CitrusC said:
I think you are being disingenuous if you think the argument that depiction of the act = act.
The point of actual contention is that depictions legitimize it and condone it as entertainment.
The argument has always been playing violent videogames makes you violent in real life. "If you play violent videogames, then you will become more violent, or have violent fantasies, or even have plans to commit violence." When this criticism of videogames was at its peak, several convicted murderers of various ages cited videogames as being why they did it, lending credence to the claims that videogames made people violent.
However, decades of scientific studies have repeatedly failed to find any correlation between playing violent videogames and a tendency to engage in real violence. Anytime a study claims to have found a connection, it always turns out that they heavily misrepresented their findings or used extremely flawed scientific processes resulting in heavily biased results. Several studies even found evidence that playing games actually reduces the likelihood of an individual to commit violence.
Now, what about loli/shota? That's harder to research, mostly for the taboo surrounding the subject, but studies have been conducted, and they've mostly returned the same results as the studies on violent videogames. That is, there's little practical correlation between someone that consumes fictional content of subjects with the appearance of a minor, and someone who actually consumes real life CP or even predates on real children. There's some overlap, but it's the same kind of overlap as seen with videogames. Many people consume the fictional content without ever posing a danger to a real life person, some people never consume fictional content but still go on to create victims, and some consume fictional content and are actual predators. But there's never been any evidence found that consuming fiction leads to committing real life crimes.
It's a stupid argument no matter what the topic, because studies always return the same results. That being that for the average person, X does not cause Y, and someone who commits Y showed all of the signs that they were already predisposed to it with or without X's influence. Consumption of X may even reduce a desire to commit Y.
Tldr: Claiming fictional content creates criminals is scientifically unsupported thought crime BS. Maybe stop doing things like letting pro smash players hang out unsupervised with people half their age instead of screaming at random people on the internet for stroking it to an anime character if you care so much about child abuse.