Okay, preface: this is getting far afield and we could probably do with some new threads to house the stuff like a publishing (trad & self) thread and a web serials thread.
Huh. What I ruminated about the other day is in fact now happening, maybe has been for some time. And people looking for bright line explanations from Amazon about why their books were banned are gonna be waiting a long time. Authors get banned, their books get banned all the time and Amazon says diddley. Surprised these people didn't know.
Also, to clean up some definitional confusion: Light novels are considered anime? I thought they were basically manga with fewer pictures and more text. Or are we at a point where such distinctions have become kind of moot?
No, it is not happening, just as much as no, light novels are not anime, some people are just YouTube drama whores optimizing video titles for maximum clicks.
This happened because the publishers at Yen Press and J-novels didn't set an age rating on light novels that include images with "tee-hee steam-censored titties" fanservice (which frankly most LNs do at some point or another in a given series, it's a genre staple). Some bored dorks discovered that Amazon's automated takedown system recognizes enough in those images that you can report them and the bot will pull them. That's all. It's a perfect confluence, one that has only come about because either through laziness, ignorance, or "if we don't set an age rating we can sell more copies to kids" the publishers didn't do the work and now someone's having their shits and giggles.
After over a decade of the "Amazon's gonna cut the KDP royalties any minute now and your income is going to be nuked" recitations and the like I'm kind of done with people whining about evil shit Amazon
may do. There's enough fucky shit going on in the space that it doesn't need people imagining things that aren't happening (my new favorite from the past year is watching scumbags ripping entire web serials, find/replace changing the character names and inserting enough typographical noise to make searching difficult and then publishing them, that one's
delightful, but Support has been amazing in dealing with it if you catch it). This is just dumb bot shit on the level of how a lot of YouTube streamers are getting flagged and shut down mid-stream since there aren't enough human eyeballs on the system to deal with it right now. Once the humans sit down and deal with it properly it isn't a problem (although the publishers may have to suck it up and acknowledge that no, you cannot have glistening bath boobies and count for "all ages" for searches).
