Well, that’s a ban in a specific context.

I suspect that something perceived as being for children will have skeletons/skulls removed for reason of not disturbing them. (How bad is it? When I was teaching here, on my first Halloween I played the movie Ghostbusters as a treat. People didn’t realize it was a comedy and were terrified by it. These are students between 18-22.)

But there’s no particular cultural or governmental ban on skeletons in general. There may be context-specific bans. (I’m not really in the video gaming scene so I don’t know what happened with WoW directly.)

Remember when we laughed at the weird things China called “national security”?

Yeah. I remember last year too.

And moneyed. I suspect this is the real reason.

Trusting any kind of software is a sucker’s game. Trusting “AI” is worse.

'Murica.

Annie Lennox’s supremely sarcastic “Keep Young and Beautiful”.

The word of the year should be “stop”. As in “STOP PUSHING THIS FUCKING SLOP DOWN OUR THROAT FROM EVERY CONCEIVABLE ANGLE!”

And there’s a whooooooooooooooooooooooooooole loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot of policies that I would pick to excoriate Chinese leadership over, believe me!

It’s just that they’re, you know, real ones. Not made up shit like “social credit points”.

Do you feel like the government represents you?

The government represents the government. This is true of any society. Only the strategy differs.

Personally I’m an anarchist (specifically an anarcho-syndicalist). I don’t like any governments. I just think some are easier to live under than others. Plutocratic (direct or indirect) governments are among the worst to live under, however.

Have you ever tried to get politically involved? If so, what was your experience?

As a non-citizen, I’m not permitted to join the Party (nor would I really want to, to be fair) and thus I’m not able to get officially involved in politics. For the grassroots side, as a foreign guest I am more careful about what I get involved with because I could very easily be invited to exit. With great alacrity. This would disrupt the pseudo-family life I’ve built up for myself here and would harm people I genuinely care about.

When I was teaching (2001-2016) I did very carefully insert some material for students to think about into the curriculum. The duller of them would not have spotted it, but the sharper among them did and talked to me about it outside of class. I did not, however, participate in student protests (like the ones that had students knocking down over a kilometre of brick wall over SARS restrictions way back when), nor any other such disruptive activities as such. I worked with more finesse and subtlety than that.

No reponse, then, to my thorough dismantling of your claim that ghost stories and time travel stories are banned in China?

Didn’t think so.

That would involve something an American is incapable of doing: confessing ignorance.

…

They aren’t? Not even slightly?

I can get the Skull card game from a hundred different places on Taobao. I have skull and skeleton enamel pins I bought from Taobao. (Some of them verge on the pornographic. The pornographic parts are censored.) I have skull-shaped bead bracelets and a skull-shaped keychain. None of them were censored when I bought them.

Here’s a Taobao search on skulls. If the search link doesn’t work, there’s a screenshot behind the spoiler.

It’s not my fucking country. Just like your country isn’t my fucking country. I live in it. There’s a decided difference.

And you know what? Given the choice between living in a country where the only response to more-than-daily mass shootings and regular school shootings is “thoughts and prayers” and a country that stops me from seeing some web sites outside of their borders unless I use technological trickery …

… Well, the latter, while certainly not ideal, is MOTHERFUCKING ENDLESSLY BETTER, yes. (It’s why I live here and not in the shithole you come from.) Thank you for asking.

And yes, I fully believe you can buy stories where there was “time travel” that turned out to be all just a dream or where it was actually part of an in-universe fictional story, but everyone’s heard about Back to the Future being banned for having actual time travel in it.

P.S. “Everyone’s heard” a whole bunch of bullshit about China. Like the complete and utter bullshit of “social credit points”. Let’s use some evidence-based research instead, m’kay?

Taobao, the world’s largest digital souk, is China’s favourite place to buy shit. (It’s my favourite place to buy shit too. There’s nothing like it anywhere in the world. I’ve seen a jetliner for sale on Taobao. Or a nest of live Asian giant hornets.)

Here’s a whole bunch of “banned” Back to the Future merch from a trivial search. Indeed here’s the video itself on sale. Pretty fucking lame ban, isn’t it? Let’s add some more. Time Child is a movie in theatres now so I can’t link you to a DVD/BR but I can link you to a shitload of merch. Here are a couple of older ones.

Oh, and here’s Ghostbusters on sale. But ghosts are banned in China! HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE!? How? Easy. They’re not banned. That second link is a ghost story (Silk) from 2006. (There’s a 2022 movie (The Curse) whose title is a single character (咒) that is also used in a lot of Taobao Buddhist content. I can’t be arsed to go finding that one movie among all the Buddhist stuff so you’ll just have to believe that it’s there. Or not. It doesn’t really fucking matter since I already proved twice over that ghost stories aren’t banned.)

Seems what “everyone’s heard” is utter bullshit.

Is there anything else you’d like to incorrect me on?

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Did you really stop reading at that sentence so you could leap in and make a point I MADE IMMEDIATELY AFTER IT!?

I’m going to assume you were “educated” (for want of a better term) in the USA from this.

Did you have to use a VPN to access Lemmy, by the way, or is it too small for the Great Firewall to know or care about?

When I was using a big Lemmy instance I needed a VPN, yes. This one is just far enough under the radar to not really need it. (Same thing with one of my Mastodon accounts and my Pixelfed account.)

I have no words.

And I must scream.

Ghosts and time travel are banned in fiction.

And yet I can buy ghost stories and time travel stories (Hyperion and Endymion heavily involve time travel) in any decent bookstore here.

Mysterious how that works. It’s almost as if you’re making shit up or taking highly-localized happenings and claiming it’s country-wide. Which would be about as honest as me taking the Brown University shooting and claiming it represented the USA as a whole.

No, wait. That’s probably a bad example.

Ah …

Labubu is Chinese. It doesn’t have “Chinese characteristics”.

No idea what a 529 is.