Trivia / act-age

• Bury Your Art: Following author Tatsuya Matsuki's arrest for groping minors in August 2020, Shonen Jump immediately cancelled the manga and withdrew it from circulation; both they and illustrator Shiro Usazaki additionally removed all references to it from official documentation and their social media accounts. In her final word about the subject, Usazaki mentioned the decision was also made out of respect for the victims, who might be reminded of their trauma every time they’d hear of the series or see a cover of it in stores.
• Cancellation: After the author Tatsuya Matsuki was arrested for groping minors in early August 2020, artist Shiro Usazaki and publisher Shueisha immediately reacted and announced a few days later that the manga was cancelled.
• Demand Overload: Matsuki's arrest and the manga's cancellation made the Streisand Effect kick in and copies promptly flew off the shelves.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The entire series was pulled from distribution worldwide on August 17 2020, a week after Matsuki's arrest. The last sixteen chapters of the manga were never compiled into a volume release at all before the series' cancellation, and thus can't be read legally unless one can track down older issues of Shonen Jump.
• No Export for You: Chapters 26 through 45 were unavailable on Viz prior to the manga's delisting, so the first half of the Night on the Galactic Railroad arc is unlikely to ever be legally available in the States. The manga's final chapter (123) was also not officially released on MangaPlus or Viz immediately following Matsuki's arrest. The planned English volumes from volume 3 onward were quietly delisted from all vendors; publishers for non-English languages that had further progress also dropped their planned future volumes.
• Promoted Fangirl: The artist, Shiro Usazaki, was originally known as a popular fanartist, mainly for fellow Weekly Shonen Jump series World Trigger (which she also considers to be her favorite manga) and My Hero Academia, before starting her work on the series and getting serialized in WSJ herself. An interview with the editor revealed that she was actually found through her fanart, which led to WSJ contacting her for work on her first one-shot.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Writer Tatsuya Matsuki was caught and arrested for sexually harassing middle-school girls, leading to the manga's cancellation.
• Sleeper Hit: The manga was on its way to becoming this; it slowly but surely gained popularity during its first year of publication, and the first few volumes eventually got heavy reprints with the fifth selling over 50,000 copies in a few days. This baffled even the fans, who didn't expect a series that's neither action-, nor romance- or comedy-focused to survive long in Jump, much less a series so focused on grounded showbiz having an impact at all outside of shoujo manga. Instead it was regularly put forward with color pages and often stood near the top of Jump's table of contents. Sadly, the series' status as this trope would never be fully realized as it was Cut Short in August 2020 due to writer Tatsuya Matsuki's arrest.
• What Could Have Been: There was a stage play adaptation planned for 2022. It went as far as the audition stage before the manga's cancellation put the kibosh on that.

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