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 from its school libraries. The decision was made after a ninth-grade student’s mother filed a complaint regarding the series’ content. The mother who issued the initial complaint stated that the manga featured numerous pages depicting “handguns, rifles, knives, and potions,” as well 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 came to the decision to pull the title. Per the school district’s regulations, the decision cannot, and will not, be reconsidered for five years minimum. 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 manga originally began serializing in Weekly Shonen Jump‘s Jump Comics imprint in 2012 until it officially came to an end in 2016. The series received an anime adaptation in 2015 and had a 47-episode run. The series is classified as a shonen, which means that the target demographic for the manga is younger teenage boys.
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Assassination Classroom Isn’t the Only Manga To Get Hit With Book Bans In the U.S.
This isn’t the first time Assassination Classroom has been hit with school district book bans in the U.S. In March 2023, a Gifford Middle School in east Florida removed the series from their libraries after receiving numerous complaints, with the Elmbrook School District in Wisconsin following shortly after, removing the title from their electronic library. However, Assassination Classroom isn’t the only series to be the victim of school-wide bans. Brevard Public Schools in Florida banned the first volume of Sasaki & Miyano by Sho Harusono, a popular boys’ love manga, during a school board meeting in August 2024. The decision was made after an unidentified person filed a complaint about the book’s content, stating that “sexual orientation should not be encouraged, suggested, or implanted”. Despite the book being rated for teenagers and lacking in any blatant explicit content, the complaint continued, stating that there is “no value in making homosexual books available at school.”
Sasaki & Miyano is a popular, 10-volume manga series that follows two male high school students who eventually develop romantic feelings for one another. The series’ main character, Miyano Yoshizaku, is a first-year high school student, who, despite being attracted to girls, enjoys reading boys’ 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 extroverted than Miyano, and helps to bring him out of his shell throughout the series. He’s the first character to recognize that he may be developing romantic feelings for his friend. The series was an instant hit when it began releasing in 2016, and has since received a spin-off series and an anime adaptation from Studio Deen.