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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.
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.
There is an alternative steelman of homophobia based on refusing to memory hole the AIDS crisis.
First, the AIDS crisis made every-one notice that homosexuality includes both Love is love nest builders and bath-house high scorers. That matters because lots of people go along with gay lib on paradigm of Love is love nest builders. Noticing forces a rethink.
That rethink may include a father deciding
The AIDS crisis had libertarians and gay friendly people saying "Unholy shit, that is a lot of sodomy!"Also the amount of gays that did not (and still don't, though anti-retrovirals have changed this somewhat) care about having and/or spreading AIDS gave and still gives a lot of people pause.
The "standard fuck party" clip from this documentary about bugchasing still makes the rounds on /pol/ from time to time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_(2003_film)
Worth looking up the clip, it doesn't show any actual sex, it's some middle-aged gay guy giving a tour of the house where he hosts gay orgies. One of the other guys in the video, who is visibly very sickly, talks about how he doesn't care about being sick or potentially spreading it, he just wants to have fun.
I realize that "not all gay people" are like that, but given the massive amount of gays that do engage in such behaviors I think homophobia can be completely justified. But like you said, the "We just want to get married and live like normal people!" gays are carrying water for their hedonistic fellow gays. It also doesn't help when news stories of the "nest builder" gays being pedophile rapists come out, like this disgusting example:
https://au.news.yahoo.com/qld-boys-horror-raised-global-075915383.html
And the (now deleted) article titled "Two Dads are Better Than One" about the same gay couple adopting a kid:
https://static.life.ru/posts/2013/07/115738/Snimok_ekrana_2013-07-01_v_12.40.27.png
Edit: BONUS ROUND, turns out the female journalist that wrote the puff piece about the gay pedophile couple wrote a response to the controversy. Accountability is nowhere to be found, but getting mad at American conservatives is! https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-10/gorman-second-thoughts/4809582
I have a "want to get married and live like normal people!" gay brother, and even before he came out to me, the people who reliably made my skin crawl were the moralizers, the ones who can't watch someone live an alternative lifestyle without reaching for the pulpit. That impulse disturbs me more than anything happening behind the bush.
And yes, there are millions of gay men getting their backs blown out and gagging on cock behind that bush, and I seem to know half of them. That's what happens when you spend a questionable amount of time in gay spaces because the conversation is genuinely good (and the drinks are cheap). I'll keep it simple. When two consenting adults do something gross in a way that touches only the two of them, the harm doesn't fuck you in the ass or to the kid down the street. When their lifestyle does turn harmful, the fallout lands almost entirely on the people who opted in. I have zero appetite for assless chaps or golden showers. As long as nobody touches me up, which has never happened because I'd sock them, it stays squarely none of my business.
I'll turn my gaze to the strongest version of the other side, because I'm an even handed and bored person. Bugchasing is "real". The documentary exists. The visibly sick guy saying he doesn't care if he spreads it exists. The tail of the distribution is not empty.
There. Done being even handed. The "standard fuck party" clip recirculates on /pol/ for the same reason 2003 Rolling Stone "Bug Chasers" article went viral. It happened to be lurid, enraging, and claimed bugchasing accounted for up to a quarter of new HIV infections among gay men. That figure was downstream of a single source and fell apart on contact with reality, in part because Freeman had casually reclassified every barebacker as a bugchaser regardless of intent. When researchers actually combed profiles on a bareback-centric site, the share of HIV-positive men actually trying to infect partners came out around 1 percent. Most self-described "bugchasers" were roleplaying a fantasy they never acted on. Your feed is tuned to churn up that 1 percent because it enrages you, which means the sample is poisoned before you ever start counting. Base rates people. Look them up.
The most questionable things get signal-boosted to awareness. That is how the internet works. Nobody forwards clips of a gay accountant making lasagne for his husband, two mildly overweight lesbians arguing over oat milk, or some HIV-positive man taking his ART, remaining undetectable, and living a life so boring it would put /pol/ into a coma. The transgressive, and morally alarming material travels. Normality is busy tying laces. You can build an entire worldview out of the most alarming 0.1% of a group, but at that point you've given up on sociology. You've ended up producing pornography for your prejudices. And whoever enjoys that hobby should take up yoga and go fuck themselves.
My own anec-data, for whatever an n-of-my-social-graph is worth? I have the ethnographic essays, and after snowball sampling through the gay men I actually know, nobody could name a living bugchaser. Only the gray-haired ones remembered a few, and those few were dead. AIDS, obviously.
The calculus of harm has gone to bed, while some of the panic remains like a bad hangover from 2003. A virally suppressed person on antiretrovirals transmits HIV to sexual partners at a measured rate of zero. Howdy, PARTNER: we've logged tens of thousands of condomless acts between serodiscordant couples and recorded not one linked transmission when the positive partner was suppressed. "Undetectable equals untransmittable" is the CDC's official position, and that happens to be backed by the largest prospective evidence we have. Is there any problem better drugs can't cure?
Sigh. I really can't spare more effort for the old "some members of group X do something disgusting, therefore contempt for all of X is warranted." Run it against any large population and watch it generate nonsense. The worst 1 percent of evangelicals, of soldiers, of parents, of whatever demographic you happen to belong to, or dislike. That's where the ruin lies.
So sure, go off, kings (or queens) who disagree. I've made my peace with being one of the rare freaks in this thread who is actually open-minded and willing live, let other people live, or die.
Who pays for these antiretrovirals and other PLWH costs?
You, me and everyone else who is a net positive tax payer. In theory, I'm not subsidizing the lifestyle of an American with HIV, or even just their life.
But we subsidize a lot of things dawg. Old people. T2DMs hitting the soda fountain while their kidneys spit out sprite. Children with leukemia. Not smokers, since they pay for their sins by saving the taxpayer money by denying themselves old age <3
In the US the tab runs through the public ledger far more than the private one (your healthcare system is deeply in the closet, and claims to be privatized). Medicaid is the single largest payer of HIV care, Medicare second, and the Ryan White program bottoms underneath both as the "payer of last resort," funded at roughly $2.6 billion in FY2024. Domestic federal HIV spending sits around $28 to $33 billion a year, the large majority of it mandatory entitlement money that swells with caseload. Per head, lifetime care runs about $420,000 discounted and north of a million undiscounted, with something like 60 to 68% of it being the antiretrovirals themselves. So yes. It is socialized. I'm not going to pretend otherwise to protect my flank. Or my ass, which is unviolated by anything but NHS negative-ply today.
But you gotta spend money to make money. And in this case, you do make money.
Then the part that should actually interest a cost-conscious person, because it cuts the other way from how you're swinging it through implication. Because U=U holds (UwU) and a virally suppressed person does not transmit, the single most cost-effective prevention tool available is putting positive people on the drugs and keeping them there. Every suppression is an infection that never happens, and every averted infection is another ~$420k to $510k lifetime tab that never opens. The modelling supports this, AFAIK: in the Botswana combination-prevention work each averted infection saved about $9,200 in downstream care and pushed the whole intervention into cost-saving or near-cost-saving territory.
ART buys a lot of QALYs for the treated person, and viral suppression also prevents expensive future infections. At U.S. drug prices, the treatment itself is costly, but interventions that get people diagnosed, treated and suppressed often become cost-saving once avoided transmission is counted.
ART for diagnosed HIV? A fucking bargain at about $21k per QALY.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23318310/
Well below the usual threshold of $100k per QALY.
ART for prevention? Even better, because you're averting transmissions and secondary QALY/financial losses. HIV is highly contagious (surprising nobody here, I hope, there's a reason it's everywhere and has been for decades).
Finally, ART costs money because people live for decades and keep taking drugs. Duh.
Untreated HIV is not free to the pool. You must consider opportunistic infections, ICU admissions, and onward transmission, all of which cost more than the pills. If your genuine concern is my wallet (doing fine) or yours (can't say) the wallet-minimizing policy is more treatment, started earlier, not less. I'm libertarian-adjacent, and I'd prefer that people pay for themselves really, but if we're going to pool risk and expenses, we might as well do it sensibly. Why yes, I work for the NHS.
If you're trying to pray away the gay, or AIDS, it's not going to work. Things were worse in the 80s and 90s, when the disease was a death sentence. I have little interest in considering "solutions" that involve trying to get rid of gay men being gay men (good luck, even immense social stigma and a near lethal disease couldn't do it), and it's not like most countries don't spend on primary prevention or awareness programs. I'd suggest cutting the budget for expeditions in the ME first, not that anyone listens to me about that. The drugs continue to get cheaper, and I continue to get drunker while the Ritalin wears off.
That is all I have time for, because I'm at a straight pub and I intend to enjoy myself.
These are a lot of words to say that "spreading HIV actually costs the taxpayer a ton of money and even the best way that we know how to reduce the costs still costs a ton of money and all things considered it would be better for society if people didn't engage in risky behaviors that spread HIV."
And yes, this is also true for a lot of other things - simple overeating is a much larger drain on the taxpayer than HIV, and you shouldn't pretend like that doesn't have negative externalities either.
And I never have. I'm voting for the party that supports Universal Public Ozempic.
Are you surprised that I am internally coherent and know the facts? Don't be. The nerd who calculates QALY figures isn't. You can also use more words too, really, but I'd presume that if you found an actual logical flaw in my argument you would have pointed it out.
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