So how do you feel about those violence filled blu-ray changes?
Did you ever wonder why those were censored in the first place? Anime gets violent all the time even now. There was a conversation going on in one of my internet lurking spots where a clip of Blood-C came up, and the violence in that was brutal to the point of being cartoonish. Those might have been DVD clips too, but violence is prevalent in anime. JoJo’s even airs at midnight. So why the censorship?
It turns out that just because kids might not see your violent Nazi battles doesn’t mean you don’t have to try anyway. The image linked Ure article sheds a little light on the decision to censor things like the intense violence and Stroheim’s Nazi connection. I hadn’t thought about it watching the episodes, but if you look at Stroheim across the episodes, his connections to Nazi Germany are a bit muted. It’s obvious because he’s a big wig military man from Germany in the 1930s, but he has iron eagles instead of swastikas, a more ubiquitous symbol of Nazi Germany. You also may remember this from Episode 19.
That is clearly a Nazi salute, but they covered it with the dark cross section used to cover up heavy violence. So why is that?
Well, it a self imposed censorship. The Q&A session with the anonymous Mr. T talks about why and reveals that it’s pretty much exactly why you’d think. JoJo’s does air at midnight, but because it airs on Saturday at midnight, there’s still a possibility that grade school age children will see it because they don’t need to go to bed. If the kids see it and it becomes an issue for the station, sponsors start pulling out. Sponsors pull out, then the show might have to pull out. It’s just safer in the long run to censor these things and give the full version in blu-rays that have to be bought instead of being randomly caught in the middle of the night.
But JoJo’s was always violent. Why wasn’t it a problem in publication when Araki did it? It’s because manga authors have a little more freedom in their expression. It comes back to that “have to be bought” thing. You have to go out and buy manga, but any TV can be watched so long as you get the channel the show is on. There’s a mentality of having to “protect the audience” by TV stations, and davidproduction can’t sell places like Tokyo MX a show that’s going to give rise to a scenario like the aforementioned.
The terms of self regulation are obviously up to whoever’s doing it, but there are some agreed upon standards. Discriminatory language, langauge against human rights, anything that might physically harm someone like the Porygon incident, and sexual violence and some levels of smoking and drinking. I’m starting to feel like a kid watching Toonami again and hearing anime fans complain about beer being edited into juice. Mr. T also mentions wanting to be cautious about religious talk, and that makes me wonder how all those Christian symbol heavy vampire shows get made.
Of course, those are older mostly. Mr. T closes the interview mentioning that regulation both internal and external has increased and may continue to, though there may also be some point in the future where there will be an agreed upon, ridged border when adapting a work. Regardless, they want to always make best possible show even if there is controversy among the fans.
Man, that got long. You can check out the original article for a little more fleshing out. This sort of stuff apparently also happened to some part of One Piece where some characters were starving on a desert island. Guess violent times are hard on the cartoon industry all over.
(Thanks to Yaraon for pointing me in the original article’s direction)
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