Here’s some news that isn’t about to make parenting any easier: The FCC has announced that they can’t understand what the hell is going on in anime and honestly have no idea if it’s okay for children.
Wow. You won’t often find the FCC without a strong opinion, but they’re clearly at a loss on this one.
In a statement disclosing their full-blown bewilderment as to what the hell is going on in the Japanese animation genre filled with bejeweled magician top hats, giant snakes with regular human hair, babies helicoptering into the air with their own spinning legs, and God knows what else, the FCC explained that they can’t issue a parental advisory on anime if they can’t even grasp what the fuck is happening, and they’re as far from understanding it as they’ve ever been.
“The FCC works tirelessly to protect our nation’s youth from potentially damaging content, but as far as anime goes, we don’t know what to tell you, because we straight-up don’t know what we’re looking at here,” the statement reads. “We’ve thoroughly reviewed dozens of anime shows, and although they usually start out with a bunch of vaguely magical cartoon characters like your safe, run-of-the-mill Nickelodeon show, they throw so much at you that after a while it’s tough to know if it’s appropriate or not. On one hand, every character seems to be, like, 14 years old, and there’s usually a talking cat or rabbit or whatever in their crew, which seems great for kids. But then all of a sudden, several shredded warriors will fly into the scene and graphically gut one of the teenagers with a lightsaber in slow motion for, like, five full minutes, which somehow kills the kid but also turns them into a dragon? We honestly don’t know if that’s an accurate description of what we saw, and that’s our big problem.”
“For every innocent physical gag where a character trips in the school hallway in front of their crush, there are an equal number of moments where a teenager will blush in a super sexual-seeming way for basically no reason, which somehow prompts their strong, blue turtle fellow of a sidekick to morph his own head into the head of a human baby, all before he gets decapitated by a subway,” the FCC’s statement continued. “We never have any goddam idea what’s happening in these shows, and thus we are unable to determine if anime is insanely damaging for kids to watch or educational or neutral or what.”
Yikes. If you’re the parent of a child who loves anime, this certainly isn’t the development you’ve been waiting for. Hopefully, the FCC can get a feel on what’s happening in anime sooner than later so that we can finally get a verdict on whether kids should be watching it.
