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NEWS: Assassination Classroom Manga Removed From Florida, Wisconsin School Libraries

Quote:

a class of middle school students are tasked to assassinate their homeroom teacher (who is really an alien with superpowers) before it destroys Earth at the end of the school year.

spoiler[Wrong. He is not an alien.]

Moderator: Spoiler put under spoiler tags

Considering that there's been 21 school shootings in the United States in 2023, and we're only halfway through April, I can understand why they would want to pull a series which has a plot that centers around students trying to kill their homeroom teacher.

Frankly, I'm surprised that they even allowed such a series to be in a middle school in the first place.

This is another important bit of context. The manga was written for an audience that has a much more limited access to firearms, so the chance that some kid that "doesn't get it" would choose to act out the story and be remotely successful is almost non-existent. Meanwhile, as I'm writing this, the news is breaking about 4 people shot dead, several others injured, at a birthday party in Alabama. Maybe having middle schoolers exposed to a story that, at best, treats attempted murder for hire as an aside, might not be be greatest strategy. As I alluded to in my other post, it's not as simplistic an issue as many would like it to be. Remove the political posturing and you reveal a complex problem that doesn't have clear-cut, actionable, solutions. As far as reasonableness goes, this is a reasonable decision by the school.

Most of the anti-anime rhetoric comes from the left these days because Japanese media is often seen as problematic. Japanese creators and their media often get called racist, sexist, nationalist, pedophilic, and similar -isms for their different values and content in media. It wasn't conservatives making all those outrage articles about Final Fantasy 16 not caring about diversity. Usually conservatives only get mad when there's a titty or something in a manga in a public school, or something like this. In the 90s it might have been true when they had enough power to do the Satanic Panic stuff with Pokemon, but these days the cultural space has shifted in America quite a lot.

Considering that there's been 21 school shootings in the United States in 2023, and we're only halfway through April, I can understand why they would want to pull a series which has a plot that centers around students trying to kill their homeroom teacher.

The manga was written for an audience that has a much more limited access to firearms, so the chance that some kid that "doesn't get it" would choose to act out the story and be remotely successful is almost non-existent. Meanwhile, as I'm writing this, the news is breaking about 4 people shot dead, several others injured, at a birthday party in Alabama. Maybe having middle schoolers exposed to a story that, at best, treats attempted murder for hire as an aside, might not be be greatest strategy.

This is flawed logic because plenty of parents think Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss are too macabre, racist, or encouraging of hopping on dads (yes, an actual complaint) for a school library. I don't agree with removing those books either; however, collection development is something best left up to the librarians and not parents who aren't involved enough in their child's life to know what they're reading. There are multiple legitimate purposes for acquiring Assassination Classroom for a middle school within collection development policies.

There are guns all throughout the school curriculum; even before getting into specific books studied, they cover Lincoln's assassination and several historical wars in grade school. When I was in 7th grade our teacher read to us aloud a trilogy of books which included a school shooting as a major plot point in the last book. I'm sure these very school libraries have other books, historical or contemporary fiction, that contain gun violence.

You can't strip any reference to guns (even special ones that only blast through tentacles) out of a school or school library, it's an impossible task. And that's the core issue behind these book censorship attempts - they want to pretend to students that guns, sexuality, racism, etc. don't exist, when a lot of them are facing those issues in real life head-on.

The Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss situations are not about them bring removed from schools. Schools can remove whatever they want as far as I'm concerned since it's their facility at the end of the day and they're in charge of it, even if I disagree with them or their reasoning. The Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss situation is about the rights holders and publishers themselves refusing to allow them to be released at all anymore or released with many posthumous edits to an author's work for modern human consumption. They have told you that if you want to read Matilda or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory then you're out of luck because they have deemed the book uses unacceptable words and language and must be edited for modern public consumption. It's not about parents deciding what's right for a child, it's about one grown adult playing moral guardian to another grown adult. Imagine Hollywood coming out and saying watching Blazing Saddles is no longer acceptable because it deals with uncomfortable themes and uses bad language. All future physical copies and official streams of the film will be the new altered version with dubbed over dialog and some scenes cut. Not a practice we want big publishing to continue.

Schools can remove whatever they want as far as I'm concerned since it's their facility at the end of the day and they're in charge of it, even if I disagree with them or their reasoning.

The Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss situation is about the rights holders and publishers themselves refusing to allow them to be released at all anymore or released with many posthumous edits to an author's work for modern human consumption.

They did a whole episode of Gargoyles about it where Broadway accidently shoots Eliza after watching a cowboy movie and being an idiot. Kids are pretty dumb. Also the particular scene of a bunch of students shooting up their teacher is probably in poor taste in America compared to other countries.

If the manga was actually being pulled from publication and removed like Rurouni Kenshin was then I could understand people being upset. But this seems no different than a parent not letting their kid watch a movie with a higher rating than they want their child to see, or getting mad your teacher isn't willing to play an R rated movie in class.

Regardless, to call this censorship is inaccurate. An individual school or library choosing not carrying a book does not qualify as censorship. They are under no obligator to host or platform any piece of media they personally find abhorrent or even distasteful.

lol It's the literal definition of censorship:

As for my own personal feelings, normally I am more of a mind to not wrap kids in bubble wrap and try and stop them from reading things that might offend someone. In this case the manga is honestly not aimed at kids of middle school age here in the US. I think this would be fine in a High School school library. While we can debate the accuracy of the age rating system for material, at the end of the day this does have a 16+ rating here. If it was in a high school they'd at least have a leg to stand on arguing why to keep it.