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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
It's been a meme for years that some of the best waifus of the souls franchise have long dresses and bare feet.
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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.
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.
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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?"
"Oh now this one's just plain sick!"
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