Forum - View topicINTEREST: Animate International Announces Omission of 1st Story in The World's End BL Manga English
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MagicPolly
 Posts: 1623 |
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Since the story's a one shot I decided to read through a scanlation to see what exactly doesn't meet their editorial standards. Sorry for the massive block of text, I'm not exactly the best at concise summaries.
spoiler[Essentially, the story is about a forest demon who rescues an abandoned human baby and chooses to raise it on his own while taking a human form named Magnolia (this all happens before the events of the story). As the child (named Emil) grows up, obviously puberty happens. There's a strange segment where Emil has a wet dream about an older version of him having sex with Magnolia. Then there's a timeskip to when the Emil is now an adult. He continues to have wet dreams about having sex with Magnolia. He wakes up one night and admits his feelings to the Magnolia, and asks him to refuse so that he can move on. The Magnolia instead accepts his feelings and there's a sex scene that isn't a dream. When Emil wakes up, he looks out the window to see Magnolia walking into the forest (it is established before that neither of them leave the clearing, and demons live in the forest who kidnap children (Emil is not aware Magnolia is a demon)). Emil follows him through the forest to find him kneeling in a cemetery. Magnolia reprimands him for going into the forest, and shows him the bones in the coffins. Emil runs away. There's then a flashback to Magnolia finding the baby Emil. Later on, as Emil is running through a village an old woman recognizes a birthmark on his neck. This is his mother. There's then a flashback to Emil's childhood, which shows him walking into the forest and meeting Magnolia (but this time he's a young child rather than a baby). A montage of scenes are shown with Emil and Magnolia living together with Emil growing old due to being a human. It's then revealed that the "first Emil" cast a curse on himself that no matter how many times he was reborn, he would always be drawn to Magnolia so that he wouldn't be alone. That cemetery was full of the previous Emils. Emil tries to go back into the forest after realizing the truth, but his mother stops him since the demon hunters are about to burn it down. Magnolia watches as the forest burns down, knowing he'll lose his powers since they're linked to the forest. Emil finds him in the burning forest, and Magnolia tells him that the curse has been removed and they can no longer live together forever. Emil asserts that this is better, since they now have the same lifespan and can grow old and die together. They embrace, and the story ends] It's a pretty ok story, confusing as you're reading it but it all makes sense in the end. For a one shot, it does a pretty good job of establishing characters and relationships. So here's my theory on why it was removed: spoiler[I'd say most likely that the caretaker relationship could be considered grooming, since Emil is raised and falls in love all over again in each of his lifetimes. I'm not really sure if it's THAT bad that it warrants the removal of the entire story from the collection. I was expecting something more like massive explicit noncon or pedophilia or the like. There's only 3 sexual scenes, two of them are 1 page wet dreams and the other is only like 3-4 pages long and not very explicit.] Can't say I can justify them removing it, though at least they're being upfront about it before release and lowering the price because of it coughsevenseascough. I won't be picking it up though. |
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wolf10
 Posts: 928 |
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I've also read this particular story, and it's beautiful. Its removal is a definite loss for this collection.
BL has ever been a tool for exploring "abnormal" romance and sexuality. often exploring relationships that would break the mold of "traditional" romance even if they weren't between two men. At the same time, it's precisely because these atypical relationships are between two men that their stories can depict love that exists for its own sake, free from the usual biases present in stories about love between men and women. When you spend a long enough time with the genre, nothing really surprises you anymore, and you start to become accepting of just about anything. That's probably my most affirming take on BL ever, but at the end of the day lots of people simply aren't that accepting. The publisher may have been afraid of negative press, but they've certainly gotten it now. As I'd never even heard of Animate International before now, that may have been the point. |
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AmpersandsUnited
Posts: 633 |
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That's more than likely the reason given some of the responses I've seen in the west for series like Higehiro, Usagi Drop, and Ancient Magus Bride with similar themes. |
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MagicPolly
Posts: 1623 |
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Yeah that's the ironic thing, they removed the story to avoid backlash but there probably would have been far less backlash from the people who would dislike the story than the people disliking the random censorship. As you said BL is strange and we put up with a lot of weird things. I honestly didn't really get weirder out by the premise, it was more I figured that was the reason why they removed it. (Side note, but I reread it less analytical as to why it got censored and I agree, it's actually really great) I don't think a publisher going "We censor things!!" falls under "all press is good press" though, since they've turned me off from them despite not knowing they existed before now either. |
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harminia
 Posts: 2046 Location: australia |
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Yeah, definitely odd to remove stuff from a BL collection. The people reading this would already know BL and have seen much worse.
I can understand the hesitation due to some of the themes/contents of the story based on MagicPolly's summary, but this isn't really a collection some random, easily offended person would buy imo |
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