It doesn't matter if your supposed 15-year-old partner is from Iceland, if you're in the US and over 18(for argument's sake, most US states are 18), you could risk trouble by US authorities if the US authorities investigated you.
If you're a minor engaging in ERP, if you refrain from telling your 18+ partner, you can still get them in trouble if your parents find out and decide to press charges. And even if you lied to your partner and told them that you were old enough, if your parents have a good enough lawyer you still risk getting your partner branded as a sex offender.
As for the "only the character is a Minor" thing... it depends on so many things. Laws in the country wanting to prosecute, the explicitness of the act in question, the medium used. Big-name writers have both editors and legal teams that keep them from crossing lines, but even still some books are banned from sale (by county/town law) because they're too explicit. For example, the town I grew up in, only recently could the bookstore and public library put "Clan of the Cave Bear" on the shelves because of laws, but the rest of the Earth's Children series has been available since their original releases.
-- Random factoid I discovered on the internet: some "dating sim" games and "hentai comics" feature characters that are under 18; in their country of origin they're legal but in order for these items to be sold to other countries, localization teams change dialogues and bios to make the characters fit the regions they're selling to so consumers don't run afoul of child pornography laws.
Really, in the end, the whole topic is going to depend on lawyers. And if a lawyer can get a man a $3,000,000 settlement from an RV dealership because the dealership failed to inform the man that cruise control is not auto-pilot, and the man crashed his RV when he got up from behind the wheel in traffic on the highway to make a pot of coffee... yeah.
If you're a minor engaging in ERP, if you refrain from telling your 18+ partner, you can still get them in trouble if your parents find out and decide to press charges. And even if you lied to your partner and told them that you were old enough, if your parents have a good enough lawyer you still risk getting your partner branded as a sex offender.
As for the "only the character is a Minor" thing... it depends on so many things. Laws in the country wanting to prosecute, the explicitness of the act in question, the medium used. Big-name writers have both editors and legal teams that keep them from crossing lines, but even still some books are banned from sale (by county/town law) because they're too explicit. For example, the town I grew up in, only recently could the bookstore and public library put "Clan of the Cave Bear" on the shelves because of laws, but the rest of the Earth's Children series has been available since their original releases.
-- Random factoid I discovered on the internet: some "dating sim" games and "hentai comics" feature characters that are under 18; in their country of origin they're legal but in order for these items to be sold to other countries, localization teams change dialogues and bios to make the characters fit the regions they're selling to so consumers don't run afoul of child pornography laws.
Really, in the end, the whole topic is going to depend on lawyers. And if a lawyer can get a man a $3,000,000 settlement from an RV dealership because the dealership failed to inform the man that cruise control is not auto-pilot, and the man crashed his RV when he got up from behind the wheel in traffic on the highway to make a pot of coffee... yeah.
