I'm not the one who brought in the "real world" and the platonic cafes were grown ass adults need to have conversations with children because once they graduate they no longer placate grown ass man's desire. I just pointed out the ways it became a huge problem with compensated dating, assault, prostitution, and sex trafficking. As far as the "lowest rates of those types of crime" goes, I'm reminded of that fairly widespread meme picture where the UK is saying loli porn is bad and the picture is comparing rates of rape between the two countries in 2014. The part they left out was that, in 2014, having sex with literal children wasn't rape in Japan unless violence was involved. Incest wasn't illegal. It wasn't rape if you put a gun to someone's head and forced them to give you a blowjob. Men and boys couldn't be legally raped *at all*. Rohypnols? Sure, drugging somebody's illegal, but after that it's not rape, the should've known better than to drink with you. Blackmail? Coercion? Long as it wasn't threats of violence, it's fair game.Dreiko said:I don't see how all that real world stuff is relevant in the world of fiction. If anything, more people playing games with these elements would serve to reduce the amount of real world problems. Japan already is one of the biggest if not the biggest consumer of games and other such media in the world and they have some of the lowest rates of those types of crimes despite still having some such crimes so you definitely can't say that games are promoting them. What they're doing is channeling a demand in a harmless direction.altnameJag said:Man, you can't say that making these gals 19 and 21 instead of 15 and 17 would *matter* and is *important* to the folks that want them to be younger for the implications and then hand wave the literal opposite of the coin away as irrelevant.
You can't bring up "but Japan has X" and then just ignore the heinous shit that happens because of it because it's inconvenient to your argument.
It's easy to have low crime rates if nothing's defined as illegal. It's disturbing the amount of hentai out there that's tagged as "rape" that wouldn't've been rape under the Japanese legal code at the time. I'm like, 90% certain that nothing in Emergence/Metamorphosis counted as rape. Hell, a chunk of the above is *still* true, even after relatively major reforms. The Japanese feminists riot about it every few weeks. The biggest problem the police have with Chikan is either A) giving a shit, or B) getting people to overcome their social programming and actually make a scene. Most incidents of groping don't happen at rush hour. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/04/21/national/media-national/chikan-japanese-term-groping-increasingly-recognized-abroad/#.Xbun3y9MGf0
Yeah, and that clearest expression seems to be hard-capped at 17, with significant flex downwards,Dreiko said:The truly important thing for me isn't whether the chars really are 15-17 since they all look however they look, some will look 25 and some will look 12 and their personalities can follow in that pattern too. No, the important thing is if some artist decides that the char is 17 we treat that as equivalently worthy of respect as any other age, as either age would equally be the artist's expression were they to pick it. Like I explained with the term arbitrary, when you have such ages and appearances not really matter, what you get is indeed the clearest expression of the artist that you can get.
Make no mistake: Marvelous, Compile Heart, Idea Factory et all are very much in the business of making money. It's my very firm belief that if they tone down their overwhelming schoolgirl fetish and make some ultimately minor tweaks to their arbitrary numbers, they could make *heaps* more money. And of that means otaku might have to recognize that people exist after they graduate high school, maybe that's for the better.