Posts in Splatoon 2's lobby go through trends just like the fashion world. Weeks ago it was Knack 2 jokes, and more recently it was drawings of furries. Right now, the Splatoon 2 lobbies are full of LGBT pride, and a few players that wish this trend was over.


Splatoon 2's lobby is adorned with posts from players. These are drawings from your fellow players that either hover above their heads or are graffitied on the walls, and the stages. Sometimes you’ll wander into the lobby and wonder how or why some new trend emerged. Why is everyone arguing about furries? Why are people saying, “I wish teamwork was real?” The latest of these trends is showing support for LGBT players, especially trans players.



Splatoon lobby trends go through cycles of excitement and then backlash. It goes like this: someone will make a post about about they wished Inklings were real, that gets memeified into “I wish helpful team members were real,” and then as people get sick of it, the backlash begins and people will post, “I wish original joke structures were real.” This isn’t limited to Splatoon—this is how jokes get run into the ground all over the world. But being LGBT isn’t a joke or a trend, it’s a person’s identity.







The Splatoon 2 lobby is in the backlash part of this trend, kinda. Because this is about pride, seeing players criticize their identities has only made LGBT players even more prideful. The posts they make are are pretty innocent. Mostly, they just say, “Nonbinary Pride” or “I love queer squids.” But they have become ubiquitous. It’s like Inkopolis is having its own mini-pride weekend. I never saw more than one or two posts that admonished people for talking about their sexuality or gender identity, but it looks like the community’s response to those one or two voices was to just be more gay and trans.




The way that these trends propagate is an utter mystery—players have very little control over what they see in lobbies, and the only way to get posts you don’t like out of your sight is to report them. We do know that Splatoon players have a history with using the lobby to display LGBT+ pride, as very similar posts exploded in the first game two years ago. Technically, posts about LGBT+ pride have been floating around Splatoon 2 for weeks now, but in smaller numbers. Over the course of the weekend the posts about trans pride significantly outnumbered the people who were angry at the presence of trans people in my lobby, but there’s no way of telling whether that’s an algorithm or if there were more trans players. In any case, wall to wall LGBT pride posts will eventually pass. By next weekend, Inkopolis will have something new to cheer for.