Blocking runobe on the Baka Tsuki website

At https://antizapret.info/?search=baka, it is easy to verify that the Baka-Tsuki website (whose logo I quote on the right; this is one of the world's largest repositories for unofficial translations of Japanese jobs) since August 1, 2014 in Russia, it was blocked at the direction of Roskomnadzor. Officially, the blocking concerns four URLs, but in the actual case many major providers (Rostelecom, for example) block the site entirely.

What is ranobe? This word (as you can read on Wikipedia ) refers to Japanese entertainment stories for teenagers and young people - these are small books, the text of which is interspersed with illustrations, the style of which resembles manga or anime.

The blocking of the “Baka-Tsuki” website is not connected with, for example, that the translation of a translation by the author’s office without the consent of the authors can be perceived by the agencies as “piracy” - but only because the drawing in the style of manga can in some cases be perceived by the authorities as “pedophilia ". (Both words have to be put in quotation marks: under Habrakat, I will try to list the signs that these pictures have as little of a relationship with children as far as the translation of the book they illustrated is far from attacking ships.)
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Before our eyes, the flywheel of repression continues to unwind, aimed at hampering access to information for consumers of Japanese visual culture on the Internet. (For simplicity, I’m going to talk about “animeshniks” here, although it’s about fans of not only anime, but also manga, ranobe, visual novels, danmaku, mini-sculptures, dakimakur, and so on.) Pretext for blocking websites ( and also, perhaps, their ultimate goal) is to defame animeshnikov as “pedophiles”.

We discussed the two previous revolutions of this flywheel at Habrahabr last year: they were blockages of some anime (on June 14, 2013, “ Roskomnadzor recognizes hentai as childish porn, calls for complaints, promises to replenish the registry of prohibited resources on the Internet ”) and then some kind of manga (September 24, 2013, “ Roskomnadzor bans twenty-nine Japanese manga comics, equates to having sex with children ”). What was that anime, what kind of manga? But who knows them! - and in fact, and in another case, unfortunately, the readers of “Habrakhabra” (among which ≈37% of animeshnik ) did not have a list of names of specific blocked works and therefore could not independently assess the validity of the decisions made by Roskomnadzor; we could only shudder from the obviously excessive assessments published throughout the country from the words of one or another expert (“ consumers of this kind of content are psychopaths ”, “ they can be called aesthetes of perverts ”, “ “ manga ”we consider as a type of creative activity that gave the beginning of the development of "hentai" , this is all in Izvestia alone).

With the “Baka-Tsuki” blocking, the situation is much better: the exact addresses of the blocked materials became known - therefore, we also have the opportunity to draw independent conclusions about them. Let's start this lesson.

At https://antizapret.info/?search=baka we see four URLs. Let us number them for the convenience of later mention:

• No. 1: https://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/images/8/8c/STnBD_V05_001.jpg
  
• No. 2: https://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=File:STnBD_V13_002-003.jpg
  
• No. 3: https://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=File:STnBD_V09_004-005.jpg
  
• No. 4: https://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/images/9/90/STnBD_V09_004-005.jpg
  

The Baka Tsuki website is a wiki (on the MediaWiki engine) that stores revision history and other metadata. This means, for example, that blocking the entire wiki hinders the participation of Russian translators (or, for example, proofreaders) in translation, just as yesterday’s blocking of the entire Github prevented Russian programmers from participating (or, for example, authors of documentation) in creating open and free source code - and even more so, because instead of DVCS (Git) on the Baka-Tsuki website, the only central repository of edits is used. But it also means that address number 3 makes no sense to consider separately from address number 4: this is the same illustration for which number 3 is the address of the metadata, and number 4 is a direct hyperlink to JPEG.

And the appearance of such a set of forbidden addresses may mean that the direct authors of the ban did not have a perfect understanding of the MediaWiki technology, or else the restrictions of the address No. 1 (direct hyperlink to JPEG) and the address No. 2 (metadata pages) would also be accompanied by the prohibitions of neighboring pages, like №4 for №3.

There is another, more sinister oddity: the ban for some reason only concerns https-addresses, although nothing prevents you from opening the Baka-Tsuki website via regular HTTP (the Baka-Tsuki website does not force a redirect to the HTTPS address ). But, as we all know, it is the prohibition of HTTPS (that is, a protocol that encrypts intercepting and analyzing traffic) is for many providers a reason (or at least a thick hint) to close access to the site as a whole.

As a result, it is not difficult to observe the situation when, for example, MegaFon currently does not allow HTTPS to even open the title page “Baka-Tsuki” - but it will open any of the above four forbidden addresses, if the address is “https” to “http ". Well, Rostelecom (as I already mentioned above) should not be the letter of the ban, but the spirit of the hint it contains, that is, it closes access to the entire Baka-Tsuki site as a whole, it closes according to any of these two protocols.

All four addresses (all three forbidden illustrations) belong to the same “Seirei Tsukai no Blade Dance” (“精 霊 使 い の 剣 舞”) runob, the abbreviation of which (STnBD) appears in the illustration addresses. At address 1, there is a fragment of the cover of the fifth volume, at address 2, one of the initial color turns of the thirteenth volume, at address 3 or 4, one of the initial color turns of the ninth volume. To the right for clarity, I will give the cover of the tenth volume of the same run, not yet banned in Russia.

The name of this ranobe is translated into Russian as “The dance of the blades of elementalists”, where the word “elementalist” means a wizard who has contracted with the spirit of some element or object (for example, a sword). I’ll say at once that (as in Wikipedia it is not difficult to read ) Japanese nouns do not have the category of gender, so, speaking of wizards, we also talk about wizards at the same time (in the STnBD plot, elementalists are the rule, and elementalists are rare exceptions), and speaking about spirits, we also mean feminine spirits.

In all three prohibited illustrations depicted the same character named Est; she is the spirit of a powerful magic blade, on which is engraved the Latin inscription “terminus est”, the end of which Est made its name. (There is nothing unprecedented in the way of picking a name for characters in the Japanese ranobe; for example, in the Shakugan no Shana run, the owner of the Nietono no Shana blade gets the name Shana.) Thus, we see the imposition on the whole library site complete blocking about just one of the books on it - and even just one of the characters in this book. And why did Esto deserve such attention of Roskomnadzor? Is there something in her images that looks like sex with a child?

How old is est? Supernatural beings do not age like mortals. In the second part of the eighth chapter of the second volume, Ranobe Est clearly recalls the events of the distant past - no less than a few centuries - which she witnessed. Thus, we again have to deal here with the problem I pointed out at Habrahabr on July 12, 2013 : artistic images of characters face the charge of pedophilia, which, by the standards of the work, are , firstly, not children, and secondly, they are not people at all.

Is any of the three illustrations depicting sex, penetration, rubbing, flagellation, shaking, kissing, nibbling, licking, or something like that ? Go around the Roskomnadzor ban in any of the ways you know, look at these pictures - and there you will not see anything of this. In illustration No. 3 (also known as No. 4), Est is shown lying on the back of the elementalist, just hugging him; in illustrations No. 1 and No. 2, Est alone is shown, stretching the open palm towards the viewer.

Does any of the three illustrations have complete nudity of the characters - or not complete, but providing at least visibility of intimate organs? Also no. In all three illustrations, Est is dressed in at least mid-thigh stockings; in illustration number 2 on Est also something like a combination (panties and bra) and gloves to the middle of the shoulder; on the other two illustrations, the angle and posture exclude the appearance of the groin, anus, nipples and so on.

After that, it’s not obvious that in the comments on antizapret.info, visitors express their extreme degree of surprise by the ban received from the supervisory body (“Pornography? Drug addicts or what?”, “You can just as well equate children's dolls with sex shop products”, and so Further). This reaction is understandable: if Roskomnadzor had such experts who are able to see “child porn” in a semi-naked supernatural being, then they have, for example, traditional European images of winged babies (“cupids” and “cupids” of paintings and sculptures of the pagan trend, ” angels "pictures of Christian) will be perceived as something pedophilic, because both nudity is much more complete, and the seeming age is even more infant.

Seeing such shaky grounds at the ban on the Baka-Tsuki site , is it possible not to have doubts about the grounds for banning several dozen manga and anime in 2013? For example, in Japan, the first three volumes of “Seirei Tsukai no Blade Dance” this year were close to the text filmed in the form of a twelve-part anime (the last series was shown just this Monday - September 29). If the same expert who forbade illustrations from subsequent volumes of the same ranobe had reached them, would he not have seen “psychopaths” and “perverts” in the viewers of this anime, and not only in the readers of the original source? Very likely what I would see.

My conclusion is the following: in the evaluation of works of Japanese visual culture, there is a certain arbitrariness and a sad absence of any publicity. It is terrible to think about who and why such an organization of this matter and such results were needed. (Didn't they just want to fulfill the meaning of the logo ? ...) I have two political versions and two racist ones; I will not disclose any one in Habrahabr (because it would not be according to the rules); I can only say that the conclusions that are coming out for each of these versions sadden me.