Quote:
Originally Posted by Last Sinner
Smaller places still sell them in the US.
Kinokuniya's actions are pretty easy to explain. They're preventing themselves from getting associated with a potential mess like the aftermath of the Chris Handley trial. Handley's conviction will have far reaching effects over the industry for the years to come. And this is one of them. Publishers, retailers and licensers are living in fear.
What's interesting is that at the anime convention I went to on the weekend:
1. The proportion of females to males was even.
2. They were mainly adutls in the 18-30 range.
3. A lot of them dressed in very spicy/elegant cosplay and loved it. Some females like doing this and seeing other women do it. They're entitled to. Not all people think the same.
4. One of the better prizes was given to a woman who dressed as a female character from a H title. The crowd loved it. Other one dressed up as Yoko from TTGL and also got a prize. Yoko may be 14 but there's a BIG difference between liking the design/aesthetics of someone like Yoko and having sex with a 14 year old. 99.9% of people will have enough brains and decency to do that.
5. The women made it clear they love seeing both males and females dressed up sexy/cute and the like.
It's horses for courses. Some people like it, some don't. The problem is when people who don't understand how things work in the industry or within the fandom simply interpret it based off of what they know without even bothering to look into it. Which leads to this whole Straight-Edge mentality. That they're better than us because they're puritan-like and live plainly. Which is blatant discrimination, really. Telling people how to live is pretty arrogant. One is supposed to live within the tenants of morality and common sense within society. As long as you don't hurt anyone, it isn't a crime to like anime girls. To be told that anything outside a single line of thinking is wrong is the beginning of the death of civil liberties and democracy. One way doesn't apply to all. It never has and never will. You can't force everyone to be under the same banner or live the same way. That's a one way ticket to hate.
My experiences on the weekend showed me women are into it as much as the men are. Keep an open mind about it and know where to draw the line with a balance between common sense and morality.
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To be fair, there is
some anime material that even I feel is designed to appeal to pedophiles. The Straight Edge crowd would support banning those even if they did understand them. Which actually illustrates
my big gripe with the Straight Edge crowd, which is their tendency to like to shove their noses into other people's private affairs. (Edit: Well, okay, they tend to have an overly broad definition of pedophilia. That probably qualifies as not understanding what they're talking about. I'm just saying there's some stuff they're not misunderstanding too.)
You are right in that there's plenty of practices in the fandom that outsiders probably misunderstand though. Luckily, in some cases they lack the knowledge to misunderstand in the first place... you can't be appalled that 14-17 year old girls are cosplaying characters from erogames if you don't know the costumes are from erogames in the first place.
(In the case of the 14 year olds, they had only seen the non-ero anime adaptations of the works in question. Because their mother wouldn't let them play the games.
She was definitely aware where they were from, but I guess she just (correctly, in my opinion) figured the costumes were modest enough that there would be no issues.)