A New Zealand man has been sentenced to three months in prison for downloading anime of what his lawyer called “pixies and trolls” gettin’ busy.
Ronald Clark said he downloaded the videos three years ago for “a bit of a laugh”—not for any sexual purpose. But those fantasy creatures looked disturbingly young, prosecutors argued. And Clark had a record, according to Fairfax New Zealand News: He’d previously been convicted of “indecently” assaulting a teenager and gone through a rehabilitation program.
Clark’s lawyer, Roger Bowden, said that the conviction was “the law gone mad.”
“You knew at a glance [they] weren’t human,” he added.
New Zealand clearly takes issue with anime porn. In May 2012, the country dropped charges on Xiran Zhang, a 22-year-old university student from China. He’d previously pled guilty to violating the country’s Customs Act by importing DVDs that portrayed rape and a particular kind of anime that depicts bestiality with eels.
The U.S. also arrests citizens for possessing drawings of child pornography. In February, Missourian Christjan Bee got three years in prison for what he’d labeled “incest comics” on his computer—cartoons of kids having sexual relations with each other and their parents. Bee was found guilty of obscenity, since a judge agreed with the Department of Justice that the comics “clearly lack any literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”
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