The Overreach of Payment Processors and the Future of NSFW Content.

Wall O Text Warning

TL/DR: Catering to peoples sensibilities, weather on the right or the left makes everything rigid, bland and miserable.  And will ultimately effect how much personal freedom I have to illustrate what I want.

Even though I don’t have much of a following, I believe that silence is one of the greatest enablers of tyranny. So I will speak, even if it’s just into an empty void.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been hearing a fair bit about payment processors, namely MasterCard and Visa doing full crackdowns on NSFW artiest. This has caused several middle men like Patreon and Gumroad, places I considered using to fund my future game development journey, to toe the de-fund the anime tiddies line. I believe the justifications given for this change is to save ‘the children’ (how original).

While crack downs on ‘immoral' words, thoughts and arts like this is nothing new, I have the feeling we as artiest and customers are heading for a showdown between freedom of artistic expression/consumption to a new revisiting of shaming people who like strange different things and ‘dangerous’ thoughts that some would try to convince you is outside the sphere of ‘normal’.  IE: it's not popular and it makes some people feel uncomfortable, so let's ban it.

The reason I believe this time is different, is I have been observing an ever growing trend since the start and end of the state of emergency over the last 4ish years. There has been a very visible uptick in the tired old trend of ‘won’t someone please think of the children?!’. The crazy woke left has lost a lot of political and social pull over this time and the power vacuum has begun to fill with the crazy religious right. A trend I believe is intentional and motivated by the same bad actors who profit greatly by having people fight with each other, all while they rob them from their blind spot.

At any rate, I don’t feel like going down too many rabbit holes about the inner clockwork that has brought about this change, and simply want to just state my case to why I feel this will lead to nothing good.

The arguments usually given, is for the well being of ‘the children’ and in some cases (if they can shoehorn it in) women too. Its been my observation all throughout my life that when someone brings up women and children as a reason or defense in an argument, they often don’t have any solid ground to impose their claims. This is a very dirty tactic as they know most people deep down do not wish harm on the vulnerable, and don’t want to be seen by their peers as such.

Thankfully we have a wonderful tool called the internet. And while some people may think the internet was a mistake, I feel this is by far the greatest of weapons against tyranny that any single person can use. In the past one would have to worry about getting stoned in the street, but on here we can say what we want without fear of such reprisal in most cases.

Anyway the idea that anime characters drawn on digital paper causes harm to the aforementioned is absurd. The most convincing arguments that I heard are:

‘It makes people violent criminals’. No it does not. This is the same argument as violent video games (music, books, etc) make people violent/do criminal acts. This is as easy to disprove as looking at the sales figures for games like Grand Theft Auto. If there were any reasonable backing for the above claim, we would be in serious trouble given the sheer popularity of the above mentioned title. Besides, there is no social activity without sin. Every social activity that has ever been done, has at one time been used as a proxy for someones bad conduct. The only reason this argument has any social standing is because video games are a relatively new medium.

‘It corrupts the minds of people, especially the CHILDREN!’. When you decided to have children you should have done a cost/work analysis. A lot of us that indulge in NSFW content often do so BECAUSE we have done the cost/work analysis. Your job as a parent is to keep your child from wandering off into places you don’t want them in. Producers, Customers and Vendors usually put tags and labels on these kind of things. This, I honestly see as a courtesy because it has never been easier for someone to read a review or do a search on anything, enabling the end user great freedom to curate their own lives to the finest detail.

There is no excuse for letting your child run around unsupervised. They do not need to wander around the internet and they do not need a smartphone with full internet access. If you provided it for them, you police their conduct. Your child will grow up in a few years anyway, it is nonsensical to think we should make far sweeping changes for an issue that will remedy itself in that time. And for all you know, at some point sanctions like this may even impede your, now grown up child's, adult life.

I grew up in a time period were parents would plop their kids in front of an R rated slasher film. The world did not come to an end and most of us did not grow up to become Freddy Kruger. I may be going out on a limb here, but I’m fairly certain your child will survive in the unfortunate event of seeing anime titties, should your valiant efforts as a care giver and guardian fails.

The next argument(s) I often hear are more specific to anime styled artwork. Whereas it is often cited that characters look too young, and thus must be children (and yes I’m getting tired of typing this word). And because of this, the story that has this art style attached to it, warps and twists into something that will cause the end of civilization.. Unless you are writing the next installment of the Game of Thrones series.. (I guess because George doesn't use the anime art style he can get away with everything)

There is also character archetypes used that employ traits often found in children (typically referred to as ‘loli’). Although these traits can be used to illustrate a child character, more often than not, they are less about the characters age and more about portraying a character with exceptional vulnerability or very defined immature mental traits.

The opponents of anime artwork will also claim that depicting a child character in a violent/degrading situation will create ‘problems’. Most stories that use elements like this I feel the author is actually trying to make the viewer uncomfortable. I believe it is similar to the horror genre, you are not suppose to be ‘happy’ or ‘comfortable’. And more often than not, it actually works.  Some people appreciate these bitter emotions.

At any rate, the only 'problems' I've personally observed is people acting irrational an immature because they  can't handle their own mental state.  Most of the time I believe this behavior is caused by the viewers own guilt.  As they feel they may have crossed the line, they frantically throw everyone else under the metaphorical buss in an attempt to somehow exonerate themselves of, supposed 'wrong thinking'.

Despite popular belief, adult women come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes the author is just filling the void with diversity (yes, actual diversity). And it is just the viewers jealous ego and dirty mind filling in the imaginary blanks, or trying to prove or dis-prove ‘something’ to someone.

None of the claims I’ve heard are rationally backed. And if you removed the social discomfort, all complaints would quickly become non-issues. And if they personally feel uncomfortable, the best solution is to leave the room and respect those that are not scared to be uncomfortable.

While I’m only doing this as a side hobby for the time being, having limited means to get funding will influence what path I take as a game developer moving forward.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but this current game is actually an edited down version of a game I wanted to make previously.

That game was suppose to be a full fledged farming sim, complete with everything you have come to expect from this genre. The monster girls part was going to be a part-time or full-time profession that your player character could do to earn a living along with farming crops. The monster girls would also be a common part of the story, with several scenes already written in my mind and character interactions including them as an intricate part of the story.

This project took the monster girl ‘job’ part of that game and made it a stand alone experience. This cropped the massive project I had in mind to a more manageable scope, with the limited time I had available to work on game dev. It also provided me with much needed practice with programming using the Godot engine.  I was hoping to get much needed feedback as well.

My original goal was to get the game to a state were I could periodically update it with new items, monster girls and areas. Then I was hoping to start getting some funding via subscription based sites like Patreon. If the money coming in was good, I’d start making plans to do game dev full-time.  Being able to work on game dev full-time would enable me to work on this game and work on other games in the background.

Unfortunately that’s kind of a pipe dream at this point, and I only have so much time to invest. Unless there is a significant change in the course that the payment processors are taking or a viable alternative appears, I’ll have to change course myself if I intend to make game dev my next day job.

So unless something major happens, I will be getting this game to the next release (full gameplay loop). After that I’ll likely start working on the original concept I had in mind, as unlike this game that game can be made SFW. Unfortunate though, as I wanted to graphically illustrate the love and romance with the various marriageable characters. There are also a lot of other things I’ll have to censor, from no on and the foreseeable future....

Suffice to say, things look very depressing to me right now.  As there will never be an end to the demands for censorship, me and many other creators will live under the jackboots of constant fear of being de-funded.

This showdown was bound to happen sooner or later.  Some developers/publishers employed the use of splash screens, making various nonsensical statements such as the fictional characters 'are over 18', which to me sounds a lot like 2+2 = 5.  

The problem with this solution is it tries to evade the 'bully'.  And if you've lived long enough, you know very well you can only evade a bully for so long before they catch up to you.

I feel the real solution is having people stand up and push back.  Something that is very difficult given the social stigma surrounding NSFW content.  It's a good idea to at least acknowledge this problem by posting a couple of words on a public forum.  Comments are like a petition, while they don't immediately do anything, having a show of solidarity will have an effect at some point.  At the very minimum, it lets others know they are not alone.  It also allows big companies that may be to afraid to speak out, konw that they do have their customers support.

There is also the outright hypocrisy that should be pointed out, as sites like Only Fans (basically electronic prostitution) and anything labeled as LBGT+ always seems to get special exemption status.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not here to drag Only Fans or anything LGBT+ down to my level.  I'm just pointing out that if Only Fans (that is outright porn) and LBGT+ get a pass.  While completely factious illustrations usually intended for a hetero sexual male audience gets the ban hammer, if this was about saving anyone the payment processors would be going after everyone equally, regardless of social ramifications.

I hope there is enough of an outcry eventually and maybe even some lawsuits from the big companies like Pixiv.  Otherwise we will eventually move into a very regressive world where freedom of thought and expression will be strictly regulated.

Thank you for reading my rant if you made it this far.  Until next time.