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Current Mood: WTF is going on? emoticon WTF is going on?

Christ, there’s a lot of hullabaloo on the ‘net today. SlashThrough2007, Kodomo no Jikan, Anime > Sex at Wikipedia, Rozen Maiden ending, and all sorts of other junk.Let’s see, where to start…I guess the LJ thing sort of hit the fan first, so let’s get there, shall we? And I should note that since I’ve been a very poor LJ’er lately, I’m not necessarily the most up on how things went down…

LiveJournal: SlashThrough 2007

But as I understand it: a pedo-hunting group called the Warriors for Innocence, who I shan’t link to since their site actually nearly crashed my computer with all its spyware crap, started bombing LJ with complaints about various journals containing objectionable or illegal content. LiveJournal took the complaints seriously, looked at the journals, and permanently suspended the ones they thought were really and truly advocating pedophilia - over 500 in the end.

Except that some of those journals weren’t really about pedophilia. Some of them were people who had “pedophilia” or “incest” listed as an interested - because they were survivors of such difficulties in the past.

Other communites were devoted only to the most fictional sorts of pedophilia, such as shota - which is the male equivalent of loli, meaning it runs the gamut from innocuous to hardcore, and which is equally as much a fantasy as loli. Very much not reality.

Fans complained, petitions were signed, LJ apologized, and a number of journals were reinstated, including the shota community (though the user yaoi_slut was left suspended, though of course I have no clue what kind of content was on the journal).

All in all, I’m pretty damn disappointed in how the whole thing was handled by LJ - or perhaps I should say Six Apart, since LJ’s fearless leader Brad has been on vacation, apparently. I find myself very glad that I started this blog to get my fandom stuff off of my main LJ account ;P

On the other hand, no matter how many times WFI says they just reported objectionable content and LJ just enforced its TOS, there IS a certain amount of pressure involved here. As long as LiveJournal can reasonably be seen as unaware of such content, they don’t have to do anything with it. But if WFI reports it and nothing is done, and anyone EVER sues LJ over any content on the site, WFI can come forward and say “look, they KNEW this was here and they did NOTHING.”

This is exactly why having a complete hands-off policy tends to be better than doing ANY sort of limiting whatsoever. As soon as you have those rules, you have a responsibility to enforce them, and as soon as you’ve taken responsibility for the content on your site, you’re that much more open to lawsuits over it.

So yeah. I hate how it went down, but I don’t really know a better way LJ could have done it either. Well, except offering better communication (like, “we’re going to do this sweep in one week. You have been warned”).

Kodomo no Jikan

Okay, what is with manga companies licensing a series without having read a significant portion, if not ALL, of it? Years ago Dark Horse licensed NaruTaru and started publishing it and promoting it as a kids’ title, only to have it turn extremely dark and mature and sexual later on. (In their defense, I don’t think any of those volumes were actually *out* when they licensed it.)

Now Seven Seas comes out and says “oh, well, actually, we read more of the manga and realized that we reeeally shouldn’t publish it.” Which makes them sound like they jumped into something without researching it, AND like cowards.

The comment that really struck me, though, was when he said that complaining fans must not have read the rest of the manga, because if they had they’d be as disturbed as he was or something. What does that say about someone who DID read the manga and WASN’T disturbed? Way to tick off some of your readers, DeAngelis.

Granted, I haven’t read Kodomo no Jikan, but I’ve seen pages here and there and know enough about how these things are handled in manga to have an idea of what’s in those later volumes.

Randall over at Ikimashou suggested that 7S should do a small run and sell at whatever bookstores they can (and the ‘net), which makes a lot of sense…but only if they have no way to recoup the money they’ve spent on the license so far. If they cancel it at this point, they may get all/most of their money back, for all I know, in which case business-wise it probably makes more sense to just drop it…though who knows? It could be a big hit on the ‘net.

“Anime: Officially More Interesting Than Sex”

Any day when I can use a title like that for a headline at work is a good day, as far as I’m concerned. A blog called Compete compiled Wikipedia data and found the the single most-researched subject on Wikipedia is…anime! Sex was behind by 10% (along with Pop Culture). How fucking amazing is that?

Though as I told someone else - if it was a survey about how many people are interested in sex versus anime, sex would win hands down.

Rozen Maiden Ending

Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you what happened, because I have no fucking clue. It makes no sense. A friend of mine used the following meme/image to explain his reaction, and I’m going to blatantly rip him off.