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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?
There are arguments against that that are not primarily based on "it's disgusting to me", though of course the line is thin ("disgusting to me" is easily turned into a seemingly less-egotistical "I believe it damaging to the consumer's psyche/society" at no cost).
While this is true, little-l liberalism has long believed that a certain amount of "harmless disgust" or "low-impact psychological damage" should be present in society.
There are some pretty gruesome horror movies out there, that would shock and dismay a lot of unprepared people. But instead of banning them, we trust that individual consumers will avoid things they think will make them unhappy.
How harmless/low-impact is it? The Montreal shooter clearly thought easy access to, and mass dissemination of, and mass consumption of, porn was not harmless.
The problem is the slippery slope, and that can't be simply shrugged off as "pfft, that's only a fallacy". Tolerance leads to pressure for tolerance of the more extreme, little by little, and then acceptance, and then celebration (look at Pride Month). I did find the outrage over "Pride has become too family-friendly and wholesome now! it's supposed to be kinky and obscene!" funny, however.
I'm seeing it in my own country right now with pressure to change elements of the safeguards around the limited form of abortion access we legalised six years ago. I'm not surprised by this, because I knew it would come, seeing the way things went in other countries and the open declaration by pro-abortion activists back then that this was just the beginning.
But this is how it happens: no, we don't approve of this thing, but it shouldn't be illegal, however we will put safeguards in place so it will go this far and no further. Time passes, it becomes an accepted thing, then the next move is "well do we really need this particular safeguard? it only hurts and doesn't help" and then bit by bit things get chipped away, people become accustomed to "it was always like this", so the old views on harm/impact are lost, and now there's a new "well this is okay, it's normal even, but that is not good" standard.
Then, in time, the "that's not good" becomes the pressure point for "we don't approve but it shouldn't be illegal".
Move the needle on "this is only fictional/only pixels on screen" and "of course most normal people won't even look at this stuff but if it keeps the real sickos from going out and committing offences then it's worth decriminalising it" and in time there will be the dares of teenage boys to "did you watch this baby-rape animatic? no? chicken!" and here we go again: "Dear Abby, my twelve year old son watched baby rape porn at a friend's house, how do I talk to him about this?"
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However, liberalism only persists so long as "the people who can suffer from low-impact psychological damage should not be helped and to a point deserve it" does. Once that's gone, liberalism "degrades into" progressivism, where the damage goes from descriptive (something that happens to people) to prescriptive (something that should specifically be visited on the outgroup).
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