Narrative Warfare: Cute Aggression Intensifies

They are coming for anime, manga, and light novels. Make no mistake about this. (Taken from Nicchiban's article:)

Mizuno stated today on Twitter that Netflix had removed a series or episodes seemingly due featuring a “dark elf.” This made him concerned that if the depiction of evil characters with dark skin is deemed wrong, his own works would eventually be banned.

“I saw the topic on TL that ‘Dark Elf’ appeared in Netflix was deleted, so I checked the source, but the dark elf itself was not deleted because it was discriminatory, except black people It seems that it became a problem that the characters of the race had blackened their faces to dress up as Dark Elves.

However, in the future, there is a possibility that it will be discriminated against as black-type = evil, not limited to dark elves. There may be a future where all my books will be banned.

While gathering accurate information, I will pay attention to future trends.”

Translation: Google Translate.

Looking through what Mizuno retweeted, it appears the banned content in question was an episode of US comedy Community. In the aftermath of the protests and riots after the death of George Floyd, Netflix has been removing episodes of TV series featuring characters seemingly in blackface [1, 2, 3, 4].

I said previously that the Death Cult suffers from Cute Aggression, and you can bet that any excuse to attack and censor Japanese media will be taken as soon as they think they can get away with it. While Mizuno's concern focuses around his works as a whole, the far more likely outcome is that only the anime and manga adaptations will be affected; the Cult doesn't read Japanese works, even in translation, so his novels are in the clear for now as there is nothing obvious to assault their amygdala and trigger Cute Aggression.

I also said that, for now, there is nothing the Death Cult can do to poz and converge anime and manga in Japan. They can choke off access to the West, however, and this is one way they can accomplish this goal; there are far more people who don't know about--nevermind use--off-brand sites than those who stuck to Funimation, Crunchyroll, etc. and thus pay the folks who hate them. If the Cult can't ruin anime by ruthlessly censoring it contrary to the wishes of creators or IP owners in Japan, they can sour the business relationships with the Western distributors and thus provoke a cutoff while concealing the back-channel via Singapore (which, by the way, means PlayAsia is next on the hit list).

This leaves piracy, and that one remaining channel coupled with a political environment friendly to snitching means enforcement can go way up and prosecutions actually have an impact.

So Mizuno is right to be concerned. They're coming. Get ready.