This past week Tumblr and Twitter burst into (yet another) uproar over cultural appropriation, specifically a Tumblr based webcomic called Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club, a comic set in Japan and based on the trials and tribulations of Japanese voice actors in Tokyo. The creators, although not Japanese, had studied the language and even lived in Japan for a while. Their Twitter commentary on the debacle indicated that they had sought input on the comic from Japanese people and had gotten positive feedback. However, after a couple of aggressive and angry comment via the Tumblr Ask feature, Toril Orlesky and Katie O’Neill, the creators, decided that they would prefer to simply cease making the webcomic rather than to “create a comic that will hurt people…” Shortly after they released a statement indicating that they would no longer be working on Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club, Orlesky and O’Neill were embroiled in a bitter contest between Twitter users who spewed vitriolic hate at them and at their creation, and users who defended the art both for art’s sake and for the sake of the medium. The full conversation, spanning dozens of users and roughly six days, is all available here.
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