Fail Love and Deepspace · 2026
The wolf at the balcony window
What happened
On 28 June 2026 the version 6.0 preview stream of the otome game Love and Deepspace introduced a new wolf-coded love interest, Valko (敖尹), with the line 引狼入室有什么不好 — 'what's wrong with letting a wolf into the house?' The promo showed him climbing a balcony at night into the bedroom of a woman living alone. The character was pulled within days; petitions to restore him passed 300,000 signatures. On 8 July the Ministry of Public Security's news outlet published a piece saying that dressing up intrusion does not work in games either, and noted that illegal entry into a residence carries up to three years under Chinese criminal law. Papergames withdrew from Bilibili World 2026 the same day, and revenue fell sharply after the cancellation.
What went wrong
引狼入室 is not a neutral idiom. It means bringing disaster on yourself by trusting the wrong person, and in practice it is the phrase used to tell a woman that what happened to her was her own fault. Turning it into a flirt put victim-blaming and a night-time break-in in the same sentence — in a market where the safety of women living alone is an active public-safety topic, not a mood.
The rule
In China a slogan that a regulator can describe as glamourising a criminal act stops being a tone problem and becomes a licensing problem. The state can join the conversation, and once it does the fandom's opinion no longer decides the outcome.
Takeaway
Before you build a campaign on an idiom, write out the literal scene it describes in one plain sentence. If that sentence names an offence, the wordplay is not yours to make.
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