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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.
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?
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.
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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