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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...
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.
I mean there's the whole ephebophilia thing that comes up here a bunch and you can argue as long as you want about 18 being a fairly arbitrary line and the whole '17.99999999 years old you sick fuck' situation. Personally I feel like arguing the point always veers off into a ditch so I ignore it but I also feel if I lived in a society where legal consent was at 17 I'd probably barely notice a difference.
The best argument I've heard is along the lines of "Yes, there are probably 17 year olds that are mentally capable/ready of consent and 19 year olds that aren't. But we need to clearly draw the line somewhere (and somewhere close to where we can be reasonably confident that most young people will be capable/ready), because otherwise we'll get all kinds of arguments from creeps about why they should be allowed to fuck a 10 year old that they say is totally capable of consent."
And this is true of laws in general. There are probably people who can drive safely with a blood alcohol level of [two percentage points over whatever the legal limit is in your jurisdiction], and people who can't drive safely after imbibing so much as a thimbleful of sherry. But in order to enforce laws effectively we need to set cutoff points somewhere.
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