Azur Lane

This article is about the video game and its community. For the game's app icon, see Gacha Alliance app icons.

Azur Lane
Name	Azur Lane
AKA	AL, AZL
Description	A community centred around the shoot-em-up gacha game by Manjuu.
Subreddit	AzurLane AzureLane
Discord	AzurLaneOfficial
Website	https://azurlane.yo-star.com/
Twitter	AzurLane_EN
Artwork	Dumsex, Admiral Graf Spee, Akagi, & New Jersey, Azur Lane app icon

Azur Lane (AL) is a 2017 alternate history shoot-em-up gacha game for mobile devices; developed by Chinese studio Manjuu, and published by Yo-Star. Players take the role of a naval commander, commanding and controlling fleets of anthropomorphized warships from the Second World War--known in-game as shipgirls. The game takes place at an indeterminate time after a war between the Azur Lane and Crimson Axis--the game timeline's equivalent to the Allied and Axis powers. The two instead unite against the Sirens, a faction of mysterious, timeline-hopping shipgirls that wreak havoc upon various timelines of Earth through "reenactments".

As Azur Lane's international release was after 2017's r/place, it only had a notable presence in the 2022 canvas. Its r/place community's growth was stifled, as one of the most active r/AzureLane moderators believed that the subreddit should be exclusively for game-related content. Nevertheless, a small community to coordinate actions on the canvas did form via the official discord, and they allied with the United Gacha Alliance.

r/place 2022

Artwork

Dumsex

A drawing of the chibi form of USS Essex. She is a well known meme both within and outside the AL community due to her dopey facial expressions and eccentric personality in-game.

Aftermath

The poor handling of r/place 2022 created a lot of drama which resulted in the removal of the entire moderation team of r/AzureLane by the head moderator and replacing them with new moderators. A new r/AzurLane subreddit was opened by most of the previous moderation team hoping to lead a better community and are unaffiliated with r/AzureLane.

Through the duration of r/place 2022, nearly all posts about r/place posted to the r/AzureLane subreddit were being removed by the most active moderator at the time. This would prove to be very controversial with community members who want to participate in r/place criticizing his decisions. On April 7, 2022 facing backlash from the community, he announced his decision to leave the moderation team citing 3 main reasons.

1. Conflicting visions for the r/AzureLane subreddit between him and the community resulting in backlash.
2. Subreddit toxicity and frequent complaint posts relating to politics and in-game characters.
3. Burnout due to overwork from the other subreddit moderator's lack of activity moderating the subreddit.

On April 8, 2022, a post was made acknowledging the moderation problems, the handling of r/place and current situation in the r/AzureLane subreddit by another moderator. The moderation team would work to reform the subreddit with rules based off of community feedback and recruit more moderators. Through the next few days, the moderation team at r/AzureLane would draft new rules but the head moderator would disagree with one of the new rules proposed. Due to the head moderator's attitude and behavior which stemmed from disagreements with the new ruleset, the atmosphere of the mod team quickly degraded. Moderators were removed from the moderation team by the head moderator due to disagreements. By April 13, 2022, all of the moderators before April 13 were removed and permanently banned from the r/AzureLane subreddit. The head moderator of r/AzureLane was reported to reddit admins by the ex-moderators but no action was taken against him. Some of the ex-moderators went on to create the subreddit r/AzurLane in hopes to "leave behind the tarnished history of the previous subreddit".