It’s Not About Revealing Clothes: How ‘Stellar Blade’ Became a Front in the Culture War

  

I’ve been reporting on the drama unfolding around the South Korean video game from Shift Up studios called “Stellar Blade.” The only reason there’s drama behind it is because radical leftists are furious that the game sports a beautiful female protagonist with sex appeal. Here in the West, the left has made it clear that a beautiful female protagonist isn’t something that can happen. Any female character in a video game must be uglified or made less pretty. 

Why? Because it could harm people’s feelings and harm their self-confidence. It should be noted that studies have shown this to be a lie, but the narrative must survive for the left to have the excuse to push censorship and box-checking. 

(READ: The Drama of ‘Stellar Blade’: The Game With a Sexy Female Protagonist That Has Leftists Furious)

The game finally dropped on Friday and quickly became the third-highest-rated game by user score in PS5 history. I’m one of the people who bought the game and have been playing it over the weekend. Suffice to say, it’s good and perhaps I’ll write a full review once I’ve finished it. 

But the release of the game was marred on day one by a patch that took some of the costume and gore effects and censored them for Western audiences. Other countries, such as Japan did not undergo these censorship patches to the main character’s outfits that covered up more skin. This caused gamers to revolt against Sony, with former Blizzard employee turned free speech activist Mark Kern leading a charge to convince people to cancel their memberships to the PlayStation network to punish Sony. 

So far, Kern has succeeded in taking a fat chunk out of Sony’s membership stockpile. 

Kern also has an ongoing petition encouraging Shift Up to revert back to the uncensored version of the game. As of this writing, it has over 50,000 signatures. 

Naturally, this has led to members of the social justice and woke left accusing gamers of being perverts who just want to see more skin on fake women. 

This is a distraction from the actual point gamers are making, not that people wanting to see beautiful women with sex appeal on screen is somehow wrong or a social sin in the first place. 

(READ: Sexy Women, the “Male Gaze,” and Feminist Society’s Hatred of Femininity)

What this is ultimately about is two-fold. 

For starters, it’s wrong to promise not to censor a game and then censor it on the first day of its release. The reason people were so happy with Shift Up is because they weren’t bowing to the censorship efforts of the Western left, and watching them cave on the first day isn’t a good business practice and will lose the trust of their customers. Moreover, you teach these woke scolds that if they apply enough pressure, you’ll cave and give in to them in the future. This is a road that leads to bad products, as we’ve seen time and again. 

(READ: For Corporations, Being Woke Is Absurdly Expensive Thanks to You)

But what this is ultimately about is the fact that gamers, and indeed anyone who enjoys any form of entertainment, aren’t okay with radically ideological psychopaths dictating what they can and can’t see. What they say is just a piece of lace over some cleavage is a sign that they have an industry in its grip enough that they’ll change parts of their game to something they feel is okay for everyone. 

This small group of psychopaths is making decisions on behalf of everyone else. They are deciding what’s appropriate for us to view. They are deciding what we get to consume and how. They have appointed themselves the arbiters of morality and they love nothing more than shoving it in people’s faces.

That’s bad enough, but these people are absolute hypocrites. If the media in question checks enough boxes and has the “representation” they believe is necessary, they’ll applaud things with gratuitous sex and nudity. Suddenly, the idea that there’s too much skin showing isn’t a big deal. 

But if it doesn’t check enough boxes, it’s suddenly guilty of social sins, and action must be taken…or else. 

These people have proven they have no business deciding anything. They are, themselves, guilty of some of the worst hatemongering and bigotry in the modern era; they just mask it with talk of social justice and claims about being fair that have no basis in reality. 

(READ: Woke Company ‘Sweet Baby Inc.’ Is Lashing Out Like a Cornered Animal Thanks to Gamers)

This is why gamers are mobilizing over “Stellar Blade.” This isn’t about a hot girl showing a little more skin; this is about pushing back against people who think they know better and are better than you. This is about prying their grasp off our culture and proving they’re not as powerful as they think, not just to them or ourselves, but to every corporation and creator watching. 

It was never about the outfits.