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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.
Perhaps some useful additional context: ShiftUp are also the developers of the gacha game Goddess of Victory: Nikke and that game has characters that I think could be argued are both children and sexualized. For example Alice or Liter.
On the main topic: I don't think it matters at all whether Evie looks particularly childlike or is particularly sexualized. She's not a real person and so her depiction and sexualization fail to have any of the features that make it bad when it's done to a real person. For any kind of depiction or action beyond a sexualized one I think most people understand this latter fact intuitively.
If you, as an individual, are aroused by a sexualized depiction of a minor then you may want to seek help from an appropriate therapist. But declaring, preemptively, that it is immoral to create fictionalized depictions because they might arouse pedophiles is insane.
A Tumblr post, amusingly, gets this right:
I've only quoted the top post for brevity but the whole thread I've linked is good, IMO.
So, you are presumably okay with people possessing and distributing actual CSAM?
The reason why CSAM shouldn't be possessed or distributed is because its production is inherently harmful. Not because it's disgusting.
I gotta imagine you'd see a lot of arguments-
"It's disgusting," "making it is terrible," "having this exist encourages production, consumption, and interest," various religious and specific ethical motivations etc etc.
Production is bad is probably the most clear and obvious bad outcome but the vast majority of people would be against drawn or AI versions.
I've actually wondered about how people would feel about a government making an "authorized list" of confirmed AI-generated CSAM with no CSAM in the training data, that would be the only legal form of such content to own. Assuming that the mere consumption of CSAM doesn't encourage victimization of real children, this seems like the best all around compromise, if you can figure out how to distribute it in a way the government can't easily track.
If the government can easily track it, it just becomes a blackmailer's wet dream. Although, we're in an era where "they fabricated all of the evidence connecting me to this" is an increasingly plausible claim, considering where generative AI is.
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I'm definitely not comfortable with AI content trained on actual cp. That feels like extending the abuse of the victim into eternity.
I am 100% against CSAM existing in any capacity, but your objection raises a question - is it about training data? Would an AGI that can act based off of extrapolation salve your objections?
I mean, personally I think porn of real people should simply be illegal (outside of private production and consumption i.e. it's okay to take naked pictures of your spouse and enjoy them).
But in terms of a compromise within our current legal and social frameworks, yes, I think it makes sense to allow for AI-generated content so long as it's not derived from actual CSAM. Not healthy for the user, but that occurs to me as their problem, and I have no reason to believe it would make them more likely to actually engage in abuse.
And then there's written or drawn erotica which should also -- again I say in compromise with the current framework -- be unconstrained IMO. The idea that it should be illegal to write about or draw... pretty much anything strikes me as ludicrous. Especially given the ambiguity (re: age, etc.) inherent in many such works.
Thank you for indulging my curiosity!
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Mandatory abortions for women who rape boys when?
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