Interest Stacks

The scenes of the Blasters destroying buildings and putting Kentaro's friends in danger hit a lot harder when you remember that when the same time period, Lebanon (where the Arabic dub was being filmed) was also undergoing a civil war, and even Ganger's own voice actor was affected.

One memorable scene from The Second Renaissance, the backstory for the machine war of The Matrix, shows a female android being brutally murdered by an angry mob, her last words being a desperate cry of "I'M REAL!" The scene is reminiscent of transgender people being victims of violence, which makes it all the more uncomfortable following the Wachowskis coming out as trans women.

is far from a happy story, but a chapter that was taken out of the volume release for revealing too much about the world too early revealed that the setting's God, called the Idea of Evil and literally representative of suffering humans wanting to look for a God to believe in exists in this world. It's appearance resembles that of a giant human heart. Kentaro Miura, the author of the series, would die at a young age on May 6th, 2021. The cause of death? Aortic Dissertion, which ruptures the heart.

• The episode "Wild Horses" has an old old Space Shuttle being brought out for one last mission. The shuttle? Columbia. Cartoon Network actually pulled this one off the air for a while after the disaster.

• The episode "Cowboy Funk" was pulled off the air after the events of September 11th, due to the episode involving the bombing of tall buildings. To boot, the buildings are two towers situated right next to each other.

Some of the scenes were reanimated or even cut or censored after the Kyoto Animation arson attack on July 18, 2019: the first season of the anime, which deals with fires, had started airing less than two weeks before. The third episode, scheduled for the following day, was postponed and reworked so as not to offend the memory of the victims.

• The anime suffers a really bad track record of having certain episodes banned or temporarily eliminated from broadcast, rewritten, and sometimes Retconned entirely out of canon when they can be linked to tragic events in the real world. Other anime episodes not aired by networks for being too close in subject matter would include an episode in which a skyscraper is destroyed by a giant Tentacruel. Ironically, that didn't stop the scene from being in the show's opening for the rest of the Indigo League season.

• The episode "Tower of Terror" was banned in North America after September 11 solely on the basis of its name, and the episode "A Scare in the Air" was renamed "Spirits in the Sky" until the anime Channel Hopped to Cartoon Network, and reverted back to the old name.
The Team Rocket vs. Team Plasma two-parters were not only unaired but, as the story of Episode N can attest, completely written out of the plot because of the earthquake in Japan. The special contained such scenes as a Paul-lookalike Plasma Grunt and a Liepard blowing up a building, and James blowing up the city. It also forms a nasty Plot Hole, because the Team Rocket Trio, who Took a Level in Badass, had acquired a meteor for Giovanni that would be used to generate seismic waves, and after this scheme failed, they would be told their services under Giovanni were no longer of importance and slowly backpedal to comic relief. Instead, because the two-parter was nixed, they just abruptly go back to their old selves and the meteor is never brought up again like the infamous GS Ball.

• A Rescue Team during Episode N deals with evacuating a factory fire, which Team Rocket takes advantage of to steal Pokémon. This becomes much harder to watch after the bombing of the Boston Marathon and the explosion of a factory in Texas in April 2013.

There's a little joke in the first episode involving bulbs lighting up as each character realizes Haruhi is a girl, which didn't really make much sense until the reveal at the end. And then in the second to last episode Eclair suddenly has the same type of bulb pop up dark in her head, and then we see it light up when Haruhi interrupts her and Tamaki and walks out of the room again. Which almost doubles as Harsher in Hindsight.

has a minor villain in the Dressrosa Arc named Baby 5. She cannot say no to anyone. Because of this, she's been engaged multiple times, and has a debt of nearly a hundred million. Even in battle, she accepted a sarcastic request from her enemy to just die and was prepared to shoot herself before that same enemy stopped her. While this was at first played for laughs, it became Harsher in Hindsight when her backstory was revealed. She was abandoned by her parents as a small child, with the last thing her mother said to her being "you're of no use to anyone." This is why she's so utterly desperate to feel needed. Even so, when one of her fellow villains says right in front of her that their group only values her because she's "convenient" (and not because they actually care about her at all), she breaks down crying.

In episodes 14 and 15, the coach starts making the gymnasts get on the scales in front of everyone and scolds Hikari and her friends when she catches them eating junk food. It's Played for Laughs, but this wouldn't be acceptable practice nowadays as it's much more well-known that young girls in aesthetic sports (e.g. ballet, gymnastics, figure skating) are highly susceptible to eating disorders. There have been several well-publicised cases of gymnasts' bodies being criticised by coaches or judges, resulting in them suffering serious mental health issues.

• Kazuko's wacky ramblings about her failed relationships. In the first episode she warns the girls about men who judge women by the eggs they can prepare; Kyubey/Incubator turns out to be exactly that kind of guy. In episode 4 she goes off on a tangent about biological eligibility having nothing to do with finding or pursuing love; unfortunately, Sayaka is in no state to listen, and only gets worse. It's also possible that, in light of what happens to Sayaka, her frustration, instead of something to be taken lightly, might be a symptom of deep depression.

• Mami breaking down in tears and asking, desperately "Will you stay with me?" when Madoka decides she'll become her student Magical Girl was already sad, but is made worse once you read The Different Story manga, where it is revealed that Mami has had several students (including Kyoko) who have all abandoned her ideology and left her behind, and even worse by Scene 0's revelation that Mami's latest student, Mabayu, had abandoned her without any explanation only weeks before, although Mami doesn't realize that it's due to self-inflicted Laser-Guided Amnesia.