Anime Sunday: New Life+ Controversy

Michael Blaker
Game Industry News is running the best blog posts from people writing about the game industry. Articles here may originally appear on Michael's blog, Windborne's Story Eatery.

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This week for Anime Sunday I’m not covering a new series. It’s all about the New Life+ Controversy!

Huh?: So for those unaware there was in the past month a huge controversy that exploded regarding a Light Novel series that was getting an Anime adaptation. Than someone found some pretty inflammatory Twitter posts by the author and everything went pear shaped. First the Voice Actors quit the Anime adaptation, than the Anime itself got cancelled. Following that the original publisher pulled the series from Print and the US Publisher did the same.

Seriously?: Yeah, it really happened and personally I find it a shame that it happened and now a bunch of people are out of jobs after putting in work on it.

But they were really insensitive remarks, and so was the main character in the book!: Well I will agree that the Author was an asshole, and probably still is one, but I will dispute the fact that the main character was racist.

First the main character doesn’t have any memories, only knowledge of his past life. The fact that he killed thousands of people as part of a war is something he’s completely unaware of from the first 60 or so pages of the first volume of the Light Novel that I’ve read. The fact he did that is slightly unbelievable, but then again it’s a war, people die; get over it. The fact that some American people got upset at that and call foul when America has a sitting president with known racist Tweets, Multiple Sexual Assault Allegations and tons of other sleazy shit is a bunch of bull to me. Personally I am fully aware of how nationalistic Chinese citizens can be, it’s featured prominently in much of their own literature and authors make similar remarks all the freaking time. Some of the authors of series that have even gotten true Anime have also made rather insensitive remarks on the Chinese equivalents of Twitter. So this occurring is a bit confusing to me   I’m fully aware of how much bad blood there is between Korea, China and Japan, but people losing their jobs over remarks made by another person years in the past is a bit much to me. If you’re going to be upset, than be upset BEFORE people start working on something.

That’s it for this week’s Anime Sunday.

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