Honkai: Star Rail's Aventurine Exposed as a Double-Dip: miHoYo Caught Selling ML AND BL Simultaneously, Community Erupts

How many audiences can you milk from a single gacha character? miHoYo's Honkai: Star Rail has the answer with Aventurine (砂金) — sell him as both a BL (Boys' Love) ship bait AND an ML (Master Love, i.e. romantically appealing to male players) waifu-alternative. A recent NGA post went viral when a player shared marketing screenshots implying that Aventurine, a character heavily pushed through male-male shipping dynamics, was simultaneously being marketed with suggestive ML undertones to attract straight male spenders.

The OP captioned the screenshots with a sardonic "How is Aventurine supposed to sell? miHoYo really knows what they're doing" — a mix of grudging respect and outright mockery. The two images told the whole story.

Comments erupted. One user nailed the core contradiction: "Isn't Aventurine supposed to be BL bait? Now they're doing suggestive ML stuff too? Trying to sell to both sides? Aren't the people buying into this worried about being the 'beard' (同妻, a woman unknowingly married to a gay man)?" This captures the fundamental tension — if a character is sold as BL, pivoting to ML feels like a betrayal of the original premise.

Another highly upvoted reply exposed miHoYo's recurring playbook: "Does this guy have CP (couple/ship) pairings too? It feels like miHoYo's characters are always being double-dipped — sold as both CP material and ML material." Someone replied, "You're absolutely right, and it's not just one character." The implication is clear: this isn't a one-off, it's a business model.

The irony hit harder when users pointed to a concurrent controversy: "Pair this with the fact that a female character's ML fan-made commercial got mobbed — how poetic." In other words, female character ML content gets attacked by the community, while official suggestive marketing for a male character sails through unchecked. The double standard didn't go unnoticed.

Not everyone was on the attack, though. Some defended Aventurine from a storytelling angle: "Writers really know how to build characters — I was physically repulsed by Aventurine in the 2.0 storyline, thought he rivaled Scaramouche in being insufferable, but after 2.1 I've made peace with him and even want to pull a bit. Also, the follow-up team comp is genuinely fun." But a rebuttal came fast: "After playing so many games, Aventurine's storyline does nothing for me. Scaramouche next door got the death penalty as far as I'm concerned."

Some players took direct aim at what they see as community management (社管, shè guǎn — a term for corporate-hired moderators who manipulate online discourse) interference: "CMs love pushing that scripted 'I was indifferent until I played the story and now I love it' BS. I was indifferent, played the story, and uninstalled the game. What garbage." The raw emotion in this reply resonated with players who felt manipulated by the marketing.

One commenter brought it all back to reality: "Let the revenue numbers do the talking — Aventurine is so ML-coded, surely he'll sell like crazy, right?" The sarcasm cuts deep, reducing the entire debate to the one metric that matters in gacha: banner revenue. And somewhere in the chaos, someone whispered the quiet truth — the follow-up combat team is genuinely fun. Poetic, in its own way.