Recently, fans of anime and especially of “Vinland Saga” have realized that China has once again made its own with one of its more than known moments of censorship, because this time the work about Vikings by Makoto Yumikimura is the one who has been the victim of the Chinese government censors. A situation that has not gone unnoticed by Western fans and has caused a tremendous stir, as well as unleashed several mockery in different social networks, but has also aroused some suspicions about the veracity of this fact, as we will see below.
China and Vinland Saga find themselves in the middle of a controversy over anime “censorship”.
Some fans have noticed that Vinland Saga has been censored in a very peculiar way in China, this because a post on “Twitter/X” has gone viral pointing out a particular scene where Olmar’s character is having a conversation with a girl. The detail here is that in the “original scene” this “waifu” is shown lying on a bed covered only with a white sheet, while the “censored scene” in China, this girl simply disappears making the conversation and the development of the moment a little strange and without much sense.
This controversy does not stop there, since also in one of the comments of the post a user has shared a link that directs to the popular Chinese video platform called “bilibili” where this scene that corresponds to chapter number two of the second season of “Vinland Saga” is shown with no apparent change and without any censorship. This detail has caused even more commotion and confusion among anime fans, since it is worth remembering that some users have been caught trying to become a trend with editions of alleged censorship of several popular anime in China.
And as expected, the reactions of some fans to this post that became very popular and reached more than two thousand seven hundred “likes” on the platform did not take long to arrive and where there were 3 statements in general that sounded the most in the comments. The first was how unfortunate it was that China used this crude attempt to censor “Vinland Saga” and other anime in a ridiculous way, since it took away the meaning of some scenes, which made it lose the special touch of each censored work. The second was that this was totally false, as on the aforementioned Chinese video platform the scene was shown unchanged, so this was nothing more than clickbait.
Meanwhile, the third statement focused on the fact that it was becoming very common for some users to use China’s censorship of anime as an excuse to make false edits and gain interactions on their accounts, something that was contributed by the same body responsible for censoring some works for the Asian country. Since there were some very pointed cases where these censorships were very crude, as in this alleged case in “Vinland Saga” and even more when it is difficult to find the versions that are broadcast in China of these anime.
Undoubtedly, this is a new chapter in the never-ending controversy between China and anime, because as we have seen today with “Vinland Saga“, the Asian country has a long history of censorship in various entertainment media. So it is not very unusual that from time to time a new controversy of this kind arises in the different social networks and within the community of fans of anime and video games in the West.
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