The way I look at this: maybe you’re not a pedophile, but you definitely are pedophile-adjacent. Like cmon, no one’s stupid enough to look at this and not realize what’s going on.
Back when I wasn't permabanned on Reddit for refusing to suck the tranny cock, I used to argue with the people on r/kotakuinaction2 about this.
They'd always say "we like violent video games but that doesn't mean we want to kill people", and I had to put some thought in how to counter this and differentiate the two, and I wanted to share in case anyone else comes across this argument from these fucking pedophiles.
I think the strongest argument is that the point of a violent video game isn't the same as it's real-world analogue. The point of a violent video game is to have fun, first and foremost. Violence, life, and death are very convenient, universal human experiences to explore and one of life's great binaries (along with gender--fight me, Reddit fags). Life is success; death is failure. Few people leave a Call of Duty or CS:GO match thinking "wow, I really enjoyed the brutal death animations of all those guys I just killed, this has satisfied my violent urges". Instead, you're thinking about how you could have done better, how bullshit the lag is, what kind of upgrades you should bring next time, etc.
In terms of how well committing the on-screen violence translates to its real world analogue, consider: it doesn't matter what the characters or enemies look like (aside from basic aesthetics), it doesn't matter if they're sexy or ugly or whatever. The one exception to this that gives people pause is killing children in video games, which is virtually never done except as a poignant story beat to show how fucked up something is--not even Hatred, that game that let you be an edgelord mass shooter, let you kill children.
Compare this to the sexy anime children... in this case, the point of it
is to satisfy the same urges as it's real world analogue: namely, sexual arousal. It doesn't exist as art, it doesn't exist as fun, it exists to get dudes horny so they can jerk off to it (which is gross, considering most of these characters are played by dudes). The people watching as evaluating how attractive the child-characters are. You know this because similar adult-like or ugly/fat characters are not nearly as popular as these sexualized child-characters. The people watching are satisfying their very real-world desires and fantasies of being sexual with a child-like character. This is sick, and something we need to strongly discourage as a society.
The video game analogue to this would be like a highly realistic VR torture simulator specifically designed to let people experience high fidelity violence as if they were committing it in the real world. I think people would rightfully take issue with this and be sickened by the people who choose to engage in that activity in their free time.
Secondly: violence as a method for conflict resolution is elemental to our species. Having sex with children is not. If somebody deeply, truly wrongs you or you have irreconcilable differences that directly oppose one another, violence can be and often is justified. Consider a story where the antagonist kills someone close to the protagonist in cold blood and then is killed in turn--the violence isn't the point of reading the story; it's a plot device that speaks to our fundamental nature. If you wanted to include a pedophile in your story with a graphic description, I would defend that so long as it adds to the story. If you're writing obvious torture porn or child erotica, that's a different story.
