An update on the Kono-fatty project

Good day everyone!

I was planning on making a post on how the main site was going latter this week, but we where alerted a possible issue we missed with one of the projects we sponsored a bit back.

A user on bbw-chan helpfully pointed out that one of the characters, Megumin, was under age. We knew this was a fact in the anime but when initially talking with @DrBlackJack he believed that everyone in the web comic was over 18 which would have made it ok. After hearing these complaints from the user on bbw-chan though, we asked @DrBlackJack to reconfirm the ages for us incase something was missed, and unfortunately we did miss something.

It turns out that Megumin was 17 and not 18 in the web comics like initially believed. We also found another character by the name of Yunyun is underage as well; luckily her case is similar to the girl scout case we reviewed a couple years back where she is a small side character that is not directly involved with the fetish aspects making her less of an issue.

With this information we came to the decision that to stay consistent with our own rules as well as to comply with US law we have to remove Megumin. Luckily the story is mainly focused around Darkness who is over 18 and Megumin only really pops up at the latter end of the game. We have started working with @DrBlackJack to help rectify the issue.

I would like to apologize that we missed this. I know how we have to handle this stuff has been a point of contention among some of our users, but we do our best to hold ourselves to the same standards and follow the same rules we set. We hope that one day we can actually afford to hire an attorney that can help us figure out a better way we can enforce the rules to comply with the law.

That all being said we thank you for your patience with us. Also, expect a news post this weekend about how the main site is going and I swear I will try to get a finical statement out next month, I know I am very much behind on those. And, also thank you to the bbw-chan user who pointed out our mistake.

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I probably won’t discuss the strange laws of the United States, but isn’t it enough to point out at the beginning of game that all characters are adults?

Yeah even just saying it’s a year after the events of the series which would cannonly make megumi 18

Or even have a flashback of her blowing out candles on her 18th birthday proving it

It’s a common misconception that you can “age up” characters. To the best of our understanding, under the current law the IP holder determines the canon age. So if the IP holder does not state they are 18 they are not 18 in the eyes of the law (there is a caveat for if age is not specified but that does not apply in this case as a cannon age is known).

There has been some changes to the law due to a recent supreme court case, but to understand how the case affects the law would require someone much more versed in law then us so we choose to err on the side of caution.

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I have a suggestion: add an explicit warning about “age-ups” to the site FAQ. There’s already a section devoted to user age.

International law is so annoying oh, Japan’s tradition is that women can get married at about 16 years old, men are 18, but 20 years old is defined as an adult, and then human beings can be sexually mature about the age of 13, international law says that the appearance of characters below 18 years old are not allowed to NSFW.
In the original setting megumi and yunyun is 17-year-old girl is right, but I remember in the story of time should have passed some, right?
By the way, why is WG involved in child pornography?

That is horrible. All those innocent lines on flat surfaces will never recover.

Jokes aside, damn, that law needs revisiting. I get why you feel the need to follow it as well as possible, but it should really not be like this.

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@eatfortwo that is a fair point. I think I will add that as a clarification to the rules.

Can you clarify? If you are talking about this incident it was just a simple mistake. Most of the characters are 18 or over in the web comic it just turns our megumin was a year younger then what was originally thought.

Well the 10 year minimum prison sentence and lack of safe harbor doesn’t help either lol. What we really need to do is review it with a lawyer once we can afford it.

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Some scenes depicting young girls being fattened are classified as child pornography, and many of the artists I follow have been asked to change their content or have their accounts deleted for this reason.(no nude)

We’re not involved in CP.

We were informed that there was a sub-18 character that was immediately removed from the project. We do not have anything that fits your description unless it was overlooked.

I just want to ask why characters under the age of 18 in WG fetish should be removed?

Its been explained above, as per our understanding of US law, we cannot depict any character under the age of 18 in a fetish or otherwise sexual context for fear of legal repercussions.

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ok, thank you and your patience.

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I really don’t think the solution here is to revise the content of the game to comply with the unlikely worst-case scenario, especially considering the VN’s content (likely no-genitals weight gain) wasn’t really sexual in nature.

If you’re afraid of the site at large getting damaged by this, why not just drop official association with the project? I’d rather not see it get creatively damaged by something this illogical and petty just to retain the benefits of being hosted here.

Also, Jesus, why did it take such so many months and years for you to suddenly care about this?

It was explained in the original message.

And this is not a discussion on what we’re going to do, to be sure. We’ve made the decision as we do not allow sexual or fetish-based depictions of characters below the age of 18, regardless of the content creator or our involvement. We don’t make exceptions to this, we’re not going to make exceptions to this no matter the arguments being presented here. This is not up to debate.

I’m not trying to be rude here, but this isn’t “illogical” or “petty,” its our following a set of standards that will keep us from getting shut down. I know this is a touchy subject for a lot of people, but the short and long of it is that legality isn’t the only concern here, its getting shut down by hosting services, getting blocked by payment processors, public perception, etc.

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, this isn’t a moral statement, its a pragmatic one. And I feel as if people are looking at this from a purely emotional standpoint because of how asinine the discussions about sexual depictions of fictional characters have gotten in these recent years.

We don’t like telling people that they need to change their creative vision, and of course they always have the choice to host it elsewhere, but the content creator for this has already agreed to alter the project. And it isn’t just about “hosting it here,” they don’t want to get caught up in accusations of CP peddling either.

And the last thing I want to make abundantly clear:

The argument of “just do it” is a hell of lot easier to make when you literally have nothing on the line. We do, as does the content creator.

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I didn’t mean to imply your unwillingness to host the project is either of these things, especially given how big this place has grown in the past few years. I was specifically talking about the moral/philosophical debate, which, as you say, isn’t really of concern here.

I do heavily disagree with editing the project though. I think if you’re going this route with the site, it is your responsibility as the administration to not use it to put a crutch on content creators. You should be trying to convince blackjack to continue the project elsewhere where there’s less risk, not to stamp a boot down on their face demanding compliance.

Forgive me if I don’t believe this decision happened at the snap of a finger or super decisively like you say. Blackjack’s been writing anime fanfic of high school girls for eons. They absolutely must have been aware that Megumin is underage and wouldn’t suddenly fall prey to this type of overzealous defense if only their butt were on the line.

If they suddenly ARE sweating bullets, I can only come to the conclusion that fearmongering from people like you is getting to their heads in the short-term and they’re not thinking clearly about the oodles of other stories and projects (DDLC anyone?) they and other prominent figures in the community have released that could be used as ammunition in an underage crusade. The likelihood of something like that taking off is astronomically low, and while I understand your decision as a community site owner to not want to risk it regardless, I think it’d be the height of stupidity for someone as free as Blackjack not to.

You’ve made a lot of assumptions here that I’d like to clarify on.

One, we do not fearmonger. At worst, we can be accused of having an overly protective SITE POLICY. That’s all this is, is a site policy. We’re not making profound statements here, or crusading against something. We are simply enforcing our policy, which I’ve already explained is from a business standpoint, not a moral one.

Two, Blackjack works extremely closely with us, and has throughout most of this project, @grotlover2 mostly. We did not “demand” he do this, we mentioned that someone noted one of the characters was underaged, he had thought they were over 18 in the webcomic, but saw that it was 17 instead, so decided on his own volition to change the story to avoid any issues. He’s very much a businessman when it comes to this field, same as we, and also came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth the risk. I don’t want to speak too much for him, though.

And yes, it did happen at a snap of a finger. It was literally minutes between me pointing it out to grot, who pointed it out to Blackjack, who found out and decided to change the project. For what its worth, this is the screenshot of the proceedings:

I understand you want to be angry with us, that you want us to be the bad guy here, but we do not demand anything of our content creators, we simply ask that you follow our site policies. If it can’t be followed, then we have always invited the content creator to host it elsewhere if we cannot come up with a compromise.

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That’s, uh, certainly a conversation. I guess you’re right.

If this is the impetus for some kind of Patreon nuke and radical shift in policy for Blackjack, I’m frankly at a loss for words. I really hope they sit down and think on this for a long time, because it’d be setting a really, really bad precedent.

On your end, I hope you eventually manage to grow the site to a secure enough state that you can reverse this policy, and I’m sorry you have to deal with it now. Please though, try to make it clear in the future that it’s a policy you’re not comfortable adhering to.

We 100% would like to step back some restrictions on this, as it has been a headache for us, especially in very gray areas like the Persona project. We do hope to eventually get proper legal advice to see what the actual risks are. Ultimately, we like to form our rules and policies here on as much objectivity as possible, so if the objective risk is lowered, we would reconsider our approach.

I know the rest of this is going to come off as hollow given that this is basically a PR statement, but I do want to make more of a direct statement to the community as a whole:

We never like telling a content creator that their vision is incompatible with our policy. Grot and myself usually spend several hours on back and forth emails trying to help the content creator out by offering suggestions, looking up legal precedent to address edge cases, etc.

But we never enjoy the process, because at best we’ve altered the original intention of a creative endeavor to fit with some larger business/legal standards, at worst we’ve told a content creator that they have to host it elsewhere due to legality concerns. There’s no winning here, and both myself and Grot hate every minute of it.

But again, those are easy words to write. I know none of you have any reason to believe we care at all, but I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it.

To any content creators that we’ve upset in this process, and I know there’s been a few, I hope the above conversation makes it more clear as to why we currently feel this is the necessary approach, and always invite you to return to the community if/when that approach is changed.

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