producers told him they loved the story (about Death taking an apprentice) but wanted to lose the "Death" angle.
  • In Feet of Clay the word is actually used; a common dwarfish saying in regards to height is "All trees are felled at ground level", it is mentioned that this is merely an extremely Bowdlerised version of the actual saying, which is "When his hands are higher than your head, his groin is level with your teeth."
  • In Hogfather, a choir sings "the red rosy hen greets the dawn of the day". A footnote explains that while it's usually not hens that would crow at dawn, a woman had thought that the original would offend listeners of a certain disposition and had rewritten it.
  • Parodied and inverted: A bit called "Medical Notes" (published in A Blink of the Screen) mentions Scroopism, named after Male Infant Scroop, who was compulsive about adding rude words to texts and would use his wealth to print editions of books with them inserted, and replace the regular editions with them.
• Fahrenheit 451: Ballantine Books published "Revised Bal-Hi" editions for high school students from 1967-1979, heavily altered and censored until catching Ray Bradbury's attention.^note While the point of the book is 'the dumbing-down of society through T.V. and lack of reading', it has received a Misaimed Fandom regarding censorship (which can be supported, if you look at it in the right way). So for this book to be "censored"....
• "Figment", the Little Golden Book based on Journey into Imagination, has the scene in the Literature realm of imagination include things from stories of all kinds of genres instead of just having things from horror stories. As a result of this change, the verse about ingredients for a scary story from the original ride's theme song "One Little Spark" is also left out.
• There exists a condensed, 'kid-friendly' pop-up book version of Gulliver In Lilliput.
  • In fact, Gulliver's Travels is frequently censored due to the rather explicit material found throughout the different parts — such as Gulliver's account of how the Brobdinagian women would use him as a dildo. Which admittedly does sound rather Squicky.
• Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories includes "How the Leopard Got His Spots", in which an Ethiopian and his Talking Animal Leopard friend, who both start out light-coloured, decide to change their colours for the sake of camouflage. The Ethiopian paints the Leopard with spots, of course, but chooses plain black for himself. In the original version he tells the Leopard "Plain black's best for a nigger". In more recent editions this is often changed to "Plain black's best for me".
• Sometimes changing cultural standards can leapfrog over attempted Bowdlerization. Many early English translators of The Count of Monte Cristo tried to disguise the lesbian subtext of one of the sub-plots; however modern readers should have little difficulty putting two and two together with the information left in the story (tomboyish woman abandons her fiancé at the altar, flees Paris with her close female friend, they're discovered sharing a room and a bed at a country inn). Translators also removed the part where a character takes hashish and has some rather vivid lusty hallucinations.
• The Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (published in 1964) were originally a tribe of pygmies from "the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before." And they get recruited by a rich American/British guy to work for food in his overseas private factory! This was changed in the 1970s to present them as being native to the fictional Loompaland, and having "rosy-white" skin; illustrations followed suit, and all adaptations use the Bowdlerised version of their origins (each takes a different tack on visualizing them — the one constant is that they are Little People). While the 2005 movie still sets Loompaland in Darkest Africa, the Oompa-Loompas are all played by Deep Roy, an Indian.
• The Doctor Dolittle series contains several passages that have been criticized as racist, most infamously a plot point in the first book where African prince Bumpo enlists the Doctor to bleach his skin white so that he can be attractive like the prince from Sleeping Beauty. Current editions, with the blessing of Hugh Lofting's son Christopher, have Bowdlerized the problematic language, but this in turn created Unfortunate Implications with some readers pointing out it doesn't remove the underlying Colonialist ideology.
• Parodied in J. K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard, where in his commentaries on the tales, Albus Dumbledore reveals that a witch named Beatrix Bloxam tried to bowdlerise the eponymous tales to make them more supposedly "child-friendly". The result, called "The Toadstool Tales", is, for Dumbledore and many child readers, literally Sickeningly Sweet.
• Marie de France's poem "Lanval":
  • The original story has the faerie queen ride into town, and save Lanval from execution. He leaps upon the back of her horse as she rides away, providing a reversal of the traditional knight in shining armor archetype. In some translations/adaptations/what have you, people have had Lanval take the front of the horse, returning the archetype to its "proper" form. This has the unfortunate side-effect of removing a huge chunk of what makes the faerie queen so mysterious and alluring (her beauty is so great that she holds sway over everyone around her, and one of Arthur's knights gladly takes the traditionally "feminine" place).
  • Guenevere at one point accuses Lanval of being a gay misogynist with a stable of catamites. One early-twentieth-century translation reduces this to: "'Launfal,' she cried, 'well I know that you think little of woman and her love. There are sins more black that a man may have upon his soul.'"
• Gaius Vallerius Catullus' Carmen 16. Written about 50-100 years before the birth of Christ, it was considered so offensive that it wasn't openly published in English until the 20th century, and even then as a paraphrased version. It was written as a response to two poets who'd refered to his work as soft and as a statement that though a poet is to act decently, he is by no means bound to write politely. The opening line is, roughly translated, "I will sodomize you and skull fuck you".
• A number of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories were bowdlerized by his posthumous "editor" L. Sprague DeCamp. Sometimes it was for reasons of content, such as toning down perceived racism, other times it was for purely commercial reasons such as converting entire stories that weren't even written as Conan stories into Conan stories. A few changes are truly inexplicable though, such as wording changes to perfectly fine paragraphs that had already seen publication in magazines. Most serious REH fans despise DeCamp for these alterations.
• Modern retellings of the Arabian Nights (e.g. the Hallmark miniseries) often soften the framing story: after the Sultan decides to take a new wife and execute her the next day, Shahrazad is the first to volunteer. (In the original tale he had married and executed so many women that his vizier had trouble finding a suitable wife for him; that's when Shahrazad [the vizier's daughter] volunteers.)
  • That may be less a case of Bowdlerization and more of a Historical Hero Upgrade. Considering Scheherzade's marriage to the sultan is supposed to be her happy ending, it's hard to believe she'll be happy (or safe) considering he's beheaded hundreds of women for no fault of their own.
• In the storybook adaptation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? the wild turkey beer is changed to soda pop and all references to the words kill and die have been removed.
• The Otherland series, set in the mid-late 21st century, lampshades the tendency for this to happen to fairy tales with their version of the Red Riding Hood tale. Instead of being killed by the woodcutter the wolf repents, and everyone lives happily ever after. The incredibly old Mr. Sellars mentions that in the version he was told as a child little Red Riding Hood didn't survive herself, much less the grandmother and the wolf.
• In the original book of Lord of the Flies Piggy says to Jack "You all look like a bunch of painted niggers"; reprints have him say "painted savages".
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
  • Some editions have all instances of the word "nigger" replaced with "slave" (even to the point of free black characters being referred to as 'slave').
  • One edition has Huck talking to the Widow Douglas about a steamship explosion. Original: "Was anybody hurt?" "No, ma'am. Killed a nigger." "Well, that's good, because sometimes people get hurt." The second sentence of Huck's reply is cut out, missing Twain's whole point that even a good woman like the Widow treats blacks as less than people.
• Life, the Universe and Everything: The word Belgium nets you an award for Most Gratuitous Use of the Word Belgium, according to the US version. In the UK version, you have to use the word Fuck a lot instead. On the plus side, the "Belgium" scene was adapted from a classic moment on the radio program that didn't otherwise see print, so that's nice. From the same book, Wowbagger's insult to Arthur was changed from "asshole" in the UK to "kneebiter" in the US, and "shit" is replaced with "swut". Opinion is divided on whether it's funnier for the alien's insults to be blunt or inexplicable. Making it more confusing, the US version of And Another Thing... leaves Wowbagger's insult as "arsehole", thoroughly confusing anyone who doesn't know better.
• In the original prints of "Super Fudge," Fudge mentions his favorite TV shows are The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and The Electric Company (1971). In modern reprints, the line was changed to "cartoons from Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network" due to a combination of licensing issues and an attempt at making the story less outdated ^note  As an aside, the Muppets had new movies in 2011 and 2014, Sesame Street is still on the air, and The Electric Company was revived in 2009 — though it's not the same as it was back in the 1970s.
• Modern reprints of Enid Blyton's classic The Faraway Tree children's series rename the characters Dick and Fanny to Rick and Frannie because of the "sexual nature" of their names. The villainous school teacher Dame Slap, so named for the punishment she dishes out to students, is renamed "Dame Snap" and now punishes students by loudly reprimanding them instead of spanking them.
  • An earlier Blyton book, Book of Brownies have the titular brownies being stranded in the Land of Clever People where failure to speak in rhymes is punishable by spanking. In reprints however the spanking have been changed to "scolding", with the Spanker given the duty of dishing out punishments renamed "the Ogre" (despite being a human). This leads to a really weird section in the book where the brownies get scolded, one by one. Similarly, a later chapter where the brownies are sentenced to spanking for crashing a train has been changed to "scolding".
  • Some modern reprints of her other books took this to ridiculous levels. For example, The Adventurous Four, the names of twins Jill and Mary were changed to the more "modern" Zoe and Pippa.
• In Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series, all of the Martians (and John Carter himself) enjoy their various adventures naked in nothing but leather harnesses. However, in all of the film adaptations and many of the artworks depicting Barsoomians (Martians), they are depicted as wearing loincloths and at least one image (depicted as the main image on the Barsoom wiki page) has John Carter in a distinctly non-leather type of armor.
• Are U 4 Real, the American translation of Sara Kadefors' Swedish young-adult novel Sandor Slash Ida, suffered from this trope. The story was relocated from the Swedish cities of Gothenburg and Stockholm to San Francisco and Los Angeles, the teenaged protagonists' names were changed from Sandor and Ida into Alex and Kyla and several parts of the book dealing with Ida's sexual experiences were censored or removed entirely. The author was not happy and stated that the censored parts are necessary to understand why Ida acts the way she does in the story. The American translator defended the changes, stating that the original contained "too much sex" and that it would have been hard to sell in American stores.
• The Canterbury Tales has gotten this treatment as School Study Media. Teachers will often only cover the pilgrims as characters and a few cherry-picked tales (the Pardoner's Tale, the Wife of Bath's Tale, etc.) in isolation from the other Tales. Not to mention the frequency with which they'll suppress any discussion of the other stories, most notably the Miller's Tale and the Reeve's Tale. As a result, the students (assuming that they have had no experience with The Canterbury Tales up until that point) only get to know about the characters and some of the stories, and don't get to read them in the context in which they're presented: as an argument where the pilgrims are telling their stories basically to prove their points and, sometimes, as take thats at each other.
• The original edition of Book 6 of The Railway Series, Henry the Green Engine used the phrase "as black as niggers" to describe a group of boys who have been showered with soot for dropping stones on trains. The newer versions use the term "as black as soot."
• The controversial Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books have been re-released with tamed down illustrations...a fact over which many fans of the classic, terrifying illustrations are very unhappy. And to rub salt in the wound for those who were never able to obtain copies of the books with the original illustrations, said books have had printing discontinued by their publishers, and online prices are being inflated in correspondence with the tamed-down editions.
• Children's book parody Go the Fuck to Sleep proved popular enough to get an alternate, actually child-friendly version called Seriously, Just Go To Sleep.
• The title of Canadian author Lawrence Hill's novel The Book of Negroes was changed in the U.S. market, to Someone Knows My Name. The title is a reference to an actual historical document of that name, but according to Word of God (from The Other Wiki): "If you use (the word 'negro') in Brooklyn or Boston, you're asking to have your nose broken."
• Occurs in-universe in Thursday Next; Bowdlerizers are exactly what you'd think: people who try to eliminate profanity from literature. The twist in this series is that books happen in their own living world that adapts to things in the real world, so the Bowdlerizers' actions can have serious repercussions.
  • An example given of Bowdlerizers in action is the deletion of all the vulgar tales in The Canterbury Tales. A reference is also made to the "Wicked Bible," mentioned above, with mention of several other famous Bible misprints. It's implied that someone (likely Christopher Marlowe) is fooling around with the texts as a joke.
• The first English translation of the infamous Mein Kampf removed some of the more anti-Semitic and militaristic statements. A more faithful one was released later but it lost a copyright lawsuit.
• The novel The Fountainhead has an In-Universe instance: the writer of a (bad) play called No Skin Off Your Ass has to change the title to No Skin Off Your Nose.
• Occurs in-universe in short story "Laokoon" by Michail Veller. It depicts a school in the soviet-era Leningrad that has a sculptural composition of Laokoon and his sons in the front yard, all of them, obviously, naked. When a prudish ex-military guy is appointed the school principal, he's outraged at such a shameless display in plain view of children and decides to...rectify it, while the Arts teacher struggles to preserve the "cultural legacy" intact.
• The classic poem "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" was reedited by a Canadian writer and anti-smoking advocate to omit every reference to Santa puffing on his pipe. Whether it will save lives or further prove that political correctness has gone berserk and is ruining time-honored media (classic film, TV shows, and classic lit) is up to you.
• The Hebrew translation of Green Eggs and Ham was translated into "Lo Ra'ev Ve'lo Ohev" (Not Hungry, I Don't Want It) because it's easy to translate. Ham isn't illegal in Israel, but due to Jewish dietary law, it's not allowed.
• Done in-universe in the Horatio Hornblower books because Hornblower doesn't like to swear at his junior officers. Lieutenant Bush is forced to bellow "You careless... young gentleman!" at hapless trainees from the Naval Academy.
• The translation of The Odyssey by M.A. Schwarz (which is considered to be one of the best translators to ever exist) is often accused of this. This is not helped by the fact that Schwarz was a big fan of Plato's philosophy and considered therefore The Odyssey to be rejectible.
• After Karl May's death his widow Klara gave the firm that published the books (which renamed itself Karl-May-Verlag) the right to make text alterations as it saw fit, and the publisher made extensive use of this. This took many forms, such as rearranging chapters, replacing foreign loanwords by more German ones, making deletions and additions, changing the names of many supporting and even a few lead characters, and suppressing some of May's more pacifist paragraphs to please the Nazis. As literary scholars and Karl May fans noted, this made the most commonly produced editions of May's works unusable for scholarly analysis. In more recent years new editions based on the original ones have been produced, however.
• The very first published version of Max Havelaar removed all the political references from the book. It was only after the copyright changed owner that the political references were included.
• In-Universe in Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Greg creates a comic called 'Creighton the Cretin', which focuses on the titular idiot. When he gets published, the published comic (where Creighton eats his maths test) is turned into a blatant ad for the local school library. He promptly quits, and when Rowley takes his place, the published Zoo-Wee Mama comic is published without edits. Greg is understandably pissed.
• Njal's Saga: On account of a curse put on him by an angry ex-lover, Hrut cannot have sex with his wife Unn because every time he is in bed with her, his erection becomes too large for them to have intercourse. English translations from before the 1970s are often extremely vague about the precise nature of the curse. The 1861 translation by George W. Dasent lets Unn say (her father having "pressed her to speak out") that "she and Hrut could not live together, because he was spell-bound".
• Strangely, some newer editions of the book Summer by Alice Low (a book showing two kids and their dog enjoying the summer season that's already a kid's book) eliminate some of the...decidedly less fun parts of Summer (such as this page◊ showing a picnic Gone Horribly Wrong and another showing the main characters accidentally riling up an angry bull) for seemingly no reason. It's likely that this was because the publishers felt that kids wouldn't like reading about the ways a Summer outing could go wrong.
• In the preface to The Brown Fairy Book Andrew Lang states that some of the stories were rewritten by his wife "in the hope that white people will like them, skipping the pieces which they will not like."
• Some variants of The Discreet Princess have Rich-Craft beating up the two older princesses instead of seducing them like in the original. That creates some Unfortunate Implications by itself, since their punishment in the original might be subject to Values Dissonance, but this way, it also seems way too disproportionate.
• The original Italian edition of Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman removed two pages in the chapter where Mr. Krupp and Ms. Ribble (almost) get married in order to not show the rabbi. The two pages were reintroduced in the 2018 reprint.
• In the Iris Wildthyme short story "The Dreadful Flap", as originally printed in Obverse's Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus Iris's friend Jenny's equivalent of a Time Ring or Vortex Manipulator is a dildo called the Time Cock, because of course it is. When the story was reprinted by Big Finish in The Further Adventures of Iris Wildthyme this became the Time Neck Massager.
• Strangely, The Martian was bowdlerized by author Andy Weir himself, because of the book's popularity and all of its real world science, schools wanted a special edition that removed all of Mark Watney's swearing.
• Early English translations of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen did their best to remove anything deemed inappropriate for children, such as family-unfriendly deaths and violence in general, less than moral behavior by protagonists, adultery, and any appearances by the Devil (who in some cases was replaced by "a most wicked magician"). This, in combination with the generally poor quality of the translations, which were often based on German translations rather than the original Danish text, gave Andersen a reputation as harmless childrens' entertainment and nothing more in the Anglosphere until a long time into the 20th Century. Tellingly, a scientific article about the early Andersen translations from 1949 was titled "How a Genius is Murdered."
• In the original version of Heather Has Two Mommies, it's explained that Heather was born when Kate was artificially inseminated. This is left out of many re-releases of the book.
• Enid Blyton's Noddy used to have golliwogs as recurring characters. Starting in the mid 1970s, books and scenes featuring any of the golliwogs were redrawn (Mr. Sparks replacing Mr Golly, and The Goblins replacing The Golliwogs◊) with newer text.
• Some editions of Whose Body, the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, gloss over how Inspector Parker concludes a naked body is not that of Sir Rueben Levy. It's because Sir Rueben was Jewish, and "the chap in the bath obviously isn't".
• The initial publication for Jack Ketchum's Off Season was edited to remove much of the gore as well as to give it a happier ending. A revised version was later made available.
• Because of the movie's popularity with young girls, Meg Cabot made a middle-grade edition of The Princess Diaries that didn't really do much besides make the typeface bigger, as all the sexual references of the original book are intact, but problematic lines such as where Mia says she wouldn't mind being sexually harassed by her crush and the line where she bets that Michael is making a bomb to blow up the school (keep in mind, the original book was written before the September 11 attacks) were removed because of obvious Values Dissonance.
• The Little Golden Book’s version of Home Alone removes some of Kevin’s more violent and dangerous traps like Marv stepping on a nail, Harry burning his hand on the doorknob after it gets heated, Marv getting hit in the face by a falling iron, and Harry getting his scalp set on fire with a blowtorch.
• A widely read 71 chapter version of Water Margin was produced in the 17th century, about 500 years after the original was written. What's special about revision is that the editor added several passages to develop the characters further, removed large sections he found boring to read and did not advance the plot, including several poetry sections as well as the entirety of chapters 71 to 120. A new prologue was added, which renumbered the entire book and made the old chapter 70 into chapter 71, which itself was reedited into a Revised Ending featuring an outlaw having a dream vision of their future defeat. All of the changes were done to appease the imperial court in order to promote an Anvilicious message that while the outlaws may have sympathetic backgrounds, rebellions are nevertheless bad and needs condemnation, as the Ming Dynasty then was under constant upheaval by rebels.
• Leo Tolstoy complained that when What is Art? was submitted for publication, some of his sentiments were softened to conform to the Russian mores of the time, like replacing "Church religion" with "Roman Catholic religion" and "patriotism" with "pseudo-patriotism", as if to imply that he was a Russian patriot who accepted all the doctrines of the Orthodox Church when in reality, Tolstoy believed, among other things, that Jesus was merely a wise man and rejected the doctrine of the Redemption of mankind, considering it "to be one of the most untrue and harmful of Church dogmas".
• In 2023, Roald Dahl books were edited across the board to be more inclusive. Gender-specific words are made gender-neutral, "fat" as a descriptor was excised, synonyms for "crazy" were scrubbed, and so on.
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The most notable change for this particular book is that Augustus Gloop is no longer described as "fat" but just "enormous." Any reference to the Oompa-Loompas being "tiny" was changed to "small," and they are no longer "men" but "people." Finally, Prince Pondicherry was renamed to Prince Puducherry.^note The real life union territory of Pondicherry was officially renamed to Puducherry in 2006
  • Matilda: Matilda no longer reads the works of Rudyard Kipling, but of Jane Austen, and Miss Trunchbull is now the "most formidable woman" rather than the "most formidable female."
  • James and the Giant Peach: Cloud-Men were changed to Cloud-People. Previous editions featured the Centipede singing, "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 of those lines have been removed entirely in favor of the following: "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: Mr. Fox no longer has three sons, but three daughters. "Bunce, the little pot-bellied dwarf" is now just "Bunce."
  • The Twits: Mrs. Twit is now no longer "ugly and beastly" but simply a "beastly" character.
  • The Witches: The main character is describing his plan to ID witches in public to his grandmother — going around and pulling women's hair to see if they're a witch. In the original text, the grandma replies "'Don't be foolish,' my grandmother said. 'You can't go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens.'" The rewrite is as follows: "'Don't be foolish,' my grandmother said. 'Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.'"
  • The BFG: The Big Friendly Giant's coat is no longer described as "black."
• In the Geronimo Stilton book "Surf's Up, Geronimo!", Geronimo goes to buy a new bathing suit and finds that the tag inside reads "I'm too sexy for my fur!" (which is a Shout-Out to the song "I'm Too Sexy For My Shirt" by Right Said Fred). Sometime after the book was published, this was changed to "I'm too cool for my fur!"
• A later printing of Frog and Toad Together changed Toad's "Shut up!" to "Be quiet!" in the final story, "The Dream".
• Arabic translations of the Harry Potter series omit any references to alcohol use, except by Death Eaters, and remove any mention of pork, since both are forbidden in Islam. They also removed every mention of characters kissing, even on the cheek, to appease religiously conservative readers.

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