This piece was drafted on the night of 2022/01/05 on a whim before bed, then revisited and extended a little on 2022/01/07 at 9:50 PM. It has no real structure or dialectical rigor — pure stream of consciousness.

I. The Holy Trinity of the Virtual Idol

Domestic virtual idols, with A-SOUL as the prime example, are in essence a trinity of idol, streamer, and 2D character. They can have idol-style events (concerts, fan meet-and-greets), the kind of frequent, close interaction with audiences associated with streamers, and on top of all that, the flawless appearance of a drawn character.

They satisfy the public’s love of 2D aesthetics, and within that skin are free to occupy a balance point between streamer and idol — simultaneously serving as a sublime object of worship distinct from the traditional idol (though the angle of worship differs from the traditional model), while also satisfying the audience’s desire for that particular quality and for interaction. Fans shift from the role of “content consumers” into participants in the interactive game with the virtual streamer, becoming “content producers” themselves. This means that the repetitiveness and monotony inherent in traditional fan secondary creation — which draws on a “non-renewable resource” whose rate of replenishment is unpredictable, namely the traditional idol’s activity content — is replaced by the constant stream of new material generated by the frequent back-and-forth between fans and the virtual idol/streamer.

II. Cultural Transmission That Reaches Across the Nation

The public’s capacity for cultural transmission should not be underestimated. Through the creation of memes — highly replicable, easily spread, low cognitive barrier, low threshold to participate — cultural content achieves maximum replication and reach. The original meaning or referent of a given meme may well have dissolved entirely in the course of its spread (as with the now ubiquitous slang yyds, coined by the streamer Shān Ní Ruò with a single line laden with ironic and comedic intent), but there is no denying that this process, combined with fans’ creative energy, can win the original source significantly more attention and recognition.

Take the classic piece “Miss Diana’s Dog” by Niito Mineko as an example. It uses the form of traditional literary writing to express genuine self-reflection and melancholy — and yet inserts absurdist elements throughout, making the whole thing at once pitiful and comic.

It opens with the first sentence: “I really want to be Miss Diana’s dog.” The self-demeaning desire sets the tone; then the next line — “But Miss Diana said she likes cats. I cried.” — deepens the abasement further. Then comes “I know why someone who is neither a dog nor a cat is crying. Because I’m actually a mouse.” The trick is deployed again: the author’s image of submissive lowliness is compounded layer by layer, while the reader’s original expectation — “I was preparing to mock this pitiful figure” — collides sharply with the text’s actual direction of “the author is in fact more absurd than the target you were planning to mock,” and the sense of the absurd wells up naturally.

This is exactly what Joubert describes in On Laughter: “The empty promise of visual pleasure produces laughter.” The reader expected a tail-wagging dog to appear in the next line, but what actually shows up is something that has shed every last shred of dignity — a packet of rat pellets. It’s hard not to crack. Freud would call this “ruptured humor”: the sympathy the reader had prepared is intercepted by a punchline and redirected to something secondary; the pleasure of this kind of humor comes from a preemptive management of emotion.

Aristotle writes in the Poetics: “Comedy arises from some defect or ugliness that is not painful or destructive.” “Miss Diana’s Dog” is sincere enough in its emotion to leave the reader sighing — and yet it is precisely the visible absurdity of the piece, combined with the absence of any element that would properly invite sympathy (such as a motive for wanting to be a dog), that prevents it from generating any real pathos. The reader cannot see the protagonist as a victim of any kind, and so sympathy has nowhere to take root.

The template this little essay established (“I really want to be X’s X”) is highly replicable and lends itself easily to widespread use. At the same time, the confessional genre suits recitation, and it spawned a wave of videos reading the piece aloud in multiple languages — entering into dialogue with literary works and cultural characteristics from those languages, reconstructing the essay’s meaning through a kind of “character dislocation,” placing the original character into radically different geographic and historical contexts (a Hebrew-language version, for instance, transports the figure to the biblical era) and thereby extending the character’s attributes to show how “abasement” manifests across different cultural registers. Most importantly, the absurdity of the original piece is so deeply felt that it is simply unforgettable.

III. The Social Psychology Behind the Crackdown on Fandom Disorder

The fact that fans from wildly different backgrounds came together in a collective carnival around A-SOUL signals that the fan community shares a single superordinate goal. Internal conflicts within the fan group are naturally converted into collective effort toward that superordinate goal when it comes into view, keeping the group connected even when it seems to be fraying. At the same time, the particular format of A-SOUL’s livestreams means its members are rarely in a position to be attacked, and the superordinate goal within the A-SOUL fan community is one that can genuinely be achieved. Various forces within the group — conformity pressure, self-censorship — all contribute to a unified attitude toward the idols inside the fan community.

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