This Week in Anime

Banned Together

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

What is Australia if not the Florida of Earth?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.