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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8689 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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According to the results of a search right now, there has been no discussion here of the Pragmata controversy so far.

Wikipedia talk page

(There is no Wikipedia article on it, at least not yet.)

Summary on Know Your Meme

Shoeonhead's video

Forbes review

Slant Magazine review

I’d put forth the following arguments:

It seems the Blue Tribe generally views Gamergate as a propaganda defeat because they see it as a long-term contributor to the MAGA/alt-right phenomenon but at the same time I don’t think they concluded that they themselves are even partially to blame. Therefore they are looking for opportunities to fight back, and are now including the pedophilia accusation in their attacks on evil gamers. As far as I can say, this was generally not yet the case back in 2014.

I’m also noticing something that eluded me so far, namely that the probable reason why both the original Gamergate (the Zoe Quinn controversy) and the current controversy proved to be effective ragebait to the Blue Tribe is that they are fueling two of their grievances at once.

One: they generally believe that toxic loser men are aiming to police women's sex lives out of resentment and hatred. I don’t think they have anything specific in mind. (I once asked here what this stuff is even supposed to be. I only received one answer: ‘compelling or aggressively encouraging women to not be floozies.’) It’s just a general vibe that makes them feel the ick. It’s why they think Quinn was unjustly attacked.

Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.

Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.

Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.

Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.

I'm beginning to think the specific argument isn't the thing and this is the ultimate point. You have a bunch of neurotic ideologues (and, to be fair, people who outright earn a living from adulterating everything with politics) and their victory is forcing you to be as neurotic as they are about it. I'm sure they'd say it was consciousness raising or something but that's what it seems like to me.

In theory you could have just played a game about a child and thought nothing else about it. Instead, you've been forced to do woke philosophy to figure out what the hell drives this stuff.

Unreasonable demands actually work better here. There's always something. The more ridiculous it is the more sensitive you become about everything because everything can be "problematized" and the little woke-model living rent-free in your brain knows that more anodyne things yield more points when problematized.

This struck me during the Snape debacle: people, antiwoke people, were pre-outraged on essentially woke grounds (are we gonna watch some white jocks beat up a black kid??). What better victory than to loom so large in your opponent's mind that they can't escape your ideology and are in a permanent defensive crouch?

There's no winning this once it starts.

The ShoeOnHead video is actually funny. These people in the comment screenshots are insane.

"I want to like it, but can't, knowing men like it" sums these bigoted losers up pretty well.

This is probably evidence of Twitter optimizing outrage, but I've seen very little in the way of leftists criticizing Pragmata for it's portrayal of Diana (besides people suggesting that it's just a retread of the appeal of God of War/ The Last Of Us) but several people getting mad that Diana's voice actress is black (e.g. this x post)

I think the controversy of Saros is also pretty ripe culture war, but I should probably get off my ass and write up a full post myself.

This is disingenuous. The reason that people are point out Diana's VA is due to earlier crash outs in the VA community that basically boiled down to 'only VAs of the same ethnicity can reprise characters of color.'

And before you say, 'It's just twitter', this did have real-world repercussions, from the Simpsons getting rid of Apu's VA and the newest Avatar movie going out of their way to find a blind VA to play Toph as opposed to getting their old VAs.

They're pointing out the hypocrisy, but people having the attention span of gold fish, it just whooshes over thier head.

Please do, I am trying to get confirmation about whether it sucks before I buy. I am interested in the premise as an occasional King in Yellow enjoyer.

Oh to be clear I'm

A. A lefty who thinks the discourse is stupid outrage farming and

B. Someone who platinumed Returnal.

I was probably always going to buy Saros regardless of reviews as long as the gameplay looked similar, and I'm loving it even though I've only had ~10 hours to put in.

Malcom Collins actually agrees that the depiction of the child is a bit off, giving the pedo accusers something to latch on to. Strangely adult features on what is supposed to be a child (in which case, robbing it of what is supposed to be attractive to a pedo, come to think of it, defeating the point?).

robbing it of what is supposed to be attractive to a pedo, come to think of it, defeating the point?

Yes, trivially.

However, adult features (and behaviors) on children are what the average person thinks pedos like (re: Cuties, etc.), so they get set off on child beauty pageantry, etc.

Of course, how would said average person ever encounter someone who would point that out, given the room temperature around the topic is so hysterical it [approves of] calling the cops on men out with their daughters?

I honestly don't see how any of the three points you cite, and gamergate writ large, are in any way relevant here. Pragmata's Diana is a 1) robot 2) child that has no possible sex life to police, the "typical male fantasy" bit swiftly evokes the meme but otherwise AFAIK there's no wife to speak of so the entire point is moot (in fact I'd posit that feeling threatened by a rather ordinary fatherly-protector dynamic, or projecting any "wifely" duties onto the robot child, are both rather embarrassing self-owns), curbing a child's freedom to an extent is pretty much the definition of parenting, and A Plague Tale exists so child-deficient women are welcome to enjoy the medium at their leisure.

As for the cause of screeching, I think it's pretty obvious:

  • unashamedly cute and funny young female
  • bulky coat but entirely bare legs/feet is fertile ground for fetish projection (as a non-footfag I don't get it but I agree it stands out)
  • canonically an android so maps heh, MAPs very neatly onto the evergreen "ackchyually she's a 500 year old dragon" trope
  • cheeky promotional badge on Twitch as irresistible self-reporting bait to gooners (please god let that bit be intentional because it would be so fucking funny)

It feels weird saying this as an admitted degenerate, but the entire """controversy""" feels like a complete nothingburger to me - unfortunately in the age of the gooner no petite/underage character is safe from uoh-posting and pedo projections allegations, judging by the badge brouhaha even normies seem to have caught on the :crying_emoji: dogwhistle. I agree with @PutAHelmetOn that, since racism doesn't hit the same way anymore, pedophilia is very likely next up for a ride on the outgroup insult treadmill; as any sort of public-facing figure you will, or already do, have to be performatively disgusted by anything remotely "loli-coded" or be branded a closet pedo. As a gachatard I'm vividly reminded of the recent ""drama"" about Tiphera, a CZN character that had the temerity to be petite and almost-flat (while explicitly not a child) among a sea of titcows well-endowed characters, and accordingly has been the subject of much handwringing from the moment she was showcased, immortalized by a memetic Reddit mod melty and subsequent closing of ranks (why is it always Reddit mods?). To be entirely fair, unlike Diana that one also flashes you every time you choose her cards in battle, but she's also not a child, and that's really the norm by gacha fanservice standards.

I'm actually surprised that this is the direction the internet decided to take with Pragmata, instead of what I assumed to be a more obvious and less explicit angle of relentlessly Shinzo-Abe-posting about blatant, egregious Japanese birth rate propaganda and emotional exploitation (seriously, you can't tell me that as a man you can look at things like this and don't feel a faint warmth in your chest). Alive internet theory continues to lose ground. I grant that some design choices stand out, as described above, but I feel like this is mostly done to give the robot child a distinctive/memorable outline and a certain degree of uncanny valley, at which IMO it succeeds.

(seriously, you can't tell me that as a man you can look at things like this and don't feel a faint warmth in your chest)

Ironically, I think Pragmata and what I've seen of the discourse may have once again confirmed to me that I'm not well-suited to being a parent. Looking at Diana, I feel nothing at all, other than slight annoyance at some of her antics. I'm not some deranged child-free lunatic raving about "crotch goblins" every other hour of the day, nor am I an anti-pedo crusader looking for nonces under my bed, but I honestly don't think I've ever seen a child below the age of like 10, fictional or otherwise, behaving like a child would, whom I didn't find mildly unpleasant and annoying.

(seriously, you can't tell me that as a man you can look at things like this and don't feel a faint warmth in your chest)

Oddly enough, I feel that I'm protected from this game's superstimulus by interacting all day every day with a hyperstimulus in the shape of my own baby daughter. But I do admit it does look pretty cute.

Having heard nothing about this controversy before this thread other than that it had something to do with a video game, I simply could not believe the cover art was real. I still kinda don’t.

You buried the lede. They made the little girl look like an age 9 version of the hottest chick in the college sorority, complete with makeup, bedroom eyes, and long flowing hair.

Spec Ops: The Line was controversial for intentionally making the player feel like a war criminal. Is part of the artistic vision of Pragmata to make the player feel like a pedophile?

I appreciate the resistance to ideological uglification in games, but that doesn’t mean we need to make preteen girls look like Kate Upton.

hey made the little girl look like an age 9 version of the hottest chick in the college sorority, complete with makeup, bedroom eyes, and long flowing hair.

Oh for feck's sake. I had heard nothing about this whole kerfuffle until I saw Shoe's video, but come on. Newsflash: little girls have long flowing hair. When I was that age I had long flowing hair and it was nothing to do with "hottest chick in the college sorority".

Makeup? Haven't seen enough of the images to notice, but from what I can see, that's not makeup. Again, little girls (and boys!) have clear, unblemished, youthful skin with strong colouring - when I was a girl in my early to mid teens, I was at school with girls with Dresden doll complexions and no makeup was involved at all. Now, she does seem to be wearing lip gloss, but on the other hand it's hard to tell if that's meant to be makeup or if it's her artificial skin under the lighting (she also has a shiny nose in this, and there isn't (yet) the notion that one's nose should be shiny so here's highlighter to make that happen). And besides, there are makeup sets for tweens so we're long past any pearl-clutching over marketing adult shit to kids too young for it. (That TikTok is one where I'd happily join in a torch-bearing mob protesting against it).

Bedroom eyes? I'll have to take your word for that.

Going off looks, Diana is around eight to nine years old. So she won't have the uwu features of the sexualised anime little girls (like the current case of Mimi Yanagi, another storm in an online teacup case and one where the 'artist' damn well is making a 'sexualised four to six year old but it's all chibi art and a totally fake fictional character so what is all the fuss about?') that maybe you are referencing as an internal model of "this is what a child in video games should look like".

Agreed. The character looks like a prepubescent girl. A pretty girl to be sure, and somewhat stylized. She is a bit doll like, which is fitting given that she is supposed to be an android.

I hope we are not reaching a point where anything feminine, cute, or pretty is immediately seen as sexy. But it seems like an unfortunate side effect of internet memes that anything that can be sexualised will be, leading to weird situations like this one.

I hope we are not reaching a point where anything feminine, cute, or pretty is immediately seen as sexy.

No, you're only seeing the connection drawn here because:

a.) angry women on the Internet want to Problematize it and equate "men getting to interact with the cute/feminine" = "pedophilia [as the most effective proxy for 'offensive to Female Privilege']"

b.) angry men on the Internet actually did see it as sexy and are crimestop-ing, or are just simping/pretending to for the benefit of the aformentioned angry women

But it seems like an unfortunate side effect of internet memes that anything that can be sexualised will be

Well, it sure beats only one gender having the privilege to determine what is sexual and what is not. That way lies your "don't worry we won't tell your folks; when you're at school, you're a girl"s.

Yeah the character in question looks nothing like an adult.

If anything, the Pragmata "controversy" is an example of seeing the fake and gay culture war strings getting yanked in real time, or whatever metaphor you want, something something outrage farming, something something grifting. People say intentionally-outrageous things to get clicks, regardless of if it furthers their own stated ideological goals or even their reputation, because clicks are the sole aim.

This controversy has two elements to it: the pedo thing and the pro-family thing.

The pedo thing is just a cost of making anything with children in it, sorta like how anything anthro unfortunately attracts furries. Yes, they made the little girl very pretty. The bare legs/feet makes for a distinctive silhouette, but that also draws attention to her physicality. (Apparently pedos are really into feet, legs, and specifically the backs of knees, but that's precisely because those are parts of children's bodies that are typically exposed to view). Getting up in arms about accusing it of being a pedo game is someone actively trying to create generic moral panic outrage when there isn't any. If I run into someone in real life who goes off on an unprompted rant about how gamers are pedos and Pragmata is Incel Pedo Gamergate Misogyny Racism, I'll update my opinion and be disappointed.

The other element is a Hassan Piker line about how gamers (a lot of his audience and periphery audience, the guy is on Twitch) are pathetic losers something something. It's just outrage bait from an outrage baiter, what's annoying is that this naked-outrage-baiter hyperconsumerist grifting socialist gay-baiting himbo nepo-e-celeb gets fawned over and glazed by the NYT.

Socialists/Marxists shitting on the concept of the nuclear family isnt a good look for them, it annoys normies and sane people. Reminding normies that abolishing the family is technically on the Marxist platform is bad tactics when socialism is supposed to just mean "the government does nice things."

I think that the Marxist platform is very diverse because there are many kinds of Marxists. I think that most of them do not want to abolish the family.

As for Marx himself, as far as I know he did not want to abolish the family, he just wanted to get rid of the "bourgeois" style of family.

I'm no expert on Marxism though, so correct me if I'm wrong.

I am more inclined to agree with the idea that the paedo thing is "how dare men like the idea of being fathers and protectors!" so in the same spirit in which "oh, you're against gay rights? hmm you must be a closet poofter yourself then!" the accusation is being levelled that "the only reason you like this blonde, blue-eyed, white Aryan little girl is because you're a nonce, you Nazi white supremacist kiddy-diddler".

Well, the pedos did factually come out of the woodwork for this game.

One would generally expect that people who are attracted to little girls will flock to a game centered around a little girl. That does not mean the game was designed to appeal to pedophiles though, just like a game with dogs is not designed to appeal to zoophiles.

Hot take: anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong.

(Of course excluding "military secrets but art", "private personal information but art", etc.)

Even if it was depicting pedophillia: pedophilia is morally wrong, murder and genocide are morally wrong, yet most people have no issues with depicted gruesome murder and genocide. And most (including me) feel it's gross, but I feel lots of art is gross; it should definitely be behind a filter, like NSFW and "trigger warning" media, but otherwise, nobody should really care about what doesn't really affect them.

The reason for allowing subjective toxic waste, besides having others tolerate your disgusting (to them) fetish, is boundary ambiguity. People are too worried about persecution to publish safe art, unless they see works they know are far edgier avoid persecution (anxiety isn't logical). Furthermore, moral policing oversteps reasonable limits when it tries to target borderline examples (like this one). They shift the rules (spoken and unspoken); they either erode, making the moral policing ineffective to its supporters, or grow, leaving us with worse and worse "sensitive" art.

I have no strong argument against morally policing obvious pedophilia (or porn, or gore, or anything that most people don't like). But I still oppose it, because I'm not convinced it's worth the utilitarian/altruistic loss and potential to stray from "obvious".

As for this game: Dunkey recommends it, the Slade reviewer complements the father-daughter relationship (and the Forbes reviewer criticizes it not for pedophilia, but "zero friction"), the worst I've directly witnessed online is "over-reactive people are over-reacting".

Of course excluding "military secrets but art", "private personal information but art", etc.

I'm old enough to remember the first few bytes of the leaked AACS master key (09 f9 11 ...) because people made so much art, some of it decent, out of it. Controversy over that was a big part of the downfall of Digg, but you're not wrong that I'd probably feel differently if it was nuclear launch codes and not content protection keys.

Hot take: anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong.

(Of course excluding "military secrets but art", "private personal information but art", etc.)

This seems kind of contradictory to me. You seem to implicitly acknowledge that there are some kinds of fiction that can have real world negative consequences that are not above moral critique (leaking military secrets or private personal information), but also implicitly take the line that in the entire universe of things art can be about, none of them will have real world consequences that could match those of military secrets or private personal information.

Now, I'm personally fairly pro-icky art, and I think the simple, obvious reality is that icky art doesn't usually cause us to do icky things. Murder mysteries don't make you commit murder, dramas about rape and trauma don't make you go out and traumatize people, etc.

However, I at least find it plausible that there could be subcategories of icky stories, like those touching on suicide in a particular way, that could actually have negative effects on society and result in real world harm, perhaps in the ballpark of leaking military secrets or personal information. I think it has to be much more piecemeal than to simply say that "anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong."

Those exceptions are non-fiction.

I agree there can be some limits to acceptable expression, but they must be specific and have very good reason. I can't find a good reason against anything fictional, even fictional pedophilia. Generally when somebody morally criticizes "art", they're criticizing the fiction.

I at least find it plausible that there could be subcategories of icky stories, like those touching on suicide in a particular way, that could actually have negative effects on society and result in real world harm, perhaps in the ballpark of leaking military secrets or personal information.

In theory yes, but I think it would be too hard for anyone to form an argument against them that couldn't be broadly applied to harmless art, without hindsight.

More importantly, such infohazardous art would probably not be describable, or the reason for its ban would probably not be arguable, without leaking the infohazard. Meaning it would have to be secretly policed. Now, perfectly secretly policing art is indistinguishable from it not existing, and secret policing can be ethical (e.g. by downranking the art so the creator simply thinks noone likes it), so I don't object to it in theory. But secret police in today's first-world countries would require unimaginable competence, and historically secret police have a bad record, so I object in practice.

I agree there can be some limits to acceptable expression, but they must be specific and have very good reason. I can't find a good reason against anything fictional, even fictional pedophilia.

In fact, don't people who are anti-pornography say that it harms society because men use it as a low-effort substitute for going out and finding a real woman? In the case of pedo porn, this is exactly what we want to happen.

In the case of pedo porn, this is exactly what we want to happen.

No, that's exactly what people say they want to happen. More realistically, people usually just want to use pedophiles as punching bags for status signalling purposes.

Those exceptions are non-fiction.

I guess I assumed you were talking about something like the War Thunder forum, which always seems to have military leaks and is a fictional MMO.

That's the point: War Thunder is mostly fiction, but the leaked military vehicle specs were real.

I'm sure at least a few folks have had to sit through a threat brief involving not falling for a loose rewording of Cunningham's Law.

It's explicitly in the FBI anti-elicitation guidance, yes.

The controversy is a pitiful one, on par with "the symbol of white power", 👌, or Pizzagate in daftness.

Yes, the prepubescent robot girl probably attracts literal pedos to the game: she's wearing her long hair down, there's this weird contrast between her massive coat and bare legs and feet. But I sincerely doubt that Capcom would intentionally design her to attract pedophiles or that its SMM would leave dog-whistle emoji for them.

there's this weird contrast between her massive coat and bare legs and feet

To me, and this is only on first glance, that's meant to underline the fact that she's not a real human child but an android, the contrast between heavy coat and bare legs is jarring and for a flesh-and-blood person, having bare legs and feet like that would be unprotected and dangerous. But if she's a robot, then she isn't in the same danger of injury.

Or it, together with her hair, makes her look like she's wearing a nightgown, which is probably a better angle of attack than insisting that the developers are aware of an obscure meme.

an obscure meme

At this point, I feel doubtful that 4chan's /v/ board counts as obscure. It's my understanding that the meme also is fairly popular on Twitter.

she's wearing her long hair down, there's this weird contrast between her massive coat and bare legs and feet

Ah yes, she has bare ankles and a coat that's too big for her. How scandalous.

This is just angry women complaining that a young female character doesn't hate the male protagonist, and toxic females wanting to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for men (everything these types complain about is projection). That's all.

I would have expected more hysteria over the DLC costumes; there's one that's quite a bit more form-fitting (and her hair is tied up and shortened) and as such maps closer to what pedophilia is in the mind of the typical normie.

As for the uoh-posting... the SMM is doing their job well. It's not like that isn't a target audience for the game, and "give people a slightly-edgy meme/emoji to spam in chat and thus annoy streamers on Twitch" is advertising as valuable as any other (perhaps moreso).

But the game isn't really trying to push "you should be sexually attracted to this character", far as I can tell. Of course, I've been busy catching up with my other backlog of games so I haven't had time to sit down and evaluate how cute and/or funny the android actually is yet.

Ah yes, she has bare ankles and a coat that's too big for her. How scandalous.

Truly Miyazaki tapped innto something with Dark Souls.

I mean there is that boss fight in Elden Ring with the crippled girls in graduation gowns trying to bite your ankles. Made my wife and I instantly say "the writer's thinly veiled fetish" when we got to it.

I sincerely doubt that Capcom would intentionally design her to attract pedophiles

It has been suggested that Capcom has done this before, with the Mega Man character Roll.

Roll? Seriously? Maybe I have no idea what pedophiles are attracted to, but I would definitely never suggest Roll as pedobait.

Capcom did authorize the sale of a statue of her bending over with a short dress and a coquettish wink.

FUCK I share my Amazon account with my wife dude. Will this make our recommendations weird? I removed it from the view history.

Isn't that generally the way with collectible figures when it's female characters, though? It's not so much paedo-bait as "crying out loud, she's too young for the standard pout'n'wink lean forward show off boobs and butt female pose".

I remember the controversy when this piece of high art was released, back in the day.

Coquettish? It's like that Rorschach test joke that goes, "You have a whole album of gay furry porn in your office and I'm the pervert?"

I don't see the connection between this and Gamergate. At best, you could say "this game causes gamers to be attacked as pedophiles" which fits with the Gamergate narrative ("gamers attacked").

My only exposure to controversy about the game was people calling it sexualized, creepy, and pedophilic. The people who call this game perverted are themselves gooners. They are kind of like woke people who call DnD racist for having low-intelligence orcs. It is a kind of self-report. "Strong man protects little child" is completely normal and wholesome in media. It does not therefore become un-wholesome because the child is loli-coded.

Pedophile is becoming more common attack de jour among the Extremely Online. I expect it will follow a similar path of the word "racist." Concretely, I expect within the next decade, a new round of MeToo/cancel culture to include cancelling men for being "pedophiles" but this will not involve any legal proceedings. The "pedophilia" in question will just be age gap relationships (not harassment!).

If this prediction is true, then it would be unsurprising to see the newest term of derision applied early to an easy target like gamers.

In short, I think the controversy is caused by:

  1. perverts sexualizing the game (even though it is not sexual)
  2. getting mad at it (because straight male sexuality is taboo)

I'll probably regret asking, but how is the robot daughter in the game 'loli-coded'?

Only in the relative sense, like compared to Baby Yoda.

The admin of Kiwi Farms claims that she looks too good, with lip gloss, makeup, and a ridiculously fancy hair style, which implies intentional sexualization.

a ridiculously fancy hair style

I haven't seen all the images so maybe there's one where she does have her hair done, but God damn, if "long hair not tied back or up" is considered ridiculously fancy, I better not show anyone that photo of me when I was nine and hadn't even brushed my glossy, long, tresses when the photo was taken!

Here's the full quote of his opinion.

By the way, someone posted this [image of Sarah Miller from The Last of Us] at me on Xitter and I think they thought it was an epic slam dunk.

But, uh, it kind of immediately proves me point. It's an even better point of reference than Ellie [also from The Last of Us]. If you compare that girl to Diana it is even more starkly obvious than Ellie why Diana is so fucking creepy.

Sarah Miller:

  • Flat, short hair (juvenile haircut).

  • Knobbly nose.

  • Close together facial features (neotenic feature)

  • Far-apart eyes.

  • Natural complex and lips.

  • Thin, fuzzy eyebrows.

This looks like a real child.

Diana:

  • Waist-length hair that is featured like a pageant girl.

  • Extreme blush.

  • Lipgloss.

  • Plucked eyebrows.

  • Dark, painted eyelashes despite being blonde.

  • Facial features are further apart like an adult woman's.

  • Facial features are both hyper-realistic and also completely blown out like she has foundation on.

  • Facial features are completely symmetrical like a Sims character.

Like come the fuck on JUST LOOK AT HOW SHE IS MADE UP.

How can you sit there and lie to my face? How can you say that these are the same designs that serve the same innocent purpose?

If you think this is the same thing you have autism. You should not have paternal instincts activated because you have autism and your paternal instincts are broken.

The website's users seem to be more or less evenly split on whether they agree with him.

Or, to paraphrase:

Sarah Miller: I wasn't attracted to this, and she is kind of homely. I'm not attracted to butch haircuts or neotenous features, so that means nobody else would ever be either. By the way, I did not get along with the girls when I was in elementary school.

Diana: I was attracted to this, and that made me uncomfortable. This means other people will be attracted to this temptress too, and that's a thoughtcrime and bad. This is especially funny because of where I'm posting this opinion. Anyway, I think pedophiles would choose this one, 100%, even though I just got done explaining about how this looks nothing like an actual kid.

(This is mainly because I don't actually think "pedophilia" has anything to do with actual kids, and is more about policing men around young women, which my mind tells me this is; obviously this here is an attempt to get around that.)

This isn't really that difficult to understand.

I'll take "telling on myself" for 500, Alex.

GamerGate was a failure for the Right because it did not promote any of their aims and norms in the video game industry, but only further cemented the progressive stranglehold on video game culture. Look at modern WoW. The Progressive side successfully narrated the event within the industry and increased the number of LGBT / women / trans and their influence by some percent afterward. It’s an interesting event in any case as it shows the way that Progressive power functionally works — in a gender inclusive space filled with autistic men, attractive women wield enormous social power and can essentially act as petty tyrants, and this is amplified by advocacy networks and sympathetic media which side with them above all. It’s also interesting in that it showed the influence of anonymous organization online a la 4chan, which would later throw their weight behind Trump.

Gamergate did not involve "the right". There might have been a minority of gamers with right-of-center political views, but this was always an inter-left fight, with some of the defeated later drifting right having found some safe harbor there/having grown a decade older.

with some of the defeated later drifting right having found some safe harbor there

This is known as "having been thrown into the pit".

GamerGate was a failure for the Right because it did not promote any of their aims and norms in the video game industry, but only further cemented the progressive stranglehold on video game culture. Look at modern WoW.

That stranglehold seems to have strangled the industry to death. I'm sure the husk of Blizzard that was left after the sexual harassment catastrophe has filled its eternal legacy MMO with all kinds of woke shit, but out there in the world the industry is seeing devastating layoffs as unwanted games full of snowflake characters metaphorically pile up in trash bins. Like say Dragon Age. They successfully murdered a series, but they sure didn't get anyone to like it.

Yeah, I'm inclined to believe that the progressive victory was going to happen anyway because it did everywhere else. If anything Gamergate is just sort of the backlash from people who sense something is moving but can't really stop it.

"Go woke, go broke" is probably overrated but gaming seems to be one of the places where it regularly happens, for the same reasons it happens at the top end of the film industry.

Progressive stranglehold on video game culture or video games themselves?

I should say the culture expressed in video games.

this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.

If that is indeed the thinking, then that's Anita Sarkeesian levels of not having played the game and missed the point entirely. There's no nuclear family, it's "single dad" coded. There's no wife. Hugh is the most supportive idealized single dad. It's not even "disgusting instinct of spreading his genes"; Hugh is more like an adoptive father. He himself has been adopted, and talks multiple times of how much he loved and was loved by his adoptive family, and how they're his real family. The game is adoption propaganda. If anything the right should be complaining that it's encouraging men to raise kids that aren't their own.

If we're going to mindread the people who screech at the game, I don't think we need to go any further than: anything that reminds men and women that there are genuinely fulfilling experiences in building a family is unpleasant because they are not currently feeling fulfilled by the life they chose for themselves of eschewing traditional family roles.

I didn’t recognize the name, so I looked it up. Ah, it’s the robot daughter one. I’ve seen a couple people playing it.

I didn’t know there was controversy, either. Google doesn’t make it obvious; none of the search results include your links, nor do the related searches suggest any drama. The Forbes review is mildly critical but not controversial. Slant’s is unambiguously positive. How confident are you that this extends beyond the Extremely Online?

It’s definitely not at the level of GamerGate, which in turn was less important than the average games journalist suggests. I prescribe less time on Twitter.

I didn’t know there was controversy, either.

No more did I until literally the other day. But someone will always find a reason to be offended by something.

It’s definitely not at the level of GamerGate, which in turn was less important than the average games journalist suggests.

GamerGate was a huge battle in the culture wars. An entire generation of nerds was redpilled by the realization that:

  1. Game journalists were coordinating with each other as a class to put out a unified media narrative.
  2. Those same game journalists absolutely hated gamers.

And, of course, this lesson was readily generalizable to other fields, such as cinema, or politics.

There is a reason that Scott Alexander had to censor the term, reducing us to talking about reproductively viable worker ants.

To this date, the Wikipedia article on GamerGate starts with "Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture." Anybody who reads that sentence and remembers being there knows that Wikipedia is not to be trusted on political matters.

How confident are you that this extends beyond the Extremely Online?

Not at all. Then again, Gamergate wasn't that different in that regard, was it? I view this as a small and delayed aftershock of Gamergate.

and are now including the pedophilia accusation in their attacks on evil gamers.

Simpler answer: Many of the people lobbing this are just ahistorically narcissistic freaks who fail to grasp a fundamental part of human nature. If you're wierd enough to genuinely not know what a "man" is, then art depicting the Protector role will just come off as alien and disturbing. And if you're a gooner, then obviously it just gets parsed through a sexual lens.

Similar to the women who mainline romance slop calling Sam and Frodo gay because they've never had a real friendship.

And this one became high octane culture war fuel because of all the videos of women streamers having their ovaries take the wheel on stream while playing the game. Of course deep blue types will feel attacked; reds would act the same way if there was a game that had the chuds openly feeling gay-curious. I'll go ahead and note that the latter won't actually happen because it's an apparently inborn trait for a small, sticky slice of the population whereas the former is arguably the literal purpose of cellular life.

And this one became high octane culture war fuel because of all the videos of women streamers having their ovaries take the wheel on stream while playing the game.

If you're going to put it like this, now I want you to elaborate.

I'm not going to say 'just fucking google it', but it's enough of a minor trend for compilation videos to get thrown together.

I recall someone saying on twitter that the easiest way to solve the birthrate issue is to just have women legally obligated to hold a baby for thirty minutes once every month. They might be on to something...

I recall someone saying on twitter that the easiest way to solve the birthrate issue is to just have women legally obligated to hold a baby for thirty minutes once every month. They might be on to something...

"57 (86%) of 66 eligible schools were enrolled into the trial and randomly assigned 1:1 to the intervention (28 schools) or the control group (29 schools). Then, between Feb 1, 2003, and May 31, 2006, 1267 girls in the intervention schools received the Virtual Infant Parenting programme while 1567 girls in the control schools received the standard health education curriculum. Compared with girls in the control group, a higher proportion of girls in the intervention group recorded at least one birth (97 [8%] of 1267 in the intervention group vs 67 [4%] of 1567 in the control group) or at least one abortion as the first pregnancy event (113 [9%] vs 101 [6%]). After adjustment for potential confounders, the intervention group had a higher overall pregnancy risk than the control group (relative risk 1·36 [95% CI 1·10–1·67], p=0·003). Similar results were obtained with the use of proportional hazard models (hazard ratio 1·35 [95% CI 1·10–1·67], p=0·016)."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140673616303841.com

How much can we trust that these vtubers are actual women?

The videos I saw were regular (hot women) streamers, though I don't actually watch any of them, and didn't note names well enough to mention.

  1. Most of them have been doxxed and are, indeed, biological women.
  2. "Female vtubers are secretly 400lbs neckbeards with a voice changer" is a dumb normie meme that has pretty much never turned out to be true. Voice changers are obvious pretty immediately, as are most MtF voices.

So it would be pretty reasonable to trust that they are women.

I don't think men who are better than women at what vtubers do exist in sufficient numbers to make it economically viable instead of just hiring women.

I'll go ahead and note that the latter won't actually happen because it's an apparently inborn trait for a small, sticky slice of the population whereas the former is arguably the literal purpose of cellular life.

Well, there is a body of thought behind the notion that although obligate homosexuality is an inborn minority, a much greater slice of the population can develop an interest in bisexuality depending on prevailing cultural norms, as per the Ancient Greeks.

Bioshock, dishonored, last of us all have "badass male MC protects little girl" and they're some of the most praised games ever. This one was created by a Japanese dev and appeals, intentionally or not, to the vtuber-lolicon crowd. Mainstream reviews will shy away from this because it's off-putting, to say the least, but this is probably why the game is getting pushback.

This trope feels very gendered: I can't think of any comparable examples where the player ends up playing dad to a boy. I'm uncertain if that's a fundamental type difference (sons grow up and become protectors themselves, daughters narratively always need protectors -- not agreeing with the position, just observing the trope), or a difference in magnitude that protecting daughters has a stronger emotional valence and makes a better story.

God Of War 4/Dad of Boy

Death Stranding.........

The baby you carry in the game is actually a girl.

But the baby Madds is talking to in the 3-hour-cutscenes is his son, you, the Norman Reedus.

IIRC, the Death Stranding baby has its gender unspecified for most of the game, and at the end of the game is revealed to be female.

The multi award winning God of War (the newer one, not the original games) and its sequel Ragnarok are just that.

I haven't played that one, thanks for the example. I have played BioShock (and Infinite) and Dishonored, though. Maybe I just missed that one: I'm not a PS gamer, and missed the PC release and don't really play that many single player games anymore.

God of War 2018???

this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut.

I don't follow. What is the nuclear family here? Who is the wife? Is this not a game where you play as a human with an "android" sidekick that looks like a child?

Who is the wife?

In this case, nobody. I didn't claim that the game wholly represents the typical male fantasy in the eyes of Blue Tribers, only that it feeds into it. In other words, it goes into the same mental bucket.

Seems like you kind of made that up out of whole cloth. Do you have any support for this claim? How does a game about (approximately) a single father relate to the nuclear family?

It seems much more likely that this game really is popular among pedos. This is not to say that this was intentional on capcom's part, or that you can't play this game as a normal person, of course.

And acts like a child. There was a viral video of a lady streamer melting down because the android drawed you a pictur.

Side thing: Why does the robot act like a little girl? Is it a cynical programming to make her an appealing product? No, I don't think cyberwarfare barefooted child robots are a consumer product.

My understanding is the game's story isn't really that deep or philosophical, so I'll do its own work for it. The android actually is a little girl; this is how you properly align an AGI, base it on human neural architecture and make it live life as a human. After X amount of time in an infant chassis, swap it to a cute little girl chassis, eventually give it an adult body. Then you've got a "Digital Native" artificial mind that can intuitively manipulate and hack technology while also identifying with and liking humans.

Kinda like in that shitty film The Creator.

There is a plot justification for the android being a little girl: it's specifically designed to be a guinea pig for testing medical treatments intended for the creator's daughter. As for why they made the medical testing doll not just agentic, but also in a human girl-like manner, your guess is as good as mine. But of course, the real reason is probably that there wouldn't be a plot without that.

Why would you do medical testing on a robot that doesn't have blood or organs? And why would it be a super-hacker?

The plot of the game revolves around lunafilament, a pretty much magical material with the potential to replicate anything. He was trying to make a robot to test artificial body parts so she was by design incredibly lifelike. Making a robot let him test that the artificial organs worked like organs, but as you say she was not a good test subject because lunafilament is toxic if inside humans and she cannot model that. I don't remember if it explained why can hack things.

But in all honestly, the plot of the game is super thin. Just enjoy your robot kid that does all the enjoyable things kids do with none of the parts that make you want to punch something.

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