Forum - View topicManga age ratings
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CatSword
 Posts: 1489 |
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Does anyone here actually use manga age ratings? Most of the time they seem bipolar at best, completely incompetent at worst. The fact that Hellsing is rated 13+ and Case Closed is rated 16+ for example.
There's also some of Tokyopop's hilarious old age rating goofs; Rave Master for the best example. The first prints were 7+, then 10+ as it went on, then 13+, then when Kodansha released the last few volumes the rating became 16+. There's a few other examples; Nana going up from 16+ to 18+, Loveless actually lowering rating with the Tokyopop prints being 16+ and the Viz prints being 13+, etc. I was just wondering if any parents here or the like used manga age ratings or if they checked out the book themselves before letting their kid read it. |
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st_owly
 Posts: 5234 Location: Edinburgh, Scotland |
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The library in my hometown used them. If you had a junior card, you couldn't check out 16+ or 18+ books without a parent/guardian's permission.
As for me, I was buying 18+ BL when I was about 14. The shops didn't care and I just hid it from my parents when I got it home. They're not legally enforceable so the shops had no reason to care. |
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zawa113
 Posts: 7357 |
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Not really, probably because I'm 25 now, but even when I was younger, I didn't. When I first got into manga, I wasn't familiar with yaoi anyway (though Borders and stuff started selling "I <3 Yaoi" merch at some point, but no one that I knew who had it was hardcore yaoi fan anyway, I think they were doing it for show). But I went more on the cover and back of the book than any age rating.
My library should probably consider using those ratings though, Bokurano should not be in with the teen manga (we have a mature section). Yet they'll blindly follow it on series like Magic Touch and Blue Exorcist, so what they really need is someone to read the damn books. When the library had a book sale back in April, I told the ladies there "umm, this is adult material, this shouldn't be in the juvenile book section" (I couldn't very well expect them to know what yoai is). Even worse, I found a copy of Catherine for 360 in with the little kids section (next to a copy of a Mario Wii game) and I was like "you see this "M" sticker in the corner? This should be nowhere near children's picture books". But they were grateful for the help and very nice and accepted my recommendations and moved things immediately. They said next year, they'll just put all the manga together in one area and be done with it. A good idea, seeing what a bad job they've done in the past. |
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CatSword
Posts: 1489 |
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I noticed when searching up manga on my library system another library I don't go to but is in the system has Battle Vixens and Cain Saga, both rated M, in their teen section, and D. Gray-man, rated for older teens, in their children's section. *sigh*
The library I go to keeps it well organized though; all ages and 7+ manga go in children's, 13+ and 16+ go in teen, and we don't have any 18+ manga at the moment but 18+ graphic novels in general go in the adult section. |
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Tamaria
 Posts: 1512 Location: De Achterhoek |
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One of the magazines I write for used to give subscribers a free manga (volume 1 of a recently released title) every year and for a while I was was in charge of picking those titles. During the last stretch of the manga boom it was like four titles for male readers, four for female readers. After publishers started dropping like flies and complaints about the seperation started piling up (some were from me), we switched to four titles for all subscribers to choose from.
There was one constant to the whole picking titles process: try to stay away from 16/T+ titles. Kinda tricky, because ratings on manga aren't very trustworthy and I wasn't familiar with every potential pick. It got harder when some publishers/imprints went the way of the dodo. For over a year, CMX was my favourite source of appropriate shoujo manga. Lots of material from Viz was labled 16/T+, so those were harder to justify ordering. As for use of ratings in the days not yet of yore: the MangaKissa in Utrecht doesn't look at ratings all that much, but they put the manga with adult/explicit content in seperate bookcases, away from the main collection. Most comic book stores have a seperate shelf for erotic manga. That may not seem like much, but they're better at giving a shit than Dutch stores in general, who'll happily place South Park next to Sesame Street. Or porn in plain sight. There's this chain of discount bookstore that also sell dvd's. Most of the rack is just regular movies and kids' stuff. Top shelves are porn. This one time, two kids were browsing the animated movies while the father was on the phone, I think he was discussing potentional birthday presents for some other kid with his wife. Anyway, the youngest one, who was I guess 6 years old was all like: "Frozenfrozenfrozenfrozenfrozen!" (sorry kid, no fancy new Disney movies in stores like this!) Meanwhile, his slightly older brother had noticed some of the other movies on sale: "Naked boobs! Naked butts! Naked boobs! BUUUUUUUUUUUUUTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTS" Dad nearly dropped his phone. |
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