[Malkuth]

Originally Posted by kuromitsu

*sigh* You do realize that the novel is not something niche, right? I've read about middle-school and high-school teachers recommending it to their students, and that's pretty much correct. The only objectionable or controversial part in the novel is the sex, but even the sex scenes are nothing particularly "scandalous" or even interesting, and the whole thing is just not particularly "mature" material. I mean, if it was the early 20th century it might have been, but it's the early 21th century.

*longer sigh* Burrough's "Naked Lunch" contains graphic rape, homosexual intercourse, swinging, adultery, gore, leaving allegories aside... none of these were central to the plot and the theme of the novel which was irrelevant to them, but all of these were essential in creating the background and mood in order to tell a very interesting and complicated story.

These elements themselves are no indication about the literary quality of a novel, but require some basic maturity maturity from their readers in order to appreciate them.

Originally Posted by kuromitsu

The anime is not cutting the porn because it's trying to be family friendly, it's cutting it because 1) in case of the first one, they're 12-YEAR-OLDS. Good luck trying to get that on TV... 2) as for the rest, they would be gratuituous. (As they are in the manga: for anyone who claims the manga is doing a better job, no, the manga actually inserted random hot two girl action scenes not in the novel without any explanation.) The only reason they're not that gratuituous in the novel is because of Saki's internal narration throughout them, but since they can't exactly do that in the anime, the scenes wouldn't add anything to the anime except for providing some fap material for horny viewers (but then if someone wants that they can find other shows that were made specially for that reason).

And the anime is still not messing up the plot "pretty badly". Apparently they left out one important bit of information that would've made this episode easier to understand, but otherwise from what I can tell the plot is still progressing pretty much as it should.

That bit was one thing... storytelling the "little monster rat adventure" was a disaster (not only the Saki/Satoru relationship), but the flow of events, references to past events and background information, time and location consistency, and so on.

Originally Posted by kuromitsu

Also, I'm not touching this debate, but...

Not really. Homoromantic relations were, if not more acceptable than heterosexual, but at least acceptable during most of history, as long as sexual behavior wasn't involved. When it comes to sex, social acceptability depends on the culture and the historical period - sometimes it was acceptable as long as one was doing the penetration not the other way around, later the whole thing was condemned as sodomy (such as in Europe in the middle ages). But being the "woman" in a homosexual relationship was regarded as something no self-respecting adult man does. Even in the Japanese middle ages where homosexual relations were common, it's not like you could just go and bang any good-looking guy. There was a hierarchy about who can penetrate whom and under what circumstances. Anything outside that was frowned upon.

From the top of my head, teacher/student relationship in medieval and early modern Japan and China, patronage system in the Roman empire, schooling in ancient Athens and colonies (which is the only one including lesbians I know of), monastic and military orders in times of peace, janissaries during the decline of the Ottoman empire... and despite forgetting a lot, I am also skipping more naturalistic societies of which the social aspects, I am acquainted with.

Generally, women that were not professionally trained to satisfy men were not viewed erotically.