Papergames' brand-new otome game Love and Deepspace (恋与深空) hasn't even given players a chance to enjoy their fictional romance before serving up a piping hot scandal: players collectively dug up evidence that the game's Weibo super-topic (超话) moderator is highly suspected to be a fan of Xiao Zhan — colloquially known as a 'shrimp' (虾, xiā). For the otome gaming community, this is the nuclear option of taboos.
For context: 'shrimp' (虾) is the nickname for fans of Xiao Zhan (肖战, often abbreviated XZ), one of China's most polarizing celebrities. '皮下' (pí xià, literally 'under the skin') refers to the real person behind a social media account. So what happened here is that a suspected XZ fan was running the official super-topic for an otome game — with full power to delete posts and ban users. When the news broke and discussion threads started getting mass-deleted, the community went absolutely nuclear.
Players didn't just sit around fuming. With their discussion threads getting suppressed, they broke out the 'big character poster' (大字报) — essentially the internet version of old-school protest banners. Even more impressively, some players deliberately went to OTHER games' super-topics to spread the word, essentially going scorched-earth: 'If you won't give us justice, we'll make sure the whole internet knows about it.'
The comment section was equally fiery. One user coined the term 'otome shrimp' (乙虾) — a portmanteau of 'otome game' and 'shrimp fans' — perfectly capturing the absurdity. Another couldn't hold back: 'Who the hell still likes XZ?' Others were more analytical: 'Otome players' biggest taboo is being associated with real-life men. It's like your beloved 2D waifu getting linked to some no-name female celebrity — absolutely disgusting.'
The roots of this conflict go deep — all the way back to the infamous '227 Incident' of 2020, when XZ's fan army mass-reported AO3 and other fan fiction platforms, causing them to get firewalled in China. This earned them generational enemies in the fan fiction and otome communities. One commenter put it bluntly: 'Search 227 on Bilibili — that's a blood feud.' Since otome game players overlap heavily with the fan fiction community (同人女), the hostility toward XZ fans is practically genetic.
This isn't even the first time otome games have clashed with XZ fans. According to commenters, other major titles like Light and Night (光与夜之恋) and Ni Shui Han (逆水寒) both explicitly ban XZ fans from their super-topics. Light and Night reportedly had an incident where the official account drew a shrimp fan in a lottery giveaway — players protested so hard the prize was revoked. One user explained the dynamic: 'Female gamers overlap heavily with the fan fiction community, so the anti-XZ sentiment carries much more weight here.'
But the comments weren't all one-sided. Some users saw the whole thing as much ado about nothing: 'A toxic community game has a toxic moderator — what's shocking about that?' Even more spicy was a longer take arguing that the entire Chinese otome community essentially uses idol-fandom tactics on 2D characters: 'Unified protest templates, comment control, playing the victim, offline poster campaigns, Photoshopping death images onto fictional characters, comparing screentime and dialogue word counts across male leads... You really gonna tell me these people aren't doing stan culture?' It's a cutting observation that exposes how the otome community's own fandom practices mirror the very idol culture they claim to despise.
As of now, Papergames has yet to issue any official response. Is the super-topic moderator actually an XZ fan, or is this a false accusation? If it's confirmed, how will Papergames handle the fallout? This 'otome shrimp war' may be just getting started.
Four years may have passed since 227, and some may have forgotten that the internet has a long memory — but the otome community clearly hasn't. That score from the 227 Incident? It's far from settled.
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