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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24302 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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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.

Messy culture war battlefields are always fun. As far as I can tell, there are at least the following factions involved:

  • Left-wing moralists who want to restrict sexualisation of women/"male coomer content" in general, and especially when it affirms numerical more-is-better specs like body proportion and breast size

  • More-is-better men (socially tend to be lower-class and thrown in the pit with the right wing?) who want big tits and think that every cm³ of lost breast volume in media is a conspiratorial attack by the aforementioned against them personally

  • Hard-progressive activists who think that it is morally imperative that they control the sociosexual development of children, in order to fix whatever aspects of reality don't agree with their ideals

  • Right-wing moralists who are afraid of the preceding, and hope that whipping up moral panic about pedophiles can help them build a stronger coalition against them

  • Animecels whose sociosexual development was anime set in Japanese high school settings, and who are therefore imprinted on the 14 year old phenotype (but fail to meet the definition of pedophiles because they are neither into real children nor into age/power differential dynamics)

It's not obvious what are the natural coalitions here! No two groups can make common cause without having to sacrifice something that is pretty dear to them.

On the object level, I am much more intrigued by the sequel trailer than I was by the original, both because the protagonist actually seems memorable in design (rather than being generic cookie-cutter K-pop plastic surgery bot) and because I like the Mamoru Oshii cyberpunk city setting a lot more than the original's knockoff NieR:Automata clanker desert. Hope they can ride the controversy to greater sales.

Are there no progressive sex-positives getting involved?

Sex-positive movement is for LGBTQ, fetish, ugly women, sex work, fats, abortion, and birth control.

It is not what it says on the label. It would not like "hot for teacher", gamer men into anime girls, or Amish families with 8 kids.

It is in favor of certain kinds of left-coded sexuality, not sex in general.

Perhaps an overlap is where they defend cartoon-porn. But this is because so much of it is LGBTQ or fetish. They would not like WWII soldiers with their pinups. Too close to supporting heterosexual fascism.

Even taking this as read, you might still expect male-to-female trans lesbians who like themselves a sexy video game protagonist, no? I had been reliably informed there were a lot of those in the gaming world.

It's hard to say, but my perception of those folks is that, for whatever reason, they prefer to see themselves in a video game as the protagonist, rather than to see sexy female protagonists who appeal to their male gaze. Could be cultural, could be psychological, could be just random chance, or could be nothing.

My perception is definitely that it's mostly cultural. There are severe underlying faultlines between the trans movement and the feminist movement, but most trans people still see themselves as allies to feminism, and they were trained to hate sexy stuff and hate themselves for being interested in it back when they still thought of themselves as men.

I’d say they only get involved in a culture war matter when anyone is questioning, ridiculing, criticizing or delegitimizing women’s sexual choices and behavior.

I’d say they only get involved in a culture war matter when anyone is questioning, ridiculing, criticizing or delegitimizing women’s sexual choices and behavior.

Agreed. As near as I can tell, progressivism is 100% a who/whom ideology.

For example, suppose an aspiring male actor alleges that he was sexually taken advantage of by a female casting director. Will progressives take the man's side in order to support the principle that these sorts of accusations should be taken seriously? Generally speaking, no. Generally speaking, the best progressives would do would be to remain silent.

Agreed. As near as I can tell, progressivism is 100% a who/whom ideology.

Perhaps the same could be said of all ideologies.

The thing that gets me, though, is that progressivism specifically is supposed to be not about that, because it's specifically supposed to be about progress (as the name might imply). Which means progressing away from the old, bad way of figuring things out based on tribalism and moralizing and such, and instead using our modern, enlightened tools to figure out what the best things are. Unfortunately, it seems like there are like 30 progressives who try to think like me and about a billion witches bitches tribalists who simply use the stated principles of progressivism to launder in their own tribal opinions as the Officially Good Beliefs, almost always without conscious intent or even awareness.

Perhaps the same could be said of all ideologies.

I certainly wouldn't say it about libertarianism. But I do think that if an ideology starts to gain power, it's going to be a magnet for psychopaths, narcissists, and various Machiavellian types. The kind of people who have a very strong who/whom orientation.

Which means progressing away from the old, bad way of figuring things out based on tribalism and moralizing and such, and instead using our modern, enlightened tools to figure out what the best things are.

Not only that, progressives are always going on about fairness, justice, tolerance, being against hate, and so on. When in practice they are extremely hateful, intolerant, unfair, and unjust. What other ideologies have practices which are so wildly at odds with their stated principles?

What other ideologies have practices which are so wildly at odds with their stated principles?

The groups progressives treat as boogeymen?

The groups progressives treat as boogeymen?

Well, what are the stated principles of National Socialism (more accurately, neo-Nazism?) Seems to me they are (1) white separatism; (2) white superiority; and (3) opposition to Jewish influence. And what are the practices of followers neo-Nazism? It's hard to say with absolute certainty since they have so little power, but it does seem that they oppose non-white immigration to Europe and the United States and they oppose Western support for Israel. And I am pretty confident that if (unfortunately) Neo-Nazis did get power, their practices would be pretty much in line with these principles.

Say what you will about neo-Nazism, but there doesn't seem to be a disconnect between their talk and their walk as there is with progressivism.

I'm not sure what your point is here, but to the extent you are simply asking a question in good faith, my answer is "no."

Edit: Just to be clear, I absolutely positively hate Nazis, including the ones who post on this discussion board. It's interesting that Nazis and Progressives/Bolsheviks/Whatever-you-want-to-call-them hate each other so much that it's easy to not fully appreciate just how horrible one of them is when one looks at the horrors of the other.

Tribalism is too baked into human psychology. You can taboo all the old tribal markers, but then people will just find more indirect, abstract, and novel markers to be tribal about even while earnestly believing themselves to be non-tribal. Tribalism is not optional. Its excesses can only be mitigated. It cannot be effectively mitigated by denying or hiding it, but only acknowledging and restraining.

That very well may be true. It seems to me that progressives ought to try to do actual credible scientific research to to figure that out, and, to whatever extent that's true, to use actual scientific tools to figure out how to structure society, systems, organizations, etc. to channel people's tribalism in productive or, at least least deleterious ways. Instead, most have been just embracing their own tribalism as well as ignorance while also destroying our very ability to do credible social science research.

All 5 of them?

I'm confused. Surely the sex-positive movement is a subset of the progressive movement? Maybe it's a generational thing? There's a lot of Tumblr discourse about young (I guess Gen Z?) progressives having sex-negative views.

Sex-positive feminism never extended all the way to accept male sexuality, it's this weird thing where it's empowering to be a sex worker but evil to be a client. There used to be non-feminist sex-positive progressives but they all disappeared when SJW/wokes took over 10+ years ago.

I'm still a feminist sex-positive progressive. There are dozens of us, dozens! Unfortunately, we're all in hiding, so perhaps it's accurate to say that we all disappeared when the SJW/wokes took over.

Identify as bisexual. Then you can come out of hiding and any SJW/woke who attacks you is engaged in biphobia. You don't need to actually sleep with someone of your own sex to be bisexual nowadays.

Unfortunately, that's not really an option for people who are bad at consciously lying, even before you take into account that my sex and race are sufficiently low status enough in the woke hierarchy to negate the positives of being bi. After all, the notion that "gay men are the whites of the LGBT community" has been around for at least as long as the term "woke" has been popular to describe this ideology, and bi men aren't too far off from that. And as much as I wish it were not so, my looks also are nowhere near sufficiently good enough to counteract all that, either.

Are they? I thought they mostly care for battles involving real people getting it on; defending East Asian coomer games would put them on the side of people they don't like against people they like, without advancing any cause that affects them directly.

The games are too mediocre to get all hett up about; the booba is bland and kind of booring unless you are a fully brain melted gooner, and the gameplay is 6/10 mid "We like Devil May Cry but all the buttons scared us :( so here is a game you can play with one hand."

There's a small faction of the tumblrite left that's willing to... 'defend coomers' is probably a strong word, but at least make allies of convenience with them. It tends to be very flaky around the more it involves sexualization of women and especially women-as-coomers-like, but it's there.

But they mostly fall into the hard-progressive activist section; they just have a broader understanding of the correct sociosexual development.

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