Aion 2 Players Are Using The In-Game Character Creator To Sexualise Underage K-Pop Idols
Jack Coleman (He/Him) is a News Editor from Ireland. This is his third full year in games media, having previously worked freelance for various outlets, including DualShockers and NME.
Previously, he’s interviewed breakout indie developers, broken big news stories, reviewed massive releases and recounted his time living as a humble woodsman in Oblivion.
A lifelong gamer, Jack is primarily interested in RPGs and narrative experiences. He’s also been playing League of Legends for a decade, unfortunately.
Aion 2 is a South Korean MMO that was released last month in both Korea and Taiwan, with an international release planned for some time in the future. The sequel to the beloved 2009 MMO Aion has not been well received by players, who are extremely critical of the MMO’s monetisation, which has been accused of being pay-to-win, a cardinal sin for the genre.
However, something that’s more troubling than Aion 2’s predatory microtransactions is the misuse of the MMO’s ‘Style Shop’. This feature is a community marketplace where players can upload custom characters to sell to the community, with developer NCSoft and the creator splitting the money 50/50. Unfortunately, creators are using the Style Shop to sell characters modelled after real-life celebrities, including minors (thanks, Automaton).
Identity Theft
Aion 2 is a game with a plethora of sexual and revealing outfits, so you can see the obvious problems associated with using a real person’s likeness. This is especially problematic in South Korea, a country with strict protections for celebrities, designed to curb obsessive fan culture.
A lot of these real-life recreations are of Korean Pop idols. A cursory glance at the Style Shop’s front page shows several characters modelled after members of the girl group Aespa, such as Kim “Winter” Min-jeong and Yu “Karina” Ji-min. Several of these creators don’t explicitly use the performers’ names, presumably for plausible deniability. Though some do, or use obvious pseudonyms that I imagine wouldn’t stand up to legal scrutiny.
According to Korean attorney Kang Jang-meok, who wrote a piece on Aion 2 for GameMeca, the creators of these models and NCSoft, who enable these recreations, could both face serious legal trouble if someone were to make a complaint. According to Korean law on digital sex crimes and deepfakes — video and/or audio targeting someone’s face, body or voice that’s edited to arouse sexual desire or cause sexual humiliation constitutes a crime.
According to Kang, the technical specifics of the recreation aren’t actually that relevant. In other words, if people recognise and associate a deepfake creation with a celebrity, then the actual process of how the deepfake was created doesn’t really matter legally speaking. If someone were to use a celebrity’s likeness and dress them in a sexual outfit, that would likely constitute a digital sex crime.
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NCSoft profiting from the community’s recreations of popular celebrities means the publisher could also face legal trouble in the future, especially if the prosecution can prove that the company was aware of what was happening and chose not to stop it.
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I guess in a few more years it will become ethical, once the virtual character skin has had the time to virtually grown up to match or surpass your countries’ legal age. Even though they will look identical, at least you’ll know enough time has passed, and the virtual character’s mind won’t be corrupted by virtual adult themes anymore.
2025-12-19 01:15:58
