Controversy over anime in America has been existent for the medium, dating back to the late 1990s with the popularity boom of the Pokemon franchise. This caused controversy for some who thought the Pokemon franchise could cause negative effects for children, ranging from both psychological and religious reasons. Another manga hit, Death Note, causing some major controversy and incidents, with some writing their classmates and school staff’s names on the book. While controversy calmed down later on during the late 2000s and early 2010s, the medium entered the spotlight of controversy once again in the late 2010s, continuing on into the early 2020s. Assassination Classroom’s latest controversy in the country is very much a continuation of controversy.
A middle school located in east Florida called Gifford Middle School Library has removed three volumes of Assassination Classroom so that students will be unable to read them. Jennifer Pippin, who chairs the Moms for Liberty Indian River County chapter, gave a statement.
“We don’t want students to think it’s OK to kill their teachers.”
Jennifer Pippin
Her response is likely due to the recent school shootings that have occurred in the country. She believes that the manga is inappropriate.
Kristen Huber, the director of the organization’s National Communications, furthered her statement.
“We should all be able to agree that violence toward teachers and explicit sexual content is not something that schools should be glorifying or promoting, especially on taxpayer dollars,”
Kristen Huber
particular reasons for the removal of Assassination Classroom due to the use of firearms in school, and being used to kill a teacher. However, the story and premise of Assassination Classroom is not what the public thinks it is. In fact, here is a synopsis of the manga.
In the blink of an eye, the night sky is forever changed when, with a great explosion, the moon is blasted into a permanent crescent. Confronting the governments of the world, a yellow tentacled monster boasts that it was the one responsible for the catastrophe, and in a year’s time, it will do the same to Earth. Zooming around at Mach 20, the creature makes a peculiar demand: a teaching position at the prestigious Kunugigaoka Junior High School. Desperate to keep the creature in one place, the government agrees, and so the students of Class 3-E find themselves faced with an impossible task—assassinate the creature responsible for destroying the moon.
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Although the fate of the world now rests on their shoulders, the class has more personal issues to deal with. Trapped at the bottom of Kunugigaoka’s hierarchical education system, they face harsh discrimination from both teachers and students alike. Defeatism abound, they don’t believe themselves capable of success in daily life, let alone against a monster that surpasses the abilities of any human. But as the enigmatic creature—whom they dub Koro-sensei—educates them in both assassination and academia, the children slowly find the courage to rise up and take aim at their target: the greatest teacher the world has ever seen.
In no way does the manga promote violence. In fact, it’s the complete opposite; the manga teaches the importance of life, friendship, dreams, and climbing to the top of the school against all odds. Not to mention that the classmates and the teacher himself are the closest to each other. The teacher, Koro Sensei, supports his students until the very end of the series. Assassination Classroom is much more than just a basic story.
To make matters worse, the Citizens Defending Freedom organization recently announced on Monday that it will challenge the manga, which can still be found in Florida middle schools, for its violent and sexual explicit content. If it goes according to their plan, then Assassination Classroom could possibly be removed from all middle schools in Florida.
Florida recently passed the HB 1467 bill, which went into effect last year. It requires school libraries to only include books pre-approved or vetted by the holder of “a valid educational media specialist certificate” from Florida’s Department of Education.
However, it’s not just Florida where the incident happened. Across five states from Florida, a similar problem is happening in Wisconsin.
In Wisconsin, the Elmbrook School District added five books from the series to its e-library beginning with the 2021–22 school year, but it removed them over a month ago after a parent raised concerns that the district might be promoting gun violence against teachers from the manga. Elmbrook’s Director of Library Services, Kay Koepsel-Benning, said that the claim was “inaccurate”. However, another parent raised concerns about the depiction of violence and sexualization of minors in the series.
The manga is being challenged in two other states, North Carolina and Virginia. In North Carolina, the series was described as a work that educates students on how to kill their teachers. In Virginia, a house bill passed, 1379, that requires school principals to keep a catalog of all audiovisual content, keep track of which books contain sexually explicit material, and make the information available to parents. It passed the house of delegates in February and was up for a debate in the senate subcommittees. However, it did not pass through the Senate. Tim Anderson, who sponsored the bill, took issue with the fact that the series is available in some school libraries.
Now, please take note: I am 100% for parents exercising their rights to know what content is being shown to their children. However, I do believe that many are poorly informed about what Assassination Classroom is really about, and because not all still know how anime and manga work with their tropes and cliches, they will assume that the genre and elements in some manga are supposed to be a device of influence when in reality, they’re just for gag and entertainment purposes. My biggest fear is that the banning of Assassination Classroom in some schools or even the entire state could cause a scary domino effect on many other manga simply because people will assume that the genre is inappropriate or unreadable for some. All we can do is hope that things will resolve and get better, but for now, manga in America finds itself in another culture war, a culture war that was never intended to be in the first place.
What do you think about this? Let me know in the comments!
Sources: Anime News Network, Otaku USA
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