i wrote up this whole thing and for some reason tumblr was giving me an error message when i tried to post it so i had to make it a post rather than an ask. maybe because its so long lolol

it will be hard to condense all of my thoughts into coherent words. mostly, i think this is the most spectacular marketing and PR failure i have ever seen and should be studied in marketing schools as an example of what not to do for decades. i can think of a million ways the negative reaction to him could have been mitigated by more careful and intentional marketing, and most importantly by restoring the broken trust of players by fixing and updating the lacking game mechanics that have been festering resentment for months BEFORE dropping what everyone always knew was going to be the discourse equivalent of a nuclear warhead. to not anticipate the 6th LI to be violently controversial is bafflingly stupid.

every fan who has ever seen a conversation about the possibility was anticipating a reaction like this. for infold to instead act surprised when he was unpopular speaks to a startling lack of self-awareness and self-preservation. i dont know how much more transparent marketing could have mitigated the chinese reaction because we only get snippets of whats happening, and its hard to know how much of the criticism was centered around the timing and negligence of other aspects of the game, and how much was the colorism and homophobia that we are hearing about, versus the complaints about the breaking in the window. we cant know who was uninstalling for what reason and who was sending cow dung to their office for what reason. i dont want to paint millions of chinese players with a wide brush because im already seeing a lot of criticism that is veering dangerously close to sinophobia. i dont agree with what i have heard and seen screenshots of, but i also know how easy it is for vocal minorities to misrepresent a community. it seems the 731 controversy also got pulled in to be used as ammunition despite being unrelated to valko and from an april update. regardless, infold clearly took the wrong message from all of it.

i do genuinely think all of this was avoidable to an extent. road maps and more transparency regarding releases would have mitigated a lot of this. not wasting resources on the home system no one asked for while people were begging for sylus and caleb content updates, abyssal/unicorns updates and new methods of farming would have mitigated a lot of this. i dont think people would have reacted so violently about valko if they didnt already feel like the game was neglecting them in the first place. the problem with him is that people felt like he was coming at the expense of what they already care about, and although i dont believe that is the truth, infold did absolutely nothing to assuage that perception that they should have anticipated in a game designed for parasocial attachment to characters.

i have always felt like LADS downfall would be the way it wants to have every cake and eat it too, while encouraging such a high level of involvement and parasociality with its playerbases. it wants to be an RPG but its fundamentally an otome. it wants to make players feel loved with fluff and otome style pocket-boyfriend mechanics. it wants to draw in worldbuilding lore nerds who enjoy complex plot heavy sci fi space operas. it wants to satisfy both a local and global audience with very different cultural values regarding relationships and desire. there has already been tension for a long time between these spaces that the game tries to occupy.

someone is always going to be disappointed. people complain when the world underneaths get updated because they think the game has "too much reading". a huge swath of players dont even play the main story. others complain at the lack of main story updates and the focus on fluffy AUs. caleb's entire story is handicapped in the english translation to scrub it of pseudocest. then they put it in the english. then they stopped because people freaked out. CN fans hated the home system when it released not because its stupid and useless (its stupid and useless) but because it broke the first person immersion and they didnt want to see their MC. they have been trying to straddle these lines for a long time, global versus CN, otome versus RPG, combat versus sims 3 knockoff, and they have been failing to satisfy both camps for a long time. they have bitten off more than they can chew in trying to fulfill every fantasy and be every genre of game. i think this was the culmination of those failures, unfortunately placed on what is in my opinion an innocent and inevitable 6th LI.

valko looked fine to me. im not into werewolves and his marketing was a little camp for my tastes but anyone who has been paying attention to the lore knows a 6th was inevitable and with his cancellation there is no doubt that a load-bearing pillar of the greater story has been toppled. i have absolutely no clue how they're going to salvage a plot that's been in the works for years without an essential character. even if i wasnt interested in valko as an LI, its a death sentence for the things i do care about in this game, which is it's storytelling.