A school district in Horry County, South Carolina, recently announced a shocking book ban on Friday, November 15 – making the decision to remove Yusei Matsui’s Assassination Classroom of its school libraries. The decision was made after the mother of a ninth grader filed a complaint regarding the content of the series. The mother who filed the initial complaint said the manga had numerous pages depicting “handguns, rifles, knives and potions,” as well as content featuring young female characters wearing lingerie.

Initially, the manga was pulled from school shelves in October while the district conducted an investigation into the series’ content and ultimately made the decision to remove the title. Per school district regulations, the decision cannot and will not be reconsidered for a minimum of five years. Assassination Classroom follows a class of middle school students tasked with assassinating their homeroom teacher – an alien creature with superpowers bent on destroying Earth at the end of the school year. THE the manga began to be serialized in Weekly Shonen JumpIt is Jump comics imprint in 2012 until its official end in 2016. The series received an anime adaptation in 2015 and ran for 47 episodes. The series is classified as shonen, meaning the manga’s target demographic is young teenagers.

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Assassination Classroom isn’t the only manga to be hit by the US book ban

This it’s not the first time Assassination Classroom was hit by book bans in the school district In March 2023, a middle school in Gifford in eastern Florida removed the series from its libraries after receiving numerous complaints, followed shortly after by the Elmbrook school district in Wisconsin, removing the title of its electronic library. However, Assassination Classroom isn’t the only series to fall victim to school-wide bans. Brevard, Florida public schools banned the first volume of Sasaki and Miyano by Sho Harusono, a popular manga about boys’ love, at a school board meeting in August 2024. The decision was made after an unidentified person filed a complaint regarding the contents of the book, stating that “Sexual orientation should not be encouraged, suggested or implanted.” “. Although the book is aimed at teenagers and does not feature any explicit and blatant content, the complaint continues, claiming that there is “no value in making homosexual books available in schools.”

Sasaki and Miyano is a popular 10-volume manga series that follows two high school students who eventually develop romantic feelings for each other. The main character of the series, Miyano Yoshizaku, is a first-year high school student who, although attracted to girls, likes read a boy love manga. He hides his love for the genre out of embarrassment, but shares the stories he reads with his friend and classmate, Sasaki. Sasaki, Miyano’s love interest and friend, is more outgoing than Miyano and helps bring him out of his shell throughout the series. He is the first character to acknowledge that he may be developing romantic feelings for his friend. The series was an instant hit when it was released in 2016 and has since received a spinoff series and an anime adaptation from Studio Deen.

H/T Anime News Network