IPad Says No to Violence and Adult Situations in Manga | Hacker News Reader

IPad Says No to Violence and Adult Situations in Manga

mangahelpers.com

17 pointsjpatte14 comments

So, they're censoring anything with blood or nudity? Just for fun, let's look at the most popular manga on One Manga:

http://www.onemanga.com/directory/top/

1-4: Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Fairy Tail. These all have blood and violence. They generally don't have much sexual content, though there is occasional mild fanservice.

5. Hajime no Ippo. It's about boxing. There will be blood. And broken bones, and so on.

6. Full Metal Alchemist. Pretty gosh-darn violent. Dark, too.

7. History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi. Guess what: it's another fighting manga! Less bloody than you might expect, actually, and I'm pretty sure they keep the sexual content down to PG-13 levels. This one would probably get through! Way to go, Apple!

Skipping #8, because I've never heard of it...

9. Hunter X Hunter. Quickly flipping through it at random turned up a page in chapter 28 where a murderous nightmare clown is carrying a severed head. Pretty tame sexually, though.

10. No Bra. There is no way in hell this would pass any censor, anywhere, ever. Moving on,

11. Mahou Sensei Negima. Oh dear lord, no. It's not just the violence, although it has violence aplenty. It has pretty vast amounts of sexual content, most of it involving characters who are, at most, 15 years old. (Fun fact: has a freakishly long TV Tropes page.)

This kind of strict policy doesn't just block a lot of manga; it blocks almost all of the most popular manga. It's madness, and the policy's only redeeming virtue is that it probably won't be applied consistently, so they might let some stuff through that they would have blocked if they'd been more thorough.

I'm going to burn some karma for saying this, but is it the policy that's mad here, or is it manga? You can't get through the top 10 grossing R-rated movies without finding at least two (Up In The Air, Crazy Heart) that would make it past this standard.

Part of it is that the manga which achieves the most popularity tends to be shounen fighting stuff. I mean, look at the top four: Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, and Fairy Tail. They all use much the same formula, but with the details changed. (Naruto has ninjas, One Piece has pirates, Bleach has something else, and Fairy Tail has mages.) It gets tiresome after a while, but that kind of thing tops the charts, consistently.

Meanwhile you have absolutely beautiful manga like Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (which is made from liquid happiness) that don't even get licensed for official English translation.

Ugh. I really enjoyed the happy feel of Love Hina, by Ken Akamatsu (and also the music in the anime), so I bought a bunch of Negima (same author). I read through a few, and realized the sexual content was growing more explicit, while the girls seemed to be growing younger. I was like, what the hell? The worst is, I bought them on amazon, so even if I burn them, it's recorded that I bought them.

Aside from the sexual weirdness of the comic, it's really just not too interesting. I think there are too many characters, and way too much focus on magic. Love Hina was nice because it could focus on a few characters, and the fantasy bits were much less prevalent.

If this is true, it's a complete joke. When material that is designed for 12-13 year old boys is blocked for being too rough, you might have issues with your standards.

It's true, but manga in Japan is not limited to 12-13 years old but very segmented throughout age groups. For example, anything labeled with "Seinen" (usually those published under magazine with title prefixed with "Young", e.g. Young Jump, Young King) is intended for the 18~30 age range. Even "Shonen" (male 13~18) nowadays are not very strictly shonen. "Shoujo" (female 13~18) most of time shouldn't really labeled shoujo.

The problem is that Kodansha never publicize the title of 30% that has been rejected, so we're in no way to know whose standards are at issue here.

If you can read Japanese, the actual interview quoted in the Japanese source can be found at: http://builder.japan.zdnet.com/sp/epub2010/story/0,380010362... Here's the line in question, translated (note he's talking about _iPhone application_, not the iPad):

Hagino: "Of all Kodansha's application to Voyager to be made into an iPhone application, about 30% are rejected by Apple. There are series that was accepted until vol.4, but we can't release vol.5 and on. Not only violence, but blood depiction are also considered brutal by Apple. 'Hatarakiman' (series about female editor) was recently rejected because of a massage scene. There's no series with office lady as a main character that has no bathing scene, but we're not allowed to show that too because there's breast depiction."

This one is interesting:

Hagino: "This is another story, but anything related to Apple is also rejected. Two books called "The Company That Invented an iPhone" and "The Man That Made an iPod" are also recently rejected. The reason for that was they disallow merchandising anything related to Apple employee. Then how about Microsoft? (Laughs)."

No violence anymore? Wow, a lot of Hollywood movies in the iTunes store show mostly violence in epic form. Some movies only seem to exist to show as much violence as possible. Steve, what do you want to do about that?

You know, ComicZeal on my iPad shows violence and adult situations just fine.

It also shows Tintin, which for some, could be even more disturbing.

I really don't know what people have against Tintin.

Maybe because I grew up with a partial collection of it that I inherited from my brothers.

Can you explain what's disturbing about it?

The first album was written during colonial times and reflects the consideration European people had towards natives at this time (ie. they would be savages waiting to be "enlightened"). This is considered a racist behavior today and some people are offended by it being still available for young children without any censorship, while others see it as an historical document that should remain intact.

The idea looks like what already failed on the fictional character of RoboCop - be too tame.

Someone needs to tell Apple about http://mobile.youporn.com/ and all other thousands of web sites that stream porn for free on the iphone/ipad.

Jobs wants to keep the walled garden pure of corruption.

Says not to eat of the fruit of the tree of porn, lest the consumer lose their innocence.

The serpent of webkit/safari tempts you.

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