That negative public response came from all sides of the political spectrum, of course. If this hypothesis is accurate, it seems as if the problem might have been that the publisher uncritically accepted the hostile framing of "woke." Turns out it's not actually about censorship.

> more like

Based on what?

Honestly, more like a malicious compliance way of doing it; designed to generate that backfire and aim atleast part of the blast at the "wokies" or whatever bullshit term you want to label non-conservatives.

As I said on reddit about this:

Warner Bros. have done fine with the pre-amble to their older cartoons that says something to the effect of "yo, this was written back when attitudes were different, they were shitty attitudes, but to erase them is to pretend it never happened."

A similar preface in the books would have worked much better, but wouldn't give you any amount of PR like this.