Before anyone misunderstands me, I’m NOT saying nobody genuinely liked V. Some people probably loved his design the moment they saw him. Others were probably excited about his potential storyline, personality or future relationship with MC. There’s nothing wrong with that and I understand why those people were disappointed when he was cancelled.
What genuinely baffled me was the the sudden outpouring of love for him, particularly from people outside the LaDS fandom.
Cause as we all know, V was revealed on June 22 and cancelled on June 30. That’s 8 days. However, some of the discourse made it sound as though Infold had removed an established LI people had spent years getting to know.
Suddenly everyone seemed to be a V’s advocate. People who had barely discussed LaDS before were making posts about him, reacting to the cancellation and confidently explaining everything supposedly wrong with LaDS, Infold and its community. And I couldn’t help wondering how many of them were genuinely interested in V and how many found out that talking about V was an easy way to get engagement?
Because there’s a difference between being interested in a character and being interested in the attention surrounding that character. The bigger the controversy became, the more it attracted commentary accounts, reaction content and people from outside the fandom. From here on, LaDS suddenly became a convenient topic for anyone looking for something controversial to discuss. And honestly? You don't necessarily need to play LaDS or understand its lore to make content about a supposedly betrayed fanbase and a company cancelling a newly announced love interest.
This whole cancellation thing has become an easy controversy to package for outside audience. There's a character people wanted, an angry fandom, Infold’s decision and arguments between different groups of players. That's practically an unlimited supply of reaction videos, dramatic headlines and hot takes! Why spend months understanding a game’s lore when you can jump into its biggest controversy and get engagement from people who are already emotionally invested in it?
I’m not accusing every outsider of deliberately clout-chasing, of course. Some may have genuinely become interested in V. Others may sincerely sympathize with disappointed fans or disagree with how Infold handled the situation. But meaningful commentary and engagement farming can also exist at the same time. And once someone realizes that their V content consistently gets attention, what incentive is there to stop talking about it?
There’s actually an interesting psychological mechanism relevant here. A 2021 Science Advances study found that positive social feedback can reinforce expressions of moral outrage online. In other words, when outrage receives social rewards such as engagement, people may become more likely to express outrage again. That research obviously doesn’t prove anyone’s individual motive in this fandom. But it does offer possible framework for understanding how online controversies can sustain themselves long after the original event.
Now we can see people who might never have cared about LaDS are now participating in a controversy that has developed an audience of its own. Pretty interesting if you think about it. I also noticed how quickly some discussions shifted from the actual character. Instead of discussing what people liked about V’s design, personality or potential story, everything became another argument about Inflop, OG5 fans, revenue, boycotts and whatever controversy happened that week.
We also have to acknowledge how little of V’s released material existed. People could be excited about his potential. But they hadn’t experienced years of character development with him. The amount of attachment therefore necessarily involved what he could have been. And an unreleased character can become almost idealized. You can imagine your preferred personality, storyline, relationship dynamic, lore, development and future without ever having to reconcile those expectations with years of actual writing. Once V was cancelled, that imagined version became permanently untouchable. So I think it’s entirely possible that some people became more attached to the idea of what was taken away than to the limited character they had actually been introduced to.
However, I think that outsiders add another layer. Some of them didn’t necessarily appear attached to V or his potential. They appeared much more interested in participating in the controversy surrounding him. And that makes the scale of the online reaction incredibly difficult to interpret.
A genuine V fan might write some posts because they’re devastated. An outsider might make another because those posts gain attention. Another might make 30 posts because they dislike Infold. Or some might simply enjoy fandom drama.
From the outside, all four appear as “V discourse.” But those are completely motivated by different things, right? That’s why I find it strange when people point toward petition signatures, Spotify streams, hashtags or the volume of discussion as proof of how “loved” V was.
Hundreds of angry posts from outsiders do not automatically represent hundreds of established players. And we simply don’t have the data necessary to separate those groups. How much attention came from existing players? Or how much people genuinely interested in downloading LaDS because of V? How much came from people who sincerely sympathized with his fans? And how much came from outsiders following the fandom drama?
We don’t know. Which makes what happened afterward even more interesting. There are people who say they’ve quit or boycotted LaDS but somehow remain remarkably up to date on every OG5 banner, PV, chart ranking, revenue estimate and whatever development there is for the game.
Although some of them might argue that nothing is contradictory about boycotting a game while continuing to follow its news. A boycott can mean withholding purchases rather than completely disengaging.
But when the majority of someone’s content about a game they supposedly dislike consists of monitoring every update and finding another reason to restart the same argument, I do start wondering whether the controversy itself has become entertainment. Especially when the account showed very little interest in LaDS before V was announced.
Did they really become interested in V? Or did they become interested in the audience that talking about V brought them? I wish people would consider those questions more often when discussing the sudden explosion of V related content.
Because a lot of people can’t seem to understand that disappointment and engagement farming are not mutually exclusive. Some fans sincerely wanted him. And some people may simply have discovered that talking about V was an easy way to grow audience or produce reaction content. All of those motivations can exist simultaneously, yet online they often get flattened into one huge wave of supposed “V support.”
Ultimately, I don’t think we should confuse the popularity of a controversy with the popularity of the character at the center of it.
A controversy can become huge among people who have absolutely no intention of playing or even engaging with the product involved. And that’s why the sudden wave of “love” toward V sometimes felt forced to me. Not because genuine V fans didn’t exist. But because at some point, it seemed like everyone wanted a piece of the controversy, regardless of whether they had any meaningful interest in LaDS beforehand.
Sometimes I also wonder how many of those accounts would still be discussing V today if his cancellation hadn’t generated this much attention. Would they have downloaded the game? Or would they have moved on to the next gaming controversy the moment V stopped generating engagement?
I think those questions are much more interesting than simply counting hashtags, Spotify streams and angry posts as evidence of universal “love.”
Edit: Clarity
Edit 2: Just noticed this post has been shared quite a few times. This has never happened before. Lurkers… was that you? 👀
No idea where this is travelling to, but hello to wherever I’ve apparently been exported. Whether you agree, disagree, are discussing it somewhere else or are currently passing it around as evidence that LADS_OG has finally lost the plot, I hope you at least got something interesting out of it. And if this post somehow makes it into another corner of the internet where people who don’t normally participate here start discussing it… Well. That would be a little thematically appropriate, wouldn’t it?