‘Assassination Classroom’ Manga Pulled From South Carolina High School, Submitted For Content Review Following Parent Complaint: “We’re Giving Them Too Much Adult Material Than Their Brains Can Handle”
For the second time in as many years, Yuusei Matsui’s Assassination Classroom has come under fire from American parents.
Its run in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump lasting from July 2012 to March 2016, Matsui’s best-selling manga follows the students of Kunugigaoka Junior High School’s Class 3-E, their ranks consisting entirely of various misfits, punks, and other various troublemakers, as they train under the orders of the Japanese government to prevent the Earth from being destroyed.
The threat? Their teacher, Koro-sensei, a yellow-colored, tentacled alien who has practically conquered Earth.
Threatening to destroy the planet in one year’s time, the alien offers to train Classe 3-E in the art of assassination in the hopes that before the clock hits zero, they’ll be able to use their skills to end his life – and net themselves a ¥10 billion bonus in the process.
Popular in both American and Japan among its intended teenage demographic, Assassination Classroom recently drew the ire of South Carolina mother Jennifer Hannigan, who first discovered the manga after her daughter, a ninth-grader, checked it out from the campus library of her school, Socastee High.
Expressing her complaint with the series’ contents to reporter Ale Espinosa of local news outlet WMBF News, Hannigan asserted, “Even if I didn’t have children, I would not want a child to read this book.”
“I mean there’s girls in lingerie hopping on top of men in the book,” she continued. “In the book, they’ll have several chapters that are telling you…a killing is in the title, of some nature.”
Hannigan added, “There’s also several pages where there’s handguns, rifles, knives, and potions, and it talks about killing in the pages.”
“It’s just the whole thing,” she toold Espinosa. “They’re talking about the operative on how they’re going to kill this teacher, and different ways to kill the teacher.”
“We allow our children into an adult world too soon,” she concluded, “We’re giving them too much adult material than their brains can handle, and I think that’s a problem.”
As of writing, the Horry County School district has confirmed that in response to Hannigan’s complaint, all copies of Assassination Classroom have been, per WMBF, “temporarily removed” pending a review of its contents by district officials.
Notably, WMBF’s report did not specify if the series had been removed from all schools libraries within the Horry County district or just the one belonging to Socastee High.
As noted above, this is not the first time Matsui’s manga has found itself in the crosshairs of American parents.
In 2019, a concerned mother of a student at Markham Intermediate School in Staten Island, NY complained about the series’ references to classroom violence, which in turn resulted in the manga being pulled from the library’s shelves.
“My biggest thing was is it should have never been in that library and I would love to know how it got there and who thought it was a good idea to do that,” the mother, who wished to remain anonymous, explained to silive.com
Then in April 2023, conservative activist group Citizens Defending Freedom challenged the inclusion of the series in school libraries due to what they described as its “violent and sexually explicit content.”
“This is a non-partisan issue,” Citizens Defending Freedom’s National Communications Director Kristen Huber told Fox13 Tampa Bay. “We should all be able to agree that violence toward teachers and explicit sexual content is not something that schools should be glorifying or promoting, especially on taxpayer dollars.”
A few days later, members of the conservative parent group Moms For Liberty campaigned to have the series pulled from schools in the Hillsborough County Public School district in Florida due to the then-recent Covenant School shooting.
“It’s stating the obvious to say that the theme of this book series is disturbing in light of the prevalence of school violence, Moms For Liberty member Julie Gebhards told The Florida Standard. “While the books have fictitious characters, the settings are realistic.”
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