If you've seen my C-Blog's header image, you might have noticed that the title says "Death by Eroge." It's a joke on how I'd like to die in a way somehow related to H-games.

I'm thinking that that may never happen anymore, ludicrous as it might sound.

Why? Well, in light of the whole Rapelay-fueled "international controversy," Japan's lead censorship body has gone above and beyond the call, more or less banning any form of potentially controversial content from future (and perhaps upcoming) adult games. Check the link to see what exactly has been banned.

Yes, this is an act of shameless self-promotion, but I haven't put anything up here in a while, and I wouldn't want you to think I had died (by eroge or otherwise).

Think what you will of rape fetishes, S&M, lolicon or whatever, but seeing this kind of suppression in ANY creative field, for any reason, is out-and-out tragic.

Historically speaking, creative industries are set back years, maybe decades by these sorts of draconian censorship laws. Even today graphic novels are still feeling the fallout and cultural stigma created by the enforcement of the Comics Code Authority.

I love superheroes as much as the next guy, but prior to the CCA comic books were very much more mature in terms of content. Think of how diverse the creative environment graphic novels would be today had that setback not occurred. Then think of how many game-makers today are influenced by the comics they read when they were younger. The impact of these kinds of decisions reaches farther than the content the decisions themselves address.

Of course, some of you might support the decision. Why defend such a screwed-up, deviant fetish culture? That sick filth deserves to be banned. Perhaps. I'm not into guro, or the kind of content that spawned the famous "shitting dick-nipples" meme.

At the same time, think of curb-stomping an innocent civilian and eating him, then changing your hands into sharp claws and cutting more innocents into chunks of meat. Does this sound familiar? It's an all-too-common action sequence in [PROTOTYPE]. What makes our ultraviolence less repellent than their sexual fetishes?

Is it out of concern that rape game players may act upon their persuasions? One might express the same concern as we use IEDs and truck bombs to collapse public buildings in Red Faction: Guerrilla. Many of the arguments we use to defend our hobbies against those who would censor us can be used to defend theirs.

One of the most tragic consequences of this decision, even at these earliest of stages, is that many eroge publishers have turned inward, cutting their websites off from foreign access. Minori, responsible for eroge that are actually incredibly tame, enough that they were easily adapted into "clean" anime, manga and console ports. They've blocked off non-Japanese IPs from their site, the blocking text saying this:

"Some foreigners seem to be having an antipathy against EROGE.
Therefore, We prohibited the access from foreign countries, to defend our culture.
Sorry for you of the fan that lives in a foreign country."

Woah, woah woah! Why so nationalist?! It was their censorship body that went and banhammered everything, right? Right, the EOCS is a Japanese regulatory body. All the same, the Rapelay dust-up happened when the game appeared on an English-language vendor site. The internet blew up, and Japan jerked its knee. In a way, Minori is justified in its nationalist statement. A foreign culture indirectly imposed its values on another. Think of how you would feel if, somehow, another country managed to force the US government to ban games that featured war in or against other countries. An entire subgenre, gone.

Then again, that just proves how much in the minority the rape-loving deviants are. Fetish eroge are far into their niche. But does being in a niche make one any less important or at least worthy of continued existence? Again, think of games. Fully half of us play them, and they're bigger than movies. Then again, they still have little in the way of cultural legitimacy. Far too many people think of gamers as at best wasting their time, at worst ticking time-bombs ready to go on a shooting rampage.

I know, this is probably commonsensical for many of you. The horse I ride is pretty tall right now. I just had to get it off my chest. I suppose I just get a little irritated whenever I see the comment threads in posts of this nature, when someone goes out and says "LOL JAPAN U HAD IT COMIN THIS IS Y WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS OLOLOL".

But hey, that's just what I have to say. For all you know, I actually like those shitting dick nipples and am butthurt about the whole thing.