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Censorship (in my opinion) has a time and a place. And it should always be a choice, never forced on you. This is an extremely controversial topic that seems to
by umvi 7y ago
Censorship (in my opinion) has a time and a place. And it should always be a choice, never forced on you. This is an extremely controversial topic that seems to get a lot of people's emotions running hot, so please try and counter that before responding. In my opinion, censorship of media is a personal preference akin to food aversions. Picking the mushrooms out of a chef's dish isn't censorship, nor an insult to his art. It's personal preference.
For example, GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire series has a great story with tons of intrigue, but it is marred (in my opinion, don't all jump on me), by an over-reliance on sex jokes, explicit sex scenes, and extremely explicit violence/gore.
It turns out, you can tone down that stuff (using Calibre) and it makes the book so much better, (again, in my opinion) without losing anything of value. The story is still perfectly in tact, but now more stuff is left to the imagination (implicit instead of explicit). Instead of being described in great detail how a corpse is rotting in a cage and how the maggots are eating the various sex organs, it's now just a decaying corpse in a cage.
Same for movies. I enjoy watching censored (TV edited) movies with my teenagers, like "The Matrix".
- saagarjha 7y agoDo your teenagers prefer watching the censored version?
- oefnak 7y agoHow can you tone that down?
- umvi 7y agoMainly by deleting explicit extraneous details so that more is left to the imagination. "There was another dead man beyond the old one, a big red-bearded man with a rotting grey bandage covering his left ear and part of his temple. But the worst thing was between his legs, where nothing remained but a crusted brown hole crawling with maggots." becomes "There was another dead man beyond the old one, a big red-bearded man with a rotting grey bandage covering his left ear and part of his temple." I personally find explicit gore like that revolting, and I also don't like reading explicit descriptions of sex organs and/or act of sex so I deleted them. I remove the explicit descriptions of the sex organs and act of sex, while leaving it clear that the characters are sleeping together.
- mtrower 7y agoI suppose it depends on what you consider valuable. Some details will matter more to some people than others. Essentially, those details you're removing are flavor. Alright, so you don't like the particular flavor here. I'm not going to tell you that you should. There's a certain level of gratuity beyond which I lose appreciation as well. For my part though, I want the experience as envisioned by the author. If I don't like it, I'd rather avoid the content entirely, rather than censor it. This is because, to me, it's all interconnected --- the primary plot, the flavor, all the little details --- everything. I guess I'm a purist. I'm also not the type to pick ingredients out of a dish. If you want to modify content for your personal consumption though, well, I don't see the harm in that. As you say, it's a personal choice.