So how bad is the guro on a scale of Euphoria to Maggot Baits? Because if it is only as bad as in Euphoria, I might give this a try. If it even comes an inch close to Maggot Baits, hell no. Not for me.
Euphoria struck me as more disturbing than Maggot Baits - but that's mainly because Maggot Baits really overdoes it.
Seriously. Maggot Baits tosses you a half-hour torture rape scene between every five minutes of actual story. It's so bad you'll spend half the time wondering whether or not you've hit a bad ending. Not only that, but Maggot Baits manages to overdo it so much that the guro actually becomes
boring. "Oh hey, another torture porn slog. Yawn. Shoulda gotten an autoclicker already..."
Euphoria OTOH is pretty low on the gore, but it handles the psychological angle much better.
Don't you know that generally, depictions of murder are perfectly fine but sexual stuff is icky? But also... I think the whole Japanese censorship actually date back to the British controlling Japan for a bit, or something? My history isn't perfect.
Close. There was an Allied occupation of Japan after WWII, but even though there indeed was a British occupation zone in Japan, the occupation as a whole was mainly an American thing.
The Americans did
a lot of media censorship in Japan, especially when it comes to communism and Japanese nationalism - and they also specificially targetted pornography and other things that were deemed "morally harmful" (such as pessimism and fearmongering, of which there was a lot what with food shortages, economic troubles, and the literal fallout of the A-bombs).
However, pre-surrender Imperial Japan also did a lot of censorship, and they didn't spare pornography either. A lot of those laws were changed or abolished after the war, but they didn't disappear entirely. In fact, there was an upsurge of porn and prostitution right after the war, mainly because Japan's imperial censorship authority had been dismantled (though people craving escapism also had a lot to do with that).
Occupation-era censorship laws are the biggest single reason why today's Japanese porn censorship laws are the way they are. Though there already was porn censorship in Japan before the war (and even before the Meiji era).
People shit on Japan censoring their porn while being okay with gore, but the same can be said about the west with all their FPS, games like GTA where you commit crimes, or gruelsome scenes like Mortal Kombat and Dead Space. But sex? Nah dawg, THINK OF THE CHILDREN! You would be VERY lucky if they let an exposed titty into the game.
Oh man, remember how people lost their shit over the Hot Coffee mod in GTA San Andreas?
"Porn in muh children's videogames!!1!" - never mind that this is a Teen-rated game where you're literally a POS gangster. But hey, running over people and shooting prostitutes is totally so much more kid-friendly than a milquetoast minigame where you can have consensual vanilla sex with your girlfriend, amirite?