IGN France Scrambles To Backpedal After Writing Off ‘Stellar Blade’ Protagonist Eve As “A Doll Sexualized By Someone Who Has Never Seen A Woman”
Spencer Baculi
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In the latest example of the Western video game press having a chip on their shoulder when it comes to media created not just by Japan, but apparently an East Asian nation, IGN France has found themselves scrambling to defend themselves after writing off Stellar Blade‘s lead protagonist Eve, despite being based entirely on the real-world appearance of an actual female model, of being nothing more than the “sexualized” fantasy of “someone who has never seen a woman”.
The French arm of the video game news outlet leveled their accusation against Stellar Blade‘s artistic direction on March 27th as part of their preview of the South Korean character-action title.
Following a brief overview of the game’s post-apocalypse, humanity-must-fight-for-survival premise, the outlet’s Ben Ossola took a detour to share his protestations against Eve’s ‘sexually appealing’ character design.
“The design of the game, in particular its character, highlights an obvious bias,” wrote Ossola, per an English translation of his piece provided by this article’s author. “We’re going to beat up the alien, but if we can do it while pleasuring the eyes of the men, that’s a bonus.”
“And the result doesn’t really work,” he continued. “It’s not new, and other games have made the choice to highlight the assets of their female characters, but where Bayonetta bears an iconic character design, or 2B from NieR: Automata, inspired an entire generation of cosplayers, Stellar Blade’s Eve is just boring. A doll sexualized by someone who has never seen a woman.”
Unfortunately for Ossola, even the briefest of internet searches regarding Stellar Blade‘s development reveals that his complaints are based not in any real-world fact, but rather his own personal hang-ups.
To start, Eve’s designer, game director and the CEO of its publishing company Shift Up Hyung-Tae Kim, has definitely seen a woman before, as evidenced by the fact that he is currently married to Shift Up concept artist Jiyun Chae.
Further, while Eve herself may be a fictional character, her appearance is not, instead being based on a full, 1:1 body scan of real-world South Korean model Shin Jae-eun.
“Yes, we did base the character of Eve on the model Shin Jae-eun,” the aforementioned Kim explained to PushSquare of his protagonist’s conception. “We thought that her body shape would be a good reference for the character that we were pursuing. But the face was created originally in-house – it’s just the body of the model that we scanned for the game.”
In light of both their ignoring of these facts and their blatant attempt to insult Kim, both Osolla and IGN France soon found themselves facing a massive wave of backlash from the general public regarding their lack of journalistic integrity.
However, rather than respond to this outrage by admitting to having completely missed the mark with their accusations, the writer and outlet instead moved to try and cover up their shoddy work by blaming the public for having ‘misread’ their original statement.
Changing their insulting description of Eve from “A doll sexualized by someone who has never seen a woman” to “A doll sexualized by someone you would think has never seen a woman,” Osolla then added the pompous disclaimer, in English, that “This last sentence has been slightly edited for French speaking people pretending not to understand what we meant, and the English speaking mob who Google Translated the initial text.”
However, since then, IGN France has amended the disclaimer to instead claim that the article was edited “following death threats”.
Notably, neither Osolla nor IGN France have provided any proof of having received any such threats.
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