Silver Palace Fans Can't Agree Who the Waifus Are For. Then Came the AI-Ad Fight.
Yuri fans, male-lead supporters and ML enjoyers want different things from Silver Palace. Suspected AI ads added a separate marketing headache.
Silver Palace gave the female Detective and Red Rose enough chemistry to get yuri fans invested. Male-lead supporters wanted their turn. ML enjoyers started arguing about who all that affection was actually for. Then suspected AI ads handed the marketing a completely different problem. The characters were flirting; the audience was negotiating terms.
These are separate controversies. The shipping fight didn’t cause the AI accusations, and the ads don’t explain anyone’s romance preferences. What connects them is the question players keep throwing back at Silver Palace: who exactly is this pitch supposed to win over?
Yuri fans saw the chemistry. ML fans saw the protagonist.
The Detective and Red Rose’s intimate presentation landed with yuri enjoyers. Fans celebrated their dance, compared the pairing with other female duos and wanted more. A scene doesn’t need to come with a relationship certificate to get shippers moving.
Male-lead supporters had a different complaint. They wanted the male Detective to matter in the romantic-looking marketing, too. Enthusiasm for the female lead wasn’t the problem for everyone; the perceived imbalance was. Meanwhile, players delighted to see a female protagonist receiving that attention weren’t lining up to apologize for enjoying it.
Then came the ML argument. Master Love expectations center affection on the player character. From that perspective, a woman flirting with the female Detective can still fit the same self-insert fantasy a male protagonist would deliver. Yuri fans can enjoy the pairing for its chemistry while ML fans focus on being the person receiving the attention.
The September 14 yuribait argument exposes the split. Critics object to the female-focused presentation; others are comfortable with protagonist-centered intimacy but draw a harder line at shipping between recruitable characters. Everyone is looking at the same flirtation and reading a different contract.
The audience labels got messy in Chinese, too
Taiwan’s PTT had its own argument over the female-oriented label. Participants questioned why a game with conspicuous female fanservice was being sorted into that box, while others connected the label to yuri presentation and the female lead. Apparently, liking a woman in a hat is now a market-positioning exercise.
Mainland Chinese feedback doesn’t fit a tidy opposing camp either. On TapTap, a player asking for more female characters and yuri also rejects sexualized presentation. That combination makes perfect sense as a personal taste and absolute chaos for anyone trying to divide the audience into two neat teams.
None of this confirms a romance route. It does explain why Red Rose can attract enthusiastic shippers and suspicious audience gatekeepers with the same promotional moment. The chemistry is doing its job. The expectations attached to it are doing several other jobs at once.
And then the ads became another argument
October’s suspected AI-ad backlash introduced a different kind of disappointment. In the advertising discussion, critics complained about unnatural-looking motion and clips they felt made an anticipated game look cheap. Others weren’t bothered or questioned where responsibility belonged.
The sharpest complaint wasn’t even about proving which tool made the clips. Fans wanted the promotion to show the game they were interested in. Distinctive art, character chemistry and detective gameplay were already reasons to pay attention. They didn’t understand the appeal of advertising that seemed to undersell those strengths.
That is the connection, without pretending it is a conspiracy. The shipping dispute concerns what the marketing promises. The ad dispute concerns how convincingly it sells anything. One audience wants more of its preferred fantasy; another wants a better-looking introduction to the game.
Silver Palace’s marketing has managed to attract people who passionately disagree about what it should emphasize. That’s attention, certainly. The awkward part is that the fandom is now arguing over the target audience while the ads are being accused of missing it.