[garbre]

Frankly, I refuse to believe so many people on HN have the kind of scruples about or lack of exposure to this part of AmerOtaku culture. As such, I believe many of the comments are simply 2nd-degree trolling.

Also, the post title is misspelled. It's "building", not "builing".

[subjectsigma]

Do we visit the same website?... Cause it seems to me like this place is full of stuffy, smug moralizing about what other people do, at least as much as any other forum. We just use bigger words than most forums. I'm not surprised at all that there are people ignorant of the culture but simultaneously convinced they don't like it.

[weeb_throwaway]

I think I refused to believe it too until reddit, a San Francisco company, started banning people for posting fictional high school anime characters in bikinis (not even nudes).

[FearNotDaniel]

I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make here. But it sounds like you're trying to say the sexual objectification of children is okay, as long as they are fictional children with a tiny amount of body covering. Is that what you meant, or did you mean something else?

[claudiawerner]

What do we mean by "okay"? How do we differentiate virtual murder (for example) from virtual pedophilia in a sufficiently rigorous way? You can say that rigor isn't required beacuse Reddit can make whatever choices they like, but it's not at all clear that the necessary connection for sexual objectification of children is made when these images are posted - that presupposes that the viewer sees the image and real children in the same light, which current evidence gathered of Japanese fan communities does not support (see Galbraith and McLelland's work on this). This is why researchers in the field are sometimes skeptical about calling this material "child pornography".

Morally, one can differentiate between virtual murder and virtual pedophilia and condemn virtual pedophilia while consistently enjoying games and other media depicting murder - but as Gary Young pointed out in his piece on the Gamer's Dilemma, it requires us to accept moral relativism.