Pragmata, The Pitfalls of Un-abstraction and Desire of the "Family"

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:30:50 GMT

Warning: discussions of and allusions to loli/shota media, reader discretion advised.

In an attempt to be more honest about my thoughts and provide a better reading experience, I’m going to avoid the obvious prefaces clarifying I’m a moron who isn’t a fan of the game and hasn’t played it yada yada. The truth is I do know a lot, about a lot of things! I’m just not an expert in this game in particular, nor have I read it. I am only curious about it as a person who has observed this discourse online and finds it fascinating. I realize it's a very pedantic thing to even post about, but chase your dragons, right? Or something.

For starters, no, obviously this is not pro-birth propaganda. Propaganda is media made with the explicit intent to radicalize or influence a population, you can’t just say “The lion king is heterosexual propaganda” without proof. Although it’d be funny if that were true. They just made a game where you’re a dad to this little girl thing, and its a sci-fi I guess? And for some reason everyone lost their minds. Why?

It’s a long story, involving banned-sub communities, kotaku articles, a twitch emote that was actually based on an (arguably) extremely obscure lolisho meme, and X, the pedophile app. And a lesson I think that can be taken in abstraction, and how cartoons actually would save it a little.

This… thing, Diana, whatever it's called, is an android. In a better made work I could see how her agelessness is an allusion to the fact that she’s not human, but I cannot stress enough how inhuman and un-childlike this character acts. Aside from the fact that she’s clearly voiced by a woman with a mortgage, (no offense) she doesn’t behave the way an actual feral six year old would act, not even an android pretending to be a six year old. Instead, she acts like a cute anime girl kid would act. If Pragmata were a low poly ps2 game, and Diana had big anime girl eyes, or if it was a 2d visual novel, this wouldn’t be a problem! but it’s none of those things. It’s a triple A video game in which this american girl doll with 4lbs of horse hair on its head moves in wistful MMD-style physics, giggles and coos at you as she prods her intentionally(?) barefoot toes in the sand.

It’s kind of weird. Conservatives who secretly want to fuck children anyway insist that this is the game for THEM, that this is what society NEEDS, because Diana is a beautiful aryan child here to the save the day and inspire the evil wimen of the world to finally have babies again, and people on twitter who get scared to ask for the bathroom code and only watch cartoons made for six year olds, scrolling past a video of a very clearly loli-designed vtuber going “hi chat! It’s me agaiwn, what aw we gonna pway today? Teehee ^^” think it's disgusting this game would even get made.

I fall into neither camp earnestly. I think it's a lame looking game and the little android girl is ugly. I don’t care about games like this, and I’m convinced most people don’t either. The truth is more complex. It’s a game where there’s a lot of scenes of you role-playing as a caring dad for this anime thing, and its extra weird that she looks like a photo-realistic robot girl child. But all that aside, even if this game had proper abstraction that made its premise more believable, I don’t think it would save it nor would I play it.

Because if I’m being fucking honest? Even as someone who is a fan of these kinds of characters and their dynamics in work, and likes exploring their image and metaphorical potential, I find this so, so, painfully fucking LAME. It’s not natalist, it's a conservative idealization of the family that is only dreamed up by men so completely out of touch with reality, they dream at night to christmas-lit slideshows, fantasies of smooth-skinned, traditionally beautiful woman cooking for them as their little blonde children play in the living room and a Ghibli movie plays on the TV. It’s SpyxFamily. It’s spiritually a mobile game ad.

To clarify, there is absolutely nothing wrong with fantasizing about a family or wanting children, that’s not the problem— one of my favorite anime is Clannad for fuck’s sake, I cannot stress this enough (Clannad is way more sophisticated in its depictions of grief, family and navigating the difficulty of raising children, that’s for another day.) so I get it. I also care for children and think, as should be the standard for leftist praxis, that children are vulnerable, and a society is only as healthy as its most vulnerable individuals are cared for. But this shit? This weird fantasy of a little girl daughter who doesn’t do anything really gross or inconvenient, who doesn’t act like an actual child is dumb. It’s dumb and its lame. It doesn’t have anything earnestly meaningful to say about family or what fatherhood is, it’s just “having a kid is great and being a parent will save you.” Which I get to most people sounds like propaganda, but again, propaganda is intentional. What you have is a work that doesn’t make you engage, it is escapist for escapist sake. I also think it’s out of touch with a reality where most people, even those who otherwise might want kids, don’t even feel comfortable to maintain housing let alone work. That and the average man is completely unable to overcome their own learned patriarchy to actually be good fathers.

Tinfoil hat time, I do actually think the developers or concept artists for this game have some lolisho tendencies, but not in a “check their hard drives” way, I would never insinuate that even as a joke; (remembers I called X the pedophile app) Well, you get it. I mean in a “spiritually and creatively dishonest” way. No, I don’t think the twitch emote was some kind of secret signal, it was a moe blob probably built on a pre-existing moe blob emote. They probably did just borrow concepts from anime and games they liked without thinking. I do believe authorial intent is key here, I don’t earnestly believe that the devs are lolicons or that they wanted Diana to be one– The problem is like, that's what you made man. You even have the obvious ‘it’s ok because she’s not ACTUALLY a child” justification that is staple of the genre. (Pushes several drawings of my robot tweenager oc behind my back.) Anyway.

This game is not being honest about what it is or what the goal is. I don’t think that secret desire is a Lewis Caroll tribute, I think rather, the devs probably like a lot of moe media and probably do fantasize about being parents themselves. I just think it’d be worthwhile for them and anyone, making anything, to think about what you’re trying to say with what you make. Which is not to say its your fault if people are creepy, or get the wrong idea– Bad faith readings happen all the time, and the unfortunate reality of creative work online now for anyone, regardless of intention, is that yes, people will be creepy about characters. It sucks but its reality! People develop kinks for surgical implements and going to the dentist, yes, they’re going to want to fuck the little dough-eyed thing you put in your story. Not because it's a child, but because it represents a child and childhood, and all the parts of ourselves we bury and cling to and comfort. A game like this really could’ve been about that, maybe made people engage a little bit with the concept of just how fucking hard it is to be a parent and to be a child, but, it doesn’t look like they did. Damn shame.

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Pragmata, The Pitfalls of Un-abstraction and Desire of the "Family"