MangaDex Will Remove Manga Featuring Minors in Adult Situations to Comply with the Law
The pirate manga site MangaDex will begin complying with the law, despite being widely known for hosting many unlicensed manga. The change came to light after several titles started being removed from the platform, especially works containing sexual scenes involving underage characters.
The situation began when a scanlation group posted on the site’s forum asking why their translation of the manga Stray Cat Girl, by author Shiina, had been removed. They later discovered the reason was a new internal policy: manga that depict sexual activity involving minors violate the law, and MangaDex has decided to remove them to avoid legal issues.
This was confirmed by MangaDex administrator EtherealNeko, who stated:
“Stop spreading misinformation. Manga are being removed because they show sexual situations involving minors, either by appearance (handled case by case) or explicitly confirmed in the manga. This is about the law and complying with the law. If you masturbate to little kids, go do that somewhere else — there are specialized sites for that.”
On MangaDex’s Discord, other admins also confirmed they are removing manga to “comply with the law.” Reactions have been overwhelmingly negative, with users canceling their MangaDex subscriptions and saying they never imagined that a pirate site would take such actions.
Others are criticizing the site’s admins, who strangely joined only two years ago, with many suspecting that some admins may want to bury MangaDex entirely or redirect visitors to their own projects.
Check out some reactions:
“The site was good while it lasted. Don’t be sad because it ended, be happy because it existed.”
“Here we go, Crunchyroll 2.0. Actually Crunchyroll 3.0, since Fakku was 2.0.”
“How pathetic and cowardly of you to remove this. I’m glad alternatives are appearing.”
“So they’re going to remove 80% of manga? Most anime characters are minors.”
“Every site, every company, every community is run by idiots. I’m so tired.”
“Oh, so the pirate site suddenly cares about ‘the law.’ They’ll have to remove half their content if that’s the case.”
“People should complain about this. How can a pirate site suddenly cry about morality when they’ve been breaking laws that could get you jailed in any country?”
“It’s funny how the guy who should be in jail is talking about law.”
“MangaDex used to be the GOAT, now it’s trash. I’ll have to find another site to read.”
“The main admin who mentioned ‘legality,’ EtherealNeko, is part of the NamiComi group. If you don’t know, that’s the group that publishes non-Japanese ‘manga,’ which are terrible and can’t even be read on MangaDex. But you can read them on their own site, which links to MangaDex. I imagine this is all part of an attempt to clean house and push people toward their content (laughs).”
What do you think about this entire controversy?