Anime fans may know all too well that many of Twitter’s more toxic arguments and debates involve users who adopt anime characters for their icons or memes, but these arguments are beginning to escape from Twitter and make their way all the way to the UK Parliament. This eventually led to one of the members of Parliament, Joanna Catherine Cherry QC of the Scottish National Party, using a picture of Lily from Zombie Land Saga to demonstrate Twitter’s toxic underbelly.
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During a presentation you can currently see at Parliamentlive.tv (which you can find here), Joanna Cherry MP uses cede picture — which comes from a tweet with explicit language — to question Katy Minshall, Twitter’s Head of UK Government, Public Policy and Philanthropy, about abuse on Twitter.
As reported by Anime News Network, the particular exchange begins at the 15:39:17, but the particular instance of Lily’s meme kicks in at 15:43:15 and contains some strong language. When Deputy editor of the New Statesman political journal Helen Lewis made some controversial statements about trans individuals, one of the responses to her tweets featured a “meme” of Zombie Land Saga‘s Lily with a gun photoshopped in her hand and had a strong language caption (which Lewis shared herself here).
Joanna Cherry MP uses the Lily photoshop as an example of the toxic environments on Twitter, and used even fouler language than seen on the image itself to further argue her point. Lily is at the center of this larger debate, however, because she was revealed to be a trans girl in Episode 8 of Zombie Land Saga. Given the anime’s positive portrayal of the reveal itself, Lily has been highlighted by fans as a good example of how to present trans characters in anime. It’s one of the many reasons Zombie Land Saga is a major 2018 fan-favorite.
Nevertheless, it seems anime is influencing the world in many ways. Though many fans certainly didn’t expect it to show up during an official UK Parliament meeting in any way. If you’ve never heard of the series, Zombie Land Saga an original anime devised by Cygames, AVEX Pictures, and Studio MAPPA.
Zombie Land Saga is a particularly unique series following Sakura Minamoto, a high-school girl who dreams of becoming an idol except she comes across a major speed bump…she dies. Ten years after her death, she’s brought back to life alongside six “legendary” idol girls from different eras by a mysterious man in order to form an idol super group (known as “Franchouchou”) that will put Japan’s Saga Prefecture on the map. The idol industry has been dying, but now these living dead girls will try and spring it back to life.
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