The CN Silverash Alter Saga
This is sort of outside of the scope of the things I normally post about, but I kind of want to talk about it a bit regardless, as a sort of aggregation of some bits of info I'd shared to Reddit.
First off, I will preface by saying that although I can neither write nor speak Chinese, I often glance at the Chinese social network site Weibo when I can, usually to browse fanart and memes, and sometimes to gage fan response. Due to this fact, I am slightly familiar, though by no means an expert, with some of the predominant CN opinions there and a few CN fans, particularly as they pertain to my area of expertise (if you can call it that), namely, the Kjerag faction and storyline. Because of this, I ended up in the odd situation of being privy to some ongoing Weibo drama in the months leading up to the 6.5 anniversary stream, something I reported on occasionally on Reddit.
By happenstance of sharing my findings, I ended up saving screenshots of quite a few things, though by no means everything, that I saw. Finding specific posts on Weibo is a bit difficult; it's akin to the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, so many posts by many people, and being as I rely on MTL, it's hard to search for specific terms. So unfortunately you will have to take my word for the things I don't have visual proof for, though others who engage with CN SNS can corroborate what I say. I also say that what I encountered was only a part of the Weibo userbase and not representative of the entire CN playerbase (as we will see).
We begin with the leak which came before the Ato PV leak. Everyone knows about it, but for completion's sake, I will include it below:
"The summer limited banner will feature two female characters, one is Hoshiguma Alter. There will be new skins for Thorns Alter, Eblana and Chen Alter. For the Ave Mujica collab, there will be a total of five new characters. The collab banner will feature one six star and two five stars. Then one five star event welfare, and one five star given as login reward during the event. Limited Silverash Alter will be released on half anniversary. An Ursus event will be released in October."
This leak was posted half a day before the visuals of the Ato PV leaked and confirmed half of it, thus lending credit to the rest of it. Speculation then began as to what Silverash Alter (SA2)'s class would be. Being somewhat anxious myself on the subject, for a time I frequented both Weibo and the "Arknights Insider" Baidu board in hopes of securing more information or another leak.
Instead what I found was mostly speculation, and on Baidu in particular, an endless parade of predictions often dressed up as leaks, with multiple people claiming to have an inside channel inside HG and their info was totally legit, y'all better believe it. (Needless to say, almost all of these were proven wrong by the official release.)
There I discovered that the primary rumor or forerunning theory was that SA2 would be either a Guard or a Sniper, amongst some other more outlandish theories like Skyranger. This is in stark contrast to the EN side, where r/arknights pretty much unanimously agreed after the release of Matsukiri that the Strategist Vanguard class seemed tailor-made for Silverash, much as Shaper Caster felt designed for Eblana.
The underlying thread running through an overwhelming number of comments was that it was nigh-imperative and utterly unthinkable for SA2 to be anything but a big red number DPS, a powerful game-breaker potentially on par with Wis'adel. He simply had to be a DPS unit. Part of this was likely nostalgia due to the fact that Silverash was a famous early-game carry who had fallen off the meta, but the rest of it was... rather a bit different in motivation.
Keep this in mind as we go forward.
Silverash Alter 9/11 Part 1: Sakiko
With the release of Togawa Sakiko came the first meltdown: she was a Lord, therefore, SA2 would not be a Lord. This was the first of the CN Silverash fan meltdowns. Many of them were utterly convinced that the only class for Silverash is Lord; they even claimed that the name itself is perfectly suited to him, and thus, his Alter would, too, be a Lord. The release of Sakiko put a bullet into this, because the chances of HG releasing two limited Lords so close together were close to null. There was quite a bit of teeth-gnashing and wailing as they struggled to reconcile the thought of Silverash not being a Lord. It was probably about this time that the ranged class and Sniper theory became popular on Weibo, though I did still see a few people insisting on Lord even after this. I have included some screenshots below with the usernames redacted, translated by MTL.
Note: "alien" = alter; "konoe" = primal guard. "Super large cup" is slang for the highest tier of operator.
Part 2: Mantra
The next meltdown came with the release of Mantra. "But why?" you might ask. "Mantra is a Caster." Well, it's because her S3 has stealth reveal in a large range. The wailing and gnashing of teeth began again as the fans lamented the fact that SA2 was not, in fact, the first operator with mass ranged stealth reveal as they had hoped. (Nobody remembers or cares about Tsukinogi.) This was, according to the fans, meant to be Silverash's, and would secure him a very powerful and important spot in the meta and Mantra had taken it from him. They also then began to doubt he would be a ranged unit, and thus flipped back to hoping that he would continue being a Guard.
Part 3: Vanguard Rumors
About a week or two before the livestream, a sudden panic swept through Weibo, with numerous users posting upset and angry comments about how SA2 couldn't, wouldn't, and shouldn't be a Vanguard.
Baidu, also, changed their tune: they had been previously insisting that the 6-star Strategist slot was reserved for Wang, and didn't suit Silverash at all, but seemingly overnight, they began saying that SA2 would be a Strategist. Perhaps this was what sent the Weibo side spiraling, I can't say, and I was unable to verify whether someone had spread a legitimate leak. Regardless, Weibo was extremely upset, as they could not stomach the idea of SA2 not being a big red number DPS unit, and "merely" being a support.
"Well, that's silly," you might say, "support units are more valuable in the game and have longer meta longevity, everybody knows that. DPS units are more replaceable." Of course. But this fact didn't matter to them. As I said above in my introduction, the belief in and desire for "DPS SA2" was absolutely unshakable.
(Note: I'll explain what "DL" a little further down. "YJWL" is a nickname for Hypergryph. Yige is another mistranslation of alter, and MTL sometimes renders "strategist" as "tactician".)
Part 4: Sanrio
This isn't quite related to the SA2 drama, but it was a notable moment for how the fans flew off the handle: the second Sanrio collab, which featured Silverash and Pramanix and gave them in-game avatars with Little Twin Stars, thus making them a set: if you look closely, Silverash has a small Lala and Pramanix has a small Kiki, thus giving each sibling the other's mascot.
There was a dumpster fire fight about this. Seemingly within hours, the fans all turned on each other in a very ugly spat. Cliffheart fans were understandably disappointed that she was left out and befuddled why exactly would Little Twin Stars be given to two siblings of a notable trio. Silverash fans, however, turned on the Pramanix fans and Pramanix in general, accusing her essentially of dragging on Silverash's coattails and being a blood-sucking relative and unlikable, unpopular character who wouldn't even be remembered if not for him. Apparently, they took offense both at the siblings being connected in the collab, the mascots, and avatars, and also because of how it foreshadowed the actual event banner, and again, seemed to believe her appearance and her story connection to him was some kind of detriment, possibly because at the time, she stood at odds with him in the story and criticized him.
(Chuxue, Hatsuyuki, and First Snow is Pramanix; Yin Er and Yinhui is Silverash; Yaxin is Cliffheart.)
Part 5: Actual Release, and Actual 9/11
This is the part that most people have probably heard about: the absolute meltdown by the fans, so vocal and prominent that CN Infodump on Twitter posted about it.
Subsequently, the news reached Reddit, as well, where much conversation was had, with comments surpassing 500. (I think this is the first time I've seen a thread on r/arknights hit over 300 comments.)
Here's a few comments I happened to have saved from Weibo. As above, people were not happy to discover that SA2 was indeed a Vanguard.
It's here that I must note that the "Silverash fans" I've been referring to throughout this post were not mere casual fans, but rather, yumejoshi: for those unfamiliar with the term, it translates literally to "dream girls", and refers to those fans who fantasize about their favorite character in a ship with themselves. Usually, this entails using the Doctor as their proxy as a self-insert, while more rarely, they will make personal "Doctor OCs", but the end result is still the same: at its core, it's still about shipping the character with themselves. (This is the "DL" mentioned above, short for "Doctor Love," AKA fanservice and fuel for the Doctor/Silverash ship.) As a result, they have a specific image and standard they hold Silverash to, and they become upset when the canon falls short of that. As a CN friend of mine told me, they want Silverash (or their preferred character) to "stand alone" "in beauty," isolated and severed from his background and connections to the other characters. Presumably this is because it makes him easier to fantasize about and more flexible to fit into whatever they mold they like. (This is also why they threw a fit back in the day about Silverash's summer skin: it was unacceptable to these people that Courier and Matterhorn were in the background; they impeded the yumes' fantasies, even though they were literally just carrying luggage. I speculate it's this reason that prevents Karlan Trio from appearing in each other's skins and E2s like the Darknights Trio do, as Karlan Trio has a pretty heavy marketing push as of The Rides to Lake Silberneherze and U Takes Terra.)
This is also part of the reason behind the desire for him to be a DPS: he would be the "star," rather than someone deployed to enable or support the "star" who is the main damage dealer, a sentiment that I saw on Weibo: SA2 didn't "deserve" to be someone merely deployed to make some DP and then retreated so someone else could take the stage. In their minds, this was not good enough for him, despite the fact that AK is a game that generally requires a team to clear stages and that as I said above, support units are more valuable.
In addition, the fact that Strategist Vanguard suits Silverash's character far more than his original Guard class barely entered the discussion. As The Kjerag Lore Person (tongue-in-cheek), I personally feel it's the perfect fit for him: aside from the title being apt for him, Silverash is not a fighter in lore. He's not capable of great feats of swordplay or powerful Arts; rather, his primary weapon is his intellect and his daring. He himself rarely fights personally, but is the chessmaster moving the other pieces on the board to fight for him. A Vanguard with relatively low DPS and DPH who enables other units to be deployed tactically fits him to a tee.
But the CN fans didn't really care about this. Here I must also note that this is a recurring theme among the Silverash yumejoshi: their image of him is often something that doesn't match up with his canonical lore, based on their impressions of him from launch (what I disparagingly refer to as "the sekuhara asshole CEO boyfriend" in more casual writing). One of the most popular SilverDoc artists (I won't name names as this post is not intended to target or bash any particular person) has admitted to flat-out not reading all of the Kjerag lore and stories, as it simply doesn't matter and interferes with that personal fantasy.
Hopefully, this explains just why they were so upset. It wasn't a matter of SA2's gameplay being considered lackluster, or something about him being horribly and drastically out of character, or some bit of his presentation being incongruous or inaccurate with his previous lore. No, it was simply that he didn't live up to or match the fantasies these fans had created about him.
Then came this NGA post, with the crude number analysis of the comments on the PV, which was also posted to reddit.
Aside from saying that they all desperately need to touch grass, after witnessing the repeated meltdowns over the three months leading up to the livestream, I can also add that I think the backlash was inevitable. There was so much hype and the expectations surrounding SA2 were so high that drama was going happen one way or another. This is primarily why I'm writing this, as I'm aware the information and statistics in the NGA thread was already shared here on Tumblr: the fact that this was all building up for three months. The fans were whipping each other and themselves into such a frenzy that the explosion was guaranteed. There was simply no way HG would have been able to make this portion of the fans happy unless SA2 was an operator who deleted the entire map a la Wis'adel, except even stronger. But this (thankfully) did not happen. Equally fortunately, HG did not listen to this frankly somewhat deranged subset of the fans and left SA2's kit unchanged, as I personally believe that capitulating to their frenzied demands would have been a grave misstep.
This is where this article will have to conclude, as because as I am trying to avoid story spoilers for Retracing Our Steps, I have refrained from digging too deeply on Weibo post-release, so I don't how their reception or reaction to SA2 and his impact on the meta was, nor if the fans eventually settled down with no other choice and accepted it, or uninstalled the game in their rage. I suspect the former, though I don't think it would be any great loss if these bitter people moved on to another game and target.
