These are the kinds of things that I always hate to write about, but here we go…
A 25-year-old woman from Miyagi prefecture has been arrested for sending an email to Wit Studio (Attack on Titan, Vivy – Flourite Eye’s Song –) that said she was going to set fire to their building in a week. The email was sent on May 7th and police arrested the unnamed woman earlier this week on the charge of suspicion of forcibly obstructing a business. In a sworn written statement, the woman confessed to writing the threatening email.
It’s been further reported that the harassing messages from this woman began in 2018 and only grew in frequency and intensity over the years until the actual threat of arson was made, at which point the studio contacted the police. In a statement, Wit Studio said that they had no direct or indirect contact with the suspect. Her motives for coming after Wit Studio are still unknown to the public.
Arson is still a sensitive subject for anime fans, ever since the July 2019 Kyoto Animation massacre at the hands of a man who claimed that the studio plagiarized his work. Thirty people, including the director of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, were killed in the attack. Ever since that incident, there have been unfortunate incidents of people threatening businesses with similar arson attacks, including production companies Square Enix and Key. There was even a recent incident with a person trying to set an idol concert on fire, which luckily ended in failure.
I’m relieved and grateful that I’m only reporting on someone making a threat, rather than the worst-case scenario of someone carrying out one of these attacks and injuring or possibly even killing more innocent people who just want to bring some entertainment into the world.
Source: Kotaku
