Image source @ Visual China
Text | Hedgehog Commune, author | Ouyang, Editor, | Director
As March was about to end, Lin Orange suddenly realized that something seemed to be missing this spring.
At first, she saw the software push that popped up on Arbor Day and asked her to plant a sapling; then she saw the "Beijing snow" in the circle of friends, and the snowflakes brought by the spring cold drifted aimlessly in the air; then when I went to KTV, I heard a song "Love That Never Loses" from my friend, and the melody echoed in the dim box, which was somewhat too familiar.
When passing the time to brush Weibo, I saw a message sent by netizens "I want to draft a talent", and finally answered the confusion that Lin Orange had been flooding for a while. Those moments that make her feel familiar and associative have found their source and correspondence in the memories of the "draft".
This March of 2022, in the eyes of these "show fans", is destined to be a cold spring different from previous years.
Show fans trapped in time
Tian Yu felt that he should be called a "show fan trapped in time".
This description comes from the movie "Father Trapped in Time", in which the father played by Anthony Hopkins has a confused memory because of Alzheimer's disease, and the repetitive, fragmented, and chaotic sensory narrative pictures and timelines give the audience a sense of suspense as if they are trapped in a labyrinth.
To a certain extent, Tian Yu was also trapped in the labyrinth of memory.
When she brushed Weibo that day, she saw a message that "Xu Minghao was diagnosed with new crown" and suddenly had some trance: the name sounded so familiar. After a while, Tian Yu remembered that Xu Minghao was "Little Eight", the dance instructor in the first season of "Youth with You". Some memories of "Youth with You" were colored again, and Tian Yu suddenly wanted to look back at this well-intentioned draft of her year, so from 11 o'clock to 4 a.m. the next day, she spent five hours jumping to watch a whole season of the show, leaving only some emotions called "nostalgia" floating in the late night when dawn was about to dawn.
Such show fans may not be in the minority. In 2022, the topics of "Show Fan Fateful April 6", #Idol Trainee Final Fourth Anniversary # and #Youth Have You Third Anniversary of the First Season Final # have been on the hot search. In the topic-related Weibo and real-time squares, fans commemorated this day, missing those "limited groups" that had been disbanded, and some people simply recalled those days of chasing the draft, saying "who can understand me", or "the dead draft suddenly began to attack me".
How to define "show fan" is said in many ways on the Internet.
Since the phenomenal "Idol Trainee" in 2018, the talent show that will arrive as scheduled at the beginning of each year has gradually become an annual entertainment carnival. A group of young trainees moved into Dachang Film and Television Town, Guangzhou Chimelong Amusement Park and Danzhou Haihua Island, standing on the dazzlingly lit stage to welcome the votes and evaluations of the "national producers".
Some of these "national producers" can be called "show fans". They are keen to deeply participate in each grand talent show, although they are well versed in the routines and "scripts" of such variety shows, they will always plunge into the show again and again because of the youthful atmosphere when the contestants appear, and begin the "true feeling" of the draft journey.
Compared with the stories and emotions of some individuals, the talent show's experience in the past year is more turbulent.
In August 2021, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television carried out a special investigation and rectification of online variety shows, requiring "strict control of idol cultivation programs", and a series of relevant rules subsequently issued were also more targeted requirements for talent shows, from the core mechanism of talent shows such as pitching to rectification.
Perhaps in the eyes of more people, the talent show has been declared over earlier.
At 1:00 a.m. on May 5, 2021, the Beijing Municipal Radio and Television Bureau ordered the recording of the third season of "Youth with You" to be suspended. In the article "2022, No More Trainees This Summer" released by 36Kr, the staff of the program team at the time recalled that when the finals were stopped: "It was like a giant ship immediately entering the harbor, suddenly being stopped, and everyone on board was confused." ”
Grass Carp, a contestant at the time, also described his "short final night" in a later live broadcast: "As soon as I opened the door and said ' go home', I said which home to go back to, he said which place to go back, I said I didn't record it, he said he wouldn't record it." Dozens of people and hundreds of people crowded in the corridor, grabbed people they knew and took crazy photos, and when they were finished, they really went home. ”
Tian Yu and Lin Orange also experienced a difficult wait together that night, they tossed and turned in different spaces at the same time, frequently refreshing various software and forums in their mobile phones, and paying attention to every message that popped up. In a trance, Lin Orange even had a feeling of being "sentenced", she could feel that the coming was not good news, the seemingly calm night was brewing and overturning, and the draft that had been in danger for a long time seemed to have nowhere to escape.
A sudden brush out of a post of "Fire near the big factory where "Qingyou" was recorded" made Tian Yu's heart tighten, and she forwarded it to her friends who chased the show together, and her mood sank to the bottom. The friend sighed: "It seems to see that the so-called 'effort', 'luck' and 'opportunity' are all lost in the flames of fate." The blurry photos in the post shone with fire, as if in an instant the traces of the trainees' efforts, existence and brilliance were about to be burned.
Even though almost a year has passed, Lin Orange recalled the emotions at that time, still an indescribable repression, not only the labyrinth of memories, but also the emotions formed a huge whirlpool, staying in that memory.
In the first season of "Youth with You", Tian Yu was a fan of Chen Youwei, the first time she was so fully devoted to the talent show, the pitch was also very attentive, and as a result, on the debut night, she was disappointed because the ranking float exceeded expectations, and several times felt that "everything is controlled by capital", but she will always participate in it again at the beginning of the next draft. "This is the spirit of remembering and not remembering, always feeling that I can do my best to change the manipulation of capital." She laughed at herself.
Tian Yu remembers a video she watched, the "station sister" at the entrance of the factory will always seize the opportunity of the trainees to go downstairs to buy snacks and shout at the contestants who pick themselves, even if many of them are strange players on a round trip, she is always touched by these images again and again. A phrase that often appears in the shouting is, "To see the spring of the big factory", fans expect them to go to the end of this cruel "battle royale", "leave the factory" in the warm spring, and start to tell a new story.
"But the spring that belongs to the draft will never come." Tian Yu felt.
The fantasy drift of the show fans
In the communication between the Hedgehog Commune and the Three Earths, the word "boring" appears a little too often.
She is a veteran show fan, almost chased all the idol drafts in China and South Korea, this year's spring without a draft, Santu helplessly returned to the "old line", when returning to an e-sports fan, on the match day to see the League of Legends pro league to pass the time.
In The view of Santu, the lack of internal entertainment after the draft and delay is really boring, coupled with the quality of TV series and variety shows has not reached too high a level, "bored" is the common idea of many netizens. According to her observation, "Many previous draft fans have begun to pay attention to competitive sports and e-sports. ”
Why can competitive sports be a somehow alternative to talent shows? The reason is that both have extremely high content tension and can provide continuous user coolness.
As a program category with a very high entertainment threshold, the talent show is first of all a sign of the development of the entertainment industry to a considerable extent, from reality shows to music and dance works, industrialized training systems, all of which shape the aesthetic discourse of the new generation to create many media landscapes; secondly, its business model is in line with the development trend of consumption to a certain extent, and The Z generation standing at the top of the consumption pyramid is affected by the media environment, and plays an increasingly important role in the entire ecology of the talent show.
Human beings have evolved to this day, just as we are accustomed to sugar and fat at our fingertips, we are also accustomed to a lot of information and high-frequency, high-stimulation leisure and entertainment content. In the context of such information, it is difficult for the audiences who have been selected to have a variety of horse-grabbing plots and deeply bound appetites, and they need enough rich texts to meet their emotional needs, and the sports competition, which has commercial attributes and is highly tense, has become the choice of many fans to divert their attention.
The 2021 Summer Olympics in Tokyo may already be showing signs. The dominant performance of the Chinese table tennis team at the Tokyo Olympics once again attracted many fans, and it may have been like the previous Olympic Games, people's attention will gradually decrease after the end of the game, but there seems to be some subtle changes: with the promotion of social platforms, coupled with the performance of many young players on and off the field, the "national table tennis" fan base began to expand and began to diverge internally.
Santu has a good understanding of this. In February 2022, the national table tennis opened the Sanya training camp to prepare for the 2022 competitions, but Santu brushed up on Weibo the "next training meal shot" and "direct shooting video", which surprised her. Those "rice shoots" content is no different from the trainees who have been filmed by show fans, and in the rice shoot trading super talk, there are not a few player pictures.
"There are also the new generation of young generals (fans), the way of fighting, obviously can feel that it is 'show powder taste', the way of the fans in the entertainment industry before." Santu added. Her Weibo homepage also has some friends who are concerned about table tennis, some like Ma Long, some like Fan Zhendong, and some like "Shatou", at this point, she stopped to explain: "'Shatou' is a BG mixed doubles Cp. ”
As a "national ball", the mainland's table tennis performance has always been very good in the international arena, and the popularity and ornamentation of the sport have a high level, so the attention is also high. Generally speaking, the show fan group is relatively young, students account for the majority, summer Olympics, winter Olympics are held during the domestic winter and summer vacation, more leisure time, natural attention will be more.
Moreover, sports competition is full of drama and strong conflict, and the will of human beings represented by athletes to climb the peak will always attract everyone to be encouraged and applauded by it, while the inevitable injuries, status and age problems of professional athletes have added a circle of "I and Tiandou" halo for athletes. As fans of competitive sports often mention, the antonym of competitive sports is "consummation", regret makes up the careers of most athletes, and these stories have been chewed up for many years, and the thickness and fatalism of the text have a deeper meaning.
Mitsuto also watched some competitions carefully during the Winter Olympics, but did not go very deep into the fan circle, she once clicked into the super words of an ice athlete, and then was dissuaded by various familiar rice circle words inside, sighing: "Sometimes the like of athletes may also be a kind of trouble." ”
Of course, show fans have not only shifted to the circle of competitive sports, but also moved within the scope of entertainment.
Girls Planet 999 of 2021 by South Korea's M-net (the production company of the "Produce101" series) is a program that brings together trainees from China, Japan and South Korea to vote for the women's group, and it also caused a lot of discussion in China on the night of the final at the end of October. Lin Orange also found out that his Weibo friend, who did not pay attention to Korean entertainment, was also watching this show, and that friend "as usual" forwarded several Weibo messages that scolded the production company, indignant for his pick. The friends of the internal entertainment met again in a program of Korean entertainment.
If you really want to see the talent show, it is true that only overseas programs can satisfy these show fans. Mitsuto told hedgehog commune that what she is most looking forward to now is Boys Planet 2022, and she has heard that "it looks like it will start in September." Judging from the list circulating on the Internet, many players who have had a good exposure in the mainland draft will participate, but the authenticity is geometric, and there is no exact news at present.
Post-draft era
The draft variety shows that have always arrived on time in the past few years have shaped too many things, not only the entertainment carnival called "draft season", but also many "logic" and "habits" attached to the audience. For example, after getting used to boosting one's show exposure through pitching and fundraising, quantified data becomes the only criterion for judging the value of things; or, when you get used to the competitive rhetoric in your fandom, everything in front of you becomes black and white.
The "distortion" of many other areas of the Internet space may also be related to these "logics" and the generalization of user habits.
In the words of many "show fans", most of them have a sense of contradiction:
Each of them is incomparably aware of the routines in the talent show, understands the unspoken rules of the show, and knows what the platform really wants. But understanding will not make them refuse the next "draft appointment", they always seem to be very sober rushing to the next "labor".
The talent show variety show always sells characters, and when watching the show, fans can even guess whose image the program group is trying to create in this editing, and what kind of script is given to him. After watching more and more variety show development, the characters in the talent show have become well classified in their eyes, who is complete and fulfilling, who can form a complete story line in the later stage, who and who can fry CP, are written in the details of the program.
They laughed taunts and enjoyed it. This kind of screwing makes people very divided, like a firm and sober cold eye on the one hand, and a "painting person" who is difficult to get out of on the other hand, and it is difficult to distinguish between pain and pleasure, as if half of the self is soberly withdrawn. Xiu fans, who have been pulled apart by the interests of all parties, have long been difficult to bridge their own internal contradictions.
What are they missing? Tian Yu said that when watching the show, the contestants' pure persistence and idealized expression of their dreams; Santu said that they were people who flashed in the show and on the stage; Lin Orange said that it was a "sense of sustenance" that found emotional projection when they were in it. But from the perspective of narrative alone, these sound like their own processing and imagination, rather than the real value that a show really gives.
As a result, the memory of the soft light filter is replayed again at this time: the contestants bow neatly forward at each time the order is released; the somewhat awkward but sincere ending action is posed after the performance is completed on the stage; the ribbon rain on the night of the final, the contestants standing in the debut position and the friends who failed to debut hug each other.
It is a spring suitable for nostalgia, and in the nostalgic memory, it seems that only the happiness that has been magnified several times remains.
Where will they go from here? As the anniversary of the draft passes again and again, the boundaries of "show fans" will slowly disappear, and even be given new meanings, eventually becoming a word that makes people feel strange and familiar.
As far as the current entire cultural and entertainment environment is concerned, it seems difficult to have an answer to how long such "boring" will last.
Whether it is the tightening of project investment and budgets on the platform, the box office of movies that worry practitioners, or the batch of cancelled performances, the entertainment industry and its users are looking for new exports.
*Lin Orange, Santu, Tian Yu, etc. are pseudonyms.