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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.
That's an argument for banning production, not distribution or possession.
I'm only against those last 2 to the extent that they provide incentive to production. To whatever extent that they don't (e.g. perhaps existing images that were pulled from some FBI evidence locker), it's ridiculous that possession or distribution would be illegal. Unfortunately, it's one of those legal fights that doesn't seem possible to win, though. It's also hard to parse out exactly how much the extents involved here are, and some actual studies and models might be valuable, but I don't know if such scientific research exists for this kind of material.
Some people argue that the original victim is re-victimized each time the media is seen; I find this ridiculous as well, as there's no magical link between the markings on paper or pixels on a screen and the original person from whom the light was reflected and captured by a camera. In terms of the harms to the person who consume such media, I believe each individual is responsible for the harm that comes about from their choice to consume whatever media. If we were in a situation where so many people eschewed such responsibility that it was causing societal problems, I could see the argument that being illiberal in this case is worth the tradeoffs, but I don't think we're there, and I'm skeptical that we'd get there.
That said, who knows how fast society will change in the near future thanks to AI accelerating everything, and short-form social media content causing massive amounts of distributed media production by children. It's not a ridiculous concern, but one that I still think is wrong.
"So long as nobody was killed when the gang broke into the house and robbed all the items, it's ridiculous that the fence be prosecuted!"
Trying to divide out "but I didn't produce this shit" from the rest of it is where we get our current legal system of plea deals, non-prosecution, and egregious offences going unpunished because legal technicality.
"No, I didn't produce it, so it should be legal for me to possess it". "No, I'm not the producer, just the distributor". But that still leaves a market for the product, and "I won't produce it but I'm happy to deal with as many producers as possible and distribute their wares for a cut of the profits" means you get more of the product.
Look at OnlyFans and how that started off (a platform for creators!) and how it has ended up (come pimp your stable of hos on here!)
I hope this is tongue-in-cheek because if meant seriously, it's a lack of empathy and theory of mind that borders on the shocking. The original images of abuse are only pixels and marks on paper, there's no magical link between the recordings of me raping my five year old kid and the kid himself! C'mon, don't blur out the features of the kid in the photos used in the article, I wanna be able to imagine forcing my cock down his throat! There's no magical link! So there's no harm done! MAP rights when?
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You need the concept "unknowingly harmed". You also need to give up the idea that harming X involves an interaction with X.
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