

A more apt comparison would be people who go out of their way to hurt animals.
Is it? That person is going out of their way to do actual violence. It feels like arguing someone watching a slasher movie is more likely to make them go commit murder is a much closer analogy to someone watching a cartoon of a child engaged in sexual activity or w/e being more likely to make them molest a real kid.
We could make it a video game about molesting kids and Postal or Hatred as our points of comparison if it would help. I’m sure someone somewhere has made such a game, and I’m absolutely sure you’d consider COD for “fun and escapism” and someone playing that sort of game is doing so “in bad faith” despite both playing a simulation of something that is definitely illegal and the core of the argument being that one causes the person to want to the illegal thing more and the other does not.
I’ve been able to explain it to people pretty easily as “like Discord, but without Discord administration getting to control what’s allowed, only whoever happens to run that particular server.”