This interesting (and I might personally add destructive) thing is happening in the romance genre where authors are going back and doctoring up all their prose

This interesting (and I might personally add destructive) thing is happening in the romance genre where authors are going back and doctoring up all their prose from the 90s and 00s to address "consent issues" as the current cultural zeitgeist understands consent. It's not that I'm not okay with people's definition of consent changing and with writing new works to be acceptable under the new definition. And I even quite like well-integrated examples of affirmative consent in romantic literature, because a good author can weave it in ever so subtly and naturally when working with a blank slate. But this need to go back and "fix" the older works really kills me. If I could buy the older edition from the publisher that would be one thing, but in the age of digital publishing the new edition just clobbers the older ones, sometimes forcibly in your library or collection. I think there's value to being able to read literature from the 90s and understand what that time period was like, culturally. Or even works set historically back in previous centuries. I think it's important to be able to read old works and critique them, etc. I would even go as far as to say that it's okay to write modern works that lack strict adherence to affirmative consent so that they can be critiqued regardless (this might make them unpopular to the masses as pleasure reading, but it makes them interesting as social commentary). It really breaks the illusion for me when you're reading a scene from an older work and you encounter a section that was clearly doctored, or which just doesn't fit with the time period the story is set in. It's just not realistic in any way and I don't think it benefits the catalog of writing we have today to expect that authors go back and "fix" their work from 20 years ago that's suddenly become controversial by today's standards.