I am convinced that conservatives in the U.S. have too much on their hands. Instead of taking a stance against, I don’t know, Supreme Court justices accepting lavish gifts or something, they’re trying to pull a manga series out of Florida schools. The Citizens Defending Freedom group intends to protect children from “violence against teachers” and “explicit sexual content” with this censorship.
Earlier this week, an advocacy group called Citizens Defending Freedom announced their intention to pressure Florida middle schools to remove Assassination Classroom from libraries. AC is a manga series in which an alien blows up the moon, and then threatens to destroy the entire earth. He tells the world government that he would allow students to kill him, and that they must succeed by their graduation. In the meantime, he teaches them subjects such as maths and English. Their lessons are occasionally interrupted when students throw knives or shoot bullets at their alien teacher. Rather than being angry at the constant murder attempts, the teacher is elated when his students become better assassins.
“This is a non-partisan issue,” the group’s communications director Kristen Huber told Fox News. “We should all be able to agree that violence toward teachers and explicit sexual content is not something that schools should be glorifying or promoting, especially on taxpayer dollars.”
Folks, I can’t emphasise enough how stupid this whole thing is. AC is one of the most wholesome mangas I’ve read last year. Rather than being disrespectful towards public education, it’s a beautiful story about how an alien teacher brings out the full potential of underperforming students who have given up on their futures. And while porn books do make an appearance in the series, you never see any actual sex scenes in them. It would be like banning Naruto because the ninja Kakashi reads explicit adult fiction in front of his students.
Public school can suck because kids are put into boxes and subject to a standardised educational experience. The kids in AC are only able to become exemplary students under the guidance of a monster who is attentive to their individual needs. It’s a lesson that school officials could stand to learn, instead of trying to remove the manga from the library entirely.
Of course, conservative finger-waggers don’t care about context or what art actually means. They just want to ban things they don’t understand under the pretext of shielding children. Florida is currently in an all-out culture war against anything that right wingers find offensive to their delicate senses, including whether or not Disney is allowed to support trans rights.
If you want to check out AC for yourself, you can easily access the entire series by nabbing a VIZ digital subscription for $US3 a month. Take that, conservative snowflakes.
Leave a Reply