Hope for the subculture? Possibly.

You've seen that story before. You know. That story. You roll your eyes, toss the newspaper in the recycle, push your less child-friendly DVDs to the back of your shelf and tune out your family's comments and questions. It's not even your fault. You weren't the one that let the random ten-year-old lay eyes on hentai.

Fear my censorship. Don't worry, real clean shoujo fanart does exist... somewhere.


Yep, another one of those reactionary news articles has popped up, this time in Ontario, where a Catholic schoolteacher took her student to the video store, gasped and quickly ushered the kid out upon seeing that the hentai was not stored with the live-action porn, but across from the family movies. I wouldn't go into hiding for a week just yet, though. The article in question, upon inspection, actually seems to be written by (gasp) sensible people.


Never in the text does the sentiment of 'animation is for kids, so if it's not, it's corrupting the youth' come up. The article condemns the video store, but not for stocking the videos in the first place; what is corrupting the youth, according to them, is the fact that there is porn out in the open near the kids' section, no matter if it's drawn. Of course, they have the little "what's anime?" blurb at the end, but even that's inoffensive and aims to calm people down rather than rile them up, describing the wide range of age-appropriateness as well as assuring that the major national video chain stocks anime but not hentai.


The short of this? We're actually getting some respect. A dumb video store manager put hentai within view of kids, and the manager is blamed, but we are not - it's not our fault and we're not out to corrupt the youth or anything. I'm kind of impressed.