01. Deep Space
dating three men and fighting aliens, neiyu in 2025, how to Go On
Hi there. Welcome to Active Faults.
I started the year the way I start most years: back at home, knocked down by some local virus that my anglicised immune system determined to be exotic and hostile, over-fed by my parents, ignoring a full-blown identity crisis. Winters in Beijing regress me into a childlike state, largely housebound by the snowless cold and yet strangely unsettled, on edge. In a petulant denial of my disconnection from my roots, I try to blend in, to act the part, to play catch-up with every trend and circulating meme.
I doom scrolled a lot, much to my dismay. My cousin sent me this viral video of Love and Deepspace (恋与深空), the world and China’s first 3D otome game that quite literally changed the game. It has repeatedly knocked down Honor of Kings as well as Douyin, charting No.1 in the application stores. Currently, its daily active user count stands at 3.1 million. I was flabbergasted. I downloaded it.
Today, let me tell you how I’m dating three men while fighting aliens in space, and what that tells me about Chinese entertainment in 2025.
I’ve written about otome games before. The phenomenon is not new and the concept of dating simulation has been simple. The main controller, “主控”, role-plays a female character in a fictional world and establishes romantic relationships with a set of male love interests. Back in 2017, the predecessor of Deepspace, Mr Love: Queen’s Choice (恋与制作人), had already made headlines, self-touted by parent company Paper Games (叠纸游戏) as China’s first otome milestone. I remember jumping on the bandwagon and playing for a little while before the novelty wore out. I was let down by its insipid storyline and flat charaterisations.
That’s no longer the case. Deepspace is on another level. You’ll have to excuse the pun, but I was not familiar with Paper’s game. The narrative is set in the future, sometime in the Lord’s Year of 2048, after an unexpected opening of a Deepspace Tunnel in 2034 that led to the landing of millions of Wanderers, extraterrestrial beings that prey on humans. With years of training under my belt, “I” learnt to master my innate superpowers and became a Deepspace Hunter, a protector of my city. In the first chapter of the game, I encounter a friend, another female Hunter and my boss, a sharp-witted woman heading Operations with a killer bob. My first day on the job, I rescue one of my love interests, a flawless silver-haired man called Shen Xinghui.
From the get-go, you’d see how players of Deepspace are told that we’re strong heroines around whom everything revolves. In the alternate, gynocentrist reality it constructs, all men exist in relation to the player-protagonist. Besides the love interests, there are barely any men with relevance. It promises us dominance.
As the plot thickens, I commit to my career, investigate criminal activities and exterminate the monsters wreaking havoc. My suitors assist me in battles. I can form a convoy of them using battle cards, which are basically photocards with buffs. The more narrative chapters and missions you complete, the more Raffle Tickets you secure, using which you can randomly draw more cards.
Here’s the twist. Battle cards are also called Memory Cards (思念). The rarer, four and five-star cards would “unlock memories”, meaning a video snippet of an anachronistic, standalone romantic happening. It’s meant to be fully immersive, shot from the perspective of the player, extremely up close and realistic. The steamiest, smuttiest interactions are the rarest to draw.
This is the video I initially saw, a screen recording of a renowned five-star Memory Card of Shen Xinghui that features…basically a sex scene with the protagonist.
These recordings average about 300K likes on Douyin. It is technically unlawful to disseminate, since it is an 18+ game and these cards belong “exclusively” to those lucky enough to draw them. But I mean…Paper Games can’t not let this happen. This is organic marketing they didn’t have to pay for, gagging and attracting especially non-players who write comments like “where am I? Is this even China? I must be on foreign soil because of how racy this is.”
Even if their best-selling content is constantly leaked, Deepspace is spoilers-proof. It has to be personally experienced. Backed by facial analysis technology, players can import self-portraits and create an avatar with a striking resemblance, only prettier and skinnier and paler. If you permit access to your microphone, you can (pay to) talk to the men and have them respond accordingly. They’d learn to recognise your voice and break down your speech. What you end up moulding is a digital doppleganger. In those unlocked memories, you’ve paid for your own sexual pleasure. It’s not simply a game with a first-person POV: you are in it.
Boundaries then blur. My second suitor is my heart surgeon who lectures me about my work-life balance. We face time each other amidst our hustler schedules, being the progressive duo that we are. On Deepspace, you can pretend to text, “face time”, post on your “Wechat Moments” and browse “news articles” on a pseudo-smartphone interface. You go on fake claw-machine dates and take “life four cut” with a selected lover.
My third suitor, a rich painter with golden retriever energy is particularly shy. You touch him on your home screen and he blushes. You can blow air into the microphone and watch their hair flutter.
Interactions add to “亲密度”, Intimacy Level, which then translates to more opportunities to flirt. The aim is to mimic a real-life relationship as closely as possible, but with all the risks averted, all mishaps removed. Level 14 unlocks a phone call from him. Level 15 unlocks the heart rate detector function to see how well he’s reacting to your presence. Euphoria is neatly quantified and regimented, a prescribed dosage, unless you pay to level up and peek ahead. All outcomes are anticipated, because you can rewind, tap a different (still scripted) text to send and see what he says. Tease out all the possibilities except it’s all roses and rainbows and happily ever after. No one ghosts you, love bombs you, or leaves you on read. No more gaslighting, PUA, emotional extortion, NPD and BPD and guilt-tripping.
And because sex itself is demonised in the modern psyche, it too shall be avoided. None of the cards portray or insinuate penetrative intercourse. Deepspace is all sensual foreplay, porn without the pornographic. Of course there’s the law. But I’d also argue that no player wants to actually see the home run. Sex-negative discourses run too deep among this generation. It entails dangers, complications, letdowns, discomfort, diseases—things young women would associate with a real man. Besides, the most erotic portion of a body is always “where the garment gapes”. The flash of the skin itself is what seduces: the staging of appearance-as-disappearance. I wonder what Roland Barthes would say about otome because it is precisely about “desiring my desire”, and loving a being that is love’s tool.
So, you develop parasocial relationships with a misconception of relationships. After a certain level of intimacy, suitors are at your beckon and call, offering dinner recommendations, virtual co-study sessions, and a heart-warming reminder of your period, because Deepspace can help you track your menstrual cycle. TikTok doesn’t know half as much. Paper Games is possibly in possession of 50 million women’s biometric, telecommunication and reproductive data. 50 million identities and bodies. These men should seep into your daily routines, embed themselves in the depths of your consciousness. Sounds familiar?
Otome players form camps and fanquanise the community, while fans rely on otome as an emotional outlet when real-life idols are too out of reach. The two groups blend into a coherent whole. When Deepspace released merch in partnership with Lawson the convenience store chain, players with different biases compete like idol fans would. Every camp tried to achieve the highest “秒切”, the amount of sales within the first second of merch release, which is a common fanquan benchmark.
Qin Che, the fourth love interest, frequently trends on Weibo like any other celebrity. He’s the villain in the bunch and by far the most widely loved. Sporting crimson eyes and leather, Qin is the leader of an underground organisation whose stone-cold world is enlivened by the protagonist. Their narrative arc reads theatrical like a Colleen Hoover adaptation. The fifth and the last suitor (so far) is a non-biological brother. Xia Yizhou is a fellow adoptee, the tender and caring father figure “I” tragically lost in Chapter 4 of the game. He makes a mysterious and exhilarating return in the latest updates, having gone through some kind of Winter Soldier-esque gothification, and is now a ruthless space army general. If you want to understand his appeal, just refer to my piece on Meng Yanchen. The rise in his popularity makes perfect sense. Together, their characterisations hit all the kinks, bull’s eye. All of them have birthday cafes, support campaigns, super topics, fan accounts. Their houses will never fall.
By August 2024, Deepspace’s total revenue reached 200 million dollars, 7 months after launch. On Douyin and Xiaohongshu you see players spending as much as 7-10K RMB every month, purchasing more gems to exchange for Raffle Tickets and hence better chances at card-drawing. Or a half-naked look of a love interest. Anything. Rumour has it that the entirety of Paper Games is propped up by Deepspace players. One Deepspace user could fund several R&D teams of their upcoming games.
Currently, the community is organising a no-spending boycott (停氪维权) to pressure Paper Games into accepting their demands. Warring fans agreed on a temporary ceasefire. They’re joining forces in hopes that Paper would treat their biases fairly: have an equal amount of cards, equal screentime and promotions and hot searches, equal cuteness and hotness and clingyness in texts and phone calls and plotline animations. Qin Che fans are spearheading the movement because they believe they’re especially wronged. According to them, a lot of Qin Che content are delayed, sidelined and withheld to “骗氪”, extort them into spending. Here’s a Weibo post calling everyone into action:
I’m not asking everyone to stop spending their money and participate in the rights-defending protests, but can you not make things worse? It’s precisely because people like this [image of a fan saying they want to buy new clothes for their man] that rights-defending gets so difficult. Billions of revenue in 2024 and you think the officials would continue to ignore us if we stop contributing to their profit-making? [We have to keep trying because] this won’t be done in a day.
They proceed to quote Lu Xun, one of the most notable writer-activist in contemporary China.
Another Qin Che fan posts a series of screenshots from Twitter, demonstrating that they have allies overseas. Foreign Deepspace players write that “CN girlies need our support and they’re boycotting by not buying passes…I think we should do that too.”
In my six days of playing Deepspace, I’ve seen people gain power from consumption, and then from the refusal to consume. I and my alter ego are bewildered as to our —— the Woman’s place—— on the food chain. I have to earn the men’s affection with my time and effort, but “I” treat them like puppets and play with their feelings and never commit. I pay for them to have almost-sex with “me”, but I get to do that to everyone, any time. Everything is a lie and everything still happens at my pace, my choosing. I’m not there. I’m in command. I’m consumed. I’m girlbossing.
This is how neiyu will feel like from now on. Bewildering, cacophonic, divisive, removed from reality. An onlooker is a King and a Slave. First week of 2025, Weibo was taken over by a class war incited by the actor Li Mingde (李明德). While filming for a drama 三人行, Li claimed that he was mistreated as a “corporate slave” Z-lister by the crew and his fellow cast mates. He was smart enough to co-opt popular discontent against the ruling class, represented by the privileged A-listers and the entertainment-tech complexes. He wrote a series of posts using terms like 资本 and 打工人 (the average Worker) and even evoking “the spirit of the Great Leader” (Mao) in his noble “proletariat” resistance. When he started to stream on Douyin, millions of viewers rushed in to make a donation. The spirit resonated with many. He kept saying that he didn’t need the money, but wouldn’t turn off the gift-giving option on his end. Backlash ensued and he was then debunked as a “fake working class” wearing Balenciagas, weaponising the commoner’s sympathies. More criticism on “208” and entitled entertainers incited. It was insane to witness.
A few days ago, another small-time influencer @黄毛毛111 claimed that the reality host Zhang Dada violently assaulted her after a disagreement at work. Her statement is similarly tactful, positioning herself as a whistleblower of neiyu’s “dark side” and a representative of the hardworking masses. Other industry insiders chip in stories of Zhang’s abusive behaviour on set. Public outrage. It works.
People need media and entertainment to be psychedelic or aggravating. Our feelings have to go somewhere: splurging on five perfectly crafted cybertrons or lashing out at an Enemy. Deceive me and tell me that everything will be just as good as I planned. Or let’s burn together. Let’s bully toxic couples who won’t divorce.
The 2024 Danmu of the Year on Bilibili is the word “receive” (接), typed on screen a whopping 5.76 million times, because people use it nowadays as another word for wish, i.e. receive something they want. Good grades, offers, money, love, health, concert tickets, money, money, money. The Raffle Tickets in Deepspace are called Wishes. People want dopamine and certainty at the lowest possible cost.
It’s why I tend to slip back into an idle, mind-numbing stupor when I’m back home. I scroll. I browse on Taobao and face-scrunch at the popular clothing items that will make me look hot and pure and sweet and perfect, especially to my boyfriend——I must have one. Everyone on your phone screen is perfect and hard-working and rich and crazy and dying.
I’m bored and exhausted from it. If I get out of the house, I find myself in a twenty-million-people city and there’s not much to do outside of the shopping malls that no one seriously shops at. Three floors of bustling restaurants on the top and a basement full of cutesy knick-knacks and merch and photocards and pop-mart figurines and blind boxes and bakeries and milk tea shops. An empty void in the middle. People hollow out the building like an hourglass without the sand.
The ennui and anxiety turn everyone into an antsy escapist seeking pick-me-ups. I picked up crocheting and made a birthday cake for my mum. I tried snowboarding for the first time and I was surprisingly good at it. I’m learning Italian using Korean on Duolingo, meaning I’m using my fourth language to learn a fifth. I don’t know how I should write about a culture and society that no longer receives content properly. I don’t know how I can write about it when I hate it myself.
Hearing of Active Faults, more than a year ago by now, has been transformative for the direction in which I want to take my studies. Every episode honestly feels full of wisdom somehow, and I continuously wonder what I could possibly do to deepen my understanding of fan cultures.. Anyway, I’m very grateful to read all of these insights, and of course I hope they never stop coming. That said, I don’t know what to do if doing this becomes too stressful, or the drive just isn’t there sometimes. Please take care.