Negotiated Fiction and Affective Politics in Chinese Dreamcore: Comparing Bilibili and Wikidot Communities
Main Article Content
Keywords
the backroom, Chinese dreamcore, negotiated fiction, participatory culture, affective politics
Abstract
In the contemporary context of decentralized information production and the deep integration of social media into daily life, the mechanisms governing the creation of online subcultural spaces have taken on new characteristics. This paper examines Backrooms and Dreamcore as its subjects, employing a method of online ethnography. Through textual analysis and participant observation, it conducts a comparative study of the rule-oriented Wikidot community and the emotion-oriented Bilibili community. The study reveals that these two virtual spaces, as typical products of participatory culture, embody a mechanism of negotiated fiction in their collective construction—users generate a sense of authenticity rooted in shared experiences within these fictional spaces through emotional resonance and rule-based negotiation. Based on this, this paper proposes an analytical framework of rational rules vs. emotional resonance, aiming to reveal how, in the digital age, contemporary youth leverage the diverse practices of participatory culture to continuously reshape their self-identity and explore new systems of meaning and modes of belonging in the intersection of the virtual and the real.
References
- Alber, J. (2016). Unnatural narrative: Impossible worlds in fiction and drama. University of Nebraska Press.
- Backrooms Wiki. (n.d.). Backrooms. Fandom. https://backrooms.fandom.com/zh/wiki/Backrooms_Wiki
- Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades project (H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
- Benjamin, W. (2012). The lyrical poet in the age of advanced capitalism (Chinese ed.). SDX Joint Publishing Company.
- Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. Routledge.
- Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press.
- Jenkins, H., Ito, M., & boyd, d. (2015). Participatory culture in a networked era: A conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. Polity Press.
- Jin, Y. (2023). The unnatural narratives and implications of new media horror literature and art: A case study of Backrooms. Literary Theory Research.
- Lévy, P. (1997). Collective intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. Basic Books.
- Morton, T. (2016). Dark ecology: For a logic of future coexistence. Columbia University Press.
- Nielsen, H. S. (2013). Naturalizing and unnaturalizing reading strategies. In J. Alber & B. Richardson (Eds.), A poetics of unnatural narrative (pp. 67–93). Ohio State University Press.
- Richardson, B. (2006). Unnatural voices: Extreme narration in modern and contemporary fiction. Ohio State University Press.
- Richardson, B. (2015). Unnatural narrative: Theory, history, and practice. Ohio State University Press.
- Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine de Gruyter.
- Xia, Y. (2023). Millennium, ruins, and Generation Z’s disconnected perception: An aesthetic allegory of Chinese dreamcore. Journal of North University of China (Social Science Edition).
Article Sidebar
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.