Let me tell you about an incident that happened at work this week which is probably affecting libraries around the country. This is the UQ holder! Incident and is currently the main topic of gossip among all the librarians in my metro area.
Act 1: Context Setting
Now, in large library systems we tend to delegate the task of choosing what books to buy to designated selectors whose jobs are to spend a lot of time keeping up with all the books being published and reading reviews and deciding what to buy the library system and they send stuff to every branch that they think that branch could use; and then when branch libraries purchase their own books they do-so from the set of books already selected by the selectors and can trust that these books have been vetted to some extent; allowing branch staff to focus on branch-specific operations.
Most manga sold in the United States can be categorized as manga for teens like Naruto and Bleach, which gets sold in tiny paperbacks separated into 15 to 100+ volumes that take up a lot of shelf space; or it's prestige Japanese graphic novels like My Boyfriend's Husband and My Lesbian Experience of Loneliness which gets collected into fewer larger volumes and sold in formats more akin to American graphic novels for adults. Because of this, most libraries put all the manga in their teen section, except for the prestige ones which get put in the adult section. If you try to shelve all those tiny paperbacks with the likes of Watchmen and March it would look ridiculous because you'd have March 1, 2, and 3, taking up very little space, and then twenty volumes of one thing for an entire shelve.
UQ holder! is a manga series by Ken Akamatsu, the author of famous harem manga Love Hina and the Negima! franchise. UQ holder! is actually a sort-of sequel spin-off to Negima! think Boruto and Naruto. All the teen materials are assigned to one selector. Taking in every single book being published and deciding what to buy can be a lot. Usually, they are reading these long 50 page PDFs of brief book reviews and publisher blurbs; and these PDFs often don't have cover images either. She can't efficiently do deep research into every manga she decides to buy, especially when only first volume has been announced...
Act 2: UQ holder! Is a Shounen Manga For Teens
Keeping that in mind, here is the cover art and back of the book blurb for UQ holder!
Tōta Konoe dreams of going to the big city to make his mark on the world. Before he can set off on his journey however, the village elder has given Tōta the task of defeating Yukihime, the master mage who raised him. Tōta spends his days challenging Yukihime until a bounty hunter appears and takes devastating actions that change Tōta's life forever. From the creator of Love Hina and Negima!
OK, sounds like pretty typical shounen fair. This could be the next Bleach or My Hero Academia. And the author has published two noteworthy popular series before. Sure, let's subscribe the library to this series. We'll buy every volume as it comes out. And we'll send the series to branches that get a lot of teens.
Time passes. Here is volume 17.
Tōta and the rest of UQ HOLDER successfully travel back in time and stop the nuclear missile from hitting the orbital elevator... but just as they do, they discover that another attack is headed their way! And with Kirië's save point destroyed, it means that this time, there are no do-overs. With only one chance to save humanity from destruction, can Tōta figure out a way to save everyone, or will it take a great sacrifice to avert an even greater disaster?
Well... that took... quite the turn? How did we get from mages to going back in time to stop a nuclear bomb from destroying an orbital elevator? But, you know what, manga is crazy. This is typical shounen fair. The series is circulating. Teens love it, they're going into the library, they're coming to homework help programs, they're picking up other books while they're here. This is good.
Here's volume 25.
43 years have passed since Ba'al's terrorist attack that derailed UQ Holder's plan to defeat Ialda. Tōta has recovered most of his memories, but still can not fill in the 43 year blank that haunts him. Though he desperately wants to find out what happened to his friends, he must first survive being hunted by Ba'al's powerful minions. Without his powers or immortality, can Tōta escape Ba'al's forces and reunite with his UQ Holder comrades? And are there even any members of UQ Holder left to reunite with?
Wow, this is crazy. What is happening in this series. 43 years?! How old are these characters now? Well, still looks like normal shounen fare. Oh and it looks like the next volume is coming out soon. The blurb, but not the cover, is sent out in the latest publisher catalog. The series is going to end with volume 28 so let's just buy the rest of the series now and pay in advance so it gets here sooner.
Here's the blurb for volume 26
After reuniting with his friends, the large gap in Tōta’s memories is filled when he’s told what really happened after Ba’al’s forces attacked the orbital ring. And with a blessed respite from being hunted by Ba’al’s elite demon hit squad, Tōta is able to take some time to reconnect with his beloved friends and comrades. Some allies that were thought lost are found and the wounds created by Tōta being absent for over 40 years are healed with immortal love.
Sounds normal, and sweet, very wholesome. Nothing out of the ordinary to expect.
Act 3: UQ holder! is Not A Manga for Teens
So a new book shipment arrives at work and there's lots of teen books and then I find this:
So I'm like, OK, well, sometimes women in shounen manga have big boobs, so what, teens can handle big boobs. But then I notice in the corner... how it says it's for an 18+ audience only? I flip through and the entire volume is just a lot of very explicit sex scenes. Like, very explicit. Tits out, cunt out, dick out sex. Lots and lots of sex. I go to the teen section and flip through the rest of the series. None of the previous volumes carried an 18+ warning, although a couple had a 14+ or 16+ warning. There's lots of typical harem-manga tropes of cleavage shots and the main character being squished up against clothed busty women but nothing pornographic. Like, no wonder teens were into it, but it was still arguably not porn.
But, suddenly, in just this volume, it became pretty explicitly porn. Like, the entire volume. And here's the thing, we allow teens to borrow adult materials. If a teen wants to borrow an adult graphic novel with sex scenes and boobs, we don't stop them, that's between them and their guardians. But those books don't have big bright stickers on them that say "TEEN" nor are they shelved with the YA novels nor do they have big warning labels on the front covers that say "18+ ONLY!"
So I, and other librarians, write to central materials about this. In every single email about this, every single librarian explicitly affirms "I don't have a problem with teens seeing drawings of genitals but I'm concerned about parents suing us for distributing porn to minors if we shelve it in the teen section when it explicitly says adults only on the cover."
We're instructed to send the "problem volume" back to materials to be reviewed. Weeks pass. Finally, we receive an email with a verdict.
The teen manga series UQ! holder has suddenly taken a very adult turn in plot. The three remaining volumes, apparently, all carry an 18+ warning and contain explicit sex scenes. We want to affirm that we don't believe in censorship or that it's wrong for teens to look at this kind of content, but we've decided it's not appropriate to shelve it in the teen section. Rather than just shelve the final three volumes in the adult section, please move the entire 28-volume series into your adult graphic novel section. We will be mailing out new stickers for you to apply. Please remove all teen stickers and update the shelving location in the catalog.
So this perfectly teen-friendly manga series just very suddenly in the last three volumes shifted to being 18+ only and having explicit sex in every single chapter for three volumes until it ends. Because of this, I had to carefully peel the stickers off of twenty-five manga volumes which are paperbacks so it damages the book and then one-by-one update their catalog records and make notes on any volumes that are currently checked out to pull them for re-categorizing before we re-shelve them.
It took me hours and I don't have the new stickers yet so they're just sitting behind my desk. When I finally re-label them, I'll be shelving this goofy teen manga series next to Watchmen and Persepolis. And because there's twenty-eight volumes it's going to take up an entire shelf. A full fifth of our adult graphic novel section is going to be about Tōta doing weird time travel shenanigans and then getting laid with every single woman in the series as a grand finale. Ten branches have to do this.
And the entire time talking about this, every single librarian is so careful to affirm "Not that I have anything against teens looking at porn, if they find it on their own, but..." and mostly just a lot of "What the hell Ken!!! Why did you wait until volume 26 to do this!! This is tedious! You should've put a sex scene in volume 1 so we wouldn't have shelved this in the teen section to begin with!"
And it's so funny to me because online I feel like the discourse is soooo extreme around this. Among professionals who had to take classes in adolescent literacy development and youth services, who work with kids and adolescents every day, the obvious position is that you can't stop teens from looking at porn, you just have to not be explicitly giving it to them for legal reasons. It's not even harmful for them to find it, really. You shouldn't try to act in loco parentis telling them what's appropriate for them individually, but the things you mark as explicitly for teens should still be age appropriate. Let them find smut in the romance section, just don't tell them where it is. It felt so completely absurd being in all these email threads about this ridiculous situation where we're in the mirror world discussing the topic of teens encountering adult content and the most important thing is changing the stickers.
It was one of those grounding moments where I remember that the intense opinions encountered online are not actually indicative of what normal people believe. The big concern we had about these books being in the teen section was just that it says "18+" on the cover and maybe some parent would go all republican on us and accuse the library of being pedophiles grooming kids and giving porn to them. What everyone kept saying is "If only it didn't have the content warning on the cover, we could have played dumb and saved a lot of time."
Now that it's in the adult section, and the covers are damaged from peeling stickers off, I'm sure it won't circulate anymore and next year I'll be weeding it all out. Because those last three volumes are pornographic, we can't just give them away to the local high school like we do other manga that we weed. It's just so completely ridiculous because this story changed so drastically right at the end and not even the publishers were expecting it to happen.
It's also a refreshing reminder that it's not our jobs as librarians, teachers, etc. to protect teenagers from finding porn, it's just our jobs to have plausible deniability and distance, so that it can be a private personal process without it involving weird dynamics with adults. The teens gotta sneak around hiding it from us and we pretend we don't know they're doing it; that's the way things should be; well, at least in libraries. If someone gets mad about a teen finding UQ holder! the most important thing is our ability to say "It's clearly labeled as being for adults :/"