This is tenth of fifteen essays contained within the fourth issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, a collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. If you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!
Written By: A. J. Malachite
In July 2025, itch.io mass delisted hundreds of adult games and other erotic media with no warning due to pressure from payment processor Stripe. There has been widespread outrage and concern over this censorship, with many organizing community action and support for the creators affected. Most of the anti-censorship backlash has focused, deservedly so, on how proponents of censorship define queer content as inherently pornographic – making a ban on “adult content” the first stop on a slippery slope to banning visible queer existence in media. A closer look at the policies of platforms like itch.io and Patreon reveals one of the key mechanisms in the slippery slope designed to harm and isolate queer people: vagueness that allows for open interpretation.
The itch.io content crackdown was just another action in a long line of governments, corporations, and platforms enforcing increasingly severe sexual repression. Only a few weeks prior, Steam had implemented their own crackdown, also in response to pressure from payment processors. In January 2022, the platform Game Jolt banned porn games in preparation for the launch of its mobile app. And in the past few years, over a third of U.S. states have introduced privacy-violating ID verification laws and other restrictions for online adult content, resulting in sites like PornHub blocking access to users in those states and a surge in the popularity of VPNs.
Content restrictions are often obvious in their vagueness. Itch.io goes as far to admit that “it’s almost impossible to come up with an exhaustive list of unacceptable products” as determined by card processing networks – essentially a shrug emoji implemented as policy. Card processing networks are generally reactive instead of proactive, responding to pressure from groups like the one that set last year’s Steam and itch.io content crackdowns in motion. As payment processors placate these groups, the goalposts change and leave platforms and artists a difficult choice: comply in advance by avoiding any content that could possibly be controversial, or risk the goalposts changing and getting punished for it. In this climate, itch.io’s statement that it’s impossible to create a comprehensive list of unacceptable products is correct – and that’s the ideal reality for pro-censorship groups, who will use the reactive stance of payment processors and platforms to back them into corners every chance they get. This is the big picture, the surface layer, of online censorship: wherever there’s a lack of clear definitions in the fine print, bad faith actors will take advantage of the opportunity to throw content they don’t like into the same bucket as content that’s societally-viewed as deserving of regulation or restriction. For example, when queer content is equated to adult content. But what is defined in policy demonstrates how the pro-censorship movement perpetuates itself beyond the direct influence of fringe groups.
Both itch.io and Patreon prohibit content depicting sexual violence, but use the word “glorifying” instead of “depicting.” At first glance, the average person might not see anything amiss with a policy that prohibits the laudatory representation of abhorrent real-world violence – but then, Patreon settles uncertainty about whether any depiction whatsoever, even in fiction, is considered glorification by stating (emphasis mine) “creators [must] demonstrate consent in all works… between adult participants or characters.” This is notable because the Australian group mentioned earlier, Collective Shout, accused Detroit: Become Human of being pro-child abuse simply because it depicted child abuse at all. Under a definition of “glorification” that covers any depiction whatsoever, sexual violence is simply not allowed to be present in fictional works. The same line of thought applies to furry content under itch.io’s prohibited themes (emphasis mine): “bestiality or animal-related.” That’s it, that’s the whole bullet point. A term as broad as “animal-related,” with no further qualifiers, leaves a huge spectrum of content – from anthropomorphized animal characters having sex to transformation content to fantasy creatures like werewolves – vulnerable to pro-censorship campaigns.
By refusing to even attempt to differentiate between depiction of sexual violence and incitement of real-world sexual violence, or furry content and bestiality, these policies allow for complete subjectivity in policy application. This subjectivity anywhere, even outside of sexual content (as demonstrated in the case of Detroit: Become Human), allows pro-censorship actors to cry foul over whatever they want to under the pretense of obscenity, of endorsement or encouragement of real-world harm, of glorification. It’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy that encourages platforms to take stronger and stronger pro-censorship actions as they attempt to be proactive instead of reactive: Steam has repeatedly been criticized for banning games for content that isn’t actually there, using the phrase “regardless of the intent of the creator” to justify their subjective rulings.
As mentioned earlier, one of the primary objectives of censorship is erasing queerness from public life. A lot of queer porn, disproportionately targeted not only by content bans but also public scrutiny and social pressure to stay away from anything “too deviant,” ends up avoiding darker themes, sexual violence, and grimier taboos, leaving adult fiction and games that center those things predominantly in the hands of non-queer creators. Art and storytelling have existed for thousands of years with the express purpose of capturing the entirety of human experience. We have always processed reality by fictionalizing it, by fantasizing about it. Our brains love dark power dynamics, taboos, forbidden passions, subversion, and taking the grossest, ugliest things and making them attractive. Perverted, pornographic fiction shines a light on them, helps us process them and understand them, and de-fangs shame and repression. In an environment of targeted censorship that drives queer creators away from taboos, queer people lose full access to one of the most powerful and ancient tools of self-expression humans have: pornography. In this environment, bigots are handed more weapons with which to further our ostracization, our oppression.
The key to changing this, to giving queer artists and writers more freedom and opening the door for queerness to be found in all tastes and subcategories of porn games (and other erotica), is to not stop with fighting for platforms that allow adult content to exist, or with dismantling the ideological argument that queerness is inherently pornographic. The key is to render it impossible for intentional, loophole-ridden vagueness to be utilized as policy. It means getting off the slippery slope entirely by rejecting the idea that governments, platforms, or payment processors can place stipulations on what’s allowed to exist in fiction. Erotic art and pornographic fiction must exist freely, without caveat, because the lack of that freedom allows for pro-censorship actors to push us all back down the slope again, over and over in an endless cycle. Without getting off the slippery slope, queer artists and creatives will always be subjected to more stringent and hostile interpretations of what’s “too deviant” or what counts as “glorification.”
This requires individuals to recognize that fiction, art, games, etc., that make them uncomfortable, that they find tasteless, cruel, gross, suspect, or downright bad, are a necessary part of a healthy, uncensored cultural ecosystem. That any sort of “this should be allowed in fiction, but not this,” creates an opening for censorship to worm its way back in. If we don’t get off the slope without compromise, we severely limit storytelling, art, and outlets for sexual expression; and more critically, who is allowed to exercise them. That is, if those stories, art, and forms of expression are even allowed to exist at all.
A.J. Malachite is a trans man who writes queer horror, dark science fiction/fantasy, and erotica. His most recent work is featured in the anthology meat4meat and the upcoming anthologies Monsterfuck (Incision Press) and Saturday Mourning Television (Sliced Up Press). You can find him at ajmalachite.weebly.com.
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