You’re at a concert you’ve been dying to go to for, like, ever. The opening acts were awesome and the crowd is super stoked. Everyone loves the headlining band and they’re all huge fans from way back. All the fans are smiling and laughing together and exchanging stories of how they “discovered” said band and little fun facts about the singers and guitarists. There’s an overwhelming sense of camaraderie; even amongst the know-it-alls that have been to every one of the bands appearances.

The band is finally up, the crowd goes wild. Then someone jostles you and cuts in front of your line of sight. A group of drunk frat boys has made their way to the front and are yelling cat calls at the band. They’re huge fans too, but they’re raucous enthusiasm is ruining your experience. The band initially ignores the loud group. The group starts yelling for the band to perform this, perform that, and are starting a mosh pit where there really shouldn’t be one. Pretty soon, the band addresses the frat boys directly; cut it out please. Too drunk and oblivious to care, the frat boys continue to blithely ruin the concert for all the fans.

Soon, fans are leaving. In twos, threes and larger groups. Why stick around? Can’t hear the band anyway and the bouncers and band aren’t doing a whole hell of a lot to make things right.

After the concert, word gets around that the show sucked and that the only people who like the band are a bunch of dumb frat boys. Potential fans no longer go to the band’s concerts since the band has a bad rep of attracting fans who will ruin it for ‘em anyway.

The band is anime and the frat boys are the irresponsible fans who potentially screw up the experience for everyone else. Would it have been censorship for the non-frat boy fans to collectively tell the frat boys to shut the hell up? Would it have been censorship if the well-behaved fans quietly cut the loud jerks off from the crowd and corralled them towards the door? Is that censorship or communal responsibility?

Granted, we’re not in a concert hall, but how is the fandom really so different from a group of concert goers after all? Aren’t we all in this together? Aren’t we all affected when a group acts up?

I don’t think it has anything to do with hentai, yaoi, yuri, etc. (although a number of these fans do contribute to the noise). It’s like alcohol; drink responsibly. Watch your porn responsibly; no one cares if you do (I don’t) just don’t slosh your beer in some chick’s hair and don’t ruin the concert for anyone else. Simple.

Fans could just as easily be moe or magic-girl fans and f* up the experience for others.

Censorship is too strong a word to apply to collective responsibility. Apathetic fans have no right to complain when things go wrong in the fandom. It’s every fan’s responsibility to keep anime alive and kicking (in the US).

If word gets around that most anime fans are like drunk frat boys, anime will get a bad rep. Sad but true. Negativity spreads hella faster than anything positive, and if anime’s growth is inhibited, companies will stop licensing as many titles as they have been. Money talks. We need new fans to keep up the growing pace in anime that we’ve been enjoying, collectively, in the past five years.

No new fans equals stagnation, equals stunted growth, equals eventual decline in anime, equals eventual demise of anime. Might seem overly dramatic, yes, but I’m talking 10 years (not not next month or next year) down the road. Should I care if someone else is giving anime a bad name? Yes. Too many apathetic short-sighted fans don’t give a damn what happens next week with anime, let alone the next decade.

Education, as suggested previously, is one of many avenues that must be explored in making the fandom more positive and accessible to die-hard and non-fans alike. But collective responsibility, along with individual responsibility will help take the fandom to new level.

Now I’m not a prude when it comes to that type of stuff, if any of the college kids absolutely wanted to watch those shows and they were over 18 I would loan them a DVD or VHS tape to watch themselves.

On my blog I’ve even considered adding a restricted +18 section, of course it would be password protected.

I think that the anime community should do a little self censoring on it’s own especially when their the possibility that children could be affected. A blog or web site that children could access to should not post hentai or porn.

This issue will only become larger as time goes on, as technology increases the ease of media transmission it will be possible for material intended for adult consumption to find its way into the hands of under-aged media consumers. It is a crime to knowingly show porn to minors, be it anime or live action.

Let us not forget that Hentai, Shojo-ai, Shonen-ai, and other types of hardcore anime are intended for Japanese adult consumption. Even thought many under-aged kids manage to get a hold of it, a very small percentage of people blame the medium itself. Alcohol consumption in this country is limited to those +21, and if under-aged people are caught consuming they go after the person providing the product not the product.

Also, in mainstream broadcasts of anime to Japanese consumers very little sex is actually ever shown. Anime girls may dress like loli’s, or anime male characters my be attracted to those girls but they almost never act on that attraction. Take Moetan for example, the main character Ink dresses like a loli, and you see plenty of pantie shots and alike, but when she gets alone with him in his room she blushes at the slightest physical or emotional contact, and nothing really happens. Even though the shown wraps itself in sexual innuendo it is very conservative when it comes to actual sex. I know of only a few mainstream broadcast anime where sex actually occurred, and it was never shown but only insinuated to. One was in His and Her Circumstances, it occurred between the two main characters, and it only happened after many weeks or months of dating it was not a hookup. Another example was in Koi Kaze between a brother and his sister, and it only occurred after they fully understood the full situation(positive and negative). A third example is in High School Girls, one of the girls admitted having sex with her boyfriend but then dumped him when she found out that he knew one of his friends was going to attempt to take advantage of one of her girlfriends. In all three examples sex occurred but was never shown, it always occurred in the context of a serious relationship not a hookup, and it was always shown with the great emotional weight that go along with it. Compared to many newer American TV shows aimed at teens, mainstream anime is much more conservative about sex.

Now to the issue of nudity and so forth, eastern culture and western culture are very different, when I lived in Korea for two years certain things that western society would have found shocking was perfectly normal, and some things that us Americans believed to be OK would shock my Korean friends. So certain types of sexual media geared towards adults in Asia might never be considered appropriate in the United States.

My final thought is that if all of us adult anime fans keep the +18 material away from under 18 anime fans everything will be all right, if the under 18 fans want to watch that stuff let them watch all hentai and pron the want after they turn 18.

[...] of The Anime Blog, a dreamlogic friendly site, has posted a passionate article on the subject here). Not helping matters are the inclusion of children’s shows like Naruto in the “Adult” Swim [...]

My negative encounter wasn’t negative because it was porn; it was negative because I thought that all anime= porn. I don’t watch porn all that much so why would I be interested in anime if all it was was animated porn? I don’t care if people like hentai. Repeat: I. Don’t. Care. I can’t speak for anyone else, though.

I think many fans dislike hentai, not because it’s porn, but because there are other fans out there running wild with no sense of responsibility in regards to how their behavior reflects on anime as a whole. If they act like pervy jerks, that WILL reflect poorly on all of us.

After reading the comments, I don’t think my readers understand what I’m getting at. I do NOT want to censor anime. If it’s legal, why would I want to censor it? Who cares? I don’t have to watch it. Neither does anyone else.

I’m talking about personal responsibility; something any real fan of anime should have. And if they don’t have that much needed sense of personal responsibility, should they be allowed to give everyone else a bad name? IMO, hell no.

This is sad.

For one, what you are saying is that the image of anime is important to you. What this means is that you are basically feeling ashamed when people find out you like anime because of their perception of it. Like any hobby, many people are going to look down on you for liking it (even mundane things such as reading can get a bad rep in some places), this is a fact of life. You can try your best to educate these people, but they will never learn if their mind is already made up.

Another thing, you have decided to disassociate yourself from Hentai. Why? Because it doesn’t follow your moral/ethical code or whatever you wish to call it. Hentai IS a genre of Anime. It is not ALL of Anime, but the fact that it is part of it needs to be accepted by you people. The sad thing is, many of you do this because of strange fetish porn. This is unfair to Hentai. Why? Because some like some things and some don’t. There is fetish Hentai, sure. There is also romantic Hentai and sad Hentai and horror Hentai and dramatic Hentai. It is not all tentacle porn, as you people seem to assume. You, as a sexual human being, can easily find a Hentai that suits you best. And THAT is the beauty of Hentai, diversity. So, in a nutshell, you took the same stereotypes of Anime in the general populace and shoved it onto Hentai.

Now, what bothers me the most, your dislike of Hentai fans that are willing to voice their like for it. Well, I like Hentai. I do enjoy awfully depressing yaoi stories (thats what I like in that genre), awfully cute yuri, I adore loli and shota (they really are incredibly cute), I have enjoyed tentacle Hentai, as well as most fetishes (I’ve glanced at ero guro Hentai, but that goes a bit too much even for me). Why is that wrong? Because you had decided that its “dirty” and “dark”. Because you feel that sex (and this goes back to my other point) is wrong if it does not fit into your simple understanding of it. What I like is what I like (I keep repeating this), and what you like is what you like. As such, you have no right to look down on me and other Hentai fans.

I’ll end this by restating everything one more time. Stop discriminating against Hentai fans. Their hobby is their hobby, yours is yours. Don’t disassociate Hentai from Anime, it is just a separate genre. Many, though they have a certain focus on sex, have beautiful and compelling plots. Something many of you, sadly, don’t see when you denounce it or give it titles and names like “dirty secret”.

I am an Anime fan. I like many genres of Anime. I liked Chobits and I like Elfen Lied, and I enjoyed Gundam Seed and Trinity Blood. But I also enjoyed Another Lady Innocent, Crimson Climax, and Immoral Sisters. Don’t fault me for it and don’t try to police it because, truthfully, you have no right to.

I don’t think we can police the fans. I don’t think anyone could, not even the original Japanese companies (if they cared). It’s definitely a cultural attitude shift here. But I’m definitely going to laugh when some little otaku’s hopes and dreams are crushed when s/he comes to Japan and finds out it’s not Anime Land Tokyo.

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve read an article about anime in the media and either it’s ‘weirdness’ is mentioned…or they throw in the now-customary ‘tentacle’ reference.

Take this quote for example from our city entertainment paper:
“The world of anime is arcane, hermetic, and nigh-unto impenetrable by outsiders. And that’s a good thing; part of the fun of anime is discovering something new in the seemingly-endless barrage of options. The Japanese style of animation is nothing like the American experience of happy anthropomorphic animals in stories aimed at kids (although that does make up a tentacle of the anime kraken).” – RFT article on anime

Like Rachel said, if she has seen a Studio Ghibli movie or maybe one of Satoshi Kon’s films (well maybe except Perfect Blue), things might have started out differently for her. And I imagine that would be the same for many people.

How many of you have known someone a little older who doesn’t watch anime now but they were shown some pervy anime in college? Don’t they usually refer to it as ‘that weird Japanese cartoon stuff’?

I just thought about how there’s also people who think just the opposite. How many of you have seen a film like ‘Spirited Away’ (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi ) in theaters with a bunch of little kids who couldn’t sit through the movie? I bet their parents thought it was ‘just another cartoon for the kids’. Or how many people still think it’s all like the Pokemon incident ™ where kids had seizures?

THEN, there are the ‘I say I like anime ’cause it’s cool’ types who are like ‘I love anime too, especially Heavy Metal and Cool World!” LOL

That’s frustrating – people either think I’m either childish, a poser or a pervo for watching anime! LOL

Or yeah, then there are people who think I’m an ‘industry insider’…but that’s another story.

So here’s my idea for a campaign: “Anime: It’s more than Pokemon and Tentacles.”

Remember everyone – try to keep the comments on topic. This isn’t a post about censorship – it’s about how to clean up anime’s image…if it needs cleaned up (my answer: yes).