Honkai: Star Rail gets painfully online with its perfect Internet speak

destructoid.com:

Check any HoYoverse social media thread, and I guarantee you’ll find a microcosm of netizens communicating in the infinite languages of online slang, memes, and pop culture references. Those conversations are often some painful mixture of absurdly awkward, endearing, or aggressive, and the writing in Honkai: Star Rail’s latest event perfectly captures that spirit.

The flagship event for Honkai: Star Rail Version 1.5, A Foxian Tale of the Haunted, follows a streamer named Guinaifen, who investigates ghost sighting claims. You and a few other characters work together to put these rumors to rest and grow Guinaifen’s social media presence. It’s a lesson in ghost-hunting and clout-chasing, basically.

The event has you join a paranormal activity forum where people post about various supernatural events around the Luofu. These forum posts become leads to investigate, starting a short quest for each one. When finishing an investigation, you make a forum post of your own to share your findings and put the public at ease.

Every post on the forum garners comments from various netizens. The comments range from thoughtful discussion to, well, this.

There’s even someone barking. What’s extra fun is that Honkai: Star Rail has a race of fox-people called Foxians. Maybe the barking is real? Is it possible that Foxians in Honkai: Star Rail actually do bark at each other to express thirst?

Of course, there are also people using the posts to get attention for themselves. There’s one guy begging Guinaifen to reply to their DMs. Even Guinaifen’s brother uses her posts to try to get more followers himself. Or maybe he’s not even her brother, just someone fishing for followers.

There’s also a nod to the rise of generative AI to churn out