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The ‘Tiny Penis’ Gesture Backlash Brigade Has Claimed Another Victim

Stella Sora, a new gacha game from Yostar, the developer behind games like Arknights, Blue Archives, and Heaven Burns Red, only launched a month ago and is already apologizing for its first big controversy. No, it’s not about microtransactions or a bad character design, as often happens with gacha games. Instead, it’s because a character allegedly made an infamous penis-pinching gesture called “crab hand.” While the pinch gesture has been used to signal a small size or portion of something forever, it’s also been used in the Korean feminist movement Megalia to insinuate someone has a small dick. Some men are apparently taking two fingers close together as a personal attack whenever they see it, including in video games.

Yostar’s apology was published on the game’s Korean X account, as the conspiracy that this signal is being put into art to emasculate men originates in South Korea. This all started because Fuyuka, an upcoming character in Stella Sora, has her pointer finger and thumb lined up in such a way during one of her animations that if someone wanted to pretend to see a gesture making fun of people’s dick size, they could do so. Once the internet took that and ran with it, Yostar updated the animation so that Fuyuka now has a closed fist in the relevant scene.

Stella Sora isn’t the only game that has had to apologize and alter its work to avoid accusations of sneaking in misandrist dog whistles. Stellar Blade developer Shift Up also recently issued an apology for art celebrating the anniversary of its RPG, Goddess of Victory: Nikke. That character did not look like it was pinching anything either, but because the fingers were parallel to each other and one was bent, kinda, the team edited it to remove any doubt. Crazy.

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