Mezzo Forte (P5 only)

I'm writing this for the benefit of the rest of the panel, since I've seen Mezzo Forte, and Komodin asked me to fill him in. In the interest of full disclosure, I did add the initial work page for this.

The work page gives a pretty good idea of the plot, so I won't expand too much on that unless someone has a specific question. What's more relevant to us are the sex scenes, for which there are two:

The first is a dream sequence in which the protagonist, Mikura, is having sex with her teammate, Kurokawa, who she has a crush on. It starts off consensual, then becomes non-consensual when their other teammate, Harada joins in.

The second is a rape scene that takes place after Mikura is captured by the mob boss' daughter. It is revealed later that (spoilering for those who haven't seen it) the real Mikura escaped with the help of her team before the rape occurred, and was replaced with one of Harada's sex-bots.

Both scenes are explicit, and combined take up ~3 minutes of the hour long anime. Neither scene is plot-relevant. In fact, the "abridged" release doesn't include them at all, and nothing is lost story wise. Like Kite from the same director, both scenes were added at the behest of the producer, who thought the uncut version would sell better.

My personal opinion on this is that the sex scenes take up so little screen time, and carry such little plot significance, that this doesn't qualify as "primarily porn", and since all of the characters are adults it wouldn't count for pedo-pandering either.

If any further details are needed to make your decisions, let me know.

edited 7th May '12 3:07:52 PM by Meeble

Hm, if that's the case, then I would be for keeping it. It sounds pretty... "clean," relatively speaking.

edited 7th May '12 3:44:47 PM by Komodin

Voted to keep. If it can work perfectly fine without the sex scenes, there's really no question.

I voted clean, for the reasons stated.

Even if it turns out to be problematic, a clean version is available, and we can refer to that version instead. For now that's not necessary, unless there will be (convincing) complaints about that in the future, in which case we can consider explicitly referring to the non-explicit (heh) version of the show.

This is resolved, three votes to keep.