Go Set A Watchman
Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch -- "Scout" -- returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in a painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past -- a journey that can be guided only by one's conscience. Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor, and effortless precision -- a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context, and new meaning to an American classic. - Jacket.
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What Hacker News says
- Harper Lee eviscerates it herself in Go Set a Watchman.
However you approach her second novel, it's worth the read to understand her outlook on life in the South.
- Reminds me of Go Set a Watchman.
- How dare you question a woman's lived experience.
Not to mention the hate Harper Lee got for Go Set a Watchman showing what happened to the characters 20 years later.
- To throw a few wrenches into that:
* As evidenced by the fact that the (RGB-based) Nintendo VS. System has a different palette than later emulation releases, even at the time Nintendo wasn't sure of the "correct" RGB palette (or has since come around and changed their mind about what that should be).
* There wasn't really any sort of standard devkit. Different developers, different games, different artists used different hardware and software tools to draw their graphics. Nintendo was notoriously crappy to third-party developers during the Famicom years, and Western developers in particular had little institutional support from them. Even if you had the correct palette that Nintendo was using between 1988 and 1991, that's not necessarily what Rare was using in 1990, or what Square was using in 1987, or...
* The Famicom was released in 1983, and development on it began in 1982. There was no Amiga, no Atari ST, no X68000, no VGA, no mainstream computers really capable of general purpose graphics editing. Developers often had to come up with bespoke systems for editing graphics at the time, including bespoke hardware - and it's entirely possible these bespoke systems used a similar non-RGB design as the Famicom, or even the same PPU, or were even just editing programs on a Famicom with some kind of serial-out hacked in.
* Philosophically speaking, the artists were aware that they were producing graphics for the Famicom/NES. That is, they weren't looking at whatever RGB output they had as the definitive version, but just as a rough guideline for how the image would appear on TVs. Given that, whatever RGB the devkit might've been spitting out isn't "definitive" in the sense of how the artist intended anyone to see it.
* I don't really trust Nintendo to make any extra effort to provide an "authentic" experience in their re-releases: witness, for instance, the low quality of the N64 emulation in the Switch Online Expansion Pack they just put out. The actual people who did the art may be gone or uninvolved in the re-releases; just because they own the copyright I don't think whatever Nintendo slaps together really represents the intent of the artists themselves, in the same way that I don't think, say, the release of Go Set a Watchman says anything about the intent of Harper Lee.
- > Altering a poem is a whole different animal than editing a book or a movie, for instance.
I don’t know about that. George Lucas has managed to butcher his own movies after the fact, and newer audiences would never know.
Hundreds of thousands of people still believe that “Go Set a Watchman” is a new book as opposed to the first draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
- > The fact that it's portrayed from a white person's point of view doesn't somehow invalidate the story unless you're just anti-white.
It doesn't invalidate the story. But if you're having a conversation about race, you would probably benefit from having black perspectives. Otherwise you convey an undertone that outcomes for blacks are for white people to choose. The message we want to teach kids is deeper than racism is bad.
This is vaguely addressed in the book's pseudo sequel, go set a watchman, in which Atticus reveals a bigoted side opposing integration.
> You're projecting an opinion that people with different political opinions are just ignorant of the facts, which is itself ignorant. There are plenty of educated people who disagree with you.
I'm not saying people ignorant of facts, I'm saying they're ignorant of nuance, and I'm saying this is a large chunk of people on both sides. Hence liberal perception of racism and conservative outrage. It doesn't matter if educated people disagree with me. The fact that "the continuation of power structures that make it systematically difficult for minorities to have equal levels of opportunity" is the fundamental argument behind recent race relations conversations.
