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Notes -
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.
My previous opinion still holds. Expressed well by the top YouTube comment (at the time of posting): “Don't bend the knee to an internet moral police weirdo.”
I don’t entirely know why, but when I see a game like this, even though I’m not planning to play it, I feel a strong urge to defend it. It’s not pedophilia: it also happens when I see some weird furry game, or movie like “Human Centipede” or “Martyrs”, or some edgy online discussion forum or post (hence why I’m here). It’s not that I like or agree with any of these. But somehow I feel defending them protects the art that I do like and opinions I hold, which I believe most people today wouldn’t even consider controversial (although probably “weird”).
An explanation that I gestured to in the last comment: I can’t know how other people feel about my opinions without risking myself, and I’d certainly be condemned in more puritan times, which moral policing can lead to. But this is the slippery slope fallacy and thus I consider it a logically bad defense: it’s analogous to “I wish people wouldn’t get arrested for murder, because I (a non-murderer) don’t want the vague risk of being wrongly arrested”. Although it does apply to enforcement infrastructure (analogous to “I wish mass surveillance wasn't built to arrest murderers, because now it can be used by brutal totalitarians to arrest passive dissenters”; we can have cops and reduce most murders without privacy-crippling mass surveillance).
A better defense (IMO) for radical speech, is that even overall “bad” speech has some “good” parts, and you need those to prevent stagnation and decay (like inbreeding). For example, this site has a lot of opinions I disagree with, but occasionally I discover some important fact or argument I didn’t notice before, which aligns with my values (changing my object-level, like policy, opinion). I think (an opinion that’s becoming more common) woke’s rejection of uncomfortable speech has directly led to its groupthink (finding uncomfortable then rejecting milder and milder speech) and downfall. Or back to art, some great works contain vague pedophilia (or other edgy themes), like End of Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain; these have directly inspired further great works that don’t contain the edgy themes, and I doubt we’d have the derivatives or anything matching their quality (from the perspective of anyone with any taste), without allowing the originals or something matching their edginess.
I'm glad we can say the quiet part out loud now. I'll go further, I'm much more petty and partisan about this. I'm inclined to defend what the wokes outrage against. I'd be perfectly fine with conservatives censoring homosexuality in television. Wokes rail against male gaze on principle. But they are perfectly capable of arresting the slippery slope short of censoring female gaze/gay oriented media. I don’t want to cede the rhetorical terrain or adopt their framework. Even when they latch onto real issues, like domestic violence or sexual assault, I’m deeply suspicious of letting them set the terms. Their track record shows they weaponise these issues as cudgels against outgroups. If someone is especially invested in race riots and sexual violence, more often than not, you'd be right to suspect their real priority is narrative control and status enforcement against whites and men. I think they're perfectly aware of this too, wokes rarely let you discuss men's issues without extracting ritual deference to feminism first. And why they breathlessly defended Amber Heard, because even if they can intellectually acknowledge the veracity of the verdictv, "women never lie about DV/SA" is just a flag to be defended at all costs.
And that principle is (apparently) men are sh*tty and must be punished and humiliated.
So yeah, to borrow from the Wokies' rhetoric, making concessions to them is like making concessions to Nazis.
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