A Japanese creator just pointed out something that sounds almost too strange until you sit with it.
Yuh Mashiro published an essay at the end of August after looking into ways to sell generative-AI adult videos overseas. The characters would be completely made up — no real performers, no real faces. He figured that would dodge a lot of the usual headaches.
Then he ran into the next wall: some platforms now apply consent rules to the fictional characters themselves.
Patreon’s adult rules say sexual activity involving adults has to show consent between the participants. That covers animated, illustrated, written, and audio work — not just live-action. They also ban “consensual non-consent” scenes, even when it’s clearly role-play. Clips4Sale has similar limits on real or simulated non-consensual content, with a little more room if the role-play is obvious.
So you can have a story with only invented adults, no likeness of any real person, and no performers at all, and still get blocked because a character in the story didn’t say yes.
Mashiro’s point is pretty straightforward. Murder mysteries aren’t banned because the victim didn’t consent to being killed. Kidnapping, war, and imprisonment show up in fiction all the time. Why is sexual fiction getting treated as a special case when nobody real was harmed making it?
He doesn’t pretend the other side of the argument doesn’t exist — some people say fictional depictions can still have social effects. He just thinks using that to shut down the commercial side of otherwise legal fiction needs a lot more scrutiny.
Payment companies have been tightening the screws too. Mastercard’s 2021 rules for adult merchants added more verification and monitoring, aimed at illegal and non-consensual material.
The bigger worry isn’t that governments will outlaw this stuff. It’s that platforms refuse to host it and payment processors refuse to touch it. Creators can still make it. Selling it just gets harder and harder.