This Week in Anime

Viewer Discretion is Advised

Recent cuts to Macross Dynamite 7 give Chris and Coop a chance to talk about trusting viewers to make their own choices about what's comfortable for them to watch.

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 the series ahead.

CONTENT WARNING: This edition of This Week in Anime features a discussion of titles that contain sexual violence, child death, domestic violence, and other potentially upsetting subject matter. Reader discretion is advised.

Full Disclosure: Coop Bicknell regularly works with Discotek Media & MediaOCD, having provided the back of box copy for their recent release of Kite. His opinions given here are purely his own and do not reflect those of his employers.

Macross Dynamite 7 (with edits), and Blue Velvet are streaming on Hulu.
DAN DA DAN, How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord, Symphogear, Black Lagoon, and Gunbuster are streaming on Crunchyroll.
Flowers of Evil is streaming on HIDIVE.
End of Evangelion is streaming on Netflix.
Revolutionary Girl Utena is streaming on YouTube (Nozomi Entertainment.)
Kite is streaming on RetroCrush.
Birdy the Mighty: Decode, Royal Space Force, and Kite are distributed as physical media that might be out of print.

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Among Macross fans, the now-excised scenes have long been a point of contention around Dynamite 7. As one of those longtime fans, I see this OVA as the highest high and the lowest low of the entire Macross 7 experience. Basara singing with the space whales is one of the greatest moments in Macross period.

However, the aforementioned scenes of sexual violence make for a huge bump in the road on the way to that moment. It's easy to say "Just cut it out, it's out of place anyway," but once a work is seemingly edited for palatability (without the original version legally available), it starts raising more than a few concerning questions. Who's doing the cutting? Why are they cutting? And will this lead to a troubling trend of erasing history? (Even if said history is hard to face.)

This was the question at the center of discussion over Macross Dynamite 7 the past week or so. It's compoundingly troublesome since, as of this writing, we aren't sure precisely where these edits came from, as they affect some (but not all!) of the current Japanese release options as well. On some level, I can grasp the knee-jerk reaction some fans had in favor of removing this unsavory material. I may be unfamiliar with Macross, but as a longtime anime fan, I know the feeling of having some less agreeable elements swerving into your faves.

We have spent the past couple of weeks talking about topics such as family-friendly incest and jubilant jiggle physics, but the realities of storytelling mean that sometimes the shenanigans are cruel and tragic, rather than cheeky and fun.

As someone who initially had that knee-jerk reaction, it's important to step back and realize the further implications of an editing choice like this. Whether it's in a work of fiction or real life, things can't just be easily edited away after the fact. Not to mention that it's a total insult to simply act like something horrendous never happened.

This week, let's talk about some of our favorites that merit a heads-up for one reason or another. From there, you can decide for yourself if any of our suggestions are something you want to check out—not the platform you're streaming it on.

It feels like being "Good...with an asterisk or two" is a reputation that can follow a lot of anime. And to be sure, as a certified lover of Weird, Messy Stuff™, that tends to define a lot of my faves. I can't exactly recommend How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord without a list of qualifiers the length of a CVS receipt.

But like, horny isekai light novel adaptations are one thing. It's another when even more mainstream stuff like a hot Shonen Jump adaptation streaming on Netflix hits you with That One Part, yet that's exactly what happened with last year's deserved darling DAN DA DAN.

Yeah, I think that's what kicked it off into egregious for me. The instance in the first episode seems like it ought to be a singular happening, leveling off as DAN DA DAN does into a story of twee teenage love and Ultraman-inspired action, with lots of layers in between. Except, then there it is again, cutting off on a cliffhanger of Momo's fate, no less, leaving us as the ending note of the season.

Do I think it leaves enough bad taste that I'd want it excised? Not really, given that it's part of the whole of Yukinobu Tatsu's decisions around crafting DAN DA DAN. But I won't deny that it definitely could have been deployed and framed more sensitively in the anime's structure, and I certainly don't begrudge anybody who peaces out of watching the series on account of it.

This belies the importance of bringing up these points when recommending these shows to others—that "heads up" you mentioned. It's what's also colloquially known as a "content warning," and is just common courtesy anytime you tell someone about an otherwise cool thing. Even if you normally block it out yourself.

Even I forget about stuff like the sexualized lesbian torture in the first season of Symphogear when I'm talking the series up to people a lot of the time. The franchise moved so far beyond that over five seasons.

It can be easy to forget if you haven't watched the show in a while. While revisiting Birdy the Mighty: Decode last year, I had to remind myself that the second season contains more than one grisly instance of on-screen child death. It's hard to stomach (for the viewer and the cast), but it's also connected to the point the series is trying to drive home: revenge is not going to make things better, it's just going to perpetuate another cycle of violence.

After that rewatch, I'd do my best to remember that "heads up."

That's the thing! Yeah, some examples like DAN DA DAN and Symphogear can be schlocky, but there are a lot of cases where content-warning-worthy works have such stuff in service of some more serious points.

Some can even do both. Speaking of child murder, I'd be remiss not to bring up one of my favorite anime, Black Lagoon and its Hansel and Gretel arc, a storyline that is a screaming neon "heads up" in a series that already merits that warning enough regularly.

And on the topic of screaming neon signs, discomfort is the entire point of The Flowers of Evil. A kid makes a stupid decision and a classmate swoops in to make things even worse through physical violence, verbal abuse, and sexual violence. The series is intentionally intense, but through that, it's able to tackle these sensitive topics that are rarely given any attention.

The Flowers of Evil asks its viewers to take a good long look into the dark and see what they can pull from it. But it's up to those viewers if they want to peer in. Some folks, like myself on occasion, can feel a sense of catharsis from coming out the other end of that dark tunnel. A classic example of this feeling for me is The End of Evangelion. As a whole, I'd recommend only approaching Eva when you're in a good headspace... Not to mention that whole bit about Shinji being "the lowest of the low."

By the time you get to that point, at least, you've been put through the wringer by Evangelion the series enough that you won't be too shocked to see it coming.

The End of Evangelion and The Flowers of Evil are also favorites of mine, and the visceral flair with which those wield their discomfort is a huge part of that. Unlike the attempted sexual assault in the first episode of DAN DA DAN, the illicit acts in The End of Evangelion and The Flowers of Evil aren't something viewers might be able to push past—they're integral to the story being told. Stuff like that is honestly why I love material like these and Black Lagoon's "Bloodsport Fairytale," in that they're inducing discomfort in service of the breadth of their emotional storytelling. Even if they're pretty far apart in terms of some of them being a weighted blanket of the dread of the darkest human impulses, while another is a theatrical tragedy of lovable child abuse twins.

Man, I am never escaping the incest in this column, am I?

I think that last column might've sealed your fate. On the same wavelength: through his art, the legendary David Lynch put a microscope up to the ugliest side of the human experience. Blue Velvet wouldn't hit as hard if there wasn't an inherent truth at its center—darkness lurks where you least expected, even in a seemingly idyllic small town.

Twin Peaks, Mulholland Dr., and his other work strike that chord, and force us to face things we never wanted to face. Without the inspiration drawn from Lynch's work, there are many hard-hitting anime classics we wouldn't have.

A damn fine anime, by all accounts. The lingering sense of dread that permeates Revolutionary Girl Utena wouldn't be around without it. Utena's director, Kunihiko Ikuhara, is purportedly a huge fan of Lynch's work, so it makes sense that the same unease is implied to be happening just off-frame. Utena is often couched in absurdity, but then hits you with a gut punch when you least expect it.

The key focus in the series' Student Council Saga is how our lead and the audience slowly realize that Utena is the only person who has ever treated Anthy as a person. It's deeply focused on abusive relationships, as evidenced by the first time we met Anthy, who is being slapped around by her supposed boyfriend. I've been given a warning that things intensify throughout the series, so I know there's more to have my guard up for. Thank you for the heads up all!

Given how foundational Utena is, it's good to have those alerts up for those who continue to check it out. It's a classic I still need to make time for. I understand that its themes require depicting hard-to-stomach things. This also goes for entries where those unsavory parts aren't as intricately interwoven as in Utena, but I feel are nonetheless indisposable.

Yeah, watching Coach smack Kazumi (his former student with whom he's in a romantic relationship, by the way) in Gunbuster is rough. But it's a key, crashing moment in the cacophony of everything piled up to this point, and the triumph that comes after, that I'd never consider asking it to be cut for comfort's sake.

I agree! In preparation for this column, I found myself thinking a lot about another Gainax classic—Royal Space Force - The Wings of Honnêamise. The infamous scene of attempted sexual assault, though uncomfortable, actually touches on a key element of the film that is often overlooked. The film's introduction to the titular space force makes it clear that most of these characters, including Shirotsugh, are dirtbags to one degree or another. Even if the film doesn't fully consider these themes, the fact that he's become something a celebrity by that point in the film also raises natural questions about how he uses that status.

But as it was presented by Manga UK back in the day, this scene was removed to perhaps focus on the film's primary message regarding the power of the human spirit. It's a hard-to-stomach scene, but the film should be presented as it was originally intended to be—problematic warts and all.

I think this screenshot from the film is oddly relevant to the conversation. Don't meddle with what's already there.

Royal Space Force was arguably the poster child for this problem in the otaku community for ages, hence the arguments from some that it's better with the offending scene edited out. I agree with your take, though, especially as Wings of Honneamise thrives on feeling like a story about a real society of real people even within its wildly imaginative fantastical setting. To remove the scene would be to sand down those human edges, and trying to make things more likable would make me like it all less, if that makes any sense.

This brings us back to where we started, though, and the point that other anime have received the treatment that recently befell Macross Dynamite 7. And while Royal Space Force is one of the infamous examples of That One Part needing a heads-up in an anime, I don't know that it's the most well-known for getting the troublesome bits edited out by its licensor.

Kite, and its successor Yasuomi Umetsu production Mezzo Forte, occupy an interesting angle in this conundrum as well. The story goes that the extremely explicit scenes of sexual violence were a mandate for the production that wasn't necessarily part of the original vision. While Media Blasters opting to edit them out for (some of) their releases arguably fall under the kind of meddling that was applied to Dynamite 7, there's an alternative argument that the non-porny versions are closer to what they should have been in the first place.

All that said, while I think it's agreeable that the sex scenes in Mezzo Forte are pretty clearly post-hoc insertions that can be cut more cleanly, the darker sexual stuff of Kite is a bit more interwoven. At least on the Media Blasters cut I watched back in the day, some of the edit-arounds can be pretty awkward.

Content warnings and affiliation disclaimers, we're getting all the asterisks in tonight. Not to go too hard on feeling like we're shilling for the Discotek release, but that does take what's probably the best route available in this situation: bundling all the available cuts, explicit and otherwise, of Kite available for audiences to choose.

Whether those cuts were right at the time is past tense, but now at least they're there for those who are interested in the film but can't stomach the more extreme material. And perhaps more importantly, the original uncut version is wholly available alongside the edits.

This reminds me... While grabbing screenshots and preparing for this column, I realized that most of the titles I brought up tonight are either on Blu-ray or an ancient DVD I have. In cases like Birdy the Mighty: Decode and Honneamise, the discs are long out of print.

Thanks to these old discs, these titles are presented as originally intended—even if they're not legally available anymore.

It's an awkward situation, rendering these anime as not so much lost media, but "harder to discover" media. That's one of the things that sting so much about this even more awkward situation with Macross Dynamite 7 (alongside the fact that a distributor censoring an anime like this in 2025 is just playing to bad-faith interpretations for some of the worst people out there). People had been waiting forever for this franchise to arrive on our shores so they could watch it and watch others discover it. Now the version released has made a choice for them about how it should be watched.

Would Dynamite 7 have turned away more people with its iffier bits intact? Maybe, but that's a consequence of presenting something in its originally intended form. To say nothing of how the dustup of this story is going to overshadow its streaming release regardless now.

Unfortunately, we'll have to see how it plays out. From what I can tell, initial thoughts from Macross fans seem to follow this line of thinking: "We should've been given a choice as to what version WE want to watch, but that nothing integral or important was lost." As for me, I hope they include both versions in a future home video release so the choice is put back in the audience's hands. After they finish watching all that other Macross 7 first—52 episodes and a movie! Get jumping on that planet dance!

There's a lot of anime to watch, and wanting to watch it uncut means it's not getting any shorter. Just remember, you can make your own choices about what you can and can't stomach, and be sure to give your friends a healthy heads-up with your recommendations when necessary.

Using the buddy system like that is far more preferable to whatever Hulu is doing.