The Overcomplicated Restrictions and Grey Areas on Fictional Adult Content
You shouldn't be too unfamiliar with Mastercard and Visa's previous actions to pressure Steam and itch.io to remove a large number of adult games.
Seeing an adult artist from Japan/Taiwan (forgot where he/she's from) ranting a bit on Facebook when he/she's trying to expand into the international market. I am intrigued by the question what should be banned?
Killing and murder is always shown in movies since people have enough common sense to know that it's not real, but when it is shown in pornographic or ecchi media those are usually cancelled. That also hits on the topic on consent, where platforms also ban CNC (Consented non-consent) or anything that depict involuntary action.
Imagine having a isekai running on feudalism, where our current law is not applicable. There's slavery, class segregation, and probably a whole lot of stuff that's actually pretty accurate according to its world-building, but you can have graping scene due to the publishing platform's regulation. I'm not saying we should promote it, but I believe people will know that it's not reality.
As for the part of giving "consent" voluntarily, how is it shown? There could even be the argument that the author/mangaka/writer decided the character will give consent, which makes it involuntary. That being said, I personally prefer some Japanese regulation that requires a real world victim to classify certain genre as illegal.
That being said, if you've seen my works, I do like my girls to be more well-endowed. The line is often very blurry on fictional media and the portrayal of the characters greatly depends on the audience's understanding, especially when people's appearance can be deceiving (Asian looking younger, or in my pov, white people often age way earlier). Given the multitudes of art-style preferences you can even argue it's just the audience's subjective view on the style, which makes things a lot harder to judge.
Well, I do feel that guy(?)'s ranting and I do hope the world have clearer definition of these things so you can't just shut off payment and services that's totally legal but "it feels wrong". Now that I've finished my rant, hopefully you can also ponder on the question, if no "feelings" are considered, where the the clear-cut line to fictional sexual depictions? Does a disclaimer of "she's adult" counts? Or all character that looks like "loli/shota" is banned? And will that impact the rights of actual human adults who looks like that?
That's it for this post. Thanks for reading. Bye!
-Toby & Rui