I think people who are sensitive to these sorts of things should feel free to criticize whatever and should attempt to justify their distaste for it. Being turned off in general by something on some visceral level is different than having it offend you in specific ways because of specific context, and I think the latter is a far better platform to start discussion than the former. And of course, you'd think anything which doesn't require defense should therefor be easy to defend, and personally I thought DC's art style and context at least as far as the main characters are concerned was, with the exceptions I've already mentioned.
Maybe I'm overreaching here, but I feel any discussion about games shouldn't stop short of including the gameplay itself, and it's not enough to say that a game is thematically offensive without discussing the game's systems and the player's agency. Dragon's Crown in general I think justifies its own existence through its quality as a game even if its presentation could be seen as offensive, and the sexualized main characters are treated with respect in context and are by definition the player's proxy.
Whether games themselves do real harm in society is beyond my scope to discuss as I'm no sociologist and can only fall back on my own experience. To me, they are entertainment, and, as immersive as entertainment can be, I have never once come close to confusing entertainment and reality. But I think when an individual has an issue with a specific item and wants to discuss it, encouraging them to feel bad for feeling bad about something rather than trying to understand what it is that's bothering them probably is harmful. I'm not saying that's what you're suggesting, I'm just thinking out loud here.
I think your final paragraph indirectly cuts to the heart of what went so disastrously wrong with the discussion surrounding Kotaku's crusade against Dragon's Crown. Kotaku's original commentary on the game was just another in a long line of dumb accusations of video games being a pernicious, harmful societal ill paired with the old cliched canard of people who make or consume video games being in a state of arrested development. It was vacuous, and it was hardly a new thing in terms of criticism of video games (or, for that matter,
any new medium).
But somehow, some way, it got turned into a springboard for talking about emergent systems of depictions in media and feminist theory in general when the appropriate response was basically "So Kotaku is still part of Gawker, huh? Noted." And as a springboard for those issues it served its purpose poorly indeed. It's really hard in that context to view an attempt to divert the discussion to systemic media portrayals as being anything other than an attempt to dissemble in defense of a game journalist channeling his inner Joe Lieberman, doubly so if you're not already familiar with the underlying concept of self-perpetuating emergent social systems (and I think it's safe to say that the bulk of people who were talking about Dragon's Crown were
probably not particularly well-acquainted with this subject, and I am by no means excluding its instigator from this appraisal).
Didn't help any on GAF that the article's original author kept showing up to ratchet the crazy up a couple notches (calling Dragon's Crown a lolicon fantasy then saying that it's absurd for people to expect him to know what "lolicon" means before he starts saying it and that anybody who points out that he clearly hasn't got the faintest idea what he's talking about is probably a lolicon too
quod erat demonstrandum was probably my favorite part, but it was pretty toxic to any actual discussion in spite of being completely, gloriously, hilariously insane).
It was a bad situation from stem to stern, and that there are still people trying to rationalize it or make it about something other than Kotaku's not-at-all-subtle statements is disheartening. Worse still, we just witnessed the debacle of PAX instituting a feminist, LGBT-friendly initiative only to immediately have it compared to Jim Crow and the Nazis by people who claim to be progressives. Shows just how little progress has been made in our ability to talk about these things. If anything, it shows we're sliding backwards.
Ghastly situation we're in, really. I think I've just gone and made myself depressed, and here right after I'd resolved to maybe try and do that a bit less often in 2014.