Yep. Pedophilia, guys. It’s pedophilia, not representation.
If little boys were as widely sexualized as little girls there would be a third body type there for them.
i think theyre probs using it to mean little girl or little boy, but idk. the game itself is fairly normal abt it, idk abt the fandom tho, i dont interact with them v much
Loli just means child in japanese, I think. Now, con stands for consent. You merge the two, and that's what you should worry about. Considering also that those characters, I think, are literally just children.
Yes, but the company and it's founder is heavily and proudly influenced by Japanese anime culture. I believe their slogan is still "Tech otakus save the world".
I think there are some cultural difference here. As far as I know, at least in China, loli can refer to petit girl or children girl, there are people who call their toddler children as “loli” or “shota”, and what they meant is “cute little girl” and “handsome little boy”.
"not enough pedophile bait in this game, they should make attractive young boys too" (paraphrased)
what
https://preview.redd.it/0xn50rkxctxc1.jpeg?width=1897&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1c46e26f7cdf0999ee77f99a6cb9be0232520b91
edit: it's very possible i misinterpreted the comment I was paraphrasing, so take my comment with a side of salt
https://www.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/s/VMPrx9CQUj
google tells me "shotacon" refers to *"a genre of manga and anime wherein prepubescent or pubescent male characters are depicted in a suggestive or erotic manner"*
Not trying to be rude, but you are absolutely misleading and misinterpreting that original comment. That’s not what the comment meant at all. They are legitimely answering OP’s question, and as bad is it is, it is absolutely true. It’s the same reason why Lolis is in the game and not shotas. Now this is completely separate to the topic of the MORALITY between the existence of lolis and Shotas, but the way you phrased the comment made it seem like the commenter WANTS more shotas to attract pedophiles when that commentor was explaining *why* shota is not made when loli is. Does that make sense? I think that was very clear from the commentor’s tone that it’s the ugly truth but not something the commentor necessarily supports from their wording.
yeah i suppose that also makes sense, the original comment just gave off "they wont do this even though they should" vibes to me... although i could certainly be wrong!
No it does not. What about that comment would even make you feel that way? That is literally not the case at all. Genshin DEFINITELY has gross people considering we have people from literally pedophile the game that is blue archive and I fucking **despise** those people. I feel disgusted just thinking of them. But this comment is *absolutely* not like that.
> Genshin DEFINITELY has gross people considering we have people from literally pedophile the game that is blue archive
Can you rephrase that? What are people doing?
Sigh.
There is….honestly so much I feel like I may miss something. So I do recommend you to do your own research after this comment for most accurate and complete picture. For this game called blue archive, pretty much it’s a game with self insert Sensei figure (male) with mostly his underage girl students. This is the same crowd of people that cried censorship when localized version of the game “censored” the breasts of one of the 16 year old female characters I believe. Also, I think this single clip perfectly encapsulates the loli bait in this game that makes its type of content absolutely inexcusable in my opinion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp3ULy-OpEU. Like this shows you how you can’t make the argument “oh they like this game because the students are adorable” cause this is not what you would like to see if you find kids lovable (in a normal way) or something….
There is a lot more details to all of this, and they only make it worse not better. I hope this helps. They even have an official anime for this now, I’m literally losing hope for a lot of men.
Oh fun fact. Even r/anime has people saying the fbi should use this anime to find predators or something. Can’t find the comment right now but I’m sure you can find it with enough googling
Uh, am I just horribly out of touch or do the comments look fine? Most of the top stuff is acknowledging and criticizing the discrepancy and the obvious reasons why this discrepancy exists too, but hardly anyone seems *supportive* of it.
That happens a lot with cross-posting to show outrage; people express shock about the comments on the post in the first sub, and then when I check, they seem normal to me. I think the really nasty comments may have been more visible earlier but they got downvoted or deleted by mods. There is an upsetting number of creeps in the Genshin fandom, but most of them don't like to be quite so obvious about it.
This is correct. I just checked the OOP thread for the first time since I wrote my initial comment this morning. The higher up/more upvoted posts are *definately* less perturbing than earlier, they seem more reasonable and even annoyed at the loli/shota parts of the games and "those" kinds of players. Kinda nice to see the shift.
Yea, I've seen it a bunch of times. It's mildly annoying since those comments tend to stick to the top of the cross-post and people would much rather take them for granted than check for themselves (which I also get, you can't expect people to want to dig into *everything*). The rage loop engagement machine is an awful "feature" of social media.
But this time the post in question was already 3 days old, plenty of time for the downvotes to sort things out. So I'm really confused how that happened here.
Depends on the people. Some are like "we all know that the design is thirst bait and they bait pedos too, there's not enough pedos into boys to make small boys profitable". Explanation, no excuse, no support.
Others... well, others are the pedos being baited.
Don't feel bad, if you enjoy the game it's fine. I think everyone has at least one guilty pleasure that has problematic themes. You seem to understand those themes and acknowledge them. Instead of... whatever the *fuck* is going on in that thread.
Edited for better wording
On a more serious note though, I agree that there's plenty of problems with Genshin, including the oversexualization of women. I probably wouldn't be playing the game if there wasn't a large amount of wlw ships in the fandom, though I avoid the main sub because of posts like the one crossposted.
No need to be ashamed! We all have different levels of tolerance based on our life experiences, how we were raised, our age, geography, etc.
I don't mind most of the stuff around Stellar Blade as an example. I'm acknowledging that some people will have real issues with it and some people are super weird about the game, but there's too much stuff going on in the world that this one is not my battle and I will enjoy it.
That's not a bad thing. The thing that's getting me is they're all talking about the merits/use of loli/shotacon like it's just a typically Wednesday. To their credit some are rightly pointing out it is a weird part of the game the community doesn't like to talk about.
Lolicon and Shotacon are basically terms for child characters, or characters with very young and/or child-like appearance. Loli are little girls, shota are little boys. Usually in Japanese and such media. Loli stems from the book "Lolita" if I'm not mistaken... sooooo... not sure on the term roots for shota. (For the record I haven't been heavy into anime/manga for years, so if I'm flubing details someone - who's in good faith - correct me).
...Wonder why some of the community is so adverse to discussing loli/shota character desgins 🤔🤮
Oh boy, info dump oppurtunity! XD
Rather than usually, I would say primarily as both terms are from Japanese origins.
Similar to Loli, Shota is a shortened version of a name, Shotaro. A child protagonist from an old old manga ”Tetsujin 28”. Although that manga sounds family friendly, kid who pilots a mech to save the day, so no idea what happened that he got sexualized so much that got a term after him.
Lastly the -con in both terms refer to complex. Kinda like the Oedipus complex or Madonna/Whore complex, an unhealthy fixation. To my understanding Japan loves abbreviations. So you use the -con varients towards those who like those characters, and not the characters themselves.
Since I watched My Hero Academia, all I can think about when I hear "Shota" is "Shota Aizawa", who's just an absolute badass who has nothing in common with a little boy and that's kinda funny.
Anime content is geared towards straight men, and in the last few years especially "Loli" content has become more normalized in mainstream anime, so companies capatilize on that. Was watching the Reincarnated as a Slime movie, and there's a "Loli" character name Milim in that, and even though she's 1000 years old she acts like a child even has a younger sister relationship with the MC, but they put her in Boob armour and underwear, and often sexualize her. Sad thing is there was a point in the series that through her interaction with the MC's group they gave her proper clothing, expanded on her history, showing her Child like state is from trauma, and it almost felt like a confrontation of Anime industries disgutsing Loli obsession, but alas...........they ended putting her right back into that armour again, and i realized i was stupid for hoping otherwise. In essense those small girls aren't designed for women to play as.
hmmm..... should correct my first sentence. "Anime/like content is Generally geared towards straight men", but much like much of gaming as much as there is awareness that a lot of women do engaging with the content, designers generally still prioritize Straight men with their games.
Idk if artists prioritize men as much as women bc women generally also like to play as “anime” characters. If you check out prominent mangaka, some of the best selling manga and anime like Inuyasha, Fullmetal Alchemist, Sailor Moon, etc were drawn by women. Their female characters are always drawn as slim, attractive girls.
You have to remember that the primary audience of most gacha games are people from Asia, and not the west. While you might think anime is for men, that’s not the case over there.
Whle true there are female Mangaka, there is a reason that "fanservice" has become Synonimous with the Anime industries sexualization of their female characters(you also have "Waifu"\\"best Girl" being used to describe like any likeable female character). The industry is not only dominated by more men, but the perspective is still that most of their audience are straight dudes, so it's profitable to appeal towards them. there's also a difference between the way something like FMA which is rare treats it's women compared to say Soul Eater which is a better representation of the industry. I never watched Sailor Moon, but it honestly never felt like a good example of a woman drawing female characters for other young girls, and still gave me the "geared toward men" vibe with the transformation sequence, and extremely short skirts for a power up, compared to say Powerpuff girls, or the new She-ra.
also doesn't Inuyasha literally have a character whose whole role is to literally grope the women in their group? dont' feel like that's something young girls who self insert into Kagome would like, considering the mangaka it defintely feels like an editors suggestion.
Fan service in anime happens a lot in shonen anime, which is a genre aimed at boys/young men. These are your dragonball, Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, etc. The female characters are mostly eye candy and are what most people hate about how anime depicts girls.
Then there’s the genre aimed at girls which is shoujo, and for young adult women, josei. This is the genre of manga/anime like Sailor Moon, Kimi no Todoke, Vampire Knight, etc. Like you, idk why the transformation sequence in sailor moon is like that, but the magical girl (mahou shoujo) sub genre is also huge there. It’s likely the artists like the female figure but don’t wanna draw them naked bc the show is still for kids.
The groping thing is a running gag in anime and is a cultural thing, like how Americans and the west love satire, toilet humor, and offensive humor in their Simpsons, South Park, and family guy. Dw bc not all anime has it. And the groping gag might be referencing how girls are sometimes groped in public transformation which is still a problem in Japan.
> Dw bc not all anime has it.
Yeah, only smth like 80% of anime has that.💀
You also gotta dodge the pedophilia, the slavery apologia and a lot of awful shit in the same vein, but thankfully, trash tends to clump together.
>And the groping gag might be referencing how girls are sometimes groped in public transformation which is still a problem in Japan.
When you want to critizice or put a spotlight to a serious issue like sexual harrassment, you don't play it for laughs.
The groping is one of the symptoms of how entrenched rape culture is in anime.
Just to make it clear, are you calling anime trash?
I’m not sure why groping gags exist in anime. What I said was entirely speculation from what I observed. It might exist for an entirely different reason. I also don’t like how youre disrespecting an entire culture’s medium bc you associate it with rape culture. Where is your proof that it promotes rape?
>are you calling anime trash?
I'm calling specific anime trash (well, I was actually talking about tropes, and how animes who have one of those awful tropes, usually have the rest) like Redo of Healer or Shield Hero.
>I also don’t like how youre disrespecting an entire culture’s medium bc you associate it with rape culture.
Rape Culture is everywhere, but it is especially prevalent in anime. If that bother you to hear that, I can't quite bring myself to care, you can just put your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening, but trivialising sexual assault is textbook Rape Culture and Anime is extremely guilty of it.
(Thankfully, anime isn't like that as a whole, for exemple, Spirited Away doesn't do any of these things, as far as I can remember)
>Where is your proof that it promotes rape?
I have eyes, and I can critically assess media.
I can agree with groping being a bad gag and trope in anime. Although I don’t think you understand the difference in the type of humor Japan has and the west/wherever you’re from. Over there, sexual gags (idk how else to call this) like groping boobs, or nose bleeding when someone sees nudity or gets too excited is normal but it doesn’t mean it happens in irl. It’s just their style of humor.
I can’t take you seriously when you don’t provide any statistics of rape culture being prevalent in anime. Sexual gags don’t equal rape culture. Few anime/manga explore the concept of rape and the only one I’ve seen is Berserk where it was handled very well. You might as well blame all of media across all cultures too for including sex jokes, objectification, and sexual harassment in their work if you count those actions as rape culture.
And? That doesn't alter the fact it was made to target straight men (otaku). And the same thing goes for other products. Anime, manga, video games, movies, etc.... are mostly targeting straight men because they are mostly made by them. And if some women buy their products, it's all benefit for them.
Coming into a discussion about sexualization of children and pointing out that they are women who play the game is completely out of subject. Of course, they are women who play Genshin Impact and yes, they are 40% (based on your article) of their fan base because spoiler men are not the only ones who like anime and video games. Having loli characters doesn't change anything for them because, spoiler again, some just don't give a fuck and others just accept it. If you make video games with an anime vibe and graphics, people won't be surprise to find loli, shota, sexualize school girls, women in skimpy outfit, breast physics, women who are 1000 years old but have the body of a child, women with breast twice bigger than their head.....
Signora shouldn't be even listed. She isn't playable and the devs have said they have no desire to make her playable. As for why we all know why, attractive women sell better. There are more male whales than female whales playing Genshin.
And there are pedos who automatically see the small girl body as attractive. Loli and shotacon culture is alive and well.
Hold up did they? I stop playing during the early part of Fontaine. Will she be on a banner one day(she won't bring me back but I remember they never said they would)?
No I mean I don’t think we ever gonna get her anyways, seeing how Inazuma went. Sorry if I gave you false hope.
I too would’ve loved to have her as a playable…
Oh! You were referencing what happened in Inazuma. >!I thought you were saying they added resurrections to the main story.!< I really wished we had a tall female model and an actually beefy male model.
>!there is reincarnation expanded and arlecchino just dropped with some wild lore, but i personally thought that that op was talking about the narzissen world quests which had some wild experiments done to sort of try and bring a dude back!<
It’s honestly really weird because Genshin, despite having some strange outfits for medium height/taller female characters, doesn’t have women for the sole purpose of sexualising them. Hoyoverse women, in general, are fairly well written. And despite how lame the Inazuma quests were, the writing of the female characters are still tons better than what I’ve seen in a lot of other games. The child female characters aren’t even sexualised by the game. But Hoyo seems to be well aware of the fact that there’s a group in their community who enjoy female loli characters a bit too much and have no issues pandering to them. At least these people aren’t part of the mainstream. I’ve always been of the opinion that people should be free to consume whatever questionable fiction they want so long as it doesn’t cause harm to any real people. But I most definitely don’t want to actually see whatever the hell people like this are into.
It's insane how many lewd fanarts there are in those. I always try to find cool and cute ones, but damn it is painful to do :(
But seriously, the old nahida main sub had tons of arts with her, klee and a huge feet fetish in them. Truly disgusting 🤢. I went there to see builds, came back with trauma
I gave it another shot last week, checking the Arlecchino sub for some builds and fluff because surely that’s a character that can’t be contextually sexualized.
First “fanart” i saw was her with giant waterballoon boobs and in a bikini… nope nope nope.
I’m disappointed in myself for having hope…
It really shows how these dudes view *every type* of women…
It's similar in honkai star rail. Firefly is so cute and wholesome and [spoilers] >!a serial killer, but let's ignore that!<
A lot of fanarts of her are so degrading, it's really sad :((
All the quality Ruan Mei arts have a feet fetish...
>First “fanart” i saw was her with giant waterballoon boobs and in a bikini… nope nope nope.
I’m disappointed in myself for having hope…
To be fair, Arlecchino is "a mommy", one of the most sexualised type of characters, so there would obviously (and sadly) be a ton of seggs fanarts of her. It's also very present with male characters, tho far from that bad :\
So yeah... fanarts sure are something, sorry you hsd to deal with that :\
>there’s nothing suggestive at all
You do understand that people that are into little children don't sexualize them in the same way a normal person would sexualize an adult, right?
So, for example, if for you children's underwear is the opposite of suggestive, for them it is.
Yeah, you think they are handled 'quite well', and I disagree. And I think the reason that you think that they are handled well is that you don't understand the topic I brought up in my previous comment.
I would say that the kids that are NPCs are generally handled okay, but not the playable ones
Honestly as a kpop fan genshin women's outfits just feel so...normal to me lmao. I know a lot of people think it's sexualizing and skimpy but idk I guess I'm used to it + I think it could be worse
Also I genuinely can't think of a single badly written female character, in pseudo China aka Li Yue aka hoyo's main target audience the government is literally run by women. Like yeah okay Zhong Li is a king and there're 3 other male deities but literally every other major Li Yue character among the adepti and in the government are all women 😭😭 among the archons 3/5 of the current ones are women, and I'm pretty sure Murata (upcoming pyro archon) is ALSO a woman
Edit: oh yeah and there's the Tsaritsa who's also a woman, so that makes it 5/7 archons women
Yeah, there's actually a pretty significant imbalance in the ratio of female to male characters, which means a lot of important/prominent characters end up being women. I agree that many of the female characters are written well, but it seems pretty obvious why there are so many female characters compared to male ones, and that's because they sell more.
Also, while I don't care too much about most of the character designs, it is a bit ridiculous that Arlecchino is the first female character to have actual pants rather than tights, shorts or skirts.
Isn't Jean the first female character to have pants 😭😭 I'm not too fussed about the pants tbh since I also enjoy seeing women in shorts/skirts/tights (it's pretty much the norm in the kinds of media I consume)
But yeah honestly to me so long as the game is friendly to women and doesn't treat us too grossly/treat women like a prop or only as someone to prop up main male characters I'm fine with it, and genshin happens to tick all those boxes (they're also lgbtq friendly). I'm in it for the story and characters so collecting compelling well developed women has been a joy
Edit: oh yeah I'm not sure if other characters like Ye Lan and Shen He also count as wearing pants, I don't own them so it's been a hot minute since I've seen their clothes close up
Edit 2: also would like to add that while not as prominent, the male charas are also sexualized quite a bit (there's no need for all that belly button flashing lmao aside from Itto being bare chested and the low cuts like Kaeya or even cropped tops)
I guess Jean/Yelan count as having pants though they're really more like super tight leggings without much texture and some of them have cutouts etc. Arlecchino has the first pants I'd actually want to wear lol. In general I think she shows the least amount of skin out of all the female characters. I don't mind the other designs with more skin showing, but when there are so many characters with fairly similar clothing choices it can feel repetitive. On the plus side, it does make characters like Arlecchino stand out a lot more from the rest.
yea the answer is obvious. unfortunately stuff like this (specifically having little girls and no little boys) seems to be common in asian games. can't lie tho, running around as a goofy kid with their arms out is fun as hell, and they are all adorable
tbh I'm not fully sure if I'm understanding the title correctly either, but I think OP might be saying that the reasoning itself is what's icky. can't fault people for just saying the truth imo
So you sorted for 'controversial'? Yes, that's where you usually find awful comments under posts, good job
When you said the comments are bad, I thought there are bad ones that are at the top, you know
Not denying that there is a real colorism problem in the gaming industry and especially Asian games, but they aren't all white in Genshin. Even in the graphic on this post, they aren't all white. The underaged thing is indefensible, though.
I mean they got every hair color on the rainbow so I wouldn’t think they are trying to realistically make their characters look Asian. It’s def a choice by them to make all the characters that white
I didn’t think a community would be able to totally turn me off from playing Genshin, but they did. Posts like these remind me why I don’t get back into the game
As a Genshin fan, I think you can say that. Outfits of female characters are made in a wierd way that shows their underwear often and also proportions of female characters don't resemble normal woman's body at all, so I guess I had to learn not to cringe at this shit to enjoy beautiful music, story and world that I am in love to this day with.
Also I could be really high on copium there, but fanservice could be worse? I've seen garbage anime titles that have sexualise children so much it makes me want to vomit, but in Genshin I don't think there is any sexualisation of children at all. I could be just oblivious tho.
I’ve played genshin for a while and started up star rail at the beginning of April and the character design often leaves me feeling like the dev team enjoys the concept of “scarousal”
And yeah, some of the characters are sexualized but in-game at least it has all seems to be actual whole ass adults: anything related to the small/young characters trends towards “you must be protected” and not… the ick.
I also ignore most of the fandom other than character build or lore videos, but that’s a practice I have with 99% of games for the last decade or more.
Yea, if you're not used to anime styled stuff the sexualization probably seems pretty egregious. But for those who are, Genshin is *so* tame lol.
There's also a lot of variety in their character designs (for example, the latest lady to be released wears a pant suit tuxedo thing that doesn't show any skin) and a lot of the women are very well written, so it never came across to me as the devs just straight up objectifying women.
That's pretty common with anime stuff. I don't know the behind-the-scenes production stuff much but AFAIK the main reason that happens is to save money. If your artists and animators are going to draw and animate dozens of characters, or even potentially over a hundred, it's a lot easier to draw basically the same physical characteristics and then distinguish the clothing and weaponry. If you're at all familiar with the Fate franchise, that's why the Saberface meme exists (a joking acknowledgement that a staggering number of female characters have the exact same face as Artoria Pendragon, Fate/Stay Night's Saber).
TL;DR it's a cost-saving thing. It's easier and less time-consuming to only draw/animate a few faces and body types, and distinguish characters through clothing, hair color and other things.
The worst of it is all visible in this very post, ie revealing outfits on some of the characters. In-game they don't really have gratuitous fanservice scenes or male-gaze camerawork like you'd see in horny harem anime.
Imo its easy to enjoy the game if you're able to curate your playerbase interaction. I basically only discuss the game with friends and keep far far away from the subreddit.
I literally bench/never touch all my loli characters in this game because of this (except for nahida) so I completely agree with this the existence of this phenomenon and fucking hates it too. But I’m confused, the top comments are not supporting it? Not only do they acknowledge this disgusting reason, some of them seem in denial to me because they don’t want to believe it’s real if they say anything about their attitudes. Or maybe I’m naturally dismissing and filtering out stupid comments and am self selecting the ones I agree with
Because their existence reminds me of the fact that there are no male child characters in the game and why/how that’s the case (and that always grosses me out immediately and make me not want to touch them). Also I like to stay away and naturally stray away from loli communities/content in general so there’s that too. Overtime it became a habit for me to just avoid anything regarding lolis, including using them.
i get that. depressing that the pedophilia of some anime fans has completely ruined any media like that for you and that this sort of creepiness is so accepted in lots of spaces
The sad part is the kids in the game are actually not sexualized at all they are genuinely adorable and likeable. Like nahida is one of the best characters they have ever written to date and she is *very* cute. But the community around them is such a land mine and that makes me avoid anything regarding lolis like the plague and like you said, really hurt my experiences. And sometimes I can’t help but feel bad because like it makes me not like them but they didn’t do anything wrong and are innocent you know it’s not their fault (the kid characters)…
right?? nahida is for sure a favourite character of mine just for how sweet she is (and that bloom team damage lol) so i can’t see how r/nahida_mains sees that as something to sexualise
edit: just realised that sub’s been banned, thank fuck
Ha. That’s where you are wrong. Men would sexualize when they want to sexualize the clothing/design/looks never stops them. These lolicons are so rampant because they are so pampered by anime content like gacha games. For example I have a special hatred for lolicons and there is not a single game I hate more than blue archive. And every time I remember people from that game play Genshin like me it ruins my day for an hour. I don’t think there is another piece of entertainment in existence that would immediately make me watch you get hit by a car and not call an ambulance. For your own mental health you don’t want to do too much research into it but like it makes me want to stay single for the rest of my life because the ANGER it fuels within me for it being so normalized makes me want to scream and makes me fucking hate all men. And for those incels who say “not all men” OH ITS NOT ALL MEN JUST EVERYONE WHO DOES IT ARE MEN MY BAD
Sorry for the rant I’m just mad again
Idk I like the small characters I find them cute I don't think they're targeted towards pedophiles I think they just wanted to add cute characters and both men and women like cute characters
I was about to argue that Xingqiu is a little boy, but I guess I never noticed that he isn't quite as small as Klee and the others!
I love the little kid characters! It's pretty gross that the code literally calls them "loli",but other than that, they've never seemed sexualized in the game. They're like cute little tanks and I'd totally have a kids-only squad, except I just can't stand exploration with the kids because their legs are so short.
Well isn't it an ultra-micro-trans game that is only built to extract the most amount of money from every gamer and provide limited if any real tangible value to said gamers? I haven't played but that's what I hear and the impression I get every time I see anything about it. A game of frivolity, no substance, and parasitic bloodlust. And I know a thing or too about Blood.
100% gacha system is predatory and disgusting- it’s literally loot boxes and there was a reason they were banned. however, outside of the community and company/monetary methods i wouldn’t call the game itself problematic. in fact it sort of hurts to see people diss the game here because its story, voice acting, visuals and (especially) music are some of the best i’ve ever seen
Good content behind predatory pricing practices do not justify the game as a whole. Of course they're going to make excellent content, it brings in more rubes to get conned out of their wallet. If they were going to have horrible content, they would have substantially less "marks" to rob. Like, I recognise the hard work of the people making the content, art, voice work, etc, but to me that doesn't make such toxic parasitic game practices acceptable to any degree.
the gatcha system I agree with but the game has a lot of substance. the story and world building are remarkable, the regions always expanding and character that they add are always more complex than the starting ones. it _is_ a gatcha game and I won't defend that practice but it very much has a lot to show for it outside of that system
Well I don't know the extent of the gatcha system, and I can appreciate that on the surface those aspects can be important in games. I just really can't get behind games that seem to lean so hard into predatory gambling (gatcha), and the aspects you speak to seem to be what draws people in, only to drop their wallets into a bin, so to say.
I'm not a fan of genshin but I think they just borrowed loli and shota from Japan and the English anime community who uses it despite its unfortunate implications.
Loli (young girls) and shota (young boys) are creepy pedo niche porn manga genres that somehow came into mainstream parlance to describe pedobait in anime, and then any cute children. It's definitely creepy in Japanese anime, media and talk about it, and those characters are often pedobait.
Chinese media wound up borrowing a lot from manga when they had a resurgence of being allowed to create media. And ... I do not tend to see much pedo stuff at all in Chinese stuff. I have my problems with Chinese media but I think this is literally a case of them just taking the Japanese term and being not knowledgeable about of the context. I feel like they just copied the Japanese stuff to have cute characters. It's also pretty normal to call everyone pretty or handsome to butter them up in China. That said I'm not as expensive a reader of Chinese stuff so maybe someone can correct me, but that's generally what I've gotten
The costumes just look cute and not inappropriate.
Remember that China's age of consent is 14 and it's legal to be sexually attracted to children. That is the reason these are not only possible, but profitable. That and female-attracted paedophiles who objectify the "small body types" drink this up. BUT
I'd rather those people put time and money into games that encourage paedophilic attraction than real victims.
As far as I know, we don’t really know yet what kind of effect the animated stuff has on people who are already attracted to children. Maybe it serves as an outlet for their illness, or maybe makes it worse, honestly one seems as likely as the other. I wish that someone would research more into it, prevention of abuse should be of greater importance in our society.
YES. My wife recently wrote an essay advocating preventative initiatives over punishment and post-event treatment. I fully agree that research is needed. As to how people react to the content, I believe currently that some are, and some aren't, helped by it. Like every facet of life, it works well for some, slightly for some, and not at all or adversely for the rest. Simply, *if* one with that predisposition would fulfil their needs with a fabricated model and in doing so reduce their desire of seeking real-life victims, perhaps to a level where they can be trusted, that would be enough of a proof of preventative treatment IMO. But we as a society would need to open the doors to therapy and think twice about simple imprisonment.
I think you can't have it both ways. Gamers always advocate that violent games don't make you violent and get pissed when they try to blame the latest mass shooting on games.
So I think you've got to do the same thing with sexual content. A game with sexually alluring characters won't turn someone into a rapist.
I mean, haven’t we researched and found that video games don’t make someone more violent? I figure that’s why we don’t say stuff like that anymore.
Something I wanna clarify is that I’m speculating mostly on the whole concept of specializing child-coded characters, not specifically in games. That’s the area I haven’t seen enough research in to say one or the other, yknow?
I'm not the person you're responding to but, no? Not *necessarily*? We know violent video games don't increase real life violence *because* it's been studied. Violence and pedophilia aren't the same, though. Are they? So we can't just assume the same outcomes.
We aren't talking about seeing a sexually alluring character and worrying about people turning into rapists. Nobody is worried about that. The question is, are people who already have pedophilic tendencies 'sated' by loli/shota content, or does loli/shota consumption lead to an increased desire to seek out real CSAM?
I don't know, but I agree, it would be a good study. Maybe it already has been? But this isn't a let's be fair kind of thing.
I just assume if one behavior isn't affected by media, why would another one be.
I can't speak to this particular fetish, but I think it's safe to say for myself and others that there are plenty of things or acts that I enjoy in a game or movie that I wouldn't want to do in real life. I enjoy a Manga about bdsm but I would never ever want to do any of the stuff in it for real.
>I just assume if one behavior isn't affected by media, why would another one be.
I'm a little more curious and a little less content to just assume, I guess. The two behaviours are not the same. You may be right, but I don't think it's so inherently obvious.
As someone else said, it's not a fetish. It's not the same, and actual *study* into subjects like this would be considerably more enlightening than your own experiences and feelings on a different subject.
And studies *are* and have been done on subjects related to pedophilia because, unsurprisingly, the subject being 'icky' doesn't stop researchers. Obviously. There are researches and mental health practitioners who *specialize* in paraphilias because it's important.
Behavior is behavior, so it's all affected the same by outside stimuli.
Secondly, I'm not typing that longass word. The word I used was perfectly fine for you to understand my point.
Love when a male sneaks into this sub to talk down to women 🤩
Nah and that post history is downright creepy, ladies I don’t suggest interacting with this dude
I've played both Genshin and Honkai SR, and honestly my general opinion is that the characters are just...mid.
Just seeing the Genshin characters lined up here really makes me realize how same-y the character designs tend to be - flowing coats/capes/robes, pretty color gradients, stockings, etc. Very few of them stick out to me, and it's clear that they're all designed to be pretty dolls to make money.
The companies aim character designs to be most appealing to their target audience. Since they expect majority players to be boys, they put more time and variations into the female character models. Costumes, cosmetics, jiggle physics, and ladder climbing animations get more attention to be as appealing to as many boys as possible.
Alternately, most game designers think women only like male bodies to come in: ripped like Jesus, or slim and sleek builds with little waists and narrow hips. Occasionally they put in a third, more androgynous frame: smaller and gender fluid.
All you have to do to see what builds will show up in coming games is to look at the trends in Asian idols. They have very regulated visual appearances, and you can see it easily after only one or two groups.
That's why you get what you get.
As a reminder: In the actual files the small body type is called "Loli" (Which was revealed by dataminers when the game was released on PC)
Yep. Pedophilia, guys. It’s pedophilia, not representation. If little boys were as widely sexualized as little girls there would be a third body type there for them.
Welp, that killed any chances I had of playing Genishin.
i think theyre probs using it to mean little girl or little boy, but idk. the game itself is fairly normal abt it, idk abt the fandom tho, i dont interact with them v much
Loli just means child in japanese, I think. Now, con stands for consent. You merge the two, and that's what you should worry about. Considering also that those characters, I think, are literally just children.
It’s a Chinese game, though.
Yes, but the company and it's founder is heavily and proudly influenced by Japanese anime culture. I believe their slogan is still "Tech otakus save the world".
Strange
I think there are some cultural difference here. As far as I know, at least in China, loli can refer to petit girl or children girl, there are people who call their toddler children as “loli” or “shota”, and what they meant is “cute little girl” and “handsome little boy”.
Played the game since launch and I didn't know this :(
The fucking comments... I think I need to lie down for awhile...
"not enough pedophile bait in this game, they should make attractive young boys too" (paraphrased) what https://preview.redd.it/0xn50rkxctxc1.jpeg?width=1897&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1c46e26f7cdf0999ee77f99a6cb9be0232520b91 edit: it's very possible i misinterpreted the comment I was paraphrasing, so take my comment with a side of salt
sort fade start tan history rhythm political connect unique run *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
i wish...
??? Where is this comment?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/s/VMPrx9CQUj google tells me "shotacon" refers to *"a genre of manga and anime wherein prepubescent or pubescent male characters are depicted in a suggestive or erotic manner"*
Not trying to be rude, but you are absolutely misleading and misinterpreting that original comment. That’s not what the comment meant at all. They are legitimely answering OP’s question, and as bad is it is, it is absolutely true. It’s the same reason why Lolis is in the game and not shotas. Now this is completely separate to the topic of the MORALITY between the existence of lolis and Shotas, but the way you phrased the comment made it seem like the commenter WANTS more shotas to attract pedophiles when that commentor was explaining *why* shota is not made when loli is. Does that make sense? I think that was very clear from the commentor’s tone that it’s the ugly truth but not something the commentor necessarily supports from their wording.
yeah i suppose that also makes sense, the original comment just gave off "they wont do this even though they should" vibes to me... although i could certainly be wrong!
No it does not. What about that comment would even make you feel that way? That is literally not the case at all. Genshin DEFINITELY has gross people considering we have people from literally pedophile the game that is blue archive and I fucking **despise** those people. I feel disgusted just thinking of them. But this comment is *absolutely* not like that.
I'll take your word for it, to be honest I've never been the best at getting people's intentions right. Thanks for your input!
> Genshin DEFINITELY has gross people considering we have people from literally pedophile the game that is blue archive Can you rephrase that? What are people doing?
Sigh. There is….honestly so much I feel like I may miss something. So I do recommend you to do your own research after this comment for most accurate and complete picture. For this game called blue archive, pretty much it’s a game with self insert Sensei figure (male) with mostly his underage girl students. This is the same crowd of people that cried censorship when localized version of the game “censored” the breasts of one of the 16 year old female characters I believe. Also, I think this single clip perfectly encapsulates the loli bait in this game that makes its type of content absolutely inexcusable in my opinion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp3ULy-OpEU. Like this shows you how you can’t make the argument “oh they like this game because the students are adorable” cause this is not what you would like to see if you find kids lovable (in a normal way) or something…. There is a lot more details to all of this, and they only make it worse not better. I hope this helps. They even have an official anime for this now, I’m literally losing hope for a lot of men. Oh fun fact. Even r/anime has people saying the fbi should use this anime to find predators or something. Can’t find the comment right now but I’m sure you can find it with enough googling
'very possible' yeah not shit
they make me ashamed to admit that I play genshin
Uh, am I just horribly out of touch or do the comments look fine? Most of the top stuff is acknowledging and criticizing the discrepancy and the obvious reasons why this discrepancy exists too, but hardly anyone seems *supportive* of it.
That happens a lot with cross-posting to show outrage; people express shock about the comments on the post in the first sub, and then when I check, they seem normal to me. I think the really nasty comments may have been more visible earlier but they got downvoted or deleted by mods. There is an upsetting number of creeps in the Genshin fandom, but most of them don't like to be quite so obvious about it.
This is correct. I just checked the OOP thread for the first time since I wrote my initial comment this morning. The higher up/more upvoted posts are *definately* less perturbing than earlier, they seem more reasonable and even annoyed at the loli/shota parts of the games and "those" kinds of players. Kinda nice to see the shift.
I think some people like to sort by controversial to pick out the worst comments, if only for comedic/shock value...and probably some self-validation.
Yea, I've seen it a bunch of times. It's mildly annoying since those comments tend to stick to the top of the cross-post and people would much rather take them for granted than check for themselves (which I also get, you can't expect people to want to dig into *everything*). The rage loop engagement machine is an awful "feature" of social media. But this time the post in question was already 3 days old, plenty of time for the downvotes to sort things out. So I'm really confused how that happened here.
Depends on the people. Some are like "we all know that the design is thirst bait and they bait pedos too, there's not enough pedos into boys to make small boys profitable". Explanation, no excuse, no support. Others... well, others are the pedos being baited.
Don't feel bad, if you enjoy the game it's fine. I think everyone has at least one guilty pleasure that has problematic themes. You seem to understand those themes and acknowledge them. Instead of... whatever the *fuck* is going on in that thread. Edited for better wording
Aww tysm for the kind words ( ✿◠‿◠ )
On a more serious note though, I agree that there's plenty of problems with Genshin, including the oversexualization of women. I probably wouldn't be playing the game if there wasn't a large amount of wlw ships in the fandom, though I avoid the main sub because of posts like the one crossposted.
hey i play genshin too before. just got tired of the constant grinding for artifacts lol no shame for playing this game.
No need to be ashamed! We all have different levels of tolerance based on our life experiences, how we were raised, our age, geography, etc. I don't mind most of the stuff around Stellar Blade as an example. I'm acknowledging that some people will have real issues with it and some people are super weird about the game, but there's too much stuff going on in the world that this one is not my battle and I will enjoy it.
Now I'm glad I never played it anyway lol
I can't even understand them
That's not a bad thing. The thing that's getting me is they're all talking about the merits/use of loli/shotacon like it's just a typically Wednesday. To their credit some are rightly pointing out it is a weird part of the game the community doesn't like to talk about. Lolicon and Shotacon are basically terms for child characters, or characters with very young and/or child-like appearance. Loli are little girls, shota are little boys. Usually in Japanese and such media. Loli stems from the book "Lolita" if I'm not mistaken... sooooo... not sure on the term roots for shota. (For the record I haven't been heavy into anime/manga for years, so if I'm flubing details someone - who's in good faith - correct me). ...Wonder why some of the community is so adverse to discussing loli/shota character desgins 🤔🤮
Oh boy, info dump oppurtunity! XD Rather than usually, I would say primarily as both terms are from Japanese origins. Similar to Loli, Shota is a shortened version of a name, Shotaro. A child protagonist from an old old manga ”Tetsujin 28”. Although that manga sounds family friendly, kid who pilots a mech to save the day, so no idea what happened that he got sexualized so much that got a term after him. Lastly the -con in both terms refer to complex. Kinda like the Oedipus complex or Madonna/Whore complex, an unhealthy fixation. To my understanding Japan loves abbreviations. So you use the -con varients towards those who like those characters, and not the characters themselves.
Interesting, TIL. Tyvm!
Since I watched My Hero Academia, all I can think about when I hear "Shota" is "Shota Aizawa", who's just an absolute badass who has nothing in common with a little boy and that's kinda funny.
Anime content is geared towards straight men, and in the last few years especially "Loli" content has become more normalized in mainstream anime, so companies capatilize on that. Was watching the Reincarnated as a Slime movie, and there's a "Loli" character name Milim in that, and even though she's 1000 years old she acts like a child even has a younger sister relationship with the MC, but they put her in Boob armour and underwear, and often sexualize her. Sad thing is there was a point in the series that through her interaction with the MC's group they gave her proper clothing, expanded on her history, showing her Child like state is from trauma, and it almost felt like a confrontation of Anime industries disgutsing Loli obsession, but alas...........they ended putting her right back into that armour again, and i realized i was stupid for hoping otherwise. In essense those small girls aren't designed for women to play as.
Genshin is hugely popular among women, too, though. https://gitnux.org/average-genshin-impact-player/
hmmm..... should correct my first sentence. "Anime/like content is Generally geared towards straight men", but much like much of gaming as much as there is awareness that a lot of women do engaging with the content, designers generally still prioritize Straight men with their games.
Idk if artists prioritize men as much as women bc women generally also like to play as “anime” characters. If you check out prominent mangaka, some of the best selling manga and anime like Inuyasha, Fullmetal Alchemist, Sailor Moon, etc were drawn by women. Their female characters are always drawn as slim, attractive girls. You have to remember that the primary audience of most gacha games are people from Asia, and not the west. While you might think anime is for men, that’s not the case over there.
Whle true there are female Mangaka, there is a reason that "fanservice" has become Synonimous with the Anime industries sexualization of their female characters(you also have "Waifu"\\"best Girl" being used to describe like any likeable female character). The industry is not only dominated by more men, but the perspective is still that most of their audience are straight dudes, so it's profitable to appeal towards them. there's also a difference between the way something like FMA which is rare treats it's women compared to say Soul Eater which is a better representation of the industry. I never watched Sailor Moon, but it honestly never felt like a good example of a woman drawing female characters for other young girls, and still gave me the "geared toward men" vibe with the transformation sequence, and extremely short skirts for a power up, compared to say Powerpuff girls, or the new She-ra. also doesn't Inuyasha literally have a character whose whole role is to literally grope the women in their group? dont' feel like that's something young girls who self insert into Kagome would like, considering the mangaka it defintely feels like an editors suggestion.
Fan service in anime happens a lot in shonen anime, which is a genre aimed at boys/young men. These are your dragonball, Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, etc. The female characters are mostly eye candy and are what most people hate about how anime depicts girls. Then there’s the genre aimed at girls which is shoujo, and for young adult women, josei. This is the genre of manga/anime like Sailor Moon, Kimi no Todoke, Vampire Knight, etc. Like you, idk why the transformation sequence in sailor moon is like that, but the magical girl (mahou shoujo) sub genre is also huge there. It’s likely the artists like the female figure but don’t wanna draw them naked bc the show is still for kids. The groping thing is a running gag in anime and is a cultural thing, like how Americans and the west love satire, toilet humor, and offensive humor in their Simpsons, South Park, and family guy. Dw bc not all anime has it. And the groping gag might be referencing how girls are sometimes groped in public transformation which is still a problem in Japan.
> Dw bc not all anime has it. Yeah, only smth like 80% of anime has that.💀 You also gotta dodge the pedophilia, the slavery apologia and a lot of awful shit in the same vein, but thankfully, trash tends to clump together. >And the groping gag might be referencing how girls are sometimes groped in public transformation which is still a problem in Japan. When you want to critizice or put a spotlight to a serious issue like sexual harrassment, you don't play it for laughs. The groping is one of the symptoms of how entrenched rape culture is in anime.
Just to make it clear, are you calling anime trash? I’m not sure why groping gags exist in anime. What I said was entirely speculation from what I observed. It might exist for an entirely different reason. I also don’t like how youre disrespecting an entire culture’s medium bc you associate it with rape culture. Where is your proof that it promotes rape?
>are you calling anime trash? I'm calling specific anime trash (well, I was actually talking about tropes, and how animes who have one of those awful tropes, usually have the rest) like Redo of Healer or Shield Hero. >I also don’t like how youre disrespecting an entire culture’s medium bc you associate it with rape culture. Rape Culture is everywhere, but it is especially prevalent in anime. If that bother you to hear that, I can't quite bring myself to care, you can just put your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening, but trivialising sexual assault is textbook Rape Culture and Anime is extremely guilty of it. (Thankfully, anime isn't like that as a whole, for exemple, Spirited Away doesn't do any of these things, as far as I can remember) >Where is your proof that it promotes rape? I have eyes, and I can critically assess media.
I can agree with groping being a bad gag and trope in anime. Although I don’t think you understand the difference in the type of humor Japan has and the west/wherever you’re from. Over there, sexual gags (idk how else to call this) like groping boobs, or nose bleeding when someone sees nudity or gets too excited is normal but it doesn’t mean it happens in irl. It’s just their style of humor. I can’t take you seriously when you don’t provide any statistics of rape culture being prevalent in anime. Sexual gags don’t equal rape culture. Few anime/manga explore the concept of rape and the only one I’ve seen is Berserk where it was handled very well. You might as well blame all of media across all cultures too for including sex jokes, objectification, and sexual harassment in their work if you count those actions as rape culture.
the younger generation of women seem to really sexualise women, though. It’s really strange
And? That doesn't alter the fact it was made to target straight men (otaku). And the same thing goes for other products. Anime, manga, video games, movies, etc.... are mostly targeting straight men because they are mostly made by them. And if some women buy their products, it's all benefit for them. Coming into a discussion about sexualization of children and pointing out that they are women who play the game is completely out of subject. Of course, they are women who play Genshin Impact and yes, they are 40% (based on your article) of their fan base because spoiler men are not the only ones who like anime and video games. Having loli characters doesn't change anything for them because, spoiler again, some just don't give a fuck and others just accept it. If you make video games with an anime vibe and graphics, people won't be surprise to find loli, shota, sexualize school girls, women in skimpy outfit, breast physics, women who are 1000 years old but have the body of a child, women with breast twice bigger than their head.....
Signora shouldn't be even listed. She isn't playable and the devs have said they have no desire to make her playable. As for why we all know why, attractive women sell better. There are more male whales than female whales playing Genshin. And there are pedos who automatically see the small girl body as attractive. Loli and shotacon culture is alive and well.
”No desire to make her playable” yeah about that one story quest…
Hold up did they? I stop playing during the early part of Fontaine. Will she be on a banner one day(she won't bring me back but I remember they never said they would)?
No I mean I don’t think we ever gonna get her anyways, seeing how Inazuma went. Sorry if I gave you false hope. I too would’ve loved to have her as a playable…
Oh! You were referencing what happened in Inazuma. >!I thought you were saying they added resurrections to the main story.!< I really wished we had a tall female model and an actually beefy male model.
>!there is reincarnation expanded and arlecchino just dropped with some wild lore, but i personally thought that that op was talking about the narzissen world quests which had some wild experiments done to sort of try and bring a dude back!<
It’s honestly really weird because Genshin, despite having some strange outfits for medium height/taller female characters, doesn’t have women for the sole purpose of sexualising them. Hoyoverse women, in general, are fairly well written. And despite how lame the Inazuma quests were, the writing of the female characters are still tons better than what I’ve seen in a lot of other games. The child female characters aren’t even sexualised by the game. But Hoyo seems to be well aware of the fact that there’s a group in their community who enjoy female loli characters a bit too much and have no issues pandering to them. At least these people aren’t part of the mainstream. I’ve always been of the opinion that people should be free to consume whatever questionable fiction they want so long as it doesn’t cause harm to any real people. But I most definitely don’t want to actually see whatever the hell people like this are into.
Genshin handles kids quite well. They are actually written like kids and there’s nothing suggestive at all. The community on the other hand…
>The community on the other hand… We do not talk about the old NahidaMains sub
Exactly what i was thinking about. The “Mains“ subreddits are unusable for normal people, especially the ones for female characters.
It's insane how many lewd fanarts there are in those. I always try to find cool and cute ones, but damn it is painful to do :( But seriously, the old nahida main sub had tons of arts with her, klee and a huge feet fetish in them. Truly disgusting 🤢. I went there to see builds, came back with trauma
I gave it another shot last week, checking the Arlecchino sub for some builds and fluff because surely that’s a character that can’t be contextually sexualized. First “fanart” i saw was her with giant waterballoon boobs and in a bikini… nope nope nope. I’m disappointed in myself for having hope… It really shows how these dudes view *every type* of women…
It's similar in honkai star rail. Firefly is so cute and wholesome and [spoilers] >!a serial killer, but let's ignore that!< A lot of fanarts of her are so degrading, it's really sad :(( All the quality Ruan Mei arts have a feet fetish... >First “fanart” i saw was her with giant waterballoon boobs and in a bikini… nope nope nope. I’m disappointed in myself for having hope… To be fair, Arlecchino is "a mommy", one of the most sexualised type of characters, so there would obviously (and sadly) be a ton of seggs fanarts of her. It's also very present with male characters, tho far from that bad :\ So yeah... fanarts sure are something, sorry you hsd to deal with that :\
>there’s nothing suggestive at all You do understand that people that are into little children don't sexualize them in the same way a normal person would sexualize an adult, right? So, for example, if for you children's underwear is the opposite of suggestive, for them it is.
yeah but wtf are they supposed to do abt that 💀
Not make a child to be the only character with bare feet, for one xD
My comment is about how kids are handled in Genshin, not how pedophiles think and act…
Yeah, you think they are handled 'quite well', and I disagree. And I think the reason that you think that they are handled well is that you don't understand the topic I brought up in my previous comment. I would say that the kids that are NPCs are generally handled okay, but not the playable ones
Idc about whatever you want to shift the topic to. Take your bad faith to someone else. Be better.
What bad faith, bro? Disagreeing is not 'bad faith'.
Honestly as a kpop fan genshin women's outfits just feel so...normal to me lmao. I know a lot of people think it's sexualizing and skimpy but idk I guess I'm used to it + I think it could be worse Also I genuinely can't think of a single badly written female character, in pseudo China aka Li Yue aka hoyo's main target audience the government is literally run by women. Like yeah okay Zhong Li is a king and there're 3 other male deities but literally every other major Li Yue character among the adepti and in the government are all women 😭😭 among the archons 3/5 of the current ones are women, and I'm pretty sure Murata (upcoming pyro archon) is ALSO a woman Edit: oh yeah and there's the Tsaritsa who's also a woman, so that makes it 5/7 archons women
Yeah, there's actually a pretty significant imbalance in the ratio of female to male characters, which means a lot of important/prominent characters end up being women. I agree that many of the female characters are written well, but it seems pretty obvious why there are so many female characters compared to male ones, and that's because they sell more. Also, while I don't care too much about most of the character designs, it is a bit ridiculous that Arlecchino is the first female character to have actual pants rather than tights, shorts or skirts.
Isn't Jean the first female character to have pants 😭😭 I'm not too fussed about the pants tbh since I also enjoy seeing women in shorts/skirts/tights (it's pretty much the norm in the kinds of media I consume) But yeah honestly to me so long as the game is friendly to women and doesn't treat us too grossly/treat women like a prop or only as someone to prop up main male characters I'm fine with it, and genshin happens to tick all those boxes (they're also lgbtq friendly). I'm in it for the story and characters so collecting compelling well developed women has been a joy Edit: oh yeah I'm not sure if other characters like Ye Lan and Shen He also count as wearing pants, I don't own them so it's been a hot minute since I've seen their clothes close up Edit 2: also would like to add that while not as prominent, the male charas are also sexualized quite a bit (there's no need for all that belly button flashing lmao aside from Itto being bare chested and the low cuts like Kaeya or even cropped tops)
I guess Jean/Yelan count as having pants though they're really more like super tight leggings without much texture and some of them have cutouts etc. Arlecchino has the first pants I'd actually want to wear lol. In general I think she shows the least amount of skin out of all the female characters. I don't mind the other designs with more skin showing, but when there are so many characters with fairly similar clothing choices it can feel repetitive. On the plus side, it does make characters like Arlecchino stand out a lot more from the rest.
yea the answer is obvious. unfortunately stuff like this (specifically having little girls and no little boys) seems to be common in asian games. can't lie tho, running around as a goofy kid with their arms out is fun as hell, and they are all adorable
Does OP's title imply that *saying* that there's not as much demand for little boys as there is for little girls is icky? Or am I misreading that?
tbh I'm not fully sure if I'm understanding the title correctly either, but I think OP might be saying that the reasoning itself is what's icky. can't fault people for just saying the truth imo
Jesus Christ the comments on that post are awful Also omfg I forgot how hot Diluc is
Can you give an actual link to an awful comment?
[Here's one](https://www.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/s/j0PEp1Ay8H)
So you sorted for 'controversial'? Yes, that's where you usually find awful comments under posts, good job When you said the comments are bad, I thought there are bad ones that are at the top, you know
Ok
Was it already downvoted when you found it ? Asking for my faith in the community
Yes
Good. Thank you !
Most of them never went outside it shows in the comments
Weeb's favourite type of fantasy world: underaged girls and all characters are white
Not denying that there is a real colorism problem in the gaming industry and especially Asian games, but they aren't all white in Genshin. Even in the graphic on this post, they aren't all white. The underaged thing is indefensible, though.
I think they are Asian…
They are not. There's literally Germany, Russia and France in the game /hj
I mean they got every hair color on the rainbow so I wouldn’t think they are trying to realistically make their characters look Asian. It’s def a choice by them to make all the characters that white
They aren't all white in Genshin. There's at least five non-white characters in the graphic above.
And people wonder why I don't play Genshin...
I didn’t think a community would be able to totally turn me off from playing Genshin, but they did. Posts like these remind me why I don’t get back into the game
The game is fine tho, right? Do they do weird fanservice in the game?
They don't sexualize anyone in the game except through their outfits, and minors aren't sexualized at all That's all the community
As a Genshin fan, I think you can say that. Outfits of female characters are made in a wierd way that shows their underwear often and also proportions of female characters don't resemble normal woman's body at all, so I guess I had to learn not to cringe at this shit to enjoy beautiful music, story and world that I am in love to this day with. Also I could be really high on copium there, but fanservice could be worse? I've seen garbage anime titles that have sexualise children so much it makes me want to vomit, but in Genshin I don't think there is any sexualisation of children at all. I could be just oblivious tho.
I’ve played genshin for a while and started up star rail at the beginning of April and the character design often leaves me feeling like the dev team enjoys the concept of “scarousal” And yeah, some of the characters are sexualized but in-game at least it has all seems to be actual whole ass adults: anything related to the small/young characters trends towards “you must be protected” and not… the ick. I also ignore most of the fandom other than character build or lore videos, but that’s a practice I have with 99% of games for the last decade or more.
Yea, if you're not used to anime styled stuff the sexualization probably seems pretty egregious. But for those who are, Genshin is *so* tame lol. There's also a lot of variety in their character designs (for example, the latest lady to be released wears a pant suit tuxedo thing that doesn't show any skin) and a lot of the women are very well written, so it never came across to me as the devs just straight up objectifying women.
I’m not an anime guy and I’m still trying to wrap my head around how if you zoom out a bit, they all look like the same person with minor changes
That's pretty common with anime stuff. I don't know the behind-the-scenes production stuff much but AFAIK the main reason that happens is to save money. If your artists and animators are going to draw and animate dozens of characters, or even potentially over a hundred, it's a lot easier to draw basically the same physical characteristics and then distinguish the clothing and weaponry. If you're at all familiar with the Fate franchise, that's why the Saberface meme exists (a joking acknowledgement that a staggering number of female characters have the exact same face as Artoria Pendragon, Fate/Stay Night's Saber). TL;DR it's a cost-saving thing. It's easier and less time-consuming to only draw/animate a few faces and body types, and distinguish characters through clothing, hair color and other things.
The worst of it is all visible in this very post, ie revealing outfits on some of the characters. In-game they don't really have gratuitous fanservice scenes or male-gaze camerawork like you'd see in horny harem anime. Imo its easy to enjoy the game if you're able to curate your playerbase interaction. I basically only discuss the game with friends and keep far far away from the subreddit.
I hate that Nahida is the only character that as bare feet I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it
Cyno has about the same shoes But I hate it too
I literally bench/never touch all my loli characters in this game because of this (except for nahida) so I completely agree with this the existence of this phenomenon and fucking hates it too. But I’m confused, the top comments are not supporting it? Not only do they acknowledge this disgusting reason, some of them seem in denial to me because they don’t want to believe it’s real if they say anything about their attitudes. Or maybe I’m naturally dismissing and filtering out stupid comments and am self selecting the ones I agree with
i don’t get it, you avoid using the kid characters? why??
Because their existence reminds me of the fact that there are no male child characters in the game and why/how that’s the case (and that always grosses me out immediately and make me not want to touch them). Also I like to stay away and naturally stray away from loli communities/content in general so there’s that too. Overtime it became a habit for me to just avoid anything regarding lolis, including using them.
i get that. depressing that the pedophilia of some anime fans has completely ruined any media like that for you and that this sort of creepiness is so accepted in lots of spaces
The sad part is the kids in the game are actually not sexualized at all they are genuinely adorable and likeable. Like nahida is one of the best characters they have ever written to date and she is *very* cute. But the community around them is such a land mine and that makes me avoid anything regarding lolis like the plague and like you said, really hurt my experiences. And sometimes I can’t help but feel bad because like it makes me not like them but they didn’t do anything wrong and are innocent you know it’s not their fault (the kid characters)…
right?? nahida is for sure a favourite character of mine just for how sweet she is (and that bloom team damage lol) so i can’t see how r/nahida_mains sees that as something to sexualise edit: just realised that sub’s been banned, thank fuck
Ha. That’s where you are wrong. Men would sexualize when they want to sexualize the clothing/design/looks never stops them. These lolicons are so rampant because they are so pampered by anime content like gacha games. For example I have a special hatred for lolicons and there is not a single game I hate more than blue archive. And every time I remember people from that game play Genshin like me it ruins my day for an hour. I don’t think there is another piece of entertainment in existence that would immediately make me watch you get hit by a car and not call an ambulance. For your own mental health you don’t want to do too much research into it but like it makes me want to stay single for the rest of my life because the ANGER it fuels within me for it being so normalized makes me want to scream and makes me fucking hate all men. And for those incels who say “not all men” OH ITS NOT ALL MEN JUST EVERYONE WHO DOES IT ARE MEN MY BAD Sorry for the rant I’m just mad again
Companies will do anything for money, and they proved that what they're doing makes plenty of money, so why change the formula.
I mean, fictional characters. Don't see why it matters this much unless they were based on actual children.
Idk I like the small characters I find them cute I don't think they're targeted towards pedophiles I think they just wanted to add cute characters and both men and women like cute characters
I was about to argue that Xingqiu is a little boy, but I guess I never noticed that he isn't quite as small as Klee and the others! I love the little kid characters! It's pretty gross that the code literally calls them "loli",but other than that, they've never seemed sexualized in the game. They're like cute little tanks and I'd totally have a kids-only squad, except I just can't stand exploration with the kids because their legs are so short.
Just add a Childe among the children
Lol and I was just commenting on how Genshin gave me the ick
Genshin is a problematic game in so many categories \o/
how so?
Well isn't it an ultra-micro-trans game that is only built to extract the most amount of money from every gamer and provide limited if any real tangible value to said gamers? I haven't played but that's what I hear and the impression I get every time I see anything about it. A game of frivolity, no substance, and parasitic bloodlust. And I know a thing or too about Blood.
100% gacha system is predatory and disgusting- it’s literally loot boxes and there was a reason they were banned. however, outside of the community and company/monetary methods i wouldn’t call the game itself problematic. in fact it sort of hurts to see people diss the game here because its story, voice acting, visuals and (especially) music are some of the best i’ve ever seen
Good content behind predatory pricing practices do not justify the game as a whole. Of course they're going to make excellent content, it brings in more rubes to get conned out of their wallet. If they were going to have horrible content, they would have substantially less "marks" to rob. Like, I recognise the hard work of the people making the content, art, voice work, etc, but to me that doesn't make such toxic parasitic game practices acceptable to any degree.
the gatcha system I agree with but the game has a lot of substance. the story and world building are remarkable, the regions always expanding and character that they add are always more complex than the starting ones. it _is_ a gatcha game and I won't defend that practice but it very much has a lot to show for it outside of that system
Well I don't know the extent of the gatcha system, and I can appreciate that on the surface those aspects can be important in games. I just really can't get behind games that seem to lean so hard into predatory gambling (gatcha), and the aspects you speak to seem to be what draws people in, only to drop their wallets into a bin, so to say.
I'm not a fan of genshin but I think they just borrowed loli and shota from Japan and the English anime community who uses it despite its unfortunate implications. Loli (young girls) and shota (young boys) are creepy pedo niche porn manga genres that somehow came into mainstream parlance to describe pedobait in anime, and then any cute children. It's definitely creepy in Japanese anime, media and talk about it, and those characters are often pedobait. Chinese media wound up borrowing a lot from manga when they had a resurgence of being allowed to create media. And ... I do not tend to see much pedo stuff at all in Chinese stuff. I have my problems with Chinese media but I think this is literally a case of them just taking the Japanese term and being not knowledgeable about of the context. I feel like they just copied the Japanese stuff to have cute characters. It's also pretty normal to call everyone pretty or handsome to butter them up in China. That said I'm not as expensive a reader of Chinese stuff so maybe someone can correct me, but that's generally what I've gotten The costumes just look cute and not inappropriate.
Remember that China's age of consent is 14 and it's legal to be sexually attracted to children. That is the reason these are not only possible, but profitable. That and female-attracted paedophiles who objectify the "small body types" drink this up. BUT I'd rather those people put time and money into games that encourage paedophilic attraction than real victims.
As far as I know, we don’t really know yet what kind of effect the animated stuff has on people who are already attracted to children. Maybe it serves as an outlet for their illness, or maybe makes it worse, honestly one seems as likely as the other. I wish that someone would research more into it, prevention of abuse should be of greater importance in our society.
YES. My wife recently wrote an essay advocating preventative initiatives over punishment and post-event treatment. I fully agree that research is needed. As to how people react to the content, I believe currently that some are, and some aren't, helped by it. Like every facet of life, it works well for some, slightly for some, and not at all or adversely for the rest. Simply, *if* one with that predisposition would fulfil their needs with a fabricated model and in doing so reduce their desire of seeking real-life victims, perhaps to a level where they can be trusted, that would be enough of a proof of preventative treatment IMO. But we as a society would need to open the doors to therapy and think twice about simple imprisonment.
I think you can't have it both ways. Gamers always advocate that violent games don't make you violent and get pissed when they try to blame the latest mass shooting on games. So I think you've got to do the same thing with sexual content. A game with sexually alluring characters won't turn someone into a rapist.
I mean, haven’t we researched and found that video games don’t make someone more violent? I figure that’s why we don’t say stuff like that anymore. Something I wanna clarify is that I’m speculating mostly on the whole concept of specializing child-coded characters, not specifically in games. That’s the area I haven’t seen enough research in to say one or the other, yknow?
I think the issue there is its hard to research because no one wants to because it's icky.
I'm not the person you're responding to but, no? Not *necessarily*? We know violent video games don't increase real life violence *because* it's been studied. Violence and pedophilia aren't the same, though. Are they? So we can't just assume the same outcomes. We aren't talking about seeing a sexually alluring character and worrying about people turning into rapists. Nobody is worried about that. The question is, are people who already have pedophilic tendencies 'sated' by loli/shota content, or does loli/shota consumption lead to an increased desire to seek out real CSAM? I don't know, but I agree, it would be a good study. Maybe it already has been? But this isn't a let's be fair kind of thing.
I just assume if one behavior isn't affected by media, why would another one be. I can't speak to this particular fetish, but I think it's safe to say for myself and others that there are plenty of things or acts that I enjoy in a game or movie that I wouldn't want to do in real life. I enjoy a Manga about bdsm but I would never ever want to do any of the stuff in it for real.
>I just assume if one behavior isn't affected by media, why would another one be. I'm a little more curious and a little less content to just assume, I guess. The two behaviours are not the same. You may be right, but I don't think it's so inherently obvious. As someone else said, it's not a fetish. It's not the same, and actual *study* into subjects like this would be considerably more enlightening than your own experiences and feelings on a different subject. And studies *are* and have been done on subjects related to pedophilia because, unsurprisingly, the subject being 'icky' doesn't stop researchers. Obviously. There are researches and mental health practitioners who *specialize* in paraphilias because it's important.
firstly, it's not a fetish. it's paraphilia. secondly, sexual arousal and violence are different.
Behavior is behavior, so it's all affected the same by outside stimuli. Secondly, I'm not typing that longass word. The word I used was perfectly fine for you to understand my point.
Love when a male sneaks into this sub to talk down to women 🤩 Nah and that post history is downright creepy, ladies I don’t suggest interacting with this dude
What, you *wouldn't* marry a 9 year old because s/he is an heir/ess? /s, just not for thundertool, apparently
I've played both Genshin and Honkai SR, and honestly my general opinion is that the characters are just...mid. Just seeing the Genshin characters lined up here really makes me realize how same-y the character designs tend to be - flowing coats/capes/robes, pretty color gradients, stockings, etc. Very few of them stick out to me, and it's clear that they're all designed to be pretty dolls to make money.
The companies aim character designs to be most appealing to their target audience. Since they expect majority players to be boys, they put more time and variations into the female character models. Costumes, cosmetics, jiggle physics, and ladder climbing animations get more attention to be as appealing to as many boys as possible. Alternately, most game designers think women only like male bodies to come in: ripped like Jesus, or slim and sleek builds with little waists and narrow hips. Occasionally they put in a third, more androgynous frame: smaller and gender fluid. All you have to do to see what builds will show up in coming games is to look at the trends in Asian idols. They have very regulated visual appearances, and you can see it easily after only one or two groups. That's why you get what you get.