When the influence of online texts, especially the genre of romance and its film and television adaptations, continues to overflow the text and intervene in contemporary life in a big way, the result is not only reflected in the debugging of the public aesthetic, but also in the social experimentation of some concepts contained in cyberspace that continue to break through the mainstream culture; at the same time, a classic concept has encountered challenges in the Internet age: "Is there a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people"?
A sense of substitution in the Internet age
The key word may lie in the three words of "sense of substitution". Although "sense of substitution" is not a new concept, it is bolded and emphasized with the popularity of online texts and their adaptations: traditional realist works are to "bring" the audience into the world of the work, occupy a bystander observation point to feel the truth, in contrast, the "substitution" emphasized by online works is the binary choice of "if it is me, I will / I will not", and the choice that has nothing to do with "private narrative" seems to be difficult to summon the audience in the Internet age.
The emphasis on the "sense of substitution" in online artworks is more like "giving away" to the characters in the work in a fashionable way. The term "sacrifice" was first derived from the Taoist term, and was later used as a setting by the generalization of xuanxuan immortal works, which refers to the active sacrifice of one's own body and the summoning of another powerful soul into the "house", at which the person who offers the sacrifice asks the person who is sacrificed to help him fulfill his wish.
This forms the unique landscape of the Internet age, a wonderful paradox about "realism", "I know that the work is only fictional – you repeatedly hint at this." But I can only treat them as real people so that I can get to know them. It can be said that when the so-called fourth wall of classical creation is dismantled by the network code, the attribute of networking makes literary and artistic works constantly close to the daily life of the public, and when the distance of the audience's viewing in the Internet age is emptied, for them, the "sense of reality" does not lie in collecting the diversity and impossibility of reality, but in sharing the sense of substitution of "we are all the same". In other words, "a thousand Hamlet understandings" no longer seem to be the consensus of the Internet today – users on both ends of the airwave and data connection may no longer share the same "reality".
The change also lies in the fact that the Internet crowd measures works by scoring, evaluating and qualitatively, and even becoming a common language of communication, so as to maintain a psychological order and revise an unwritten social contract in the hurricane of the times — in other words, the times and emotions become a set of controls. British cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams first proposed the term "structure of feeling" in the "Film Preface" as a tool to analyze the relationship between artistic expression and social change, he believes that different from the worldview and ideology, "emotional structure" was born from the gap between experience and expression, focusing on capturing more vivid emotional experience and practical consciousness outside of systematic beliefs, usually more easily recognized in the period of social transformation.
The conflict brought about by modernity lies in the fact that we are in a social structure from closed to open, and modern people attach all the security and protection to the marriage relationship, and this anxiety makes marriage a cooperative contract based on security considerations, so the proof of the value of love shifts from the emotional experience process to the emotional result. In this sense, today's readers and viewers fed by the network will posthumously comment on Qiong Yao's drama as "three views are not correct" - Fei Yunfan's "You lose only one leg, and Zi Ling loses her love" in "A Curtain of Dreams" has been repeatedly complained about, because the protagonist's experience of love concentration has caused the result of hurting others.
On the other hand, the "impotence of love", a symptom of the times, points to a new reality: the romantic definition of love as a death sentence is, no doubt, no longer in vogue— because the kinship structure in which it previously served and derived its vitality and self-importance has been radically altered. Intimacy becomes the freedom to withdraw, delete, and link at any time, and love is no longer a necessity in life, but is seen as a luxury "rhetoric.".
The advance and retreat of sweet pet dramas
Is it to resonate with the mood of the times, but there is a possibility of fast food and rapid decay, or to let "the times return to the times, and the feelings return to feelings"? Is it the implicit function of tacit literary and artistic works, or the pure aesthetic value of adhering to the independence of literary and artistic works from the "three views"?
After the online text was adapted into a film and television work, this contradictory phenomenon has been extended by a kind of "mainstream" and the public. A typical scene is when the audience "snorts sugar" in the plot adapted by the sweet pet text and sighs "What is this beautiful love!" At the same time, another group of viewers will type a question, "Don't you think it's terrible?" If that's the case in reality..."
Let's focus this on this issue: worried "realists" believe that watching too many sweet pet dramas will subtly affect women's self-perception: they are eager to be domineering, eager to be attached, and they exchange independence and dignity for a well-built "comfortable concentration camp". "A flower that grows up with poisonous juice, clear water is poisonous juice for it", there is no doubt that in the eyes of "realism", online online drama fast-selling products are "poisonous juice" for women, which will make them accustomed to lack of self-esteem and self-worth, and the more they seek satisfaction from emotion, the more they will fall into the trap of inequality.
In particular, since the so-called Gu Man trilogy "Shanshan Lai Eat" (adapted to "Shanshan Lai"), "Why Sheng Zhen Mo" and "A Slight Smile Is Falling City" have been developed by film and television, the controversy of "true white sweet and pseudo-inspirational" has entered the public eye. At the end of the chain of contempt for female frequency network reading, the president of the literary and its adaptation of the film and television drama, which is criticized as a great depression of feminism, always bears the "three deadly sins": the domineering male protagonist and his derivative creature silly white sweet female protagonist, the deformed love relationship projected by the reader's insecurity - giving equal relationship for protection, and the toxic sugar coating that replaces "love" with "need", which has become a target text.
"Why Sheng Zhen Mo"
The "aesthetic school" insists that sweet pets are cool or cool, but it is just an emotional supplement, a lucid dream, a real-life compensation. Rather than saying that contemporary people have low emotional happiness and choose to undertake the sweet pet drama of "sugar substitute" function, it is better to say that it is because they are too lazy to fall in love, or even do not want to fall in love, so they choose a "mental health product" that can be quickly satisfied, and indicate in advance: This is a powdered sugar supplement without glass slag, please rest assured to eat.
Under the wrestling of two different perspectives, a unique evolution path of domestic network works has also emerged: workplace dramas are sweet and petd, but sweet pet dramas are professionalized. The former is embodied in a group of workplace dramas that fall in love on the industry set board, and is often dismissed as an industrial saccharin that is not deep enough, superficial, and entertaining. In essence, the plot design's treatment of reality always seems to pass through a legendary, idealized processing, as if adding an overly soft filter to reality and covering it with a pink mask.
Light Age illusion and reality
If you judge the online literary works in terms of traditional realism theory, they look neither "prickly", but also with the bitterness of industrial saccharin, and their texture is very "plastic", but it is a dark cloud depicting gold edge, which looks like the innocent moaning of young people with "milky taste" - too light.
"Light" in the network text and its adaptations, mainly manifested in the following three aspects: one is the "lightness" of life, just like the protagonist in "Three Lives and Three Worlds and Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms" will easily give up life, Su Su can "change the large" white shallow line after jumping off the Xiantai, and the pain and struggle of a certain life is just a "crossing" experience; the second is the "lightness" of human nature, such as the role in "Langya list" is black and white, loyal and treacherous, and almost does not allow the existence of a gray area of human nature; third, the "lightness" of the self, such as "Step by Step" Zhongruoxi's posthumous "choice of the four masters and eight masters" in the name of love is a calm screening of survival: the history of the victor has been written, and her retrospective choice is essentially not to choose the ideal lover, but the choice of "how to live better", and thus the eighth master is abandoned because of the inevitable failure in history - the story is just a rationalization of the elimination of the wrong choice behavior, wrapped in a beautiful layer of sugar paper. Another example is the "five beauty" in "Ode to Joy", which is also soft in stature and flexible in motivation. Here there is no rebellion against all kinds of unjust social unspoken rules, classes and even fate, but more collusion with "rules".
This is incompatible with the loud aesthetics of traditional realism: especially since May Fourth, the art has taken "seeking truth" as the banner, breaking "concealment" and "deception", to express the complex side of life, and to spy on the complexity of human nature. The treatment of "light aesthetics" naturally makes the story lack some of the thick and rich "tragedy", both the sense of strength of the fate pattern and the "(thoughtful) disobedient art" of Foucault.
But in this "light" era, the emotional structure of the so-called "net generation" also contains another possibility. Such "ruptures" also stem from their admiration for imagination. They argue that when idealistic "living elsewhere" is not allowed in a realistic context, they choose to slide to the end of the "retreat"—in virtual construction, everything is possible.
For example, the professional track of sweet pet drama opened up by "You are my glory", in which the feelings of astronauts also show that this group of young people who are allowed to dream in the era of great development of material and spiritual civilization have begun to dream on the ground. These "light" treatments, once they want to describe and deal with "complex", are easy to appear wandering, left and right. Romanticized idealism is more than enough, and the understanding of real life is insufficient, too "literary", and it is not too much to say that it is "realistic" three feet off the ground.
Stills from "You're My Glory."
However, "light" is the totem of a generation that grew up in this era of great material and spiritual abundance. For this "light" can also be seen from both positive and negative aspects, although the compatibility of "light" for complexity is not high enough. But this "lightness" contains the energy to cope with the new reality of the moment, and the "realism" of online art works is not focused on writing reality, but in addition to the work, it can also ignite a hope. Narratives that seem to "access" fantasies at the expense of self-loss, identity or psychological substitution are not always false products of some "fragile" mind, but may also be an important effort to deal with life circumstances and choices, another "soft landing" in the face of real situations, and finally reach a negotiation with some real difficult situation.
In the final analysis, people's cognitive models in the Internet age have undergone new changes, and each era will put forward its own proposition: how to bridge the value of popularity and art, which is a two-way choice.