Banned Together – This Week in Anime

senpai September 6, 2024

0 1 9 minutes read

Demonizing comics hasn’t gone out of style since 1954. Nick and Steve discuss the most recent round of bans of such horrifying series as Sasaki and Miyano to look at what book bans mean for manga today.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of Sasaki and Miyano, Chainsaw Man, and How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord.

Nick

Alright, Steve, it’s time we talked about something important. Something that matters. Something controversial. We’re talking about MANGA BANS and I say we start with the big debate. I think Ban from Witch Watch is the best Ban, but Ban from The Seven Deadly Sins does have an edge with his certified slutty costume.

Steve

Sorry, Nick, while I wish we could talk more about the fun kind of Ban (and that’s quite a good jean skirt on the first example there), unfortunately, the topic du jour is a much more severe type. I’m talking about the bans they’ve got cooking down in Florida. And no, not the Ray-Bans either. The even worse kind.

Are you sure we can’t trick the editorial into letting us talk about the good Bans? I had a whole thing about how genius giving the dragon girl failure a thigh flask was.

I’m sure we can work something out. One of those “one for them, one for me” deals. Like, this week, we definitively solve the concentrated conservative effort to slap literary blinders on every single child in this country, and next week we can talk about thigh accessories.

Fine, let’s make it like Dabo Swinney and head down to the swamp. As if I don’t get enough of Florida just living in this humid affront to God.

So this is a pretty new story, but if you’ve been anywhere on the anime internet recently, you’ve probably already seen people talking about it. A school board in Brevard County, Florida just voted to ban, among other things, the first volume of Sasaki and Miyano. If you’re unfamiliar with the manga, you can read Rebecca’s review here to inure yourself to its salaciousness.

As somebody who reviewed the anime, there is genuinely nothing funnier than seeing the feigned pearl-clutching over this series of all the potential BL titles they could have picked. I like SasaMiya a lot but there are episodes of Teletubbies that have more sexually explicit sequences than that first volume. This is the spiciest thing you’re gonna get until volume four.

This issue isn’t just about manga. Another news story dropped this week about major publishers banding together to sue the state of Florida over its recent ban-happy tendencies. And of course, book banning has become one of many lightning rods for conservative punditry, with Ron DeSantis happily waging that culture war during his failed presidential bid.
But the Sasaki and Miyano inclusion helps highlight how dumb, polarized, and removed from reality things have gotten.

It’s one of those examples that is so obvious in its capriciousness that all the usual excuses stop applying. This is a slow-burn friends-to-boyfriends romance that takes an entire season of television for the leads to kiss, let alone do anything even approaching sexually explicit. The only reason to target it specifically is homophobia, as even the official complaint from the school board members admits.

It’s bigotry, plain and simple. And if you need any more proof that this particular complaint (shared on Twitter by Jennifer Jenkins) was not lodged in good faith, look at their suggestions for the alternative manga, which includes the family-friendly antics of Chainsaw Man and the notoriously heterosexual cast of Sailor Moon.

Good ol’ wholesome Chainsaw Man. A series with nothing even remotely explicit in its pages. We didn’t have a whole other annoying argument about that exact series just a few months back, no siree.

The absurdity is no doubt the point. At the center of this debacle is Florida House Bill 1069 (not nice), which allows a SINGLE complaint by a parent to result in a ban. There’s no vetting. There’s no rigor. It’s all vibes, and if one person decides a book is too gay for their child to read, that’s all the justification the state of Florida needs. Moreover, this school board doesn’t seem too keen on things being read right to left either.
Insert a political compass joke here.

That’s Florida, baby. It’s a blatantly open-ended law designed to allow anyone and everyone to remove anything they dislike for baldly spurious reasons. This is why a BL manga ends up in the same restricted section as historically censored tomes as Slaughterhouse-Five and The Color Purple. It’s as absurd as it is stupid.

The age and pedigree of its censored kin there also tell us that this dumb battle has been waged for decades on “behalf” of schoolkids (and for centuries if we were to look at the full history of literary censorship). The “won’t somebody think of the children” argument is so old and specious that my earliest memory of it is The Simpsons‘ lampooning.

We have to protect the younglings from knowing that anime exists. Otherwise, they’ll end up obsessed with Nagito Komaeda or some other character from a decade ago that’s still popular on TikTok.

You might have a point there. The recent Brazilian/multicultural Miku trend on Twitter showed me how much the youth yearn for Hetalia, and you could certainly argue that we have a moral duty to prevent the next generation from repeating our mistakes.

You make a good point that this is far from the first time there have been anime-related media bans, and it’s not confined to this specific patch of the sunken, forgotten cesspit we call Florida. Australia, for instance, also has a ratings board that likes to play fast and loose with their calls.

What is Australia if not the Florida of Earth?

There will be so many Aussies snarling over their vegemite and fairy bread when they read that.

Just calling it like I see it, mates. However, if we look at the whole spectrum of manga bans in Florida, Australia, and beyond, it’s not all as squeaky clean as Sasaki and Miyano. I’m vehemently anti-censorship, but I can understand how a classification board might look at No Game, No Life and raise a couple of eyebrows.

Admittedly, it’s a bit harder to argue the artistic merit of a show where we get a perspective shot from the inside of a catgirl’s butthole.

Still, though, there’s something to be said about the often inscrutable and unchallengeable declarations of ratings entities like this. I’m not saying there’s an easy answer to how we age-gate and materialize as a global culture, but it’s always frustrating when the black box spits out a decree with no explanation.

There’s real power to be abused there, and that’s why, to get specific, I’m wary of any “cut-and-dried” declarations of sexual deviancy in art and literature. Not only is that subjective, but it’s often subject to the most regressive ideas of the people in power. If a school board thinks homosexuality is immoral, then any expression of it, no matter how fluffy or wholesome, is going to be treated like it’s depraved pornography. That’s the point of going after titles like Sasaki and Miyano. They want every iota of queerness stamped out.

It’s equally frustrating because there should probably be regulations like age ratings. If for no other reason than some stuff, no matter how you judge its artistic merit, isn’t going to make sense to younger kids. I am not advocating for 7-year-olds to read Rosario + Vampire. They need to be old enough to go through their goth phase before they’re ready. Yet any set of standards is liable to be abused by bad actors to some degree.

And when there are sensible ratings and regulations, certain people and parents will still complain that they aren’t sufficient. Like, here’s an old story about a dad who yelled at a library because his son found his way into the marked 18+ section. This is also a cliche, but some people will go to incredible lengths to avoid parenting their children.

The thing about rules is that kids and teens love to break them. Especially these days, where all but the strictest of parental controls on phones and computers can’t prevent the youth from seeing stuff they know they’re not supposed to.

I’m not a parent myself, so I’m not going to pretend to understand everything that goes into raising a child in the modern world. It seems daunting as hell. But I think the answer, more often than not, is going to lie in open dialogues. You can’t shield your kids’ eyes from everything, and there’s lots of stuff you shouldn’t shield them from. If I had a kid, I would hope they could read something like Sasaki and Miyano and learn, question, and grow thanks to it. That’s the kind of book we should be encouraging kids to read, not yanking it away from them.

Like many problems in America, the core culprit is a political class of ultraconservatives and their constituents, and their end goal is a Christian theocratic state that conforms precisely to their prejudices, all other beliefs and perspectives be damned. What’s happening in Florida is just a pilot program for what they want out of every other state. They want even the slightest expression of gender or sexual diversity to be equated with grooming and pedophilia. That’s why we can’t have measured debates about the merits of sensible rating systems. The well is so thoroughly poisoned as to be blatantly ridiculous to anybody with half a brain and/or heart. Yet here we are.

That sure is depressing to think about. Would be nice if we could talk about the dragon lady instead.

If these school boards are going to take issue with a manga about two cute boys exchanging multiple volumes’ worth of furtive glances, then there’s nothing stopping their gaze from swinging to drunk dragon damsels in dolphin shorts. Parents wanted to ban even Dragon Ball. Nobody is safe.

That one at least makes a little more sense, in that standards for sexual humor are pretty different between the US and Japan. I don’t agree with removing it, but I can imagine a reasonable parent seeing their 8-year-old reading gags about Roshi seeing Bulma’s vulva, and being scandalized.

There are dialogues worth having, but hardly any space to have them in. And, just so this column isn’t wholly doom and gloom, people are fighting the good fight. Librarians, despite their place of employment, aren’t the type to go down quietly. Some parents and activists care about their children’s education more than clutching pearls. And the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has an ongoing history of upholding creators’ First Amendment rights in court.

That’s certainly a good thing! Activism against this kind of garbage is an important bulwark. At the same time, I think it’s also important for people to put more thought into the larger ramifications of how we discuss and disseminate art. To take it back to Chainsaw Man, amid the outcry over Asa and Denji’s Back-Alley Adventures, it was pretty off-putting how many people who were ostensibly on the side of responsible sexuality in media were parroting the arguments of the people insisting anime boys holding hands needs to stay in the bedroom and out of sight.

Similarly—and this is hardly a new debate either—arguments about the “right” kind of queer representation in media only serve the whims of people who want to eliminate that representation. There’s room for wholesome stories and there’s room for depraved ones. Both have value and appropriate contexts, and both benefit from the existence of the other. What one person finds disgusting, another might find illuminating or even life-saving. We all have to be cognizant of our inner cop.

Also, in case anyone thinks this is a “Western” issue, it’s pretty universal. In the same way, we get dumb arguments about banning The Bluest Eye, and Japanese school districts get weird scandals about banning certified classics like Barefoot Gen for equally spurious reasons.

As a rule of thumb, I don’t think any elected politician should be telling anyone what they can or can’t read. They didn’t go to school for that. I went to school for that. I have an English degree. Just ask me instead.

That’s another thing too – we have got to, for the love of god, stop acting like people not liking something is the same as calling for censorship. I can think that No Game, No Life is garbage and never want to see another second or read another sentence of it but that doesn’t mean I want it to stop existing.

We are stalwart defenders of the anime industry’s right to churn out new isekai slurry every season. That’s what gets us our clicks on this column, after all. Everything has its purpose.

I mean at some point shutting down the Isekai Pipeline is more like sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure, but this probably isn’t the column for that discussion.

True. I imagine DeSantis has already dispatched his cronies to your home anyway. You should get all your deviant anime contraband to a safe house, and we can reconvene next week to talk about ecoterrorism and/or leggy dragon ladies.

Don’t worry, we can kill 2 birds with one stone with our new recruit.