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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.
The more I read this the more I'm convinced nobody saying this has seen an actual kid in many, many years. (Or they have, but were trying so hard not to crimethink that they didn't actually perceive them.) If I didn't know any better I'd say it's something puberty does to you, but I actually think it's in-built preference. Or maybe you're old enough that even young adults have started to look like kids (something else I've heard people say- never sure if they're serious).
Actually, there's a better and more recent example of this about Diana [from Pragmata], whose character design is actually trying to be a kid (with the associated and predictable discourse about how
transparently obvious it was that whoever was complaining definitely wanted to fuck her, lmaothis was Harmful and Bad). She isn't really "sexualized" in the game outside of maybe that one DLC outfit (critics remain correct that the coat's cheating her age in the downwards direction; she can be as curvy or not curvy as you imagine under there, the mechanic outfit just makes it obvious); this protagonist is pretty obviously fully grown, which you can see clearly at 2:47-2:48 in the trailer.The most kid-like her face gets is the final frame at 2:50 (you'll have to go frame by frame for it), and note that she's slightly looking up in that frame (reducing the apparent length of her face) and taking a "pose" that minimizes the shape of her face more generally. If that shape was the default, the argument would maybe be more valid, but everywhere else you see her face it's adult-length (and comes to a finer point typical for adults), so...
But, I dunno. Maybe I'm completely miscalibrated in terms of what a kid actually looks like- I'm expecting a round/truncated face on top of a body with relatively straight lines up and down. But then again, I've also noticed people are just really bad at guessing ages, even those that should by all rights know better, so...
I think the first face reveal bit she looks underaged, the third-person model looks generic young-but-legal anime and the other cinematics look a tad young but nothing crazy.
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