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INTEREST: Two Ohio Lawmakers Put Dr. Susan Napier's Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle On the


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Heishi



Joined: 06 Mar 2016
Posts: 1314
PostPosted: Tue Dec 15, 2020 8:38 pm Reply with quote
What is with politicians and the disregard for nerd culture?
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H. Guderian



Joined: 29 Jan 2014
Posts: 1255
PostPosted: Tue Dec 15, 2020 8:40 pm Reply with quote
The book was mediocre, I am surprised that they even found it to read up on it. Which I doubt they did. It'll sell more copies now, because book burners never learn.
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7jaws7



Joined: 17 Aug 2013
Posts: 704
Location: New York State
PostPosted: Tue Dec 15, 2020 9:13 pm Reply with quote
Heishi wrote:
What is with politicians and the disregard for nerd culture?


While I don't know what's depicted in that book, I do know that Republicans will find any excuse they can to defund institutions of higher learning.
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Theodore Relic



Joined: 21 Aug 2017
Posts: 63
PostPosted: Tue Dec 15, 2020 9:14 pm Reply with quote
Looking these two twerps up, not surprising that they are two neophyte conservative Republicans from the backwoods trying to get some neocon cred from clueless Trump fans.

As an Ohioan living in Columbus, it's just embarrassing to see idiots like these have more clout than the bigger cities in my state when it comes to voting.
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CatSword



Joined: 01 Jul 2014
Posts: 1489
PostPosted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 1:03 am Reply with quote
Pretty badass that a freshman composition class has a section on anime.

Not badass that two jerkoffs in Ohio, who probably think the best college in the world is Prager University, are mad that a curriculum aimed at adults contains adult material, even though consent forms were given.

Quote:
“It’s way beyond pornography,” said State Rep. Reggie Stoltzfus. “It’s violent. It’s dark. It’s violent sexual acts. The pictures are very twisted. You know somebody with a twisted mind had to come up with this stuff. It talks about raping high school-aged girls, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”


This gives me massive Stirling Griff vibes, where one guy is just shouting hyperbolically about all this stuff and you've gotta take his word for it because no one else in the room understands these weird Japanese cartoons.
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gridsleep





PostPosted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 9:02 am Reply with quote
Heishi wrote:
What is with politicians and the disregard for nerd culture?


Politicians fall on the side of Jock culture, and they hate that nerds make all the money. That's why there are so few nerds in politics. The jocks don't want anyone with brains horning in on their racket. They might end up having to work for a living.
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yuna49



Joined: 27 Aug 2008
Posts: 3804
PostPosted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 10:37 am Reply with quote
I attended college with Susan's husband and have met her socially a few times. The idea she would be seen as a pornographer is not only stupid but offensive.

Anti-intellectualism has always been a trademark of the Republican right, seen most recently in the furor over the Wall Street Journal article denigrating Jill Biden, who holds two masters and a Ph.D., from referring to herself as "Dr. Jill Biden." I guess maybe these two Ohio yahoos jumped on board the train.
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SrkSano



Joined: 05 Oct 2008
Posts: 205
PostPosted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 10:50 am Reply with quote
Seems like a ludicrous claim. But I did read that book in school for an anime class in college. Didn't really care for it. There's a section that does a deep dive into a Ranma 1/2 episode where Ranma hit his head or something and thought that he actually was a female in his female form. This was a filler episode that was not part of the manga. You shouldn't really do deep dives into filler eps IMHO. Especially when there was so much more content in the source material that you can go into to discuss gender roles.

Guess it could've been worse. Imagine if it was written today and went into detail about the talking ninja ostrich from Naruto Shippuden filler. Razz


Last edited by SrkSano on Wed Dec 16, 2020 3:06 pm; edited 2 times in total
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andyos
ANN Associate Editor


Joined: 27 Oct 2008
Posts: 262
PostPosted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 11:20 am Reply with quote
Just to clarify one point: the book does include a very explicit image from Legend of the Overfiend among the images in the middle of the book. The image, captioned "Tentacle sex," is explicit enough that it was censored from the 18-rated edition of the film that was released in Britain.
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AkumaChef



Joined: 10 Jan 2019
Posts: 821
PostPosted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 12:06 pm Reply with quote
daggerbob wrote:
Guess there were a couple of ecchi titles included, or maybe a section on hentai. If a high school or middle school student is "mature" enough to attend college courses then their parents, or guardians, should have the inkling that most coursework won't be on Dr. Seuss or Teletubbies.
If they want to ban Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle then they need to look at another book to ban that contains a lot more sex and violence. One they probably have on their shelves at home right now and make their children read every Sunday.


Agreed 100%. It's honestly puzzling. I attended public high school in Texas more than two decades ago, and my state-approved English courses/textbooks were filled with works describing murder, rape, crime, death, etc. If kids from relatively conservative areas are reading Shakespeare, Voltaire, Chaucer, Hugo, Boccaccio, etc, in high school, then just what exactly do parents expect out of a college course? Sure some of the more extreme hentai can be pretty shocking, but I would argue it's not anything out of the ordinary compared to classic works of literature, or even worse: history class.
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SS723



Joined: 08 Aug 2020
Posts: 3
PostPosted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 12:29 pm Reply with quote
I also read this book as a teen and it sucks. The author basically claims that all anime, including Ghibli films, are sexual metaphors. The section on hentai is also very outdated and doesn't really belong in a book about anime in my opinion. Can't believe they are still using it as an academic resource.
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Brent Allison



Joined: 01 Jan 2011
Posts: 2444
Location: Athens-Clarke County, GA, USA
PostPosted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 12:59 pm Reply with quote
H. Guderian wrote:
It'll sell more copies now, because book burners never learn.


And more of us academics will probably assign it because we're persnickety and crotchety and hate being told what to do in our classes, especially by politicians. Just more projectiles fired in the Trench (Culture) War. Admonishment over under-18 individuals seeing naughty pictures in an academic setting is not unlike railing against churches for serving under-21 congregants communion wine. Context, anyone?

As for concerns about the age of Napier's book, perhaps it was assigned as one of the earlier exemplars of anime-related scholarship and the class was reading later work for the sake of comparison? The field of anime studies is far along enough to make this a viable option now.
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Actar



Joined: 21 Nov 2010
Posts: 1074
Location: Singapore
PostPosted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 1:41 pm Reply with quote
Were the comments made in reference to Overfiend or something? They're like 30 years too late for the moral panic.
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Gilles Poitras



Joined: 05 Apr 2008
Posts: 476
Location: Oakland California
PostPosted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 1:46 pm Reply with quote
Guys you can go ahead and change my cowpunk handle to my real name.

For those of you who may be interested int he book this is it:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781403970527
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AmpersandsUnited



Joined: 22 Mar 2012
Posts: 633
PostPosted: Wed Dec 16, 2020 2:03 pm Reply with quote
yuna49 wrote:
Anti-intellectualism has always been a trademark of the Republican right, seen most recently in the furor over the Wall Street Journal article denigrating Jill Biden, who holds two masters and a Ph.D., from referring to herself as "Dr. Jill Biden." I guess maybe these two Ohio yahoos jumped on board the train.


Right, because we all know liberals and democrats have never pushed for books to be pulled or banned from curriculum themselves. Not Of Mice and Men, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, or The Great Gatsby. Anti-intellectualism and book burning is not a partisan issue, but politics are certainly pretending that every bad is done by only one side.

It's especially ironic to read these posts on an anime forum, a medium where progressive voices are often the loudest ones to complain about certain issues that are common in anime and manga. Do I need to link to any of the dozens of talkback threads for series like Cross Ange, Darling in the Franxx, or Rising of the Shield Hero? Or the numerous professional translations that have purposely changed or omitted things in the official American translations to make them less problematic?
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