Fans Express Shock As TVTropes Bans Gushing Over Magical Girls

This week, X was buzzing over the decision by popular website TVTropes to ban all mention of the Gushing Over Magical Girls anime. The admins decided that since the characters are under 18, the anime must be deleted from the website and never mentioned. It’s a good thing someone is thinking of the (fictional) children!

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Gushing Over Magical Girls Banned from TVTropes

Why Did TVTropes Ban Gushing Over Magical Girls?

I’d like to say that I’m a fan of the TVTropes. In the 25+ years I’ve spent blogging about anime and Japan, I’ve visited the site many times to see if I’d missed any important element of a series I was covering. It nearly always has some interesting angle on a show that I’d missed, which I can incorporate into my post. Like Grammarly and Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, the site felt like a “cheat code” for writers.

But this week, TVTropes took down their pages relating to Gushing Over Magical Girls (blog link), the popular show that explored various fetishes through the medium of a magical girl anime. The anime no longer exists as far as the site is concerned. The reason? “Firstly, we don’t want pages on works that consist entirely of explicit sex or other fetishistic stuff, with no story,” one site member said during the discussion. “Secondly, we do not want pages on works that depict sexual activity” between younger characters.

And so the site admins added the Gushing Over Magical Girls anime and manga to the Permanent Red Link Club (they love to create colorful names for things over there), never to be mentioned in any form. How do fans feel about this?

In a word, “Pathetic.”

TVTropes Doesn’t Apply Its Ban-Hammer Uniformly

But wait! If a sexy anime about school-age magical girls in a fantasy setting is going to be wiped from the TVTropes website for all time, what about all the other “problematic” series? All these anime currently have extensive articles on the site.

To Love-ru, which regularly features sexy moments involving Rito’s sister Mikan. She’s officially in the sixth grade, despite her more mature character design.
No Game No Life, with its cameltoe shots of Shiro.
Shows like Goddess Dormitory and Miss Caretaker of Sunohara-sou focus on “Straight Shota” story elements to generate comedy and fan service.
Monogatari Series features Arararagi getting into all sorts of sexy situations with 5th grader Mayoi Hachikuji, or with his sisters, who are aged 13–15 over the course of the show.
Kuma Miko: Girl Meets Bear is about a 14-year-old girl named Machi, living with a talking bear. The show is heavy with visual fan service and puts Machi in many uncomfortable situations to titillate fans.
I hate to break it to TVTropes, but the girls in Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA, who do sexy things with each other to raise their mana levels, are not aged 18.
As Twitter pointed out, if Gushing Over Magical Girls is banned for having overly young fictional characters, why is there a detailed page for the bizarre Netflix film Cuties up?

Banning Sexy Anime Harms All Anime Fans

Banning all mention of certain anime because of “problematic” content introduces inaccuracies that make TVTropes a fundamentally unreliable source for information going forward. It also greatly harms the TVTropes brand in the eyes of former fans.

Want to look up the voice roles of seiyu Rie Kugimiya? Her creator page omits any mention of Lotte no Omocha, because a show about a sexy succubus was deemed too sexy for the site. You can’t even read about its existence.

Or are you doing research on Eri Kitamura? Unfortunately her breakout role in Kodomo no Jikan gets no mention on the site, making it impossible for you to form an opinion on how her career has progressed over the years. But there is an entry for Listen To Me Girls, I Am Your Father, in which Kitamura played a similarly young character. The directors specifically cast Kitamura in that role as a shout-out to KNJ fans, but you can’t read about this fact on TVTropes.

TVTropes Isn’t the Only One

Major anime websites refusing to acknowledge certain content in the anime world are not totally unheard of. Anime News Network — now owned by Kadokawa — has always had a “no hentai” policy which was especially frustrating for J-List and JAST USA. It wasn’t much fun being told ANN won’t do a news report on a game we worked on for years, like School Days, because some of their writers had a stick up their butts about hentai content.

Obviously, every website has the right to decide what content it will publish. But what would happen if My Anime List or Wikipedia declined to provide information about major pop cultural works based on their staff not wanting to be associated with it? Fans would laugh them off the Internet. It’s especially weird in the case of TVTropes, because they already have the “YMMV” page option for discussing tropes that are potentially delicate or offensive. You can even read details of the “Normie Filter” opening in A Sister’s All You Need…but you can’t read about Gushing.

J-List will never ban your favorite anime. In fact, we’ve got Gushing Over Magical Girls figures and Blu-rays for you here!

J-List Customers React to TVTropes Censoring Anime!

I asked J-List’s awesome customers of culture what they thought about this change. Let’s see what their replies were!

TVTropes is useful for catching things about a series I missed, but it’s insanely frustrating because it’s run by the most unfunny people imaginable.

They keep things like To Love-ru up but not Gushing Over Magical Girls. They’re happy to discuss shows with IRL children but pearl clutch when drawings appear.

They just need to let people enjoy what they want and stay in their own little corner of social media. I despise reality television, but I don’t make others feel bad about watching it.

Any site that bans an anime because of the girls’ ages in the show is full of hypocrisy. They pick and choose which shows and girls are inappropriate and aren’t consistent about it. Especially when they allow sexy shows based on real children (Cuties).