As a general rule, we love Amazon.com, the company that allows us to order almost any fun product easily with just one click. There’s just one problem: when one company, any company, becomes so powerful that they can decide which anime creations will be commercially viable and which will be forced into the garbage bin of history, it can really grind our gears. As reported by Sankaku, Amazon has recently issued blanket bans on a wide range of popular anime figures, ostensibly because the characters are under the age of 18, and/or wearing school uniforms. The fact that these figures are all completely and totally innocent, without the slightest connection to adult content or themes, has many fans quite shocked. Naturally, J-List isn’t going to take this lying down, and we’re adding the banned anime figures to our site so customers can buy them if they wish to.
Amazon Bans Your Favorite Anime Figures. What’s J-List Going to Do About It?
We got the first whiff of this problem a few months ago, when the No Game, No Life anime series was “de-platformed,” with all figures, Blu-rays, and even the translated light novels unceremoniously removed from Amazon completely, essentially making it impossible for the licensors to make that popular series available to fans. This may or may not have been as a result of pressure by some “Concerned Karens” certain Australian politicians, who have taken it upon themselves to police the morality of anime and start banning various anime products from Australia. I’m not up on my contemporary Australian slang, so we’ll collectively refer to these individuals as “cunts” and move on.
We all know that anime has an “edge” to it, and from the very beginning of the rise of anime, we’ve enjoyed having the freedom to watch stories about death and drama and violence, in which the fate of whole planets might hang in the balance. And to tell stories of people falling in love and having sex, if that’s what they want to do. The entire point of anime is that it’s a subculture free from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic hang-ups of the societies we’re a part of, and is free to tell original stories in bold and innovative ways.
While you could make the very slight argument that an anime that goes out of its way to show the main character’s cameltoe in the first 30 seconds might at least receive some kind of for-adults-only rating, the latest actions of banning a swath of normal characters who appear in all-ages anime apparently for the sole reason that they’re wearing high school uniforms is beyond ridiculous. It frankly says a lot more about the individuals banging on the table and calling for anime figure bans than it does about anime itself. It smells very much like the American tradition of “family values” politicians who are publically very concerned over the moral failings of you and me, and where we’re putting our genitals this week… yet who invariably get outed cruising for sex at gay bars, and must ask their voters for “forgiveness.” (This is a well-understood concept in psychology called projection.)
A lot of people dislike the idea that companies can ban their favorite products for arbitrary and ridiculous reasons, but J-List is going to do something about it: by finding stock of all the banned figures with our distributors in Japan, and make them available to you. Browse the figures that Amazon has banned at this link, or check out the No Game No Life figures here. J-List will make all figures banned by Amazon available on our site for as long as stock can be obtained.
What do you think of the news that Amazon has banned your favorite anime figures? Do you think that any corporation should be able to take away a figure from fans just because she has a skirt we might be tempted to take a sneak peek at? Tell us in the comments below, or on Twitter!
Our sister company J18 Publishing has really been working hard to bring out awesome new licensed doujinshi releases for everyone, which are 100% uncensored and fully translated to English. The newest book is Fox Bride, about a mani character who goes to a Shinto shrine to pray for his girlfriend, who is in a come, where he meets a fox goddess who helps him be with his girlfriend one last time, through her magic. It’s a great book for your collection!
