Whether suppression breeds a new form or a dead field depends on what it punishes

Ban something thriving and one of two opposite things happens. Sometimes the ban is the best thing that ever happened to the field: the blocked energy pours into a neighboring channel and builds something more durable than what was banned. Sometimes it just kills, and the subject goes quiet for a generation. What decides is not how harsh the ban is, but what the penalty attaches to: the work, or the person making it.

Punish the work and the maker walks free. When Japan's Tenpō reforms of the 1840s outlawed the two subjects woodblock prints lived on (kabuki actors and courtesans), the artists kept their skill and their market. Hokusai and Hiroshige poured all of it into landscape, a genre marginal for 150 years, and within a generation it became the form's most celebrated output, the work the Impressionists later obsessed over. Hollywood's Hays Code did the same, routing forbidden sex and crime into the coded shadow of film noir. Block a destination but leave the traveler intact, and he finds another road.

Punish the person and there is no other road. John Yudkin, the researcher who blamed sugar for heart disease in the 1960s, was never refuted by a trial. He was [made toxic](Nutrition science suppresses dissent through ad hominem, not evidence). His name curdled into a slur for discrediting anyone else who doubted sugar (say "he's just like Yudkin" and the conversation ended), so the whole question went radioactive. Nobody rerouted, because the penalty followed the stance, not the study. The field stayed silent for forty years.

Source claim: Prohibition redirects energy into a new and often more durable form when it punishes the work, and sterilizes a field for a generation when it punishes the person, because only the first leaves the maker free to pursue the same drive through another channel.