LADS fans about to move into the TWST fandom
One sentence horror story jumpscare/j
M-May I confess something... 😬 I do not play LaDS at all. I have zero interest in getting into it. My understanding of the game comes primarily from social media memes and friends who play. There is nothing for me to gain or to lose; I have no skin in this game. AND YET I HAVE BEEN FIXATED ON FOLLOWING THE EVER-EVOLVING LADS SITUATION EVER SINCE JUNE 22ND.
I'm not even going to attempt explaining what happened then, because it is incredibly complicated, riddled with unsubstantiated rumors, and even gets into geopolitics at some point. If you want to know what's up, there are several video essays out about the topic. I'm not here to take sides, I'm just a bystander observing the car crash happen from a safe distance and going "what the fuck is going on".
To make a very long and very complex story VERY short: many Love and Deepspace fans have lost trust in Papergames (aka Infold Games), the company behind LaDS. Some have completely lost faith in CN otome as a whole. That's why many LaDS fans are now considering "moving on" to new mobile gacha games, even if they are not otome. Twst is apparently one of the titles that came up in the discussion for migration.
Now, why are Twst fans scared about this? Well, it's a few different things, but it can boil down to the toxic behavior observed in the LaDS community. There's possessiveness over the characters, tons of thirst, extreme parasocialism, hostility to anyone that is not a woman, racism, and homophobia, just to name a few. The concern is that these things will be brought into the Twst fandom (which already has its own problems) by new fans, thereby heightening the toxicity of our community and making it more unpleasant to be in.
Again, I'm not super familiar with LaDS or its fandom outside of the recent situation beginning on June 22nd. However, I assume that the loudest, most unhinged players are a vocal minority in every fandom and aren't representative of the whole community. That’s true of the Twst fandom as well. And it’s not like Twst and LaDS fans haven’t overlapped before?? Plenty of people play both, and we’ve been relatively fine.
Twst frequently gets these fandom scares when there's new influxes of fans anticipated (like when EN was announced, when the anime dropped, etc.), and I feel like so much of that stress could be alleviated if we reframed our thinking as "Hey! I could meet new creators and potentially make new friends" instead of instantly viewing new fans as enemies. It's a net positive to us all if Twst gets more fans, because it means non-JP fans will have more leverage for merch, events, etc. outside of Japan. Even if there is more toxicity introduced, this naturally happens anyway as a consequence of a fandom growing. It’s also easily ignored if you block liberally, curate your feed, and find safety in your own smaller Twst circles.
I also think that we shouldn’t even be assuming that new fans will stick with Twst in the long term. Just about the only things Twst and LaDS have in common are having all-male playables and a lot of reading. Twst does not have the same combat systems as LaDS, nor are the playables romantic or doting on the player. The graphics are completely different. They won’t get to design their main character, their dialogue options ultimately don’t matter in Twst. I don’t see “those” types of intense LaDS fans staying if Twst doesn’t provide what they’re looking for to fill the LaDS-shaped holes in their hearts.
