Have a jolly loli Christmas

Koharu, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Ko-ha-ru: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps from the throat to roll, at three, off the roof of the mouth. Ko. Ha. Ru.

She was Koha, plain Koha, in the morning, standing five feet three in one sock. She was Koha-chan to the senpais. She was Kusumi at school. She was 久住小春 on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Koharu.

~ ~ ~

Fanboy Rampage, East Asian division:
Is Seven Seas going too far by releasing Kodomo No Jikan (retitled in English to Nymphet)? All it takes is one panel from one page of a comic to get the pedo police going ... or should I say, the pedo persecution complex? The strongest negative voices seem to come from lolicon supporters/neutrals themselves, saying something to the effect of "We don't want this, it's only going to draw more attention to my nasty little habit. Soccer moms and media watchdogs nationwide are going to throw a fit."

OR ARE THEY?

Mountain, say hello to molehill. I see too many holes in this premise, caused mostly by personal shame and paranoia. Okay, so you like looking at pictures of seductive little anime girls. Does the presence of one new book on the shelf containing that kind of material suddenly mean that it's time to get measured for your prison gear? Get real.

The only people who are going to lash out against this loli-themed comic are people who knew about loli in the first place. The moral and cultural watchdogs don't care. Look, Joe (or Joan) Schmoe isn't going suddenly see this on a bookshelf and rush to the police. Hell, they can barely tell a Naruto from a Negima. All they're going to see of this series, at most, is a seven-letter word that they may have used once for a vocab quiz in high school, a Japanese title they can't pronounce, and a picture of a little girl. And they're going to just dismiss it as more of that "weird Japanese stuff" that they don't understand.

A concerned parent would have to be actively looking for questionable content within the pages of the comic to find anything prosecutable in the first place. But how many self-righteous moralizers are going to do this? I mean, their entire modus operandi is to avoid carefully examining anything that they hate, choosing instead to keep it at a distance so that it can remain this nebulous symbol of stuff they don't like. "I've never read Harry Potter but I know it promotes witchcraft." "I've never watched or played Polka-man but that Peek-a-chew is clearly an agent of Satan." "I've never played Bully but I've heard it promotes disruptive school behavior." You think they're actually gonna sit down with a copy of Nymphet and try to hunt down the naughty bits? It's hard enough getting them into a bookstore, much less the manga aisle.

Oh, and speaking of Harry Potter, Pokemon and anything by Rockstar Games. It's going to take lolicon a LOT more media visibility before you even need to start worrying about, like, the Society for the Suppression of Modern Visual Culture coming after you. We're talking ONE series from a niche company in a niche publishing field, while there are like 5 other niche companies out there thrusting out (yes, that word choice was intentional) entire bookshelves of comics about dudes banging each other, not necessarily consensually, and sometimes with ears of corn. Not that I'm picking on yaoi, but I'm saying, if I were a raging moralist who had to pick between like one book promoting pedophilia and an entire catalog promoting homosexuality, I'd pick the bigger target. And yet yaoi STILL hasn't made the Self-Righteous Right's shitlist! I doubt they can even pronounce "yaoi," because they're too bashing on Liberal Hollywood and, like, Gay Characters in American TV Shows or whatever.

TV shows. Ah, right. When it comes to Japanese entertainment, if it's not on Cartoon Network or KidsWB or something, it's probably a really small target. There was, like, that Scholastic Book Fair flak two years ago. But by and large I have not seen much of a "Japanese comics = Satan" movement out there, much less "Japanese comics with little girls in it = Satan" at all. If anything, we hear more about manga publishers editing their comics in advance rather than indignant moralists decrying the naked boobies in Hot Gimmick Vol. 12. (Oops, was that a spoiler?)

So all I see is a handful of paranoid creeps thinking their creepy little fandom is a much bigger deal than it really is. If you wanna raise a big stink, well, do it on the Internet for all I care, it's not like you're going to attract much attention -- aside from everyone else who already thinks like you. The Self-Righteous Right doesn't get online much anyway, except to spam each other's inboxes with ABCB poems about America and Jesus. Ironically, the folks who are trying to "protect" lolicon by condeming Seven Seas' licensing choices may be the ones raising imaginary fears and creating a nebulous enemy that doesn't exist.

Therefore, in conclusion:


This image has nothing to do with anything.