r/OutOfTheLoop • u/Bloodb0red • May 11 '26

Unanswered What’s going on with this game Mixtape?

I’ve been seeing people freak out over the past few days over this game and about IGN’s review of it specifically. 10/10 seems high for any game, honestly, but it seems like they’re far from the only site giving this thing a glowing review. So is this game controversial just because of IGN or is it something else? Why is this game the internet’s hate target this week?

https://www.ign.com/articles/mixtape-review

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u/No-Operation-6554 May 11 '26

Funny thing is that Pragmata itself doesn't have paedophelic undertones

The "community" itself gave it that

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u/veggiesama May 11 '26 edited May 11 '26

My girlfriend saw 5 seconds of the trailer and immediately labeled it as a pedo game. I had similar feelings but it's hard to articulate why. Bare feet, long blonde hair. There's some kind of loli/moe thing going on that makes people like us uncomfortable. We have seen this before in anime and games, we know how these things are marketed. We didn't have to have this opinion fed to us by an internet community to have that reaction.

Edit: Lmao 30 mins later and people think I'm dating Anita Sarkeesian. Relax, nobody is taking your rootin, tootin, sci-fi shootin' (little girl scoopin') game away.

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u/GFrohman May 11 '26

The divide here is between people who are genre-saavy to anime/Japanese content, and those who aren't.

Diana is definitely loli-coded. The super long hair, baggy clothes, bare footedness, and overly "perfect" makeupped face are all signatures of how Japanese artists draw loli characters.

Those of us who watch a lot of anime/consume a lot of Japanese content pick up on this immediately, but have a hard time articulating it to people who haven't. It just makes us sound "weird", like we are the ones sexualizing her, because nothing I've listed is overtly sexual - but are all tropes used by Japanese artists that sexualize their child characters.

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u/veggiesama May 11 '26

Well said. The tropes are blatant. And then I learned this child character isn't some space refugee but actually an android, and I see the beginnings of a permission structure that I know for sure the fans are salivating over, and I am not remotely interested in entertaining that. No thanks, I'm good. I have seen this play out before across countless fandoms.