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So, are 99% of the "underage" anime girls.
It’s not a game where they have a warning “all these characters are over 18” despite being set in highschool.
Not only is their age stated during the course of the story, they are shown being spoken to as if they’re adults by their own parents. When they visit their parent’s home, the mum makes it clear she doesn’t either of them to move back in.
Their design IMO doesn’t strike me as appearing obviously underage. Based on the art style they look like young adults to me.
In non-Anglo countries people leave their nest later. In Poland, on average, if the mum expected they would back in, it would merely mean they are under 27.4. A test which expects such autonomy from characters to consider them adults, would have a high false negative rate when applied to media not produced in the Anglo cultural milieu.
This ties to my point that "perceived to be a minor" is culturally dependent and subjective.
Huh? The point is that they’d have to at least be legal adults for the mum to be saying that. The reason the mum wants them to fuck off is cause the daughter is a fucking psycho who the mum doesn't want to be around. It doesn’t really matter if they come from a culture where they normally kick their kids out at 18 or 30.
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Yeah, and it shouldn't matter either way. If you think it's important to tease apart the minutiae of this example in defense of something that is clearly not pornography then I'll take this conversational detour as an agreement that people deciding that things need to be censored or banned based on a passing familiarity with the content should be ignored.
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Maybe you're thinking of some particular subset that I'm not, but not that I've seen? Anime loves high-school, so a lot of characters are 16-18, and a fair number are 13-15 too. Reddit famously once (temporarily) banned subreddit mod holofan4life for posting a picture of Kaguya from the romantic-comedy Kaguya-sama in a bikini. (Presumably for "sexualizing minors" either because she's 16 at the beginning of the show or because her breasts aren't big enough.) Outside the school settings ages still tend to be pretty young and often feel like they were chosen at random, Yoko Littner is canonically 14, though it's not mentioned in the show. I'm less familiar with videogames but I think a lot of visual novels have school settings, and the characters in the aforementioned Atelier Totori range from 13-17.
Of course, the same is true for whole swaths of western media, like the teen sex comedy genre of movies, or teen dramas, both of which can have outright sex-scenes without anyone of note screaming about how that makes them "child porn". Some media from SJW-adjacent people will engage in the ridiculous business of deliberately writing characters to be 18+ because they believe it would otherwise be immoral to depict them sexually, but it's still not a mainstream taboo. Now, I think SJWs would probably go after those if they could get away with it (and probably have something to do with there being less teen sex comedies nowadays, though mostly for other reasons), but they're too obviously mainstream to act like they're doing something weird. Anime-style media is an easier target because any free-floating feeling of weirdness can be converted into talk about how something feels "creepy" for "sexualizing minors", without consciously thinking about how the same standards would apply to western media that doesn't feel "creepy".
My experience with this, mainly, are games that are refused from steam without explanation. This happens every few months and sometimes the people in them are children in a towel or underwear but sometimes there's absolutely no one underage in them at all. The tinfoil theory is there's someone that approves games on steam that thinks all anime games are pedophilic in nature. Maybe that's true or not there are quite a few people that are always commenting about how happy they are that steam is trying to put a stop to this stuff and they're always "SJW" when I look at their profiles. They do seem to think that even when the age is changed that it is simply a fig leaf like the little girl who is a 500 year old dragon. Which, to me, suggests that it doesn't matter what their age actually is because they think something drawn underage is underage. Though how they can tell the difference between a 17 and 18 year old anime girl is unknown to me.
Per one of the VN translation companies, there does seem to be one particular reviewer ("Mary") who is disproportionately involved in visual novels that get rejected.
This arbitrariness in the enforcement of the acceptance guidelines combines with Steam's policy of not allowing edited re-submissions means that the process for publishing or translating an 18+ game on Steam looks like this:
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Yes, I've heard about examples like that as well where the characters aren't even underage and there isn't even any real justification for calling them underage, and obviously they are a particularly telling example of the censor's mindset. (I'm reminded of how Patreon will periodically go after anime-style porn, like this pornographic animation of Hex Maniac, based on criteria that would include anything in an anime art style.) But I wouldn't call those cases the vast majority, a lot of censored visual novels are high-school romances and the like. It's just that standard is unjustifiable as well.
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