leigh bardugo has massively edited and rewritten the six of crows books and no one has noticed

or has for some reason decided not to mention it at all or let anyone else know.

I just found out something insane today. in the new dregs editions that came out for the 10th anniversary, leigh bardugo has removed any and all mention of the crows being teenagers, cut out whole sentences and completely changed quotes that are classic and very well known by fans of the six of crows duology. she’s replaced any mention of words like ‘children’ ‘boy’ ‘girl’ and ‘kids’ with ‘man’ ‘woman’ ‘grown’ etc

this is concerning, bewildering and just feels wrong for so many reasons. but besides the obvious —which is that the six protagonists of the duology being young is essential to many aspects of the plot, seeing as their world weariness and competence is a result of their experiences as children and survivors who are victims of their environment—besides even that, editing a piece of literature that’s been published and on shelves for 10 years is objectively not a good idea at all, and doesn’t at all take into account the new contexts and connotations the new wording brings.

above is an example of the original scene we know verses the new version. lots of it has changed, namely their ages, but the sentence at the end in matthas' pov doesn't even sound like him at all. her writing quality has declined noticeably and she sounds like she wrote that sentence in a rush. it makes no sense, and it's not something matthias, who knows practically nothing about the barrel, would be thinking.

and not to mention the famous line 'brekker's eyes were ancient, but he couldn't be any older then matthias' — cut out of the book completely. I do wonder what impact, effect and influence these changes will have on new readers.

this is another example. such a classic line and they cut it completely.

the entire books are like this. inej saying kaz looking seventeen is changed to kaz looking like someone's apprentice. the boy of the barrel changed to man. criminal prodigy changed to just mastermind. inej described as a woman in place of a sixteen year old girl. wylan changed from boy to young man. full scenes cut. 'jesper is zemeni but don't hold it against him' changed to ‘don’t let him wax sentimental about it’ which sounds way worse then the original.

and I don't actually own the new copies of these books, my best friend was looking at them in a bookstore and that's when we first noticed all of the changes. so I truly have no idea what else could possibly be changed besides the things I noticed as I cannot look at them for reference - the crow's physical appearance, more of the plot, other famous scenes just being cut completely, etc. if nothing else has changed, then it’s still way too much and massively changes core aspects of the books. but I do wonder.
if you own the dregs special editions, I suggest looking for similar differences. I might have to write examples to express how messed up the new connotations are.

leigh now implies that jesper, an adult black man, made the right choice by handing over his share from his job to his white father to keep for you, as he cannot control himself and isn't ready to receive his own funds, as he is a mindless gambler. this is extremely different to a reckless irresponsible teenager grieving his mother and making stupid mistakes, and then deciding to make better decisions in the future with help from his parent. I'm sure you can see without me spelling it out how awful, racist and problematic the new context of jesper being a grown man makes this situation sound.

another example is matthias' childhood centrally seeing him be groomed, manipulated and indoctrinated by a nazi coded witch hunting organisation that targets grisha, an oppressed community, with the intention of torturing, burning, hanging, raping and eradicating them from the world

matthias is just turning 18 when he meets nina. he has not yet done any of these terrible things himself. he is fresh out of training and still basically a child. his views are first challenged, and he eventually breaks out of the brainwashing and mental manipulation that has been taught and instilled in him with repetition. it's not an excuse, but it's more understandable. matthias, now a grown man apparently way older then 18, has no excuse for these bigoted views as he is way more mature, has way more experience, and would have had to have done these horrific things to grisha at some point.

it feels like some sort of fever dream that six of crows was edited and re published so that these famous teenage characters (who were first written so obviously— in dialogue, actions, pov, - as teenagers) and their criminal prodigy leader were made into poorly written adults. I can put into words how much this has deeply bothered and distressed me and many other readers I've spoken to.

it's such an odd choice and makes me think it was done to soften the backlash the shadow and bone adaption received from some fans for aging up the characters in the first place.

I cannot stress this enough- leigh bardugo would edit iconic lines and change core aspects of her characters that have been around for 10 years to justify a cancelled netflix adaption of these incredibly popular and well loved books. it's odd and uncomfortable.

now, these books mean the world to me, they have quite literally got me through physical, mental and emotional childhood abuse, suicide ideation and self harm, the everyday ableism and oppression, chronic pain and disability experience, severe depression and anxiety, absolute hopelessness, work and life, etc) but the sheer absurdity of this all just outmatches my distress that it happened. it feels like some sort of hallucination becasue it's lowkey just insane. she never even mentioned she was going to do something like this?

there is just no conceivable reason for leigh bardugo to have done this secretly and quietly other then to have stopped people negatively critiquing the show or some other deeply odd notion. and with all of these changes, the new books absolutely are not the 'dregs' editions— the heart of the dregs is the young blood, 'the kids like kaz who he had brought in a organised, who worked the hardest and took the worst jobs'

they are the bad netflix adaption editions. the sympathy for terrible adult cast editions. it's troubling, clearly not a well thought out decision, and deeply bizarre. tell me others agree.

monkey

ALT

Rest in power, Miss Major 💔

Can I just say, with no pretension and full earnestness: I love writing. I love the actual act of picking up a pen and scribbling words across a page. I love seeing my words add up to passages. I love sentences and sentence structure. I love a good twist to a sentence and the exact right word choice. I love pretty words and ugly words. I love rollicking sentences and squat sentences and paragraphs that have a good smack. I love how words can have a tone. i like how words look - the actual letters on the page are art to me. I like writing about facts and I like making things up. I like writing good stories. I like writing bad stories. I could write about doing my taxes, and I would have a good time. all this to say, shout out to my homeboy(s), words. they're great

i love when something huge happens in a fandom you aren’t a part of it’s like hearing a loud eruptive cheer from the apartment next to you and you can hear the music and the sounds of the party muffled through the wall and you aren’t sure what they’re celebrating but you’re happy for them.

sorry but voltron legendary defender RULED this website for like two and a half years. you couldn’t go a day here without hearing about it. i devoted my precious high school years to its study and analysis. it was wildly popular, considered extraordinarily well-written for an animated children’s show, and revived voltron in pop culture and the public eye. and now it has been pulled from netflix (who PRODUCED IT) and the only official way to watch it is to pay for it on youtube or amazon. and that’s only the first six seasons. i’m so serious there is no legal way to watch seasons 7 and 8 of voltron. how did we even get here man

you could not BELIEVE the trenches for this show. the racism. the misogyny. the queerbaiting. they confirmed the main mentor figure as gay at the beginning of the second to last season and then killed his fiancé later in that same season. there were ship wars. there was assumed incest. your mileage varied on how much you were disappointed when they didn’t actually turn out to be brothers. there were grooming allegations made against the fictional characters in the fictional universe of this tv show for children. the ‘you know i had to do it to em’ guy got involved. the voice actors got involved. people were cancelled by 13 year olds. death threats were sent to multiple members of the production team. the red one and the blue one were frankly barely even friends by the third season. the animators went rogue. the writers felt bad that all of their teenage fans guessed every twist they wrote so they drew out conflict and added new plotlines just to keep things fresh. the main mentor guy was killed and cloned at the end of the first season and instead of acknowledging that we all knew that the writers refused to give up an inch until the end of season 6. if you believed in the “clone theory” then you were viciously attacked in some circles. the zuko-esque antihero character had an entire redemption arc that was trashed in the season finale when it was revealed that he had actually been committing systematic genocide the whole time. the single prominent female character was never once given an interesting character arc and was shoehorned into a romance in the last season. and then she died. one of the most popular fanfictions on ao3 was taken down and replaced with the script for the bee movie. it was awful. it was glorious. it was truly mediocre. it was the greatest wasted potential in a television series maybe ever. and it’s gone. there is no legal way to witness the entire thing anymore. there aren’t even dvds of the last two seasons. it’s just over.

the first thing about rpf to understand is that it is ultimately fiction and we will never understand the true inner workings of the lives of celebrities because there is always going to be a veil of performance clouding the way we perceive them. the second thing about rpf to understand is that it’s always true + real and it happened exactly as i imagine it in my mind