"Fuck you, paid posters!"
"I'm blocking every last one of you!"
Seeing those busybodies decide he had an amazing eye for investing and saddle him with some completely absurd nickname made Sakuraba so angry his teeth itched.
Goddammit.
Were they mocking him?
He was seriously trying to pick Umamusume who couldn't run fast, okay?!
Could those paid smear posters please go die somewhere? They stank!
Every time Sakuraba saw comments on the forums praising how good he was at investing in Umamusume, he felt awful.
Sigh.
If he had actually been trying to pick fast Umamusume and just happened to choose strong ones, then the praise would not have hurt.
But the problem was, he hadn't!
In Sakuraba's eyes, those comments praising him were pure insults!
Goddammit!
These people's insults were filthy!
He was done playing with them!
But compared with all the comments hyping him up, what shocked Sakuraba even more was Cinderella Gray's popularity.
It was a little too high!
Goddammit! He had not even spent money on promotion yet, and it was already this popular!
How was he supposed to lose the money in his hands now?
"..."
Actually, it wasn't as if there was no way to lose the promotional funds he had on hand...!
Looking at the forum, Sakuraba's eyes shifted around, and an idea popped into his head.
And so, he started putting it into action...
As he watched the discussion around "Cinderella Gray" on the forums not only refuse to die down, but grow more and more heated because of an unexpected anti-fan war, Sakuraba felt his entire being crumble.
He lay sprawled across the sofa in the Nishikino Academy dormitory, staring at the constantly refreshing posts on his phone. His expression gradually shifted from confusion to distortion.
"No... what is going on here?"
His original plan had been very simple.
Since the manga had not even begun serialization yet, but its popularity was already absurdly high, he would do the opposite: spend some money to hire paid posters to flood the place with bad reviews and steer the narrative, dragging its reputation down a little.
Logically speaking, if a work was widely trashed before it even came out, that would affect reader expectations and initial sales at least somewhat. In that case, the money he invested in promotion would go straight down the drain, wouldn't it?
Perfect! Loss-making plan accomplished!
So he contacted an online marketing company that was said to be quite experienced, threw down a considerable sum, and had them organize paid posters to criticize Cinderella Gray from every angle, leaving no blind spots, across major forums and social media.
"The plot is stale," "the character designs are copied," "the art style is off-putting," "it's just leeching off Oguri Cap's popularity," "adapting real people like this disrespects the originals"... All sorts of slippery, somewhat forced "black marks" were repeatedly spammed by the paid posters using nearly identical copy.
For a time, plenty of negative voices did appear in the relevant discussion spaces, making the atmosphere rather foul.
Sakuraba looked at the initial "results" and felt rather pleased with himself.
Surely this would pour some cold water on it, right?
However, he had severely underestimated the unity of Oguri Cap's fans, as well as ordinary passersby's instinctive backlash.
At first, faced with the sudden flood of negative reviews, the fans were confused and angry.
But once they discovered that these criticisms were often empty, illogical, and even copied and pasted under different posts, they immediately became alert.
"Something's off. Why did so many identical bad reviews suddenly show up?"
"Check their posting history. A lot of them are newly registered alts or empty accounts that usually don't discuss Umamusume at all."
"This is organized slander, right? Someone doesn't want this manga to get popular?"
"Case solved. Some jealous rival definitely bought paid smear posters!"
"Protect our best Oguri Cap! Protect Cinderella Gray!"
"I was only a little interested at first, but seeing this many people mindlessly hate on it actually makes me curious how good it really is..."
The originally scattered fans and passersby quickly rallied together and began their own spontaneous "anti-slander" campaign.
They refuted the deliberate smear posts with evidence and reasoning, actively shared Kinosaki-sensei's previous excellent works, introduced Oguri Cap's real-life legendary career, and analyzed the detailed artwork shown in the preview images... Some tech nerds even dug up IP connections and posting patterns among some of the paid posters, then turned them into widely circulated "paid-poster behavior analysis charts," practically confirming that someone was maliciously manipulating public opinion.
This sudden online battle did not extinguish Cinderella Gray's popularity at all. Instead, it was like tossing a ladle of oil onto a fire.
Passersby who might originally have only watched from the sidelines were also drawn in by this rather dramatic "anti-fan versus fan" war and joined the discussion one after another.
Tags like "#ProtectCinderellaGray," "#FightPaidPosters," and "#OguriCapsLegendMustNotBeSmeared" shot up the trending chart, echoing alongside the original anticipation topics.
The media also smelled a story and began reporting on the strange phenomenon of "a manga going viral before release, only to suffer large-scale organized smearing," further expanding the incident's visibility and reach.
The result was that, on the eve of serialization, Cinderella Gray gained a level of attention far beyond what ordinary promotional methods could have achieved. It had practically become a focal work known to everyone in the recent Japanese ACG sphere, and even among sports fans.
...
Sakuraba looked at the situation developing in a way that had completely deviated from his expectations. Seeing the surging comments on the forums saying things like "the harder the antis jump, the more I'm buying," "my wallet is ready to support the official release," and "waiting to watch the haters get slapped in the face," his vision nearly went dark.
"..."
He covered his face and let out a cry of despair.
The money had been spent, yet the hype had explosively increased, and the reputation had actually been reinforced through controversy... This was the complete opposite of his planned loss-making attempt to cool down the popularity!
"How is this reasonable?!"
Sakuraba roared inwardly.
"I hired paid posters to trash my own project, so how did it backfire?!"
He slid powerlessly down onto the sofa, feeling so very tired.
He already... didn't want to fight anymore...
So this move of his had not only failed to lose money, but had basically meant... paying out of his own pocket to run a wildly effective "controversy marketing" campaign for Cinderella Gray?
"Damn it... I miscalculated..."
Sakuraba stared hollowly at the ceiling.
"These netizens... why don't they play by common sense...?"
Now, not only had the money he spent on "negative PR" gone completely down the drain—although losing money had been the goal, this way of losing it made him very unhappy—he also had to watch helplessly as the project's popularity sprinted toward an even more uncontrollable peak.
"No... I can't give up..."
Sakuraba struggled to sit up, his gaze becoming resolute again.
"The road to losing money is long and difficult... One failure is nothing! I need to think of another way..."
He stroked his chin and began pondering his next brilliant loss-making scheme, completely unaware of just how... incomprehensible his desperate attempts to sabotage his own popular project would look to outsiders.
Meanwhile, online expectations for Cinderella Gray had already gone off the charts.
---
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