A single new gacha character's name was enough to completely overrun a forum that had existed for over a decade for a romance magazine's fanbase — and that's exactly what happened after HoYoverse dropped a new character called "Sparkle" (花火) in Honkai: Star Rail version 2.0.
The setup is simple: a horde of Star Rail players searched "花火吧" (Sparkle Bar) on Baidu Tieba expecting to find their waifu's fan community. Instead, they stumbled upon the online home of readers of《花火》— a Chinese romance magazine launched back in 2007 that's still running today.
But when a hyped gacha character collides with a niche print magazine on the same platform, 'digital colonialism' is inevitable. Star Rail fans flooded the forum with character guides, fan art, and gacha pull flexes, completely drowning out the original readers' posts about the magazine.
As the original poster pointed out with a dry footnote: 'P.S. — 《花火》is still being published. Quite the survivor.' A print magazine stubbornly surviving the digital age is admirable — except its Tieba forum has already been conquered.
This kind of 'name collision colonization' has a long and storied history on Tieba. The comment section pointed out that the HuTao (胡桃) bar went through a three-way war between Genshin Impact HuTao, Princess Connect HuTao, and Touhou HuTao fans. The Nero (尼禄) bar stayed relatively peaceful but eventually 'couldn't take it anymore and banned all miHoYo-related content.' Even further back, the ToHeart bar got overrun by Korean idol fans.
But the real entertainment was the comment section's full-blown 'Chronicles of Tieba Colonialism' mega-thread. User '借半席明月' dropped a highlight reel of Tieba power struggles: the 'enduring patience' of the Ace (艾斯) bar, the 'colonial war' of the Big-Eared Tutu (大耳朵图图) bar, and the 'chain backstabbing' of the Berserk (剑风传奇) bar. Others chimed in with infamous Tieba trolls and griefers like 米线山 (Mixianshan) and 海拉鲁之剑 (Hyrule Sword).
User '半月乘风' posted a detailed exposé on how organized griefers like '海拉鲁之剑' operate: they systematically attack well-known forums by spamming low-quality posts, mass-reporting years-old resource and guide posts to get them deleted, seizing vacant bar owner positions, replacing the moderation team, and systematically purging original members until the forum is completely destroyed. His conclusion was brutal: 'These people have time, money, and organization. Most forum natives only have passion. And all of this is built on Baidu's official negligence — or rather, Baidu deliberately stoking user conflict and enabling these destructive forces.'
The previous bar owner of 花火吧 tried the diplomatic approach: letting magazine readers and game fans each do their own thing in the same forum. But NGA commenters called this 'hopelessly naive' — when one side vastly outnumbers and out-activities the other, 'peaceful coexistence' is just slow-motion displacement.
花火吧 is now in the process of re-electing its bar owner. The outcome will determine whether this forum becomes yet another Star Rail character subreddit or retains some shred of its original identity as a romance magazine community. But if Tieba's long history of 'colonial wars' is anything to go by, the prognosis doesn't look great for the OG residents.
评论 (0)
暂无评论，来说两句吧！ 🍉