"This underage girl is okay and I'll jerk off to her but this other one is more underage so I am going to make a fit and preach about morality, even tho I knew it was coming from miles away and technically we already saw it before with a boy but since it's a boy but not a girl I guess it's slightly better in my invisible morality scale"
1) There's a big difference between 16yo girls and 8yo kids
Both are underage yes but while it's not socially acceptable to be attracted to 16yo girls, there is at least some biological basis for it as they are "of age" in the physical sense (and although this is subjective and case-by-case, most on a mental sense too) even if they're not "of age" in the legal sense. That's why you see people getting addicted to watching teen girls dancing on tiktok and shit these days and why even though more than half the games on this site feature teenagers that could easily be argued to be 1-3 years underage legally speaking, you don't see people screaming "ree this is pedophillia!!!"
On the other hand, prepubescent children are not of age in any sense and it is normal, not hypocritical, to find that sort of shit disgusting even if you're fine with teenage girls
2) Yeah we saw child Akira being abused but there's two key differences between that situation and the "wizards": Akira being abused was a one-off flash-back / backstory and he was a victim rather than a perpetrator.
- Reading something from the perspective of a rape victim is real different than reading from the perspective of a predator who's actively chasing down kids
- Furthermore, Akira playing the pedo is likely not going to be a one-off thing where people find it disgusting but will sit through it and continue playing the game, thinking "well that was fucked but I'll power through it" - it'll likely be a major plot point and take up a decent chunk of word count
Basically to summarize, morality is complicated as fuck. Your arguments of "this underage shit is ok so why not that underage shit?" "this rape is ok so why not that rape?" are ungenerous interpretations of what is probably the stance that the overwhelming majority of players would hold in regards to this situation
Btw personally, depending on how major of a plot point it becomes and how it's portrayed, I may end up dropping the game too. I see this as being very similar to Made in Abyss where there's a lot of content in there that the majority of ppl (myself included) just find fucking gross but they'll kind of ignore it and still watch as long as it doesn't become too big of a part of the show. I remember reading about a bunch of ppl who said they dropped s2 of Made in Abyss because it was starting to become excessive at times, and I bet you it'll be similar with this game if it pushes it too far, although of course the line of "too far" is subjective - each person has their own degree of tolerance to this sort of thing
