Not exactly breaking news, but it would seem that the people at ANN aren't the best for that anyway. I'm sure you remember the Canadian government's site describing the dangers of hentai and labeling anime as "adult oriented material that contains scenes depicting sexual acts." I sure do. Anyway, according to ANN, they received an e-mail from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police apologizing for the site, or rather, apologizing for any confusion. I guess my issue with that is two-fold. 1.) I didn't get an e-mail. What is that all about? 2.) We weren't the ones who were confused. Apologizing for any confusion is hardly admitting you screwed up. But oh well.
ANN received the e-mail on the 17th, the same day that the site was taken offline. If you want to see the old site, I still have it up at the post linked above.
February 24th, 2006 at 6:53 am
Hell hath no fury like an anime fan wronged!
I'm just glad that they've been made acutely aware that there's a good sized segment of the population who are anime fans who don't appreciate being lumped in with pedophiles.
What does worry me is the growing prevalence of loli manga in pedo busts up here. If they seriously consider cracking down by attempting to inspect and control anime merchandise, we could see a significant drop in the variety of anime goods that are imported as people who are ignorant of the genre are appointed to oversee the process.
I doubt it'd come to that since we have much bigger and more pressing problems (guns, gangs, drugs) to deal with right now. But it's obvious that anime is a blip on the law enforcement radar and judging by how ill-informed the RCMP was about anime, this isn't a good thing.
February 24th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
It's never a good thing when the people in power are poorly informed. I think the whole problem there stems from the fact that no one can really say anything INSIDE the offices, even if they know anime isn't all porn. Because, you know, people are stupid.
Hopefully, this will cause the people who wrote that to actually look into a bit more and write up a more accurate description of the genre (hentai) and give it a fair shake instead of calling all anime porn, and only describing the fringe versions of hentai. I mean, they ignored the entire tentical rape subgenre. That shows a lack of attention to detail.