Strinova Deletes Shota Character at 10:30 PM via Fanbook-Only Post — Leaked DMs Point to Internal Female Staff Pressure, Community Gender War Erupts

At 10:30 PM, a quiet post dropped exclusively on Fanbook — Strinova's in-house community platform — confirming something that instantly set the playerbase ablaze: the shota character Julian was getting axed. No Bilibili announcement. No Weibo heads-up. Just the most controversial decision of the quarter, buried in the least-visible corner at the deadest hour. Galaxy brain PR move, truly.

The spark that lit this fire was a leaked screenshot of alleged internal team chats, circulating wildly across the community. The conversation supposedly reveals the dev team's attitude toward the male character Julian. From what the leak suggests, a faction of female players had been pressuring the development team to remove all male characters from the game, and the devs allegedly caved.

The moment the announcement went live, the NGA thread became an all-out warzone. Male players erupted, calling this the dev team's "hidden agenda" (私货, sīhuò) — a personal ideological project pushed top-down with zero regard for community feedback. One of the most upvoted comments cut straight to the bone: "So it really IS the dev team's personal agenda? They just don't give a damn about what players think?"

The sheer absurdity of deleting a character over identity politics also drew heavy fire. One user sarcastically shot back: "Why delete him? Are female players' feelings being ignored? Why not just delete all the female characters while you're at it?" Another quipped, "Since when do you need to remove character assets version by version?" — implying the real issue isn't technical, it's ideological.

Some players floated a more intriguing theory: Julian's lore involves him being coded as a terrorist (kbfz, short for 恐怖分子). One commenter speculated, "What if this design got the attention of someone they really can't afford to piss off?" — hinting that the deletion might not be purely community-driven, but potentially linked to content censorship sensitivities.

What really spooked the community, though, was this warning: "They nuked the baby boy, and who knows what vengeful xxn (radical feminist) planners have in store next." In Chinese gaming slang, "xxn" (小仙女, literally "little fairy") refers to aggressive female gamers who push for censorship of content catering to male audiences. The poster warned that this capitulation was only the beginning — more retaliatory edits to male-oriented content could follow. Another commenter echoed this: "Julian's gone, but the xxn aren't. Future content needs writer credits. FGO does it, it's technically trivial." Players are now demanding writer attribution so they know exactly who to hold accountable.

Other commenters chose pure entertainment mode over outrage. "The sisters just got a cyber-abortion" — using Chinese internet slang to mock the deletion as a kind of virtual "unpersoning." "Don't delete him, I need my daily dose of drama," wrote another, treating the whole debacle as electronic popcorn. Floor 18 went full copypasta, spamming "Brothers ceasefire, the sun is out!" ten times in a row — a meme borrowed from a legendary gaming community moment, used here to break the tension with absurdist humor.

One detail that particularly irked players: why wasn't this posted on Bilibili? Bilibili is one of Strinova's largest player platforms, while Fanbook is a smaller, self-hosted community with a noticeably more female-leaning user base. Dropping a bombshell like this on Fanbook instead of Bilibili was widely read as "too scared to face the mainstream audience."

Players also flagged other lingering grievances — like a long-standing bug with Kanami's dormitory skin nicknamed "lunch meat" that still hasn't been fixed. The implication was damning: the dev team moves at lightning speed when it comes to ideological capitulation, but drags its feet on actual bugs and content issues players care about.

As of writing, Strinova's official team has made zero announcements on Bilibili, Weibo, or any mainstream platform, nor have they responded to the leaked chat screenshots. Whether the character deletion will impact future version plans, or whether other male characters face the chopping block next, remains anyone's guess. The only certainty? The community is completely fractured, and that sneaky late-night Fanbook post did absolutely nothing to put out the fire.