ok this ridiculous thing that happened. . (whether you happen to like or dislike this genre or not) So a japanese artist mangaka made a BL manga "Prince Noir" and the english translation company "Local Manga" cancelled it claiming that a character was "mentally shota" (you read that right. Not shota but they called it "mentally shota" whatever the fuck that means) because of "legal reasons" .... what?... lol just fucking just say you dont like the content and dont lie. And they brought up some obscure law from ages ago (that was about loli / shota) that was already shot down cause it was unconstitutional. ( Anime News Network lied about this too of course and only mentioned one person that got in to trouble a decade ago but didn't mention that the law has already been shot down and considered unconstitutional)
Second stupid story of the day : Female Japanese artist wins prize for artwork of a lewd maid, And feminists attack her instead of celebrating her success, because of course they do .
You're preaching to the choir, 100% agreed on the ridiculousness.
Unfortunately, some countries are bat shit crazy. It's pretty clear that Australia is fairly draconian in this regard: see bans on the Cristchurch shooting video, banning small breasts as child pornography, arresting citizens for importing loli, etc...and they're not alone!
I won't provide citations for happenings in other countries, but other Western European countries have been complicit, though maybe to less extremes thus far. (I might revisit this point at a later date.)
For the US: Valve, headquartered in Washington state, have gone to great lengths to ban games featuring anime characters. Does it matter if the characters look like adults? No, it doesn't even matter if there is no sexual depiction! Their arbitrary judgment changes employee to employee, and 1 of those fuckers can bury a game with "child protection" as a bullshit excuse. Who's going to stop them?
Based on past readings I think there is ambiguity in federal and state laws where it could be argued that fictional characters represent child pornography because the laws weren't written with all of the edge cases in mind. Would it stand up in law? Maybe with a mentally ill judge, but eventually sanity would prevail. Eventually. Because, of course, the opposite conclusion is batshit crazy with zero legal ground.
Unfortunately, that's an expensive battle to fight and won't happen anytime soon. It freely leaves companies to ban manga, comics, web toons, figurines, books, etc., to their own whims. The worst part is that there are faggots who accept this shit because they want to "think of the children" or "pick the right battles". Fuck them.
Half-KIA mentioned this topic several days ago, here's the /r/Steam link - https://archive.fo/0E1l8
I removed mentions about past UK legislature for porn including age verification enforced at the ISP level (any bets that it wouldn't be used for extended surveillance?) and forbidding acts like water sports, but they're along the same lines albeit not restricted to 2D.
The fact that Steam removes all their Adult games over this, but xHamster, PornHub and co are still freely accessible really says a lot. Does anyone actually believe that this is for the protection of children?