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Assassination Classroom Manga Banned in South Carolina School District

Horry County Schools, the school district serving Horry County in South Carolina, moved to remove Yūsei Matsui's Assassination Classroom manga from its school libraries on Friday, after the mother of a ninth grader at Socastee High School complained to the district regarding the manga's content. According to the district's policy, the District Reconsideration Committee's decision "and if applicable, the local board's review" cannot be challenged for five years.

In the Assassination Classroom manga and its adaptations, a class of middle school students are tasked to assassinate their homeroom teacher (who is an apparent alien with superpowers) before it destroys Earth at the end of the school year.

Jennifer Hannigan, the mother who issued the complaint, described the manga's content, saying that the manga has numerous pages depicting "handguns, rifles, knives, and potions," and that the story "talks about killing in the pages." She added that "there's girls in lingerie hopping on top of men in the book." She also noted that the manga's characters discuss ways on how to kill their alien teacher in the story.

The books were temporarily removed from libraries in October during the review period.

Background

Gifford Middle School in eastern Florida removed the Assassination Classroom manga from its library in March 2023 after receiving complaints from groups. The Elmbrook School District in southeastern Wisconsin similarly removed the manga from its electronic library that month after a complaint by a parent. The series faced challenges in other states as well.

Utah banned 13 non-manga books from all public schools in the state in August, under a new law that bans books in all of Utah's 41 school districts if at least three districts boards ban them for pornographic or indecent material. According to the Associated Press, Tennessee, Idaho, and South Carolina have similar laws and regulations that allow books to be banned in school libraries statewide.

The Brevard Public Schools Board in Florida banned the first volume of Shō Harusono's Sasaki and Miyano boys-love manga from the district's school libraries during a board meeting on August 27 earlier this year. A person in the district challenged the book's inclusion in the schools' libraries on the grounds that "sexual orientation should not be encouraged, suggested, or implanted" in the youth. The complaint also included concerns children would be "exposed to age-inappropriate, obscene, explicit content" and that there was "no value in making homosexual books available at school." The book is rated for T for Teens.

Source: WMBF News (Ale Espinosa) via Otaku USA Magazine