Month: August 2020

Art: ‘Magical Girl She-ra’ by Weremole

Featured art: Magical Girl She-ra by Weremole. Check out the rest of his artwork.

Amazon Disappears Light Novels and Manga

Some time back, I mentioned that Amazon had developed a draconian new policy for its advertisements, forbidding ads for any books that feature firing guns or guns held by children on the cover. At the time, I said this was clearly an attempt to go after indie creators, and that Amazon would never enforce such a policy against, say, Japanese manga.

I was wrong.

In fact, it’s worse than that: Amazon isn’t just removing ads but removing books. Whole light-novel and manga series have been deleted from the platform silently and without explanation.

Several outlets have now reported on this, including Crunchyroll, Anime News Network, AniTAY, and Comicbook.com. Several translator-publishers have likewise announced the removal of their books.

This is apparently not limited to the U.S. Amazon but affects all Amazon portals outside Japan. Some of the publishers affected are fairly big players, too, including Yen Press and Darkhorse.

As Crunchyroll reports, publishers have tried to get in contact with Amazon to get the reasons for delisting, and Amazon has been less than forthcoming:

Pinansky said that despite multiple attempts over the last few months to get in contact with anyone on a review team at Kindle through email, they rang the support phone line and requested support tickets, doing so 10 or 12 times. “Phone support has no power to override or obtain any further information from Kindle Content Review.” Though all J-Novel Club got in response from Amazon after multiple nine-day waits are a generic email …

Because Amazon is not being transparent, we are left to speculate. The most likely reason is that Amazon is going after lolicon, and while such a purge would include a few of the titles that have been removed, some other, considerably tamer books are being removed as well. Someone in my mentions (no doubt with some exaggeration) said they were removing most anything that has a cute girl on the cover.

Most of what’s being purged, being light novels, is isekai, and while I personally dislike isekai, this censorship is still troubling: If they can throw these off the platform, they can start removing content for considerably more tenuous reasons.

“They came for the lolicons, and I did not speak out because I was not a child molestor,” and so forth.

Book Review: ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’

The Philosopher’s Stone by Colin Wilson. Wingbow Press, 1969. 268 pages. ISBN 0-914728-28-8.

Colin Wilson was a weird character. Prolific and obviously intelligent, he wrote one well-respected work of literary criticism and also wrote less influential works in other fields before he mostly turned to parapsychology and became a crank. At one point, he made disparaging comments about the work of H. P. Lovecraft, which brought him to the attention of Lovecraft’s biggest fanboy, August Derleth.

Derleth is not well-liked by Lovecraft’s admirers, ironically, because he is largely responsible for creating what we now call the “Cthulhu mythos.” Lovecraft, though he borrowed from himself frequently, never envisioned a unified, overarching “mythos” for his work (though he came close in At the Mountains of Madness). It was Derleth who went back over Lovecraft’s work and tried to harmonize it, though he in the process rejected Lovecraft’s misanthropy and Nietzscheanism and replaced them with a more conventional good-and-evil battle. Today’s Lovecraft fans disparage Derleth for this and have largely jettisoned his contributions, but like it or not, he founded the publishing company Arkham House, which is largely responsible for preserving Lovecraft’s work and making it generally well known.

Derleth took offense at Wilson’s dismissal of Lovecraft and challenged him to write his own Lovecraftian fiction. Wilson obliged, first producing The Mind Parasites and following it up with the novel before us, The Philosopher’s Stone.

Wilson, as he explains in his foreword, sincerely believed he could do Lovecraft better than Lovecraft did. However, there is a reason you’ve heard of Lovecraft and (in all likelihood) haven’t heard of Wilson.

The reason is, this book sucks.

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Anime Review: ‘Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!’

This show is everything that’s wrong with anime today, but not for the reasons you’ve been told.

Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!, directed by Kazuya Miura. Studio ENGI. 4 episodes (at time of writing) of 22 minutes (approx. 88 minutes). Ongoing. Rated TV-14.

Available on Funimation.

This show annoys me.

Mind you, its existence doesn’t annoy me, and its content doesn’t particularly annoy me; what annoys me is that this plotless, generic, milquetoast series is the most talked-about anime of the season. That’s how far this medium has fallen over the last two decades.

Granted, it might not be getting so much attention if some busybodies hadn’t had a conniption over it. In 2019, before the anime appeared but while the manga was enjoying some popularity, the Japanese Red Cross did a blood drive using the titular heroine, Uzaki-chan, as a mascot. The poster features her playfully goading you into giving blood by asking if you’re a wimp afraid of needles.

Uzaki-chan Red Cross Poster
The infamous poster, shamelessly borrowed from Baudattitude.com.

A blogger known as Unseen Japan criticized this poster and proceeded to bother lots of people about it. Here are his own sanctimonious words on the subject:

Uzaki, in other words, is explicitly appealing to heterosexual men via her sex appeal. And she’s goading them into giving blood by bringing their manhood into question. (“You’re not afraid of a little shot, are ya, ya wimp?”)

My first reaction—and my wife’s to boot—was that this wasn’t an appropriate image for the Japanese Red Cross to use.

After hiding behind his wife’s skirt, he goes on to claim victimhood status because he got pushback for being an irritant. Perhaps the strangest comment in his lengthy essay on the fallout from this is his assurance, “… I have absolutely no grip [sic] with ecchi anime, or with sexualized depictions of men and women ….”

In other words, he has no ethical ground to stand on; were he a Puritan with an actual moral code, his busybodiness would be tolerable or at least self-consistent, but by his own admission, he made a nuisance of himself simply for the sake of being a nuisance.

Also, LOL at “heterosexual men,” as if that’s some unique or special category. Newsflash: Men are attracted to large breasts; follow Unseen Japan for more groundbreaking discoveries.

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