We thought after all these years, our censorship laws have evolved with time, but clearly, we thought wrong.
Cover them up, please!
A picture showing a humanoid from popular Japanese manga 'Attack On Titan' post-censorship has become the source of amusement for netizens online.The peculiar scene from one of the pages was shared by Redditor u/flamingthunderbanana on the sub-Reddit r/Titanfolk on Wednesday (3 February), and it has since garnered more than 13,400 upvotes on the page.
In the 'Attack On Titan' manga, the humanoids are known as Titans, and the human-eating giants do not wear any clothes.
One of the scenes in the manga features two Titans in all their naked glory duking it out. This is how the scene looks like in the original manga:
However, in the Malaysian version of the manga, the Titans can be seen wearing tights and other pieces of clothing to, you know, protect their modesty (because #TitanLivesMatter):
“I want everyone to know that the titans are wearing tight pants in the Malaysian version due to local censorship law,” u/Flamingthunderbanana wrote in the Reddit post yesterday.
Netizens who saw the post were amused by our local censorship laws, as many were not aware of the treatment given to the manga series created by Japanese artist Hajime Isayama.
Another Reddit user, u/TheUltraGuy101, also chimed in with several images of the Titans getting clothes forced on their naked bodies by our censorship board.
"Some of you wanted to see how female Titans were censored, so here it is," he wrote, attaching a picture of a bare-chested female Titan being wrapped with a sarong in the Malaysian version of the manga.
Malaysia and censorship
Compared to some of our neighbours, Malaysia has very strict rules when it comes to even the mildest forms of nudity.The censorship law in Malaysia stipulates that books, magazines and prints containing nudity are required to be censored manually by shading the areas in black ink (which would explain the black tights given to the Titans).
Although no depictions of genitalia were shown in any of the 30 volumes of 'Attack On Titans' manga, we're not entirely surprised that the local censorship board finds offence in the appearance of the Titans.
After all, we were the ones who famously (infamously?) banned the word 'Morphin'' from the title of the 'Power Rangers' series.