The Witches

I'm surprised Dahl's antisemitic views have not completely tainted his work to be honest

Semi-OT, but Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells all said worse things about Jews than anything Dahl said, and their reputations haven't taken that much if any of a hit, so I don't find it that odd.

Also, Dahl is kind of "helped" by his reputation as a Hates Everyone Equally misanthrope.

Values Dissonance is in play. Kinda hard to impossible the more you go back to find a creator who didn't have some prejudice even if they weren't intending to malicious.

I would also imagine it's one of those things where he's dead, his work is beloved children's stories adding nostalgia to it, his work has been separated enough from him as an individual, and/or no one really knows much about him BESIDES his work,

I mean he's got a couple of autobiographies out so we do know quite a lot about him personally. On the other hand those same books while never touching anything vaguely antisemitic do tally with someone who could end up fairly generically misanthropic.

I meant more pop culture wise. Sure, we have a lot of biographies, but I don't think any of them have caught on enough to really get that information around. There are tons of figures we know everything about but the general population would know nothing about them.

Dahl is probably better known than the three mentioned as both an author and a person, though he's also more recent which probably accounts for it.

I think Dahl himself would quite happily confirm himself as anti-Israel, and whether that is the same as antisemitic is a knotty problem in some ways.

Per Wikipedia:

• Dahl told a reporter in 1983: "There's a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it's a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason."
• In 1990, during an interview with The Independent, Dahl explained that his issue with Israel began when they invaded Lebanon in 1982: "they killed 22,000 civilians when they bombed Beirut. It was very much hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned. I'm certainly anti-Israeli and I've become antisemitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism."

So yeah, while it's a popular "catchphrase" for people to say that "anti-Zionisim is not the same thing as anti-Semitism", Dahl was clearly (and by his own admission) both anti-Zionist and antisemitic.

I would recommend writers telling stories about witches and orcs to look into the history of their associated tropes and perhaps try something different with the concept or traits if they want to perpetuate different ideas. Neither orcs nor witches have to be written in the exact same way as they have in the past. Even Tolkien realized he had written himself into a corner when he found he couldn’t justify a people being all evil all the time with a compassionate and idealistic view on the world.

Something like that. I think it comes down to reputation, since Dahl’s stories are still largely well regarded. Compare how when JK Rowling was at the height of her popularity, criticism of HP’s goblins as anti-Semitic was largely dismissed, but after her writing quality and public image took a nosedive the prior assessment started to be taken more seriously.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Nov 5th 2020 at 10:01:59 AM

Witches Remake Receives Backlash From Disability Community; Warner Bros Says It Regrets Any Offense Caused

I have mixed feeling about this; On one hand I understand the importance of representing the disability community, both physically and mentally, in the media.

But on the other hand... IT'S A FANTASY MOVIE BASED ON A CHILDREN'S BOOK!!!

Again, I get what they're trying to say, but it's not like this movie's encouraging kids that having three fingers are considered witches. Seriously, this is crap.

Every kind of story has influence, including fantasy ones. It might be extremely ubiquitous to constantly have disabled traits on villains and rarely on heroes (though if I remember correctly in the book the grandmother was missing a thumb), but that doesn’t make it right. Sometimes we want to see ourselves as other things, speaking as someone in the disability community.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Nov 5th 2020 at 12:11:36 PM

What do you mean by "other things"?

Edited by LucyVega23 on Nov 5th 2020 at 1:08:31 AM

Heroes, lead characters, characters with arcs, more interesting figures than just “oh no, the bad guy has a scar / has a Red Right Hand / is mentally ill / is in a wheelchair/ etc, aaaaaaa”. It gets pretty boring in fiction, and pretty tiring in real life because many people do base their expectations of what disability is like based on these exaggerated portrayals. One common encounter that I have is that, at work or school or at home, it’s often difficult for me to get aid for my conditions when I request it (I have autism, scoliosis, and trachea issues) because the non-disabled people I ask for help generally don’t believe me because they’re used to expecting these conditions to look far more extreme.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Nov 5th 2020 at 1:29:16 AM

Yeah I get what you mean. I also get tired of "Autism = Super Smart" trope. I have Asperger's Syndrome, meaning I have problems to socialize with people, but in movies and tv, we're portrayed like autism. I guess it's because both have similar characteristics and might be confusing, but still I wish we we're seen more than just that.

P.S. I'm so glad to have someone who I can relate to

As an autistic person, I think that it's perfectly fine to portray autistic characters as long as that's not their only character trait.

Aka don't do a Eugene from WWE. Hell the Eugene from Walking Dead was a better character.

Edited by Mizerous on Nov 5th 2020 at 8:45:18 AM

But the witches have 3 fingers trait was portrait as more like a species trait then a disability. You can't really compare those 2 together. It would be like saying any blind creatures in Scifi is offensive to the blind.

Edited by BattleRaizer on Nov 6th 2020 at 1:17:11 AM

It's not quite the same though. Disabilities as othering or signs of "evil" feel very different to those of us who actually have disabilities.

The witches are pretty similar to human, compared to random blind creatures like those monsters from A Quiet Place, and it’s specifically a plot point that the witches are masquerading as humans and can only be told apart by their hidden bodily differences, which invites comparisons to which people (disabled, racial, etc) are often associated with those traits.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Nov 6th 2020 at 1:15:09 AM

It might have worked if the three fingered hands were more clearly supernatural or something. Make'em scaled and taloned and less like people with real life conditions.

As mentioned, the monsters from A Quiet Place have pretty much zero resemblance to blind people aside from being blind.

Edited by M84 on Nov 6th 2020 at 5:21:10 PM

A more apt comparison might be the Dementors from Harry Potter, who are largely humanoid, but eyeless.

And are walking metaphor for depression basically