Major Gaming News Site Offers Official Apology After Its Wokeness Got the Best of It Over 'Stellar Blade'

AP Photo/Kamil Zihnioglu, File

The funny thing about wokeness is that it requires a lot of emotional commitment and almost no commitment to facts or logic. While this is infuriating and often leads to some very awful results, it can just as often result in embarrassment for the woke person. 

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That's what happened recently at IGN, a major gaming news site, when one of its French writers decided to lash out first and ask questions never. 

What had writer Ben Ossola so upset? 

A pretty video game character named Eve. 

As I've been covering here on RedState, the South Korean studio "Shift Up" is releasing a game called "Stellar Blade," a high-action hack n' slash game that's got the Western world hyped up and ready for its release. The only people who seem to be angry about it are the leftist game journalists who are angry that the game's female protagonist is modeled to be beautiful and sexy. 

This caused Ossola, an IGN writer in France, to go on an out-of-place rant about how Eve is "bland," and a "doll sexualized by someone who has never seen a woman." 

(READ: Leftist-Despised Game 'Stellar Blade' Dropped a Demo That Gamers Loved, Games 'Journalists' Hardest Hit)

And here is where the embarrassment set it. For one, Eve's model is based on a real-life woman named Shin Jae-eun, a South Korean actress and model who was hired for the design process as I covered in a short video. 

@thebrandonmorse The controversy around Stellar Blade is rooted in dumb jealousy and bad idealism. #stellarblade #gaming #videogames #women #shiftup #feminism #entertainment ♬ original sound - TheBrandonMorse
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It gets better. 

The creator of Eve is married, and his wife, Jiyun Chae, is one of the concept artists at Shift Up and is one of the people who worked on Eve's design. 

According to Bounding Into Comics, Ossoa's initial reaction to the backlash was to blame the public for misinterpreting his meaning because of bad translations, but when French speakers called him out for lying about his original intent, Ossola edited his words and then wrote a condescending explanation for it: 

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 condescending 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.”

This only threw gasoline on the fire, and soon IGN France removed Ossola's name from the byline and updated the disclaimer, saying that the article was edited due to "death threats," which IGN or Ossola failed to provide. 

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It was then that IGN's main office got involved. It retracted Ossola's entire statement about Eve being a sexualized doll and even apologized to Shift Up for their writer's out-of-pocket insult. The apology is now featured in a bright blue box at the top of the article

Recently, IGN France produced and published a preview of Stellar Blade containing an offensive passage that should never have been kept. The text has now been edited and here is our official apology to the Shift Up Corporation studio staff.

Also, please note that IGN France is an independent branch of IGN and that IGN's editorial staff had nothing to do with this incident.

The original text of the Stellar Blade preview contained comments that were out of place. While it was never our intention to disrespect Shift Up or any of its employees or their work, we recognize that the phrase taken in its literal sense was inappropriate and we regret it.

To anyone at Shift Up Corporation who felt personally targeted and insulted by this passage, we are truly sorry and sincerely apologize.

While the apology to Shift Up is nice, it still holds that the comments were taken wrongly by the audience, and still feels like a shrug at readers at the end of the day. 

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Still, this bit shouldn't have been written no matter how you slice it. There's no reason for people to get upset about a character drawn to look feminine and sexy. There's nothing wrong with men enjoying the sight of an attractive woman. The vitriol and anger from Western leftists over this entire game is, frankly, weird and makes them look bad overall. 

"Stellar Blade" launches officially for the PS5 on April 26. The demo is available for free on the PlayStation Store now.


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