Thoughts on the My Hero Academia Controversy?

[May_Lily]

Recently My Hero Academia has gotten some controversy over the naming of a particular character that was revealed. It turns out the character shares the name of victims of human experimentation during World War II, and this along with the fact this character’s profession is to perform experiments on humans cause many Japanese, Chinese, and South Korean readers to take umbrage of this character’s name, and two Chinese platforms, Bilibili and Tencent, removed the series from their servers. The creator of My Hero Academia, Kohei Horikoshi, as well as Shounen Jump apologize for this and have renamed the name of the character.

Here are the sources that follow in order from the events that happen:

polygon - link
abacunews - link
Shounen Jump's Official Twitter Account - link
Caleb Cook's Twitter Account - link

Given what this character does from what I read a bit from the articles, I have an idea of why Kohei chose the name, but I can see he was not aware his naming choice would blow up in his face.

I would like to know what you all think of this matter. Are you in agreement with Kohei and Shounen Jump to change the name of this character or no? Should Kohei have used another approach to naming this character, or was his approach fine?

 

[Kanami-chan]

Well, MD community agreed to remove mild shit like Rapeman's credit pages, so I'd say everyone here'd agree to give in

 

[Kaarme]

From a business point of view, it's hard to say why he named the character such in the first place and why the editor didn't say anything when the character's name appeared in the draft for the first time. The easiest answer to the second point is the editor's general ignorance and incompetence, which seems to be the norm in Japan, but the answer to the first point is the real mystery. Personally I couldn't care less, but seeing how these days some people have made a whole career out of faking hurt feelings and protesting against everything they possibly can come up with, it's easy to see how this "scandal" happened. The mangaka, the editor, and the publication should also know we live in such a world. Not to mention Korea has made it a national policy to find fault in everything Japan does, which doesn't make things easier if you care about the Korean market. The communist dictators of China also want to use every good opportunity to punish Japan and generate ill publicity for Japan.

Was it the correct choice to give in and rename the character? The correct choice would have been to think twice about the character names when creating them. Now they were left with only bad choices, no good ones, and lost sales.

 

[Swain123]

People are already whining about the new name.

https://soranews24.com/2020/02/11/controversial-my-hero-academia-gets-new-name-comes-with-risk-of-yet-another-controversy/

 

[421cookies]

I always hate those part of korean tbh. They read scan rip before publish date in the first place, there's really no need for them to apologize for such degenerates that won't even affect much on their sales.

Also, Maruta is common name, and Hitler birthday also is shared with hundreds million people in the world so just stop with that crap.

 

[LowSanity]

It's not real life so in my opinion he can use whatever name he want. I'm against any forms of censorship and i was against removing rapeman's credits.
History teaches us that censorship breeds extremist ideas.
My opinion should be clear to anyone.

 

[Kaarme]

@LowSanity It's not censorship, it's business. No official is telling them to rename the character or else face the justice system. All it has the potential to result in is lost sales, less money, bad publicity, that's it. Sometimes stuff like this has actually helped the sales, but that typically only happens with titles that wouldn't have attracted much attention in the first place, but then due to some scandal, they suddenly became known by everyone. Unfortunately "My Hero Academia" is already well known to begin with, so it's not like this would make the large audience notice it for the first time.

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

What is wrong with this world. People can get offended over tripping and get the masses to blame the architect for leaving the curb there.

 

[KatoShuu]

I guess "names" can also trigger people :/
People who were born on "20th April" are all Hitler's reincarnation/descendant
Just make him an American and name him Steve or Bob

Spoiler

NEWS FLASH:
- Steve Roger/Captain America is a Nazi, "Hail Hydra" he said on Avengers:Endgame and on comic. Confirmed, Hirokoshi is a Nazi
- The name "Bob" if add another "o" in the middle, it will become "Boob". Marvel has a character named "Bob" and is one of Hydra's agents.
Confirmed Hirokoshi is a sexist AND a Nazi

 

[BirchJuice]

@LowSanity

It's not real life so in my opinion he can use whatever name he want. I'm against any forms of censorship and i was against removing rapeman's credits.
History teaches us that censorship breeds extremist ideas.
My opinion should be clear to anyone.

This. +1

Well, it is another story if content endorses shit like nazism or makes it seem harmless, but even then I prefer freedom of speech and expression, sure the feeble minded mind get manipulated... Note that I do not know jackshit about the series.

 

[PantsMan]

"What do you mean your character's name is Adolf/Joseph/Francois/Hugo/Juan/Robert? Don't you know those are the names of highly controversial DICTATORS?! Think before you offend someone."

lol

 

[MadeOfMagicAndWires]

I think what a lot of people are missing is that it's not just the fact that the character shares a name with someone controversial, it's the fact that the name was used in context of human experiments, making it a pretty direct reference.

If someone just happens to share a name that's one thing [1], but if you more or less directly reference war crimes, without any further context or reason, that's a different story.

Yes you can use controversial names, you can use pretty obvious cardboard cut-outs of these people as your characters, but things a get a lot more sketchy when that seemingly serves no purpose other than as a cheeky wink and a nod to those people or events.

Lastly, and freeze peach warriors always seem to get this one wrong, this isn't censorship. Horikoshi and Jump got criticized and then chose to change the name themselves. Criticism is not censorship of free speech, it is free speech.

Japan could really do with becoming a bit more aware of its WWII past, which it continues to try and sweep under the rug and play down, a German writer would have never thought to do this in such a thoughtless manner.

[1] you can even make some pretty great stories using that as a setting.

 

[TheGTF]

It's definitely a questionable decision but I don't believe for a minute it's just an unfortunate coincidence like Horikoshi and WSJ are trying to pass it off as, it's all too on the nose and context is too accurate for that. It's a ballsy decision but considering how abhorrent those things were and to whom they were inflicted on, China, Korea, and the rest of Japan being shocked and offended is entirely unsurprising and in my opinion, not unreasonable. How editorial could not have foreseen this, that's the real ridiculous part.

But I think the funny part is despite changing the name, Horikoshi is clearly trying to stick to his guns and keep this character's theme synced with Japan's past medical atrocities since the new name is pronounced the same as Kyushu University's abbreviation and that was a venue for some pretty monstrous human experimentations back in '45- it's not exactly an obscure incident in history. He definitely wants this new villain associated with these, coincidence my ass. Morally speaking, I don't see a problem with this because it's not like we don't have countless fictional analogues for people like Hitler and Stalin- this guy is as far as we know thus far being played straight as a monster of a person it's not like he's being used to try to whitewash that era into something admirable. If it were, then I would see this as being much more tasteless and far less appropriate. But otherwise, this isn't really anything new to fiction writing.

 

[deerafl]

This controvery is yet another proof that every passing year people become more easily triggered
One day people might be offended by crotch bulge or large tits

 

[Satan_Sphinx]

Oh no he referenced the code name of the old Japanese experiments during World War 2. Why do people even care? It's being used for the name of a villain who indeed does Human experiments. If anything this brings more awareness to a part of history which I previously didn't even know about.

 

[shipmeadow]

Poor little nipboi getting cucked by superior OKC (OOKII KANKOKUJIN COCK AKA BIG KOREAN PENIS) once again!

@MadeOfMagicAndWires
So you want Japs to stop sweeping things under the rug by following Germany's example of never mentioning anything about Nazis ever? Germans can't even look at a swastika without Merkel's gestapo kicking down their door. Censorship is used in modern context to mean impeding the free exchange of ideas. Attempting to disrupt speech through social media is initiating the use of force as much as impeding someone's speech offline is. You could try to argue that the intent of criticism wasn't an attempt to change the content of the work, but when it comes to encroachments against our collective liberties in the social market why would you take any chances? Betting our speech for some virtue points online has got to be one the stupidest games you could engage in. You'd have more fun wrestling bears.

Also, fuck Jump and macadamia man for giving in. We should all be radical jihadists for free speech.

 

[LowSanity]

It's nice to see a fellow mujahid.

 

[shipmeadow]

@LowSanity
Peace be with you, brother.

 

[sterven]

I swear people get offended over the dumbest things. It happened over a half a century ago get over it.
Also shame on them for bending the knee to these people.

 

[crazybars]

Uh..... guys. . . . . why would this surprise you? ****Skip if you don't want to read the explanation. It's just basically Chinese have tons of Anti-Japanese Propaganda.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/21/inside-china-anti-japanese-tv-propaganda-dramas-ba/

You guys got to realize . . . . almost half of Mainland China's main domestic Tv shows are mostly propaganda war dramas about fighting and killing the Japanese, or driving the Kuomintang out of China, a lot use both to pad the TV episodes. There are almost no Tv shows about any other war, just World war 2 and the post Kuomintang getting driven out. This is because you get massive government kickbacks for doing so, so pretty much every Chinese media company makes the propaganda war dramas.
====================

Here, I did a google search just to show you how easy it is to dig up Anti Japanese Chinese tv dramas. It's pretty unsettling to say the least, there's always a few dozen of these running on Mainland Chinese television.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b&q=china+anti+japan+drama&oq=&aqs=

===================
If you keep in mind one of Mainland China's main tv programming is mostly propaganda hating on the World War 2 Japanese, it should not surprise anyone that a modern Japanese reference to Japanese human experimentation, which was a real Japanese crime, should offend Mainland Chinese?