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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?
Wut?
This is in reference to the production of fiction.
Why is the line drawn at fiction?
Because characters in fiction aren't real? The thing that is bad about CSAM is the part where a person was abused to make it. There's no equivalent in fiction.
I see your point, but it's two-sided. The demands for representation in fiction and media, for example, are a counter to "it's only fiction, it won't change anything".
No, it won't make someone who has no attraction to fourteen year olds want to fuck a fourteen year old. But someone who does have the possibility of that? Reading about it can become its own form of addiction, like wanting more and more transgressive porn. And then fiction isn't enough any more, you want the real thing. And there's no easy way to tell, amongst a bunch of teens reading and writing NSFW fanfiction, who has the seeds of that which will develop into a problem later.
It's a bit like "why do you want a girlfriend, you can have porn?" Because porn isn't enough, people do want romantic partners if they can get them.
I do acknowledge it's tricky. I read horror fiction, and I don't want to mass-murder anyone or summon up demonic spirits or unleash mind-shattering Lovecraftian entities on the world, and someone saying "but there must be something wrong with you to read that kind of stuff" is annoying. On the other hand, getting taboos made acceptable under the guise of "it's only fiction" will also be used by those who really do want to fuck fourteen year olds, or six year olds, or consume imagery of small children being tortured and abused.
"It's only fiction" when someone likes that kind of thing does make our ancestral hackles rise, and maybe there's a good reason for it (see how the Saw franchise has devolved into horror porn for the sake of it, or any other long-running horror movie franchise). I thought the premise of the Saw movies from the start was disgusting, but hey, splatterpunk was also a thing way back and almost killed off horror fiction for good at the time because "how gross and disgusting can I go?" in the absence of anything else isn't good enough.
"I like reading and looking at images of small children being tortured and raped" may be fine because 'it's only fiction, I would never in reality', but still would you let that person babysit your six year old? Even if otherwise they're a great person and fun and smart?
One of those things is something pretty much every male goes through during at least a few years of his life. It's impolite in polite society, however, to even speculate whether or not it's supposed to go away once the young man goes past the age of majority.
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