Lux

You’re framing this as pure legal compliance, but the order was backwards. First came the wave of anger over resources being “wasted” on a new character, existing LIs lacking content, and claims that Valko was made for a Western audience, “looked gay,” was ugly, or should just BE DELETED. **Only after that did it get pushed to institutions** and classified officially. It didn’t happen in a vacuum — it came after public pressure, and an institutional ruling isn’t above criticism just because it’s institutional. "what's wrong with inviting the wolf in?" is just a fun word play, cuz he's.. a werewolf. not that deep. y'all make it deep cuz you want it to be a problem. just the classic danger/desire, hunter/hunted trope + again, he's literally a werewolf. he asks her to let him in, and the preview clearly shows they already know each other.. by that logic let's ban all action movies cuz they contain some problematic acts too. like come on, bro just was on her balcony like countless romance movies before. where was all this energy to the other LIs actions? On 731 — we all agree the company could've handled it better. But again that content already existed in the game before this, and was linked to Xavier. The reference itself was never mocking and if anything, this could've been a little remark to raise awareness and educate people. But instead it became a weapon in a completely different fight.. y’all knew what would happen once it reached higher authorities. We know the CN reaction and demand for the story was legit, 100% — tbh it's also why I slowed down my spending lately. The story is short enough as it is, so the lack of updates bothered me and a lot of others too. But companies have teams for everything — working on Valko doesn't mean resources got pulled from writing the main story; if anything, he was there to push it forward. You're saying he came out of nowhere, but a lot of us don't feel that at all — the signs were there. the missing color (yellow/amber) and "coming soon" all over the game. I want to believe the “no more LIs” promise (according to your words) was made with the sixth already being part of the original plan.. I think at least 6 LIs were always obvious to most of us. And again, you keep bringing up the "romanticizing breaking in" thing... that's just sticking to a fake narrative to fuel CN anger at the company. that whole argument is weak. y'all burning it all down because they announced Valko and things didn't go your way. I honestly can’t tell anymore who actually cares about the game and who just wants to see it burn. I agree we shouldn't generalize a whole community because of a minority. some CN girlies are cutie patooties :3 but sometimes when minority is actually big, and there’s no clear condemnation of insulting comments we saw toward global players or CN players, it’s hard to keep calling it small. And girl, please don’t make me defend a billion-dollar company — but as someone who plays like 6 Chinese gacha games, the localization was kinda normal. renaming a holiday or cutting one cultural detail is a standard thing, not deliberate erasure. It’s an otome game, and they do keep adding Chinese elements for us: outfits, events, Chinese artists, and art. I don’t get why they became the scapegoat, like they’re supposed to be the official cultural ambassadors of China for gaming. I think the game has done a great job bringing Chinese culture, art, and fandom dedication to light, to the point some of us are planning trips to China. We’re also amazed at how far CN girlies go for the LIs’ birthdays — that’s a level of love we can only admire from a distance. You're saying they wanted to pit us against each other, but if that were true, they would've just said the CN audience didn't respond well to Valko and they had to pull back.. that way the fire would've been 50/50. If the goal really was to divide us, the logical move would've been transparency, not hiding it. I'm sorry, but y'all used to protest solving everything — and it genuinely solves a lot and we thank you for that, and some global VIPs even joined you a couple of times.. But this time, in our eyes, you went way out of proportion: the demand to remove Valko, the “romanticizing breaking in” take, and tying a line about a pot to an unrelated murder case — when it was clearly just connected to the kitchen update added to the house.. cuz if we dig hard enough, we can link any random case to any story in any situation; that’s just life. And like someone said in the comments — by pulling the government and all kinds of institutions into this, you chose the nuclear option, and you chose it for everyone.

I hear you, and I'm going to answer every point because you clearly put thought into this and deserve a real response. First — Valko was not removed because players didn't like his design. Valko's own promotional content contained a scene where he breaks into a woman's home at night while she lives alone, and says 'what's wrong with inviting the wolf in?' A Chinese prosecutor's office formally characterized this as romanticizing illegal entry into a private residence — a crime carrying up to three years imprisonment under Chinese law. The national women's federation's official newspaper called it a direct threat to women's safety and demanded investigation and legal punishment. The legal system's official newspaper said it crossed a legal red line. These are not player opinions — these are institutional determinations with legal authority. The character wasn't cancelled because CN players threw a tantrum. He was cancelled because his own content was formally classified as promoting illegal behavior and endangering women's safety. This is a legal compliance issue, not an aesthetic preference. On top of that, the 731 reference in the game's human experimentation record — which had been reported to customer service by multiple players long before this crisis and was ignored — was identified by state media and a prosecutor's office as content that harms national sentiment and violates public morality regulations. The company's response of 'it's a random number' was publicly rejected by six state media systems and a national think tank. Second — you're right that Valko himself had nothing to do with 731. Nobody claimed he did. These are two separate issues that exploded at the same time because the Valko controversy triggered a community-wide audit of the entire game. The company had years to quietly fix the 731 content. Players told them about it. They chose to leave it in. Third — you ask why CN players didn't fight to keep Valko. Because for most CN players, the issue was never about one character. It was about a company that went 500 days without updating the main story, couldn't deliver for five existing characters, broke an explicit promise of no new love interests, and then added a sixth whose own promotional material romanticized breaking into a woman's home. Demanding that he stay would have meant accepting both the broken resource model and content that legal authorities had already flagged as problematic. Fourth — the CN players who liked Valko. You're right that they were caught in the crossfire, and that isn't fair. But the people who mistreated them are individuals, not a movement. Just as I won't judge all global players by the ones calling us racist, I'd ask you not to judge all CN players by the ones who attacked Valko fans. Fifth — the developers. Yes, real people worked on him. Their work was wasted. That's a tragedy, and the blame falls entirely on the executives who approved a character launch with content that legal authorities would later classify as promoting illegal behavior. Not on the players who spent six days warning them while they responded with 'look at his shiny eyes.' Sixth — localization. What happened with Love and Deepspace is not normal localization. Renaming Chinese New Year's Eve while keeping Christmas. Erasing Chinese text from animations and re-drawing entire scenes to remove Chinese characters. Removing Chinese food from every date menu — four menus, zero Chinese dishes, in a game made by a Chinese company. Scrubbing calligraphy from character art. Posting a government collaboration promoting Chinese sports culture three times domestically and zero times internationally. A provincial party newspaper — the same level as a state governor's official press — just published an editorial calling this 'diluting Chinese elements and blurring cultural identity.' Normal localization adapts content for local audiences. This systematically erased the game's origin. There is a difference. Seventh — you say global players are 40% of revenue and not irrelevant. You're right. Which is exactly why the company owed you the same honesty it owed us — and gave you a different story instead. The English apology said 'we weren't ready to introduce Valko.' The Chinese apology acknowledged broken promises, failed content delivery, and systemic trust collapse. Same decision, two different explanations, designed so you'd blame us instead of them. That's not respect. That's manipulation. Last — you say this should be company versus players, not CN versus global. I agree completely. But the path to unity isn't asking CN players to defend content that our own legal system has classified as problematic. It's both sides recognizing that the company engineered this conflict — by telling us different stories, stripping your version of cultural context, and making sure you'd never have the information needed to understand our concerns. You want us to help you push back? We already are. Every demand we've made — for accountability, for transparency, for better content standards — benefits you too. The company that lied to us is the same company that lied to you. Start there.

lol. they keep saying “blame the company, not CN players,” but CN players were the ones who escalated this to the point where state media and government-linked bodies got involved. you cannot create that pressure, celebrate the result, mock the players who were hurt and then claim you had no responsibility for the outcome.

@llux4_ @JayShan0506 Did you not understand a word of what she wrote? This has escalated to the Chinese government... No amount of player backlash is going to undo that

I'm a CN player. I'm a Caleb stan. And I'm done being polite about this. You don't get to call an entire player base racist while knowing absolutely nothing about what actually happened. So sit down and read. CN players didn't wake up one morning and decide to cancel a character because of his skin color. We spent 500+ days waiting for main story updates that never came. We watched the company fail to deliver content for five existing characters while announcing a sixth — breaking an explicit promise of "no new love interests." In 2025, Love and Deepspace ranked #1 on China's largest consumer complaint platform with 3,406 cases about unequal resource distribution. This rage was years in the making. Valko was the last straw, not the cause. Then we found a drug experimentation record inside the game numbered 0731. If that means nothing to you, that's your ignorance, not our problem. Unit 731 was a Japanese military program that conducted live human experiments — vivisections, biological warfare, forced infections — on thousands of Chinese civilians and POWs during WWII. The in-game record included the name 严颂, a phonetic match to Japanese researchers from the unit, within a full narrative of injection protocols, endurance testing, and forced mental control. Players reported this through customer service when it first launched. It was ignored. The company later called it "a random placeholder number." Six state media systems, a national think tank, and a prosecutor's office publicly called that a lie. Now let me tell you why you had no idea about any of this. The company deliberately gutted every trace of Chinese identity from your version of the game. Chinese New Year's Eve was deleted from the script. The Lantern Festival greeting was removed across every language version — Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean — while the holiday imagery was kept, proving it was a deliberate directive, not a translation choice. Mid-Autumn Festival was renamed to a fictional name. Christmas and Halloween? Kept their real names. Chinese text was manually redrawn out of cutscene animations. Chinese food was erased from date scenes — four date menus, zero Chinese dishes, in a game made by a Chinese company. A calligraphy illustration had its Chinese characters scrubbed for international release. A government-backed collaboration promoting Chinese sports culture at the Asian Winter Games was posted three times domestically and zero times on any international channel. You were handed a product that was systematically stripped of its origin. And now you have the audacity to tell us our concerns don't matter — while consuming a game built on Chinese players' money and Chinese creators' labor. The apology letter you received was also different from ours. Your version said "we weren't ready to introduce Valko." Our version acknowledged broken promises, failed content delivery, and systemic trust collapse. Same company, same decision, two completely different explanations — designed so that you'd blame us instead of them. And it worked. Here you are, calling us racist, while the company that lied to both of us watches from the sidelines. And let me be absolutely clear about where things stand right now. This is no longer a player dispute. This is no longer about your feelings or ours. The Chinese government has taken notice. As of today, state media outlets at every level — from central party organs to provincial papers, from the national women's federation to the legal system — have published critical coverage demanding accountability. A prosecutor's office has issued a formal legal characterization of the game's content as violating regulations on public morality and national sentiment. State media are calling for the company to undergo "fundamental reform." Whether this company can survive what comes next is an open question. Your anger in our comment sections changes nothing. The character was not cancelled because of tweets or Reddit threads. It was cancelled because institutional power stepped in. And that same institutional power is still escalating, not retreating. You are screaming at the wrong people about a situation you fundamentally do not control and do not understand. So no. We are not "xenophobic" for refusing to let a company monetize our historical trauma. We are not throwing "toddler tantrums" for demanding accountability after 500 days of broken promises. And we are certainly not going to apologize for defending a position that our own government, our own judiciary, and our own national media have now publicly endorsed. You want to be angry? Be angry at the company that decided you didn't deserve the truth. Or don't. But understand this: your ignorance was manufactured, your outrage was engineered, and the people you're defending don't even respect you enough to tell you the same story they told us. One last thing. Before you reply, ask yourself whether you can dispute a single fact in this post — not with feelings, not with "well I don't care about 731," not with "China is racist" — but with a single verifiable fact that proves anything I said is wrong. If you can't, then you don't have a counterargument. You have a reaction. And reactions don't change reality. Every claim above is backed by public data, official media coverage, in-game evidence, and documented company behavior. If you choose to ignore all of it because it's easier to blame Chinese players than to confront what this company did to all of us, that's your choice. But don't mistake your comfort for the truth.