This is actually a reply to KellyJane's recent Journal entry… link
It really made me think and I didn’t want to spam her site with my too-long-comment, so I posted it on my Journal instead. I somehow have the feeling that this might be a bit off topic but I just had to say what’s on my mind.
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Hmm…
I sometimes wondered, too, if Animes could have a negative effect and I totally agree that it all depends on the nature of people.

But what I really want to talk about is the fact that Animes are too often considered as series made for children in the western world. I want to give an example:

I live in Germany and Naruto is aired in German tv for 1 or 2 years now an of course it’s scheduled in the children’s program. Its target audience are 6-12 year olds. In my personal opinion this Anime is rather meant for teens. Some of the original Japanese episodes are even rated 16+ referring to German FSK.
But that’s not the exact problem I’m referring to… It’s the censorship. And I’m not talking about just cutting out some of the violent scenes. Seriously, they totally overdo it until it really turns out to be ridiculous.
They cut out parts of some violent scenes, they are editing nearly all the blood that’s shown on screen and they censor the dialogues, which means they don’t use the words ‘death’, ‘die’, or ‘killed’ at all. Instead they replace them with ‘hide’, ‘disappear’ or ‘beat’.
I’ve seen blood in many different colours during the first two seasons. It was invisible, transparent, light blue, dark blue, black, white, yellow and even neon-pink, but rarely red… Further to mention, many weapons simply disappeared, too…

Seriously, I don’t think what they’re making is good in any way. In my opinion it’s close to violence-glorifying. I mean, what good is it for little children to see how someone gets beat up and it doesn’t even bleed? Not to mention that the plot often gets difficult to understand with no weapons where there should be some, no bleeding when someone gets hurt and no death and just very vague hints on what really happened. Really, I so had to lol hearing some of the ridiculous dialogues.

All the older fans of Naruto are annoyed in Germany. There were many e-mail-actions and letter-writings to the German broadcaster, if they could at least bring a less censored version in the evening program or something, but the answer always remains the same: They won’t change it so that the younger audience can continue to watch it and they have to do this strict censor to protect the children who are watching it… The abstract about this is that there are other Animes like One Piece for example, which are much less censored on the same German program. Or ‘Detective Conan’ where death is an essential point in the series. So what do they want to say? That it’s okay to show murder and death to children in the one series and it’s a bad thing in the other? That makes absolutely no sense to me…

What really got me to think about that in particular is an article I read sometime last year on the Internet. I don’t know exactly where I found it anymore and I can’t guarantee that it’s completely reliable but the source seemed to be save enough…
It dealt with a child that died by asphyxiation while playing outside. It wanted to imitate Gaara who fights and defends himself with sand. I was really shocked when I read that and it seriously made me think about it.

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So… I’m sorry if I’m just rambling a little too much, but I wanted to say that for a long time now and I hope you understand what I wanted to say, because I had some difficulties expressing what I meant because, as good as I am in English at school (according to tests and teachers XD), it’s still not my native language.

Thanks to people who actually read this.