I Can See Why You Want to Do a Colony Drop on the Whole Industry

As Miyako pondered her life through her gauntlet of interviews, the production of Itsuki’s All About My Little Sister anime was proceeding well. Or so Itsuki thought, at least. He didn’t have a complete grasp on its status; the director and producer only gave him a vague idea during the voice recording sessions. For now, however, none of the main staff was fleeing the company, and episode one was apparently a hair’s breadth away from completion.

Those sessions, by the way, were also going well, save one time when a recording got suddenly delayed a week. The video he saw during them was still just animatics, but…

One night in mid-June, at the end of the voice-over session for episode four:

“Um, Director, Mr. Hashima, can I talk to you about something?”

Just as Itsuki and Tarui were leaving the control room, producer Tsutomu Oshima stopped them.

“…What is it?” Itsuki asked, already dreading it.

“…Yeah,” Oshima awkwardly replied, “you guessed it; we have a problem. Not a very big one, but…”

“What happened?” Tarui said.

“…We heard back from the network’s standards and practices guys.”

Before an anime went on the air, the broadcaster naturally checked the content, making sure it didn’t have anything they’d get in trouble for showing.

“Apparently, there’s one word in episode one they have a problem with.”

“They do?” replied Tarui. “What’s that?”

“Penis.”

“Penis… Yeah, sometimes that doesn’t pass,” Tarui observed.

Itsuki thought back to episode one’s content. They were right. At one point, Ichika Akatsuki did have the line:

“Hee-hee… Wow, Big Brother, look how big your penis has gotten…”

Although normally a model student, Ichika had to suck her brother’s blood on regular occasions, or else she’d turn into an insatiable erotic beast who’d want to do X-rated things with anyone around her, regardless of gender. She’d also get lewd just after a blood top-up, and the line above was from one of those scenes.

“Wait, penis isn’t allowed on the air?”

Tarui nodded at the perplexed Itsuki. “Yeah. Sometimes broadcasters will have us bleep out the whole thing—or just the part of the word that identifies it.”

“Wow, like a classified document…?”

Tarui winced. “If this was a comical scene, that’d be one thing, but inserting a bleep in the middle of that…”

“Yeah, right?!”

Itsuki was in firm agreement. This scene was pivotal. Up to this point, Ichika was a serious-minded girl at the head of her class who was outwardly crabby toward her brother, Kazuma—but the moment she tastes his blood, she transforms into a horny monster. It was the core gimmick behind All About’s plot setup, and this was where viewers got introduced to it for the first time. It was a serious, bewitching scene (or that was the plan anyway). If this got turned into “Hee-hee… Wow, Big Brother, look how big your BEEEP has gotten” or “Hee-hee… Wow, Big Brother, look how big your [sound of saucepans crashing in the background]-nis has gotten,” it’d wreck the entire atmosphere.

“There’s no way we can convince them to air it as is?”

“…Sadly, no,” Oshima said, shaking his head.

“But as far as I remember, I’m sure there’s been anime that got to say penis on TV,” the unrelenting Tarui said.

“Oh yeah, there was! About half a year ago, I definitely saw a female character say penis without it getting censored!” Itsuki was referring to the anime adaptation of another light novel broadcast last fall, on the same station slated to air All About. The memory encouraged him to speak up louder. “I don’t get why it’s okay for that one, but not for All About!”

“The standards and practices guy changed out half a year ago,” Tarui flatly replied.

“…Huh?” Itsuki raised his eyebrows, failing to comprehend.

“TV networks don’t really have clear guidelines on what’s okay to say and what’s not. It’s left to whoever’s doing the checking over there. Plus, all of TV’s getting a little stricter with sexual expression compared to half a year ago.”

“That…” Itsuki scrunched up his face, his voice ragged. “I can’t let our work go to waste for something so pointless and vague! Right at the climax, too! If they can’t air it, tell us before now, dammit!”

“…Do you think you could negotiate with the channel one more time about this, Mr. Oshima?”

Oshima shook his head at Tarui. “Unfortunately, based on my experience, a network’s never going to overturn their decision. In fact, if we harp on it too much, they may start keeping their eye on us and get even stricter with future episodes.”

“Those bastards,” Itsuki spat out.

“…Well, the broadcasters need their licenses from the government to stay in business. If they show something that causes a problem, that can put their license under threat. You can’t blame them for being a little more sensitive than other media.”

Oshima’s flat tone further enraged Itsuki.

“But, Mr. Oshima, how can you be so calm? We’re seeing this absolutely vital scene get completely wrecked, and you’re acting like it doesn’t affect us! If you’re not a creator, I guess you don’t understand the pain of watching people walk all over your creative work!”

“I-Itsuki, that’s going too far…”

Toki finally stepped in and gave his emotionally impassioned author a warning before he went off on the team too much.

“If that is the case, feel free to try to educate the public at large about that.”

It was with a low, anger-laden voice that Oshima spoke, sounding a bit like Char Aznable in his pilot’s seat.

“Wh-what?” Itsuki asked, faltering against Oshima’s inscrutable pressure.

“…Excuse me,” he replied, clearing his throat. “Compared to media like books and video games, the medium of television provides fewer hurdles to viewers, but that also makes it very likely you’ll be watched by completely hopeless idiots. If they turn on the TV and something suggestive appears on the screen, they won’t care about the context that comes before or after it. They won’t care if the creators didn’t mean for it to be immoral or racist. The lizard part of their brains will attack it, and they’ll complain to the entire world about it. There’s tons of them. And since most TV channels live off their sponsors, they’re extremely weak against viewer complaints… These jobless fools, just flipping through the channels, looking for something to whine about to kill time… That’s the kind of absurd conditions broadcasters are exposed to every single moment. I heard this from a friend of mine who works for a network…but if television’s the king of media, then it’s also a slave to the idle public. I’m sure you all understand that broadcasters aren’t looking for reasons to censor their own free speech. Who would ever go out of their way to lower the quality of their own productions?”

His words bore the weight of a veteran who had stood at the boundary between TV networks and creators for many years. Working directly with them, he knew that everybody at the network, just like himself, had pride as professionals and personal conflicts with what their jobs sometimes entailed. That was why he couldn’t paint them all as villains.

“The king of media and a slave to the public…”

Itsuki reflected on Oshima’s words, then thought of something to ask.

“…But words besides penis are all right? Like, you reminded me with the word slave, but at one point Ichika literally says ‘Make me your slave bitch, Big Bro.’ That’s beyond misogynistic, and from a historical perspective, the word slave probably isn’t something you should bandy around like that.”

“They didn’t complain about slave bitch.”

Itsuki was feeling drained. “…But a penis is just the name of body part, isn’t it? So their logic is to breeze right past slave bitch but censor something that half the human race has on them…?”

“That’s why I’m saying there’s no logic to it,” the lifeless-looking Oshima replied. “All that matters is whether viewers would see it as a problem. And a lot of people have more of a problem with reproductive activity than tragic murders and enslavement…or at least, that’s the conventional wisdom. That’s how it is… If you could logically predict how everyone who might potentially turn on the TV would react, you wouldn’t need to have standards like these…”

“Well,” interjected Tarui, “if we know we can’t get away with penis, how about we think about what we’ll do about it?”

“What we’ll do?” responded Itsuki.

“First, we could follow the broadcaster’s instructions, overlay some sound on the word, and take it out for the disc release. It’ll ruin what’s supposed to be a serious scene for the TV broadcast, but for those who like the show enough to buy a box set, they’ll be able to view the scene just as the creators intended it.”

Tarui paused a moment before continuing.

“Second, we can record another line and replace penis with something else. For example, like, ‘Wow, Big Brother, look how big you are down there,’ or ‘Look how big your wiener is.’ That’ll keep the scene from being totally wrecked, but it’ll reduce the impact a bit.”

“So either we retreat on the TV version or we switch to some non-censored word?”

“Right.” Tarui nodded. “I’d like you to make the choice, Mr. Hashima. I know ‘Look how big your penis has gotten’ is one of the most important lines of the novel series, so I think you need to be the one who decides.”

Itsuki silently considered his options. He ultimately spent about fifteen minutes doing so before coming to a conclusion.

“…Let’s change the line.”

In terms of what’d satisfy him personally the most, the first option was the clear winner. But:

“…A lot of All About readers are on the younger side, so I think a pretty big percentage of them won’t have the money to buy the Blu-rays. Plus…I can’t show a completely censored scene to all the readers looking forward to the anime.”

So he took the path that’d allow the largest amount of his reading audience to enjoy it as much as possible.

Frankly, he didn’t know if it was the correct decision. The more hardcore fans might post stuff like “If you’re gonna water down the content, don’t bother making the anime at all!” That was the exact group of people who’d shell out for the box sets as well.

“…All right.” Tarui nodded. “Let’s go with that.”

Oshima voiced no opposition.

This would be far from the first time that the All About anime production was stymied by censorship, including sex and violence issues—but sadly, this wasn’t a rare thing in television.