Stellar Blade Eve Discourse

About

Stellar Blade Eve Discourse, also known as Stellar Blade Eve Design Controversy, refers to the viral debate relating to the character Eve from the 2024 video game Stellar Blade. The contentious debate, being similar to the the prior controversy regarding 2b from NieR:Automata, primarily revolves around the character's appearance in game, notably her figure. With the release of the demo for the game in late March 2024, discourse about the character, her design and the game as a whole began to appear after reviews started to come in.

Origin

On March 25th, 2024, the official Sony PlayStation^[1] YouTube account posted the demo teaser for Stellar Blade. The game, released by Nikke: Goddess of Victory creator Shift Up studios, was partially backed by Sony and is exclusive to the PlayStation 5 platform. In the teaser, different sections of gameplay including enemy fights and climbing can be seen, with the video getting over 310,000 views in five days (shown below).

On the release day for the demo, video game website IGN posted a review for the demo that compared the protagonist Eve to other characters such as 2b and Bayonetta in a negative way while saying that the character designer had not seen a woman.^[5]

This led to immense fan outrage, with fans of those games and Stellar Blade being quick to chime in on social media about the character creator's marriage, as well as the model for Eve being created by Motion Capturing a real South Korean model. This is shown in the post on X by the user @GiveMeBanHammer,^[2] which earned over 560,000 views and 14,000 likes in two days (shown below).

Spread

Over the following days, people began adding to the discourse by either posting their own gameplay footage of the character, usually in a sexually suggestive pose or doing something that would accentuate their looks, or by attacking IGN for its review. On March 30th, 2024, X user @wwarrior_1^[3] posted a QRT to the official Stellar Blade X account of Eve doing a swinging animation on a bar, captioning it as them ordering 17 copies of the game and earning over 3.2 million views in one day (shown below).

On March 31st, X user @VibezWorldwide^[4] posted a GIF of the Ugnaught character Kuiil from The Mandalorian proclaiming that he has spoken, with a caption reading that gamers who had Baldur's Gate 3 as their "Game of the Year" in 2023 should not speak up about Stellar Blade, making a reference to the Bear Sex Scene and the ability to make the entire player cast naked for the entire game playthrough and other lewd behavior (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References