Carly Smith 📖✍️

The conclusion to Otonari Complex is here. I received my comp copy in the mail recently--just in time for it to be in bookstores tomorrow 👀

It was a delight to serve as the adapter on this one! Though @jennichijou.bsky.social's translation was fabulous. And @cranchyroll.com's lettering is 💯

#manga

In middle school, I was a Daisuke stan when all my friends were Dark stans.

It'll be good to see what this new version is like!

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

I should be working, but I keep looking up Kyoto dialect stuff in advance of my travels...

Hey go watch (or read) The Summer Hikaru Died

Now that this season of anime is ending, I can say that this was probably the most stacked season of anime that I can remember in a long time. I remember Summer 2011 being quite good.

Stuck in my head today: "I have no shelf control" sung to the same melody as "this is my last resort"

LOL Light novels are a different breed! I see that phrase in similar forms a lot. Narration gets weirdly specific, too, with directions of slashes or someone sitting "diagonally on the other side" and stuff like that. So wordy and unwieldy. 😰

I turned my gaze diagonally behind me. ➡️ I looked over my shoulder.

I should make a thread of Japanese to English translationisms that I frequently edit as someone who works on a lot of light novels and sees a lot of the same turns of phrase in narration.

Consider this a thread now.
#amediting #amtranslating

Orange cat with one front paw covering half of his face while he sleeps on a bed

The lion sleeps tonight

I got an NYT push alert about Taylor Swift getting engaged, but not about the United States spying on Greenland

so if you’ll indulge me, I want to say a bit more about what it’s been like working on The Otaku Love Connection with minami! minami and I first met when we both worked for cybird in tokyo. we quickly discovered that we were both deeply involved in otaku fangirl culture and liked the same media

Definitely my favorite panel of the weekend!

This anime fucked me up in all the right ways!!!

I was SOBBING, turning to my spouse as they said, "Oh, did I mention that Devilman is quite sad? 😇"

Manga in The Crosshairs: The State of Manga Bans in 2025 Coop Bicknell interviewed librarians across the country about how the latest Executive Orders and lists targeting LGBTQ+ are affecting students' ability to read age-appropriate comics.

and additional reading: www.animenewsnetwork.com/feature/2025...

The Legal and 'Soft' Censorship Affecting Manga in America

Daniel Cruz of PEN America emphasized the toll censorship can take on authors: “Authors stop writing the content that's getting censored.”

To close it off, PEN America's rep encouraged us to work on the grassroots level, to build our communities and have conversations about book bans and the importance of the First Amendment. Things are really, really bad right now, which is why it's more important than ever to push back.

And if you have the money, buy the books you want to see more of! Manga with LGBTQIA+ stories and protagonists have fortunately been doing really well lately, and that encourages publishers to license more of them! It means a team can go to marketing and show them we want these things.

Attend your local school board meetings, because you KNOW angry parents (and even those who aren't parents) are using schools and libraries as battlegrounds to restrict books and knowledge. Be a safe space for kids in your life to come to you to ask questions about uncomfortable topics.

So what can we do? Reach out to your local library and let them know what you want to see on the shelves. And if they don't have those stories, ask them to acquire them. Let them know you WANT to see queer stories, BIPOC stories, and tell them you appreciate their work in making books accessible!

But this is also hitting libraries hard, particularly school libraries. There's a push right now to remove content with *any* nudity regardless of context. PEN America's representative even noted that in one case, the dictionary was removed for defining "sex."

Plus, when there's shrink-wrapping, there's no way to signal to potential readers of how explicit the book really is, even if it's just one page, nor is there a way for a reader to flip through and check for themselves beforehand, so the implication is that shrink-wrapped books are VERY porny.

If we let stories about queer romance be marked as mature even when there's nothing explicit, this is in fact censorship on queer stories! There will be a pressure from sales teams not to pick up these stories because they will be way too hard to move on shelves. This also impacts BIPOC authors.

Publishers are less likely to pick up series they think will be considered "mature" and will need to be shrink-wrapped so that they can be sold in stores like Barnes and Noble--this is a sales team's worst nightmare. It is so much harder to sell a book when it's shrink-wrapped.

Censorship is also forced on publishers when they host manga or comics on an app owned by Apple, which has rigid restrictions on any sort of explicit content. Webtoons has to cut sex scenes from chapters. To combat this, some publishers now host these chapters on their websites for readers.

I wanna note that there was nothing you could see of their bodies. They were cloaked in unnatural colors, and there was nothing sexual about the depiction. Think classic Sailor Moon transformations.

Disney had us revise the art they sent us anyway.

Tiina and I actually worked on the first few volumes of W.I.T.C.H. (from Yen Press in English) together and experienced the frustration of receiving assets from Disney and then being told to alter the art so that a magical girl transformation sequence showed less of their bodies.

Example of ratings weaponization: There's a push in US politics right now to treat anything with LGBTQIA+ characters or stories as adult. In addition, the depiction of women's nipples are considered sexual content regardless of context.

Tiina from Kana spoke on ratings systems and how there are multiple different ratings systems used not only from publisher to publisher, but libraries also have their own rating systems. These exist to give more information to potential readers, but we need to be aware of how they can be weaponized.