I bought The Weeping Swan: Ten Days of the City’s Fall (哀鸿：城破十日记) pretty much on release, off the goodwill and trust earned by the developer’s previous game. For various reasons I didn’t get around to actually playing it right away. Honestly, back when I first learned the game was going to be about the “ten days of the Yangzhou massacre,” I already expected it to catch all kinds of flak after launch. There was the Mingmo: Yu Xu Zhi Yu precedent, after all. The devs couldn’t possibly have been unaware of how players, netizens, and the general舆论 would react. And under the internet’s black-and-white pressure of “if you’re not fully against it, you’re fully for it,” I figured this game wouldn’t be some totally one-sided, extremist work either — and that it would inevitably get dragged through the mud, get its rhythm hijacked, maybe even get a few clipped phrases blown up and nailed to the pillory. All of that was plausible. Of course, the devs — especially the producer-slash-writer — are smart enough to understand that risk. Choosing to keep making this game anyway means they’d prepared for it. Plainly: you touch this subject, you eat this traffic, you take on the huge risk. And it blew up after launch, just like I thought. But the direction of the explosion wasn’t what I expected. The final conclusion was still the classic “labeling” and “wrong politics” routine, but the trigger wasn’t mainly historical sensitivity or nationalist sentiment — it was arguments about “good girls” and “bad girls,” that vaguely mala-flavored stuff. That caught me off guard, and probably caught the producer off guard too.