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Chinese entertainment — and to a lesser degree, East Asian entertainment generally — is dominating Western markets. Their products appear to be organically favored by Westerners. The Chinese-made video game Black Myth Wukong was released this week and is now sitting on Steam’s top 10 list for concurrent playercount and user favorability. It sits next to Elden Ring, a Japanese-made video game. The Chinese-designed 2020 Call of Duty Mobile game has made ~4bn lifetime revenue and has 60,000,000 monthly players; a Western-designed Warzone attempted to dethrone it this year and is unanimously considered a failure, losing most of its playerbase in the first month. Genshin Impact and PUBG mobile are other highly popular mobile games led by Chinese studios. Tik Tok is the most used social media company and is a Chinese product. League of Legends (130 million monthly active) is Chinese. Final Fantasy and Lost Ark are the most popular MMORPGs this year, Japanese and Korean respectively. Korean shows are increasingly popular in the West (and have actually slanted Korean tourism in favor of female tourists), and I don’t need to note anime and manga.
What explains this? Wukong in particular appears to be a genuinely loved game, and it makes no overtures to Western culture — it is firmly Chinese in story, music, and art design. IMO there’s likely American propaganda floating around against Chinese entertainment (billions in revenue on the line which compounds), but despite this the products are favored. So I feel safe saying that their products are better. So what has led China, and East Asia generally, to make better entertainment than America and Europe for Western audiences?
As a self admitted enjoyer of east Asian cultural products I agree that they're doing well and are even ascendant but the Chinese don't really factor into this.
LoL is an American game, made by an American studio in America, that was acquired by a Chinese company well after it was released and got popular.
China is lagging in all areas of culture production, games, movies, TV and books. There are a few standout hits like wukong or the three body problem but in general the output is trash, unbelievably so. Have you tried playing the chinese mobile Skinner box games? Watch Chinese hit tv shows? Movies? They're almost universally god-awful. They have the technical and financial capacity to create good things but overwhelmingly aren't, even compared to woke America, which really says something.
Chinese pop culture is crippled by government diktats. There was a brief flourishing in late 2010s to early 2020s of Chinese xianxia martial arts stuff that started getting lots of traction, like Word Of Honor and The Untamed, which was initially pleasing to the Chinese authorities for their popular reception in other Asian countries and increased traction in the west.
Turns out, they were popular because they were adaptations of webnovels written by bored ladies chapter by chapter on long commutes. And these bored Chinese women, like bored western women, write thinly veiled smut.
So you have these xianxia novels with impeccably beautiful men having intense physical and emotional fights with each other as they struggle with their roiling emotions, while a virtuous woman laments at their conflict and tries to use her womanly charm to get them to stop their conflict and kiss and make up And continue kissing, and do more.
These adaptations, greenlit by producers desperate for content and 'blind' to the subtext, go balls out in following the vision of the author, complete with creative reinterpretations that somehow enhance the original vision, and when queried by censors the producers just shrug and say 'its the source material, and people like it'. It doesn't actually have gay kissing on screen, just two beautiful men staring intensely at each other in shiny flowing silk robes as a camera spins around them while dramatic music plays and they verbalize their emotional torments. Totally not gay sex. Oh and the 'disciple' of one of the men is the source of what is effectively a custody battle as both men try to be good role models for the 'disciple' and in the end the men make up and have their own academy with the boy as their head disciple and its totally straight and not a gay romance ending and wait wasn't there a female MC at one point?
Women went fucking feral for this shit, and Chinese cultural products started getting consumed voraciously. Then the CCP figured women were having unrealistic standards for men and mandated no prettyboys in TV, and uptake has slowed accordingly.
The Koreans dramas have a much higher international reception even in English media because the Koreans stay shamelessly pretty, and have the extensive plastic surgery to keep it up. I hate kdramas for their tropiness and generally poor acting, but the koreans have leaned in to their strengths and keep their output at max shamelessness. I don't like Jdramas because their dudes all have some weird fucking hairstyle that makes them look like unkempt hairballs and I watch too much JAV to take japanese live action women seriously.
This was hilarious, in part because I recognize parts of it and partly remember that Chinese clampdown, but also because didn't you once go a great effort post on K-Drama culture? I remember my brief exposure to K-Dramas, and some of the, ahem, interesting male-on-male focus while female protagonist orbited in the plot background.
I don't think it was an effortpost as much as it was a snide/snarky observation on the tropiness of Kdramas and their specific deleterious effect on Asian women regarding expectation management. I do think it is VERY funny to see the specific tropes crop up over and over again and the common trends. one reason my wife got sick of watching these shows is that I ruined everything for her witb my meta commentary. This dude will die and have a secret twin brother! This secretary actually is the half sister! This car is just product placement and it will be that car that will crash!
For my own edification I did follow your stated path of Noticing the intense man on man melodrama and the diminishing centrality of the female MC.
It should be explicated that the main consumers of dramas are women, and that is true across all cultures all over the world. The difference I think is that the Asian women writers and producers lean in to the degenerate goblin woman energy fermenting in their writers room, leading to women following through in putting pen to paper their boiling emotions after seeing two hot men yell at each other. @FistfullOfCrows mentions that this shit is bait for women, and I think I can reliably tell when there is a goblin woman cackling in the writers room depending on how many opportunities for personal conflict are painfully forced into the character interactions. Men write action scenes with autistic attention to power levels and how smartly the characters will use the environment and the situation to their physical or social advantage, women will force these two guys to grab the retard ball together and smoulder/yell at each other as much as humanly possible.
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