Splatoon Raiders has only been out for a day, but the series’ most dedicated fans are already hard at work. I was already matchmaking with players nearly at level 50 just 12 hours after launch. Other fans, though, have bigger fish to fry: they’re busy shipping its heroes, despite the fact that there are four characters in the whole game. (And one is a manta ray.)
Some stage-setting is in order. Splatoon Raiders puts you in control of a voiceless avatar known as The Mechanic, who, like all Inklings and Octolings, is particularly fashionable. They join Deep Cut, the celebrity pop trio from Splatoon 3, on an expedition that takes them to the Spirhalite Islands. The story mostly just revolves around the team collecting treasure and uncovering some lore. Not much room for romance, right?
Wrong, apparently, at least according to the Splatoon fan community. Head over to the Splatoon subreddit, and you’ll find that the frenzy is coming from one cutscene in particular. After defeating the first boss at Bowtlode Temple, a cutscene plays out in which Shiver, the blue-haired member of Deep Cut, gets… very close to The Mechanic.
“That nearly went a lot worse. I was sure you were done for!” Shiver says before getting right up in The Mechanic’s face. “But you’re not too shabby, are you…”
Leave it to the Splatoon community to run wild with that small interaction. There are multiple threads about the scene floating around, and some golden comments. “Your character looks like a nerd suprised the schools head cheer leader is into them,” one user wrote. Others are asking the big questions everyone is wondering about: “Is Mechanic in a polycule with Shiver and Frye? or is Frye gonna get jealous of Shiver?”
Reactions like that are par for the course when it comes to the Splatoon community, which has a long history of pairing up characters. In fact, there’s an entire Splatoon page on Fandom’s Shipping Wiki filled with more matches than you’d even think were possible. Pearl and Callie? Pearlie. Agent 3 and Marina? M3rina. The aforementioned Deep Cut polycule? Polycut, of course. Shipping characters is as much part of Splatoon culture as Splatfests, so it’s nice to see Nintendo give those players 10 flirty seconds to obsess over.
Having finished the story, I can’t imagine that fans will have much more to go on in later scenes. I, for one, just hope that Big Man, the world’s most dapper manta ray, can find love somewhere in Splatoon Raiders’ sea of Salmonid monstrosities. I would get behind a Big Man/Mechanic ship. BigMech is right there!
Splatoon Raiders is available now on Nintendo Switch 2.