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I'm a few weeks late to this, ShiftUp dropped the reveal trailer to the Stellar Blade sequel.
For the non-gamers, Stellar Blade is a South Korean action adventure game released in 2024 on the PS5, and on PC a year later. It caught a ton of media attention for its "goonbait" protagonist EVE, her sex appeal was central to the game's marketing. EVE is based on a body-scan of South Korean model Shin Jae-eun, but it's obvious that her body proportions were deliberately exaggerated in the game. IGN France ran a preview piece calling EVE "a doll sexualized by someone you would think has never seen a woman", and issued an apology for that comment after getting called out. The game was a smashing success, sold millions of copies and became the champion game for the anti-woke.
Now the Stellar Blade sequel is self published, and will feature a new protagonist, Evie. The gameplay has also seemingly taken a different style, now set in a populated, linear city area as opposed to the post-apocalyptic world of the original. Now as per tradition, the studio is caught up in a controversy again, but from both sides. The wokes are saying Evie looks like a minor but is still sexualised, now which normal adult would jerk off to that...
Edit: forgot to put it here, some users on resetera also threatened to report the game to payment processors, who were delisting certain games from Steam and other platforms last year.
But the ShiftUp CEO dismissed those criticisms, and recently reposted a comic making fun of those complaints.
The non-wokes are upset because they wanted EVE, and Evie's assets are comparatively tame. And at least some of them (including Asmongold) agree she looks too young as well.
The biggest highlight for me is how "pedophile" has become the last truly potent scare word left in the discourse. But just like "sexist," "racist," and "homophobic" during the Gamergate era (which once forced constant defensive crouching and ritual apologies from those at the receiving end), the term is now being inflated and abused by both sides. Age-gap relationships between consenting adults, anime-style character design, and anything that triggers either tribe's sensitivities gets shoved under the label. Both sides are eager to fire this particular silver bullet at each other because it's the last remaining moral failing both can still agree is beyond the pale. Eventually, we're gonna roll our eyes at this too.
There is no "steelman" for pedophilia, unlike for racism (freedom of association), sexism (traditional gender roles), and homophobia (traditional sexual morality). There's no virtuous principle or sympathetic situation that causes people to think "hmm, maybe sex with kids isn't so black and white." So I expect the taboo to hold indefinitely barring a radical shift in the legal and social understanding of what childhood is and what children are.
As for the sequel's main character -- look, I grew up on early chan imageboards and the unfiltered early 2000s internet so I have a pretty high tolerance and probably a quite warped sense of what's within the bounds of good taste -- but even in my opinion, that's a 7 year old's face on a young woman's body. That's bad enough, but all the exploitative and opportunistic camera angels make it uncanny and perverse. I probably wouldn't play it unless they aged her up at least to adolescence.
EDIT: I'm not talking about the SJW version of "pedophilia" meaning attraction to women under 30. And yes I'm aware that people online like to motte and bailey the term in bad faith. I don't have any problem with people playing this or making this game, just saying it's not for me.
There absolutely is, and, somewhat ironically, it was something pushed by the pre-"woke" and even pre-"SJW" progressive leftists certainly in the late 00s. I still see some of it now, with the woke-natured push to retire that word and replace it with Minor Attracted Persons.
The steelman is pretty simple: pedophilia is a sexual orientation like any other, a sort of innate characteristic of someone that they're helpless to change, and finding something attractive doesn't imply actually doing anything to fulfill that attraction. As such, pedophiles deserve compassion, not condemnation, along with the structures to help them never make their attraction come to fruition in a healthy, non-shameful way. This wasn't a popular topic of discussion, but it absolutely was one among college leftists when I was a college leftist, involving things like future realistic androids or future VR experiences. I remember listening to a friend who was a psych major talking sympathetically about some therapy recording with a pedophile he heard in class, and how that man was clearly in pain and suffering due to his helpless feelings of attraction, which he knew he had to suppress.
Blood Rain, of course, is a video game that uses computers to generate imagery by modeling a virtual world, so it's pretty akin to the VR experiences mentioned above. Assuming that Evie were actually child-looking (a judgment I disagree with, but that's irrelevant here), it's perfectly defensible to have a game that overtly sexualizes her, and plenty of people have indeed defended such a notion.
Sorry, my comment was sloppy. You're right about the MAP thing. I didn't mean that there was literally no possible steelman, I meant that there was no steelman that would be convincing to the mass of normies since aversion to sex with children runs too deep for the vast majority of people.
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