Genshin Impact fans are now up in arms after a recent post on its official social media account said “Ganqing Impact”.
First, let us understand what Ganqing Impact means. According to a wiki, it is “the femslash ship between Ganyu and Keqing from the Genshin Impact fandom.” And to clarify what femslash is, it is derived from “female slash” refers to relationships between two female characters. Yes, in a romantic way. In this instance, it is Ganyu and Keqing supposedly in a romantic relationship. It is not a fact though, just fans fantasizing about them.
With that out of the way, the fandom war. Recently, the official Twitter account of Genshin Impact posted an image with the two girls skiing on a snowy slope together with Paimon. It seemed innocent enough, but the following reply was a bit shocking to the community as it was quite out of place. The reply was from the official account and said “Ganqing Impact?” After a few minutes, it got deleted with no explanation from miHoYo or the social media manager who was posting those Tweets. Then, the outrage began with two sides hurling insults and angry replies.
On one side, the fans who like the Ganqing pairing were enraged as to why the social media manager deleted the message. They speculate that person did not like LGBTQ or that miHoYo was embarrassed about it. On the other side were the homophobes who were also enraged for the deleted post. They asked for an explanation as to why they would post something like that out of the blue. Currently, the Twitter account is in chaos with a fandom war brewing.
Some YouTubers who play and love the game went on the speculate on the reason for the deletion. One stated it was just the social media manager making a small mistake of forgetting to log out the official account and thought it was his/her personal account. Another thought it was a whole different reason. The YouTuber thought there was a mistake on the picture focusing on Ganyu holding a ski stick. He speculated Ganyu on the original Tweet was not holding the stick at all and the image needed to be fixed.
The post is deleted now, but several fans have already recorded the whole post in videos and shared online. One fan tweeted “ganqing impact… you will always be remembered” on his/her account.
Was it a mistake on the social media manager? Did the image have an error on the drawing? Or was it deliberately done to gain popularity? No one knows. miHoYo did not share any explanation for this.
Genshin Impact is now available on PC, PS4, PS5, and mobile devices. Ganqing Impact, however, is forever gone, but always remembered. The internet always remembers.