Japanese online artist community Pixiv aims to reduce the association of the New Horizon English course book with pornographic depictions of Ellen Baker.

If you’ve been following LewdGamer since the last week or are an enthusiast of cute anime girls being posted on Twitter, then you must have heard about Ellen Baker, the incredibly cute English teacher from the NEW HORIZON English textbook. The textbook was released in Japan and is aimed at Japanese middle school children. Ms. Baker’s appearance and cute demeanor has earned her the love of thousands of people around the Internet, and ever since her discovery in the course book, she has become a small Internet sensation.

Over the course of two or so weeks, Ellen Baker has received thousands of pieces of fanart, ranging from direct parodies of her appearances in the NEW HORIZON book, to very fetishistic and sexual depictions.

Now that Ms. Baker has become extremely popular and also known for incredibly lewd acts performed on anything ranging to her brother, coworkers, and students, the people running the Japanese online artist community Pixiv have stepped in to make sure Ellen Baker’s rule 34 is disassociated from the NEW HORIZON book.

Pixiv plans making it against the tagging regulations to tag anything 18+ that has Baker in it as “New Horizon”, because kids might search for that tag. It asks to absolutely not tag Baker’s stuff as “New Horizon”, whether the phrase is in English or Japanese. Their stance on this is that because the source of the character is a junior high textbook (with most of the Ellen material appearing in year one), it’s fundamentally different than an entertainment magazine, light novel, manga, or doujinshi someone might just purchase. It’s given out free to schools all over the nation, and knowing how popular she is on Pixiv, just searching for her, let alone searching for her on Pixiv, might lead to sexual images. To quote the page itself:

「「こういうイラストもあるのか」程度にしか感じない人もいるかもしれませんが、不快に感じる人もいます。」 There will probably be people that think “Oh wow, someone made a drawing like this.”, but there will also be people that feel extremely uncomfortable about it.

Not only will people stumbling across it feel uncomfortable, most people searching for it would probably be underage, given the nature of the book itself. They also think it might become a problem for parents and/or guardians if they stumbled across lewd stuff of their kid’s textbook. In the worst case scenario, it could lead to extremely bad publicity for the textbook manufacturer. Here are two more quotes:

The first one is from Denchuubou (電柱棒), they behind the illustrations for the books.

「話題になっているのは、大変うれしいのですが、一方で、あくまで学校教材なので、 教育現場を離れて騒ぎになると保護者の方々から悪い印象を受けたりしないかと気になってもいます」 I’m really glad she’s becoming a huge topic like this, but on the other hand, I’m worried that, since these books are school materials, a main character doing these kinds of things outside the school environment might leave a bad impression on the parents/guardians of the children.

This other one is from an “executive” of the company that manufactured the books (東京書籍).

「まだ学校では使われ始めたばかりですので、 （エレン先生をはじめ、新しいキャラクターたちが）どのように受け止められているかが気になっている」 「前例のないことでもあり、学校現場での指導に支障がないようにと 細かい点でできる限りの注意を払いました」 Schools have really just started using these books, so we’re abnormally worried about what kind of impression they’ll make. There isn’t really any preceding incident that would worry us, but given what the situation is, we want to make sure we eliminate anything that would interfere with the educational staff’s ability to do their jobs.

With Pixiv’s stance on the matter abundantly clear, it remains to be seen how the new tagging rules are going to be enforced by the company’s moderation staff.

Do you think Pixiv was right in adopting the stance they did or are they stepping over a few lines just for the sake of children? Let us know in the comments below. Meanwhile, LewdGamer will continue to love Ms. Baker our own special way.

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To help you follow the fad of Ellen Baker as she’s exposed to all kinds of depravity from her fans, be sure to follow the エレン・ベーカー character tag on pixiv and Twitter. Open the Door for Ms. Baker, but don’t be too rough with her; she is someone’s waifu, after all!

For more articles on sexy teachers, be sure to follow LewdGamer on our Twitter and Tumblr accounts.

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