Journal articles on the topic 'Dragon TV'

Recent years has witnessed China’s vigorous promotion of the excellent traditional Chinese culture. And major TV channels have launched numerous outstanding programs and works, among which the series of “Chinese Festivals” released by Henan Satellite TV has achieved “success across fields”. Not only does it provide a good example for the re-creation and dissemination of traditional culture, but it also presents a new trend of inheriting, innovating and developing excellent traditional Chinese culture.

In 2000, Mark Palmer, one of the National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED’s) founders and Vice Chairman of Freedom House—an organization funded entirely by the U.S. Congress—founded a new government-supported group, Friends of Falun Gong (FoFG). By perusing FoFG’s annual tax filings, one discovers that FoFG has contributed funds to Sounds of Hope Radio, New Tang Dynasty TV, and the Epoch Times—all Falun Gong media outlets. FoFG has also contributed to Dragon Springs (a Falun Gong ‘compound’ that hosts a Falun Gong school and a residency complex) and to Shen Yun (a Falun Gong performance company), as well as to Falun Gong’s PR arm. In order to contextualize the U.S. government’s funding of Falun Gong, it will also be helpful to examine a handful of additional U.S. agency activities, such as the NED’s funding of Liu Xiaobo, the Hong Kong protests, and other China-related and Tibet-related groups.

<div><p><em>In the article covered the features of implementing and using additional Internet functionality in the information space: in particular, audience analysis services, content research, fact-checking in real-time, automatic news generation, bots and mobile apps that are rapidly gaining popularity in modern journalism.</em></p></div><p> </p><p><em>Defined, some mobile apps: The Dragon Diction (speechy), Cogi, Imovie, Snapseed, Camscanner, Canva, Sweet Text: Story Maker &amp; GIF can help detect dictation and save it in text format; make notes, add some images, select certain parts; compose multiple videos, add audio effects and titles; edit images, backgrounds, colours, shades; scan documents and savе them in the required format; create any infographic, text and publication in different formats; make animated text stories accordingly.</em><em></em></p><p><em>The essence and purpose of IT capabilities such as virtual reality (enhancing user interest, stimulating brain activity while browsing content, etc.) and augmented reality (enhancing the effect of information through additional materials, graphics and visualisation) are detailed. It is emphasised that the introduction of the cyber tools in the media is due to the need to meet market trends, competition at local and global levels, the need to clarify data, the demanding potential audience.</em><em></em></p><p><em>Monitoring of using the latest IT in the Ukrainian media industry has revealed the presence its in the TV programs: «Siogodni», «Siogodni. Pidsymku z Olegom Panyutoyu» (TV channel «Ukrayina»), «TSN» («1+1»), programs of TV-channel «NASH», multimedia project «Ukrainer», magazine «Marie Claire», which confirmed the popularity of new formats for creating and implementing information product in Ukraine.</em><em></em></p><p><strong><em>Key words:</em></strong><em> visualisation, virtual reality, augmented reality, Internet functionality, cyber tools, media product, fact-checking.</em><em></em></p>

The TV industry has traditionally relied on advertising and subscription fees for revenue. Recently, brand extensions and co-branding strategies have been rediscovered as income sources. A prominent example of such a strategy is the TV format Dragons’ Den, which has been locally produced in many different countries. We use this intriguing case to explore the extensive and intricate co-branding relationships and brand extensions in the business-to-consumer and the business-to-business settings of TV companies. Our paper analyses global adaptations and cultural branding of Dragons’Den; in particular, brand extensions and co-branding strategies.

Series five of BBC TV's Dragons' Den has just finished, and anyone with a modicum of entrepreneurial spirit will have chanced a glance at the small screen to admire or admonish those who seek investment from the Dragons. TV entertainment it may be, but most weeks there are lessons to be learned from the experienced investors as they interrogate the hopeful and often hapless contestants. Never before has the making or breaking of business deals been made so accessible to the prime time viewer and raised so many questions about the nature of what constitutes a great investment.

The paper explores the soft power of the Serbian TV series produced in the period 2015-2021 - as focused on the in depth analysis of the TV series Senke nad Balkanom (Black Sun/Shadows over the Balkans, 2017, Dragan Bjelogrlić) - and their role in the domains of cultural diplomacy and international relations of Republic of Serbia. The research uses the methods of the qualitative (textual, narrative, genre) and quantitative (the financial success in terms of distribution, placement at the festivals, promotions on the social webs) analysis. The aim of this paper is to map out - reading the thematically and generically diverse case studies of multilayered narrative complexity - the emerging patterns of the soft power analysis of TV series and their importance and value for the national cultural policy and diplomacy. Consequently, the multifaceted narrative of the Shadows over the Balkans becomes the story of the past and the present; cultural and political tensions; opposed parties and conflicting identities in the country and in the region. At the same time the TV series creates the image of Serbia - process of 'branding the nation and the state' - aimed for and turned toward the world, but not necessarily made in accordance with the state priorities and strategies. Regional and global reactions and critical response to the Shadows over the Balkans, its international placement, distribution and promotion argue the skilful change of the global into the local phenomenon (global exploitation and the growing soft power) as well as the successfully achieved mission of the cultural diplomacy - have appropriated identity and enhanced visibility of the country and of the nation.

The aim of this article is to analyse the TV series Black Sun/Shadows over the Balkans (Senke nad Balkanom, 2017, Dragan Bjelogrlić), understood as a reflection of the ways in which diverse imperial legacies, persisting differences and contrasting pasts shaped the (ambivalent) post-imperial traumatic history of the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918. The burden of imperial legacy – mostly manifested in ethnic, political, cultural and economic tensions among diverse nations in the new multi-ethnic state – kept brewing under the surface and came to represent a constant threat of balkanization i.e. further fragmentation of the multicultural kingdom. In this article I claim that the same danger of balkanization – traced back to the years after the Great War – continued to haunt all successor states of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (and Yugoslavias ensuing from 1943 until 1992) eventually resulting in the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in 1992. The irreconcilable differences and competing ambitions of different national, social and geopolitical identities define the structure, characters and their relations in the TV narrative, and are also reflected in the cityscape of Belgrade – the capital of the Kingdom and paradigmatic Balkan metropolis – in the late 1920s. The series is read against the theories of Dominique Moisi’s Geopolitics of Emotions (2010) and La géopolitique des séries/Geopolitics of TV Series (2016), and his assertion that TV series have become crucial in understanding our world in its many aspects – from domestic politics to geopolitics. The story of Belgrade between the two World Wars reveals the traumatic imperial legacy as determining the emergence of a ‘culture of fear, hope and humiliation’, tensions of balkanization and search for identity in the city suspended between an Ottoman casaba and a European metropolis. On the other side – in terms of narrative, genre, and visual style – the series itself is seen as the acculturated version of both the novel Der nasse Fisch (Volker Kutscher, 2007) and the TV series Babylon Berlin (2017), illustrating the rise of cultural imperialism in post-imperial times.

The article discusses pitching as a communication technology and a pitch as a business PRtext. For a more complete and correct definition of the concepts of a pitch and pitching, the semantics of the multi-valued pitch lexeme underlying them are analyzed. The types of pitching are described by the field of activity, by the intended purpose and by the time of the presentation. The subject of the study was the textual features of the investment pitch as a PR communication tool. The main purpose of the work is to analyze the structural and content components of the investment pitch in the communicative and pragmatic aspect, including the characteristics of the addresser, addressee, object, goal, functions, etc. The material for the study was selected using the method of random sampling of 28 video recordings of pitch presentations presented on the foreign TV shows Shark Tank and Dragons’ Den, posted on the social network YouTube. The analysis of the material showed that the text of the pitch is based on the principle of combining standard and expression, noted by V. G. Kostomarov, in relation to the language of the newspaper. The tendency towards standardization is manifested in the typical structure of the pitch, the tendency towards expressiveness — in the use of certain verbal and paraverbal means, with the help of which the addresser seeks to express a subjective attitude not only to the content of speech, but also to the addressee, influencing his consciousness and stimulating him to make the necessary decisions. Based on the identified differential features, the definition of an investment pitch is proposed. It is concluded that the investment pitch can be included in a number of other proposals coming from the PR subject — proposals for cooperation, commercial proposals and proposals for sponsorship, calling it an offer for investors.

The article studies system-forming characteristics of pitch as a business speech genre in business communication. The research material is presented by 54 entrepreneurial pitches (a brief speech of an entrepreneur to investors) in the TV reality shows Dragons’ Den (UK) and Sharks Tank (USA). The article describes pitches studied by modern linguists within the anthropocentric paradigm. The paper considers the concepts ‘speech genre’, ‘communication strategy’ through the prism of scientific views of M. M. Bakhtin, O. S. Issers as well as the theory of business discourse in the works by F. Bargiela-Chiappini. The article analyzes the most typical structural, lexical, semantic and stylistic characteristics of the pitch manifested in dynamics. The authors demonstrate that the interaction of business, public and mass media discourses generates a genre that is not reduced to the simple sum of their components. The research shows that taken in the context of mass media communication, pitch as a genre should be considered in all the diversity of this speech situation, allowing us to rethink the genre-forming factors of pitch. The set of specific characteristics that make it special in its capacity of a speech genre includes inequality of the communication role and status, two pools of listeners, preset logical structure of the text, elements of show, turns in the process of speech, number of speakers, and a function of a trigger for further negotiation. A new understanding of the role and meaning of pitch allows us to categorize this genre not as an element of the sales genre but as the first component of the commercial negotiation genre. The results obtained can be applied in the practice of teaching modern English language, in research on communicative linguistics and pragmatics.

Abstract For this study, we analyzed the changing images of women characters involved in extramarital affairs in three Chinese TV dramas—Come and Go (CG; Hubei TV & Guangxi TV, 1998), Dwelling Narrowness (DN; Beijing TV & Dragon TV, 2009), and Nothing but Thirty (NT; Dongfang TV & Tencent Video, 2020). We argue here that shifting gender relationships, evolving political, economic, and technological conditions relating to the media industry, and a transition in the broader social environment have motivated a return to patriarchal moral discourse on Chinese TV. Specifically, in keeping with this discourse, extramarital affairs have come to be presented as immoral, primarily for the women involved—the “little third” of the title, this being the literal translation of the Mandarin term for “mistress.” We documented this return to patriarchal moral doctrines that are intended to discipline women and limit the diversity and nuance of culturally accepted forms and expressions of sexual attraction and romance on Chinese TV in case studies of the three programs.

This article explores the strategies of queer playing of video games and their relationship to the heteronormative game culture. Its premise is that most video games are, either implicitly or explicitly, heteronormative and the inscribed player of such games is in the majority of cases a heterosexual male. In order to achieve the same level of identification with an avatar and to enjoy a similar gameplay experience as the heterosexual player, the LGBT player may have to deploy various strategies to challenge the game and work around it, or to find the LGBT content which some more progressive games offer. The study is based on in-depth qualitative interviews with six players (5 males and 1 female) who identified themselves both as homosexual and as players of the Mass Effect or Dragon Age series, games that include several opportunities to initiate same-sex romance. We have identified three different queer playing strategies: imaginative play (queer reading of unspecified or heterosexual characters), stylized performance (the use of gay stereotypes to mark one as queer) and role-playing of a LGBT character. However, players do not seek sexuality in games to the same extent as they do in film or TV, and they tend to use these strategies, and especially the latter two, reluctantly or with reservations. These reservations may be linked to our finding that LGBT players consider their gay (or lesbian) identities disconnected from their identities as players or gamers. This can be explained by the mutual exclusivity of gay communities and the heteronormative game culture.

Marshall, Rita, and Etienne Delessert. I Hate to Read! Mankato, MN: Creative Education, 1992. Print. As you might guess from the title, this book invites reluctant readers to discover the wondrous adventures that can be accessed through turning the pages of a book, as opposed to tuning into TV programs. The cover features the narrator—third-grader Victor Dickens—on a dragon’s back, with flames licking out of the pages of a stack of books. Readers are told that Victor is a “really good kid” “most of the time,” and many children will be able to relate to his academic difficulties: “Victor got As in math and Bs in science, but Fs when it came to the ABCs”. He calls himself a “victim of the hate to read syndrome”. One night, Victor is visited by a series of storybook creatures, including a crocodile in a white coat, a field mouse carrying gold coins, a pirate parrot, and a white rabbit in black barn boots; all of whom attempt to convince him to read. He repeats his usual mantra, “I hate to read,” until gradually he begins turning pages, and his imagination takes over. Fictional characters morph into people from his real life: Sleeping Beauty turns into Natalie Nickerson, on whom Victor appears to have a bit of a crush. The turning point comes when one of the characters whispers: “It’s fun to read even when you’re not supposed to.” This thought appeals to his sense of juvenile rebellion, and he continues in his literary reverie, even missing his favourite TV program. He imagines his teacher as a witch, throwing books into a cauldron, and his classmates, led by Natalie, shouting, “We hate to read!” Instead of joining in, however, Victor thinks of how sad he would be to lose all of his new friends, so he looks for them in his book: “And as he read each page, he just hated…to come to the end.” Writer and designer Rita Marshall and illustrator Etienne Delessert have each been awarded numerous literary prizes for their work. The large-scale drawings of the storybook creatures are whimsical and inviting. They also contain small details that might not be noticed on the first reading. For example, the toes and talons of the dragon on the cover also form crow-like birds with pointy beaks. In another image, letters of the alphabet are hidden in animal tracks. On the other hand, the book includes some literary references that would likely be lost on a typical third-grader. For example, Victor’s parents are said to have bought all 56 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica to help pique his interest in reading. It is unlikely that many families would have this set in their homes, nor would a child normally encounter one in an elementary school library. However, these details will perhaps prompt questions from curious readers. On the whole, “I hate to read” is highly likely to achieve its principal goal. Much like Victor, most children will probably hate to see it come to an end. Not to fear, they can continue to follow Victor’s adventures in “I Still Hate to Read,” which was published in 2007. Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Kim Frail Kim is a Public Services Librarian at the H.T. Coutts Education Library at the University of Alberta. Children’s literature is a big part of her world at work and at home. She also enjoys gardening, renovating and keeping up with her two-year old.

TV shows such as “Dragons’ Den” and “Shark Tank” have become common teaching materials in entrepreneurial finance classrooms because they offer a window into the process of pitching to investors. TV exposure to pitch communication and business angels’ feedback is certainly a well-documented source of vicarious learning. It enables students to observe varying investment situations and learn from other entrepreneurs’ success as well as failure. Observation, however, does not replace direct experience. We combined vicarious learning and direct experience in order to enable students to learn how to take initial investment decisions, in practice. We originally proposed this training session in an entrepreneurship graduate program in France. This learning activity invites participants to become observers and actors in a real-life experience with entrepreneurs and angel investors. Students participate in a pitch session within a Business Angels Network (BAN). The BAN chooses entrepreneurs based on their applications and an evaluation meeting for the first round of a live pitch in their usual deal flow. Students are first spectators to the real-life pitch session, in which entrepreneurs face a team of five to 10 business angels (BAs). Then, students play the role of an active participant, making their own investment decisions in a report on each entrepreneurial project, as if they were BAs themselves.

In recent years TTRPG (Tabletop Role Playing Game) based shows or actual plays have seen amazing growth, with shows like Critical Role being the number one grossing channel on the streaming platform Twitch .TV and Dimension 20 becoming the flagship content for the newly rebranded Dropout.TV. This shows put in the forefront of their storytelling, chance, and the players´ ability to improvise, to the detriment of a traditional screenplay. The failure or success of every action and the making of every player character (the stats and backstory of the characters are rolled and fleshed out in pre-production phases) is often determined by luck of the draw (dice roll, card draw…), thanks to the rules provided by the TTRPG system of choice (in most cases Dungeons & Dragons 5e). The system allows for Dungeon Masters (the players that run the game and consequently the story) to step out of the rules set and change the impact of some dice rolls, allowing the chance of a natural 20 on D20 roll to completely restructure the narrative of the story. Is this rolling of the die aspect and more important natural 20s and 1s where this study will focus, trying to comprehend how special they really are and how much impact they can have in the result of the show.

Introduction The blockbuster DreamWorks film Shrek is a play on the classic fairy tale narrative, where the hero, atop his noble steed, rescues the cursed princess from a dragon-guarded tower. Except the hero is an Ogre, the steed is a talking donkey, the dragon just wants to be loved, and, when they finally break the curse, the princess permanently transforms into an Ogre. From the opening scene, the first movie subverts the viewers’ expectations, offering reflection as well as a critique on “some of the cultural conventions that characterise modernity” (Lacassagne, Nieguth, and Dépelteau). As one of the most successful animated films in history (Lacassagne, Nieguth, and Dépelteau) Shrek is an important text to analyse from a disability perspective. As Amanda Taylor suggests, the film introduces several disability themes that work together to make a social and cultural critique about social exclusion: there are many social and cultural issues within the movie Shrek that should be addressed when looking through a lens of disability. Shrek and Fiona are the very opposite of what society looks at as a fairy tale, yet they are still so popular. The producers of this movie have tackled social issues in a very positive way. Elements such as obesity and economic diversity are portrayed within this movie that show that there is an alternative to stereotyping. Taking Shrek as its case study, this article argues that monstrous images offer complex representations of disability that align with the affirmation model of disability. We begin with a review of key literature before starting a disability analysis of Shrek by drawing parallels between the social exclusion experienced by characters within the film and the effects of social disablement identified within the social model of disability and critical disability studies. We then move beyond the social model of disability to follow the importance of interdependence and disability pride throughout Shrek as it culminates in a representation of the affirmation model of disability. Throughout this article we make parallels between monsters, ogres, freaks (as a form of the monstrous), and characters with disability. Each as constructed as having extraordinary bodies—the non-normative. Reading Monsters through a Disability Lens Critical disability studies theorists often observe the way disability is used within narratives as a metaphor for something else (Mitchell and Snyder; Quayson; Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies; Garland-Thomson Freakery). For Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, this is particularly illustrative in the figure of the monster in literary narratives: the word monster — perhaps the earliest and most enduring name for a singular body — derives from the Latin monstra, meaning to warn, show, or sign, and which has given us the modern verb demonstrate. (Garland-Thomson, Freakery 3) Disability has become a defining characteristic of the monstrous body—“bodies that in their gross failure to approximate to corporeal norms are radically excluded” (Shildrick 2). The field of critical disability studies is concerned with the ways these norms are constructed to exclude certain bodies. Jobling notes that the typical figure of the ogre occurs in folklore across many cultures around the world. The ogre performs the function of “a semi-human monster who commits crimes against the ingroup. The hero triumphs over the ogre, usually by killing him” (Jobling). Ogres, depicted as inhumanly large monstrous characters who eat children, are recognisable as a source of fear. The ogre occupies an important position as a narrative prosthesis (see Mitchell and Snyder) in children’s narratives. The monster therefore exists within narratives as a representation of something else. Reading monsters through a disability lens has been well researched in the critical disability studies field. Studies show how monstrosity is represented in film through disfigurement, typically in contrast to the normative or non-disabled body (Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies). Feminist theory is often applied to gain an insight into “the meanings attributed to the bodies by cultural representation and the consequences of those meanings in the world” (Garland-Thomson Extraordinary Bodies). While several critical disability critiques emphasise the negative disability stereotypes associated with representations of monsters, increasingly theorists are considering the ways these monsters problematise and critique the social construction of the normate (Smith). Martha Stoddard Holmes’s Born This Way: Reading Frankenstein with Disability is a notable example of how a monstrous character poses both a critique and representation of society. The Creature forms a “visual identity first from the stares, words, and behaviours of others". She observes “his condition of disability and resulting social exclusion are, as narrated, purely aesthetic in nature, and as such, socially constructed”. Throughout the text, the Creature exemplifies both monstrosity to be feared and vulnerability to be pitied; these are features outlined by Margrit Shildrick as concepts that underpin the non-normative body in popular culture. It is evident that the perception of monstrosity is one that is socially constructed, and is largely negative. Susan Marie Schweik suggests a relationship between this negative representation and the ugly laws. The ugly laws refer to a set of laws that prohibited ugly people from participating in society during 1860s through to 1974. The ugly laws focus on non-normative bodies, especially bodies that were disfigured. The phrasing of these laws was such that it removed the personhood of so-called ugly people. For example, in the quote “so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets” (Schweik), the people phrasing the law objectify its subjects. These archaic ugly laws reflected a societal view that ugly people were frightening to behold, which manifests in fear of the person themselves. Thus, images of non-normative bodies in film and literature were reflected as frightening monsters. These representations described are the typical depiction of non-normative monstrous bodies. While monsters have been consistently read through a disability lens, we aim to demonstrate through this article the importance of representations such as Shrek, as they depict a move towards disability pride and an affirmative model of disability. The Affirmative Model of Disability The affirmative model was developed as part of the disability arts movement. Colin Cameron (Disability Arts 11) asserts “the affirmation model identifies impairment as an important part of people’s identities, to be owned as part of who they are, and not as something to be hidden or regarded as a source of shame". He locates the negative representations of disability in texts mentioned above as a reflection of the values and assumptions related to the medical model of disability. While the medical model positions disability as a problem within the body, the social model locates this so-called problem in society. The affirmative model builds on but also critiques the social model of disability. The social model has been criticised by feminists with disability as over-emphasising “socio-structural barriers and ignoring personal and experiential aspects of disability” (Cameron Developing an Affirmation Model 24). However, the affirmative model retains the definition of disability as being located in social structures, with the addition of a subversion of the dominant cultural narrative which views disability or impairment as inherently negative. While there are still heavily prevalent issues with stereotypes in media, and people with disability continue to be invoked in narratives of monsters a serious attempt to work with people with disability on authentic and positive representation is gaining traction. Inspired by the 2020 Oscar-nominated documentary film Crip Camp, Netflix-backed documentary filmmakers with disability organisation FWD-Doc has partnered with social impact company Doc Society to release A Toolkit for Inclusion & Accessibility to positively influence disability representation and media access (Mitchell; FWD-Doc and Doc Society). This inclusion toolkit ascribes to the affirmative model of disability and makes the following recommendations that in films: people with disability are seen as multi-dimensional characters people’s life is seen as valid and valuable there is engagement in the disability community disability pride is shown intersectionality is shown allyship is shown good-quality audio description and captioning is used disability is not seen as tragic disability is not seen as inspiring disability is not used a punchline people overcoming disability are not shown people with disability are not infantilised no ableist language is used. The following section offers a thematic analysis of Shrek that draws on FWD-Doc’s recommendations. Although almost all these recommendations are achieved in Shrek, this article will focus on the most relevant instances. Findings: Setting Up a Normative Society Due to space limitations we have focussed on the first film in the Shrek franchise in this article. However, at the time of writing this there are four films, a few TV spin-offs, and a Broadway musical production. Lacassagne, Nieguth, and Dépelteau suggest that the first three films form a trilogy based on the original book and follow a “high level of thematic unity”, which continues the reflections and critiques of cultural conventions that are outlined in this article. However the spin-offs and fourth film are suggested to have departed from this thematic structure. The opening scene of Shrek is a fairy tale book being read by a narrator. It is a typical story of a princess being rescued by a handsome knight from a dragon-guarded tower. As the story nears its end, a page of the book is torn out and we hear the narrator say, “what a load of *flushing sound*”. This introduction is setting up an expectation of a film that will subvert the norms, and the film delivers. The viewer is introduced to a multi-dimensional title character who seems joyful, proud, independent, and comfortable in himself. He has hobbies; he paints, cooks, and reads. Despite his looks, he is not at all the typical figure of the ogre. Although audiences are introduced to this proud character of Shrek, we soon see that the world he lives in does not treat him positively. Shrek encounters a group of townspeople that are coming to kill him. He tries to scare them away but they are frozen in place, gawking at him. This is indicative of Garland-Thomson’s concept of the stare referred to earlier in this article. The stare occurs when normative members of society encounter people viewed as the other, monsters, and freaks. The stare is depicted as something fascinating and potentially horrifying that compels people to be unable to look away. After encountering this representation of a society that doesn’t accept him, Shrek meets Donkey. Donkey is hiding from people who would persecute him for being different and immediately identifies Shrek as another “freak” and thus an ally. However, Shrek has a harder time accepting that someone might not immediately dismiss him as a monster. Shrek: Listen, little donkey. Take a look at me. What am I?Donkey: Uh—Really tall?Shrek: No! I’m an Ogre. You know. “Grab your torch and pitchforks.” Doesn’t that bother you?Donkey: Nope.Shrek: Really?Donkey: Really, really.Shrek: Oh.Donkey: Man, I like you. What's your name?Shrek: Uh, Shrek.Donkey: Shrek? Well, you know what I like about you, Shrek? You got that kind of I-don't-care-what-nobody-thinks-of-me thing. I like that. I respect that, Shrek. You all right. Although Shrek is comfortable in himself, he has built an opinion based on the view he takes from others. Much like Frankenstein’s monster (Stoddard Holmes), this view is aesthetic in nature and socially constructed. The viewer is then introduced to Lord Maximus Farquaad, who is a fitting representation of someone enforcing the Shrek franchise’s version of the ugly laws. Lord Farquaad frequently objectifies the “freaks”, referring to them as “it” or “that", and he claims that they are “poisoning my perfect world”. The lordship of Duloc he rules over is thus representative of normative society, with a welcoming song that claims Duloc as a “perfect town” and warning “don’t make waves, stay in line and we’ll get on just fine”. Duloc is also represented as a society that follows instructions around societal norms, this is done through the use of cue cards that are shown to the on-screen audience telling them how to react, which they follow. These cue cards also offer a commentary on the constructed nature of this perfect society. Farquaad himself is of short stature and therefore ascribes to Kumari Campbell’s observations about the construction of ability. It is only by establishing and then marginalising disability as other that ability can be understood (Kumari Campbell). Upon entering the castle, Shrek is discriminated against solely based on appearance. Guards are ordered to kill him as the crowd cheers on. However, as Shrek begins to display physical prowess in the fight, the crowd begins to cheer for him. This indicates a meritocratic society that finds value in Shrek now that he has shown himself to be skilled physically. Findings: Taking an Affirmative Stance After the film sets up this constructed normative society, Shrek and Donkey venture out and continue to disrupt the typical narrative. When Shrek accepts the quest of rescuing a princess instead of just destroying Farquaad, Donkey asks him why, and Shrek responds by describing actions of a typical ogre: “maybe I could have decapitated an entire village and put their heads on a pike”. Instead, he likens himself to an onion, because “onions have layers”, which reinforces the film’s idea that he is a multi-dimensional character. Donkey questions why he could not have used an analogy that everyone likes, such as parfaits, but Shrek explains it is not about what everyone likes. This is a notable example of an affirmative stance that values him for being multidimensional even if he is not normative. Shrek and Donkey rescue Princess Fiona from the tower. From the moment she is introduced, she says “this is all wrong” and “this isn’t how it’s supposed to happen". This sentiment can be read as an expression of the confusion the viewer is supposed to be feeling due to the subversion of the typical narrative. However, Shrek has been wearing a helmet and Fiona has not seen that he is an Ogre, meaning she is still treating him like a brave knight. When asked to take off his helmet, Shrek refuses. This is the first time we see Shrek as vulnerable or self-conscious. Shrek wants to be seen as something other than an Ogre. The journey back is long and Fiona’s character gains depth. She is portrayed as unconventional, she is not afraid of Shrek, instead she kills birds, eats rats, burps, fights off bandits, and catches bugs for him to eat. The relationship between Shrek and Fiona grows and Donkey advocates for them to be together, however Shrek is convinced that nobody could see him as anything other than an Ogre. Donkey points out that he did not. Donkey: What exactly is your problem? What do you got against the world?Shrek: I'm not the one with the problem. It’s the world that seems to have a problem. People take one look at me and go, “Aah! Help! Run! A big, stupid, ugly, Ogre!” (Sighs) They judge me before they even know me. That's why I’m better off alone.Donkey: You know? When we met, I didn’t think you were just a big, stupid, ugly, ogre.Shrek: Yeah. I know. Donkey is demonstrating how their shared experience of being “freaks” meant that he accepted his friend from the beginning. This is a notable example of disability community. Donkey then discovers Fiona turns into an Ogre at night. After his initial shock, he agrees she is “ugly” but does not show any indication that he cares about it or that it makes her any less valuable to him. This lack of a negative reaction is challenging for Fiona because she harbours self-hatred, similar to the internalised ableism prevalent in some people with disability. This internalised ableism is often based on a desire to be ‘normal’, usually due to a lack of support or exposure to the positive disability community (Blackwater). Donkey tries to help Fiona overcome this internalised stigma, but a miscommunication based on Shrek’s own internalised ableism pulls Shrek and Fiona apart. Donkey, who is quickly becoming the voice of affirmation for the other characters, is ultimately the one who implores Shrek to confront his internalised ableism, and makes him feel loved and accepted. It is important that this comes from another “freak”, as this represents the power in disability community, rather than an able-bodied hero complex that is common in film. This strength in disability community is another notable example of the affirmative model of disability. Shrek and Donkey return to Duloc to confront Farquaad and Fiona. We see more representation of a normative society; the cue cards are present again, illustrating the constructed nature of normative society. Farquaad alludes again to the ugly laws of the lordship he rules over when he states “it’s rude enough being alive when no one wants you” to Shrek. When Fiona reveals herself to be an Ogre, Farquaad immediately rejects her, but she has already found community and affirmation with Shrek. Rather than being defeated by the now-hero Shrek, Farquaad is eaten by Dragon who is subverting the monstrous archetype of the dragon, instead being the ultimate defeater (Lacassagne, Nieguth, and Dépelteau). The crowd claps, indicating it was merely going along with the normative societal views that had been enforced on the community. A final rebellion against the normative society is indicated when the guard crosses out the cue card and writes “aww” in response to Shrek and Fiona’s first kiss. Shrek: Fiona? Fiona. Are you all right?Fiona: Well, yes. But I don’t understand. I’m supposed to be beautiful.Shrek: But you are beautiful. The conclusion is perhaps one of the most poignant representations of the affirmative model. Shrek and Fiona end up back at their swamp where they are free to be Ogres, surrounded by other “freaks” as well as non-freak allies they’ve made along the way. They are flourishing in their proud community, surrounded by intersectional creatures. Although the first Shrek movie is a story about overcoming, it is not about people overcoming their monstrosity/disability. Instead, the film is about people overcoming societal and internalised views that disable them, and embracing a community that takes pride in difference. Conclusion Within critical disability studies, monsters are recognised as existing in the realm of hyper-representation. They are used within narratives to represent and reveal something else. As Garland-Thomson explains, monsters take on a semantic distinction to demonstrate the non-normative body. The ogre in children’s literature and popular culture is a monstrous figure used as a narrative prosthesis to incite fear. Shrek, however, takes this construction of the monster and subverts it to critique the construction of normative characters and societies in children’s narratives. To make this critique, the film draws on the affirmative model of disability and embraces disability pride through the personal journeys of its lead characters Shrek, Donkey and Fiona. References Blackwater, Amelia. “Disability Community – Our Internalised Ableism.” Deafness Forum of Australia 2020. 23 July 2021. <https://www.disabilityaustraliahub.com.au/disability-community-our-internalised-ableism>. Cameron, Colin. “Developing an Affirmation Model of Impairment and Disability.” 2013. ———. “Disability Arts: The Building of Critical Community Politics and Identity.” Politics, Power and Community Development (2016): 199. FWD-Doc, and Doc Society. A Toolkit for Inclusion & Accessibility: Changing the Narrative of Disability in Documentary Film. London: FWD-Doc. Feb. 2021. 2 Aug. 2021 <https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5dd1c2b5a0f7a568485cbedd/t/602d4708d39c1d1154d0902a/1613581716771/FWD-Doc+Toolkit+small.pdf>. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. ———. Freakery : Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1996. ———. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Eds. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. 56–75. . Jobling, Ian. “The Psychological Foundations of the Hero-Ogre Story: A Cross-Cultural Study.” Human Nature 12.3 (2001): 247–272. 2 Aug. 2021 <https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-001-1009-7>. Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Kumari Campbell, Fiona. Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009. Lacassagne, Aurélie, Tim Nieguth, and François Dépelteau, eds. Investigating Shrek : Power, Identity, and Ideology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Mitchell, Wendy. “DocSociety, Netflix Launch Groundbreaking Disability and Inclusion Toolkit (Exclusive).” ScreenDaily 25 Feb. 2021. Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness : Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Schweik, Susan M. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. New York: New York University, 2009. Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: Sage, 2002. Smith, Angela. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2012. Steig, William. Shrek! New York: Farrar, Straus and Grioux, 1990. Stoddard Holmes, Martha. “Born This Way: Reading Frankenstein with Disability.” Literature and Medicine 36.2 (2018): 372–387. Swain, John, and Sally French. “Towards an Affirmation Model of Disability.” Disability & Society 15.4 (2000): 569–582. Taylor, Amanda. “Shrek’s Portrayal of Disability.” Disability in Children’s Literature 5 May 2017. 13 July 2021 <https://disabilityinchildrenslit.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/shreks-portrayal-of-disability>. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

Game of Thrones (GoT) has become the most popular way of referring to a universe that was previously known under the title A Song of Ice and Fire by fans of fantasy novels. Indeed, thanks to its huge success, the TV series is now the most common entry into what is today a complex narrative constellation. Game of Thrones began as a series of five novels written by George R. R. Martin (first published in 1996). It was adapted as a TV series by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss for HBO in 2011, as a comic book series (2011—2014), several video games (Blood of Dragons, 2007; A Game of Thrones: Genesis, 2011; Game of Thrones, 2012; Game of Thrones Ascent, 2013; Game of Thrones, 2014), as well as several prequel novellas, a card game (A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, 2002), and a strategy board game (2003), not to mention the promotional transmedia developed by Campfire to bring the novels’ fans to the TV series. Thus, the GoT ensemble does indeed look like a form of transmedia, at least at first sight.Game of Thrones’ UniverseGenerally, definitions of transmedia assemble three elements. First, transmedia occurs when the content is developed on several media, “with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. … Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa” (Jenkins 97-98). The second component is the narrative world. The authors of Transmédia Dans Tous Ses États notice that transmedia stories “are in some cases reduced to a plain link between two contents on two media, with no overall vision” (Collective 4). They consider these ensembles weak. For Gambarato, the main point of transmedia is “the worldbuilding experience, unfolding content and generating the possibilities for the story to evolve with new and pertinent content,” what Jenkins called “worldmaking” (116). The third ingredient is the audience. As the narrative extends itself over several platforms, consumers’ participation is essential. “To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels” (Jenkins 21).The GoT constellation does not precisely match this definition. In the canonical example examined by Jenkins, The Matrix, the whole was designed from the beginning of the project. That was not the case for GoT, as the transmedia development clearly happened once the TV series had become a success. Not every entry in this ensemble unfolds new aspects of the world, as the TV series is an adaptation of the novels (until the sixth season when it overtook the books). Not every component is self-contained, as the novels and TV series are at the narrative system’s centre. This narrative ensemble more closely matches the notion of “modèle satellitaire” conceived by Saint-Gelais, where one element is the first chronologically and hierarchically. However, this statement does not devalue the GoT constellation, as the canonical definition is rarely actualized (Sepulchre “La Constellation Transmédiatique,” Philipps, Gambarato “Transmedia”), and as transmedia around TV series are generally developed after the first season, once the audience is stabilized. What is most noticeable about GoT is the fact that the TV series has probably replaced the novels as the centre of the ensemble.Under the influence of Jenkins, research on transmedia has often come to be related to fan studies. In this work, he describes very active and connected users. Research in game studies also shows that gamers are creative and form communities (Berry 155-207). However, the majority of these studies focused on hardcore fans or hardcore gamers (Bourdaa; Chen; Davis; Jenkins; Peyron; Stein). Usual users are less studied, especially for such transmedia practices.Main Question and MethodologyDue to its configuration, and the wide spectrum of users’ different levels of involvement, the GoT constellation offers an occasion to confront two audiences and their practices. GoT transmedia clearly targets both fiction lovers and gamers. The success of the franchise has led to heavy consumption of transmedia elements, even by fans who had never approached transmedia before, and may allow us to move beyond the classical analysis. That’s why, in that preliminary research, by comparing TV series viewers in general with a quite specific part of them, ordinary gamers of the videogame GOT Ascent, we aim to evaluate transmedia use in the GOT community. The results on viewers are part of a broader research project on TV series and transmedia. The originality of this study focuses on ordinary viewers, not fans. The goal is to understand if they are familiar with transmedia, if they develop transmedia practices, and why. The paper is based on 52 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2012 (11) and 2013 (41). Consumers of fictional extensions of TV series and fans of TV series were selected. The respondents are around twenty years old, university students, white, mostly female (42 women, 10 men), and are not representative outside the case study. Therefore, the purpose of this first empirical sample was simply to access ordinary GOT viewers’ behaviours, and to elaborate an initial landscape of their use of different media in the same world.After that, we focused our analysis on one specific community, a subset of the GOT’s universe’s users, that is, players of the GoT Ascent videogame (we use “gamers” as synonym for “players” and “users”). Through this online participative observation, we try to analyse the players’ attitudes, and evaluate the nature of their involvement from a user perspective (Servais). Focusing on one specific medium in the GOT constellation should allow us to further flesh out the general panorama on transmedia, by exploring involvement in one particular device more deeply. Our purpose in that is to identify whether the players are transmedia users, and so GoT fans, or if they are firstly players. During a three month in-game ethnography, in June-August 2013, we played Aren Gorn, affiliated to House Tyrell, level 91, and member of “The Winter is Dark and Full of Terrors” Alliance (2500 members). Following an in-game ethnography (Boellstorff 123-134), we explored gamers’ playing attitudes inside the interface.The Users, TV Series, and TransmediaThe respondents usually do not know what transmedia is, even if a lot of them (36) practice it. Those who are completely unaware that a narrative world can be spread over several media are rare. Only ten of them engage in fan practices (cosplay, a kind of costuming community, fan-fiction, and fan-vidding, that is fans who write fiction or make remix videos set in the world they love), which tends to show that transmedia does not only concern fans.Most of the ordinary viewers are readers, as 23 of them cite books (True Blood, Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Les Piliers de la Terre), one reads a recipe book (Plus Belle la Vie), and seven consume comics (The Walking Dead, Supernatural). They do not distinguish between novelisation (the novel adapted from a TV series) and the original book. Other media are also consumed, however a lot less: animation series, special episodes on the Internet, music, movies, websites (blogs, fictional websites), factual websites (about the story, the production, actors), fan-fiction, and cosplay.Transmedia does not seem to be a strong experience. Céline and Ioana respectively read the novels adapted from Plus Belle la Vie and Gossip Girl, but don’t like them. “It is written like a script … There’s no description, only the dialogues between characters” (Ioana). Lora watched some webisodes of Cougar Town but didn’t find them funny. Aurélie has followed the Twitter of Sookie Stackouse (True Blood) and Guilleaume D. sometimes consumes humoristic content on 9gag, but irregularly. “It’s not my thing” (Aurélie). The participants are even more critical of movies, especially the sequels of Sex and the City.That does not mean the respondents always reject transmedia components. First, they enjoy elements that are not supposed to belong to the world. These may be fan productions or contents they personally inject into the universe. Several have done research on the story’s topic: Alizée investigated mental disorders to understand United States of Tara; Guilleaume G. wandered around on Google Earth to explore Albuquerque (Breaking Bad); for Guilleaume D., Hugh Laurie’s music album is part of the character of Gregory House; Julie adores Peter Pan and, for her, Once Upon A Time, Finding Neverland, and Hook are part of the same universe. Four people particularly enjoy when the fictional characters’ couples are duplicated by real relationships between actors (which may explain all the excitement surrounding Kit Harrington and Rose Leslie’s real-life love story, paralleling their characters’ romance on GOT). If there is a transmedia production, it seems that there is also a kind of “transmedia reception,” as viewers connect heteroclite elements to build a coherent world of their own. Some respondents even develop a creative link to the world: writing fan-fiction, poetry, or building scale models (but that is not this paper’s topic, see Sepulchre “Les Constellations Narratives”, “Editorial”).A second element they appreciate is the GOT TV series. Approximately half of the respondents cite GoT (29/52). They are not fundamentally different from the other viewers except that more of them have fan practices (9 vs. 1), and a few more develop transmedia consumption (76% against 61%). To the very extent that there is consensus over the poor quality of the novels (in general), A Song of Ice and Fire seems to have seduced every respondent. Loic usually hates reading; his relatives have pointed out to him that he has read more with GoT than in his entire lifetime. Marie D. finds the novels so good that she stopped watching the TV series. Marine insists she generally reads fan-fiction because she hates the novelisations, but the GoT books are the only good ones. The novels apparently allow a deeper immersion into the world and that is the manifest benefit of consuming them. Guilleaume G. appreciates the more detailed descriptions. Céline, Florentin, Ioana, and Marine like to access the characters’ thoughts. Julie thinks she feels the emotions more deeply when she reads. Sometimes, the novels can change their opinions on a character. Emilie finds Sansa despicable in the TV series, but the books led her to understand her sensibility.Videogames & TransmediaThe vast majority of transmedia support from the GoT universe primarily targets “world lovers,” that is, users involved in media uses because they love the fantasy of the universe. However, only video games allow a personalized incarnation as a hero over a long term of time, and thus a customized active appropriation. This is in fact undoubtedly why the GoT universe’s transmedia galaxy has also been deployed in video games. GOT Ascent is a strategy game edited by Disruptor Beam, an American company specialising in TV games. Released in February 2013, the franchise attracted up to 9,000,000 players in 2014, but only 295,107 monthly active users. This significant difference between the accumulated number of players and those actually active (around 3 %) may well testify that those investing in this game are probably not a community of gamers.Combining role playing and strategy game, GoT Ascent is designed in a logic that deeply integrates the elements, not only from the TV series, but also from books and other transmedia extensions. In GoT Ascent, gamers play a small house affiliated to one of the main clans of Westeros. During the immersive game experience, the player participates in all the GoT stories from an insider’s point of view. The game follows the various GoT books, resulting in an extension whenever a new volume is published. The player interacts with others by PVE (Player versus Environment) or PVP (Player versus Player) alliances with a common chat and the possibility of sending goods to other members. With a fair general score (4,1 on 10), the game is evaluated weakly by the players (JeuxOnLine). Hence a large majority of them are probably not looking for that kind of experience.If we focus on the top players in GoT Ascent, likely representing those most invested, it is interesting to examine the names they choose. Indeed, that choice often reveals the player’s intention, either to refer to a gamer logic or the universe of GoT. During our research, we clearly distinguished two types of names, self-referential ones or those referring to the player’s general pseudonym. In concrete terms, the name is a declination of a pseudonym of more general avatars, or else refers to other video game worlds than GoT. In GoT Ascent, the second category of names, those very clearly anchored in the world of Martin, are clearly dominant.Is it possible to correlate the name chosen and the type of player? Can we affirm that people who choose a name not related to the GoT universe are players and that the others are GoT fans? Probably not obviously, but the consistency of a character’s name with the universe is, in the GoT case, very important for an immersive experience. The books’ author has carefully crafted his surnames and, in the game, assuming a name is therefore very clearly a symbolically important act in the desire to roleplay in that universe. Choosing one that is totally out of sync with the game world clearly means you are not there to immerse yourself in the spirit of GoT, but to play. In short, the first category is representative of the gamers, but the players are not restricted to those naming their avatar out of the world’s spirit.This intuition is confirmed by a review of the names related to the rank of the players. When we studied high-level players, we realized that most of them use humorous names, which are totally out of the mood of the GoT universe. Thus, in 2013, the first ranked player in terms of power was called Flatulence, a French term that is part of a humorous semantics. Yet this type of denomination is not limited to the first of the list. Out the top ten players, only two used plausible GoT names. However, as soon as one leaves the game’s elite’s sphere, the plausible names are quickly in the majority. There is a sharp opposition between the vast majority of players, who obviously try to match the world, and pure gamers.We found the same logic for the names of the Alliances, the virtual communities of players varying from a few to hundreds. Three Alliances have achieved the #1 rank in the game in the game’s first two years: Hear Me Roar (February 2013), Fire and Blood (January 2014), and Kong's Landing (September 2014). Two of those Alliances are of a more humoristic bent. However, an investigation into the 400 alliances demonstrates that fewer than 5 % have a clear humoristic signification. We might estimate that in GoT Ascent the large majority of players increase their immersive experience by choosing a GoT role play related Alliance name. We can conclude that they are mainly GoT fans playing the game, and that they seek to lend the world coherence. The high-level players are an exception. Inside GOT Ascent, the dominant culture remains connected to the GoT world.ConclusionA transmedia story is defined by its networked configuration, “worldmaking,” and users’ involvement. The GoT constellation is clearly a weak ensemble (Sepulchre, 2012). However, it has indeed developed on several platforms. Furthermore, the relationship between the novels and the TV series is quite unprecedented. Indeed, both elements are considered as qualitative, and the TV series has become the main entry for many fans. Thus, both of them acquire an equal authority.The GoT transmedia storyworld also unfolds a fictional world and depends on users’ activities, but in a peculiar way. If the viewers and gamers are analysed from fan or game studies perspectives, they appear to be weak users. Indeed, they do not seek new components; they are mainly readers and do not enjoy the transmedia experience; the players are not regular ones; and they are much less creative and humorous than high-level gamers.These weak practices have, however, one function: to prolong the pleasure of the fictional world, which is the third characteristic of transmedia. The players experiment with GoT Ascent by incarnating characters inserted into Alliances whose names may exist in the original world. This appears to be a clear attempt to become immersed in the universe. The ordinary viewers appreciate the deeper experience the novels allow. When they feed the world with unexpected elements, it is also to improve the world.Thus, transmedia appropriation by users is a reality, motivated by a taste for the universe, even if it is a weak consumption in comparison with the demanding, creative, and sometimes iconoclastic practices gamers and fans usually develop. It is obvious, in both fields, that they are new TV series fans (they quote mainly recent shows) and beginners in the world of games. For a significant part of them, GoT was probably their first time developing transmedia practices.However, GoT Ascent is not well evaluated by gamers and many of them do not repeat the experience (as the monthly number of gamers shows). Likewise, the ordinary viewers neglect the official transmedia components as too marketing oriented. The GoT novels are the exception proving the rule. They demonstrate that users are quite selective: they are not satisfied with weak elements. The question that this paper cannot answer is: was GoT a first experience? Will they persevere in the future? Yet, in this preliminary research, we have seen that studying ordinary users’ weak involvement (series viewers or gamers) is an interesting path in elaborating a theory of transmedia user’s activities, which takes the public’s diversity into account.ReferencesBerry, Vincent. L’Expérience Virtuelle: Jouer, Vivre, Apprendre Dans un Jeu Video. Rennes: UP Rennes, 2012.Boellstorff, Tom. “A Typology of Ethnographic Scales for Virtual Worlds.” Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual. Ed. William Sim Bainbridge. London: Springer, 2009.Bourdaa, Mélanie. “Taking a Break from All Your Worries: Battlestar Galactica et Les Nouvelles Pratiques Télévisuelles des Fans.” Questions de Communication 22 (2012) 2014. <http://journals.openedition.org/questionsdecommunication/6917>.Chen, Mark. Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of An Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.Collective. Le Transmédia Dans Tous Ses États: Les Cahiers de Veille de la Fondation Télécom. Paris: Fondation Télécom, 2012. 29 Dec. 2017 <https://www.fondation-mines-telecom.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2012-cahier-veille-transmedia.pdf\>.Davis, C.H. “Audience Value and Transmedia Products.” Media Innovations. Eds. T. Storsul and A. Krumsvik. Gothenburg: Nordicom, 2013. 179-190.Gambarato, Renira. “How to Analyze Transmedia Narratives?” Conference New Media: Changing Media Landscapes. Saint Petersburg, 2012. 2017 <http://prezi.com/fovz0jrlfsn0/how-to-analyze-transmedia-narratives>.Gambarato, Renira. “Transmedia Storytelling.” Serious Science, 2016. 2017 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thZnd_K8Vfs>.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. Updated ed. 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Paris: Fondation Télécom, 2012. 29 Dec. 2017 <https://www.fondation-mines-telecom.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2012-cahier-veille-transmedia.pdf>.———. “La Constellation Transmédiatique de Breaking Bad: Analyse de la Complémentarité Trouvée entre la Télévision et Internet.” ESSACHESS-Journal for Communication 4.1 (2011). 29 Dec. 2017 <http://www.essachess.com/index.php/jcs/article/view/111>. ———. “Les Constellations Narratives: Que Font les Téléspectateurs des Adaptations Multimédiatiques des Séries Télévisées?” TV/Series 3 (2013). 29 Dec. 2017 <http://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/729>. ———. “Editorial.” Inter Pares: Revue Électronique de Jeunes Chercheurs en Sciences Humains et Sociales 6 (2016). 29 Dec. 2017 <https://epic.univ-lyon2.fr/medias/fichier/inter-pares-6-maquette-v8web_1510576660265-pdf>.Servais, Olivier. “Funerals in the “World of Warcraft”: Religion, Polemic, and Styles of Play in a Videogame Universe.” Social Compass 62.3 (2015): 362-378.Stein, Louisa Ellen, and Kristina Busse. 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“A bunch of faggots for watching men hug each other in tights.”For the past five Marches, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) has produced an awards show which honours its aged former performers, such as Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka and Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, as pro-wrestling Legends. This awards show, according to WWE, is ‘an elegant, emotional, star-studded event that recognizes the in-ring achievements of the inductees and offers historical insights into this century-old sports-entertainment attraction’ (WWE.com, n.p.). In an episodic storyline leading up to the 2009 awards, however, the real-life personal shortcomings of these Legends have been brought to light, and subsequently mocked in one-on-one interview segments with WWE’s Superstar of the Year 2008, the dastardly Chris Jericho. Jericho caps off these tirades by physically assaulting the Legends with handy stage props. Significantly, the performances of Jericho and his victims have garnered positive attention not only from mass audiences unaware of backstage happenings in WWE, but also from the informed community of pro-wrestling fans over at the nihilistic humour website SomethingAwful. During Jericho’s assault on the Legend Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka at the March 02 WWE Raw event, a WWE-themed forum thread on SomethingAwful logged over sixty posts all reiterating variations of ‘gently caress me Jericho is amazing’ (Jerusalem, n.p.). This is despite the community’s passive-aggressive and ironically jaded official line that they indeed are ‘a bunch of faggots for watching men hug each other in tights. Thank you for not telling us this several times’ (HulkaMatt, n.p.). Why were these normally cynical fans of WWE enthusiastically expressing their love for the Jericho-Legends feud? In order to answer this question, this paper argues that the feud articulates not only the ideal of the “giving wrestler”, but also Roland Barthes’s version of jouissance. Consuming and commenting on WWE texts within the SomethingAwful community is further argued to be a performative ritual in which informed wrestling fans distance themselves from audiences they perceive as uncritical and ill-informed cultural dupes. The feud, then, allows the SomethingAwful fans to perform enthusiasm on two interconnected levels: they are not only able to ironically cheer on Jericho’s morally reprehensible actions, but also to genuinely appreciate the present-day in-ring efforts of the Legends. The Passion of the SuperflyTo properly contextualise this paper, though, the fact that “pro wrestling is fake” needs to be reiterated. Each match is a choreographed sequence of moves. Victory does not result from landing more damaging bodyslams than one's opponent, but is instead predetermined by scriptwriters—among whom wrestlers are typically not numbered—backstage. In the 1950s, Roland Barthes thus commented that pro wrestling ‘is not a sport, it is a spectacle’ (Mythologies 13). Yet, pro wrestling remains popular because this theatricality allows for the display of spectacular excesses of passion—here Barthes not only means “an intensity of emotion”, but refers to the physically tortured heroes of medieval passion plays as well—giving it an advantage over the legitimate sport of amateur wrestling. ‘It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself’ (Mythologies 16). This observation still holds true in today’s WWE. On one hand, the SomethingAwful fans go ‘gently caress Jericho, [Superfly] will MURDER you’ (Jerusalem, n.p.) in disapproval of Jericho’s on-screen actions. In the same thread, though, they simultaneously fret over him being slightly injured from an off-screen real life accident. ‘Jericho looks busted up on his forehead. Dang’ (Carney, n.p.).However, Barthes’s observations, while seminal, are not the be-all and end-all of pro wrestling scholarship. The industry has undergone a significant number of changes since the 1950s. Speeches and interview segments are now seen as essential tools for furthering storylines. Correspondingly, they are given ample TV time. At over ten minutes, the Jericho-“Superfly” confrontation from the March 02 Raw is longer than both the matches following it, and a fifteen minute conversation between two top wrestlers capstones these two matches. Henry Jenkins has thus argued that pro wrestling is a male-targeted melodrama. Its ‘writers emphasize many traits that [legitimate sports such as] football share with melodrama-the clear opposition between characters, the sharp alignment of audience identification, abrupt shifts in fortune, and an emotionally satisfying resolution’ (Jenkins, “Never Trust a Snake” 81). Unlike football, though, the predetermined nature of pro wrestling means that its events can be ‘staged to ensure maximum emotional impact and a satisfying climax’ (Jenkins, “Never Trust a Snake” 81). Further, Jenkins notes that shouting is preferred over tears as an outlet for male affect. It ‘embodies externalised emotion; it is aggressive and noisy. Women cry from a position of emotional (and often social) vulnerability; men shout from a position of physical and social strength (however illusory)’ (Jenkins, “Never Trust a Snake” 80). Pro wrestling is seen to encourage this outlet for affect by offering its viewers spectacles of male physical prowess to either castigate or cheer. Jericho’s assault of the Legends, coupled with his half-screaming, half-shouting taunts of “‘Hall of Famer’? ‘Hall of Famer’ of what? You’re a has-been! Just like all the rest!” could be read to fit within this paradigm as well. Smarts vs. MarksWWE has repeatedly highlighted its scripted nature in recent years. During a 2007 CNN interview, for instance, WWE Chairman Vince McMahon constantly refers to his product as “entertainment” and laughingly agrees that “it’s all story” when discussing his on-screen interactions with his long-lost midget “son” (Griffin, n.p.). These overt acknowledgments that WWE is a highly choreographed melodrama have boosted the growth of a fan demographic referred to the "smart" in pro-wrestling argot. This “smart” fan is a figure for whom the fabricated nature of pro-wrestling necessitates an engagement with the WWE spectacle at a different level from mass audiences. The “smart” not only ‘follow[s] the WWE not just to see the shows, but to keep track of what “the Fed[eration]” is doing’ (McBride and Bird 170) with regards to off-camera events, but also 'has knowledge of the inner-workings of the wrestling business’ (PWTorch, n.p.). One of the few “GOLD”-rated threads on the SomethingAwful smart forums, accordingly, is titled “WWE News and Other Top Stories, The Insider Thread”, and has nearly 400 000 views and over 1000 posts. As a result, the smarts are in a subject position of relative insider-ness. They consume the WWE spectacle at a deeper level—one which functions roughly like an apparatus of capture for the critical/cynical affect mobilised around the binary of ‘real’ and ‘fake’—yet ultimately remain captured by the spectacle through their autodidact enthusiasm for knowledge which uncovers its inner workings.By contrast, there is the category of the “mark” fan. These “marks” are individuals who remain credulous in their reception of WWE programming. As cuteygrl08 writes regarding a recent WWE storyline involving brotherly envy:I LOVE JEFF HARDY!!!! i cried when i heard his brother say all the crap about him!! kinda weird but i love him and this video is soooo good!! JEFF hardy loves his fans and his fans love him no matter what he does i'll always love JEFF HARDY!!!!!!!!!!! (n.p.)This unstinting faith in the on-screen spectacle is understandable insofar as WWE programming trades upon powerful visual markers of authenticity—nearly-bare bodies, sweat, pained facial expressions­—and complements them with the adrenaline-producing beats of thrash metal and hard rock. Yet, smarts look down upon marks like cuteygrl08, seeing them as Frankfurt School-era hypnotised sots for whom the WWE spectacle is ‘the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness’ (Debord 117), and additionally as victims of a larger media industry which specialises in mass deception (Horkheimer and Adorno 41). As Lawrence McBride and Elizabeth Bird observe:Marks appear to believe in the authenticity of the competition—Smarts see them as the stereotypical dupes imagined by wrestling critics. Smarts approach the genre of wrestling as would-be insiders, while Marks root unreflexively for the most popular faces. Smart fans possess truly incredible amounts of knowledge about the history of wrestling, including wrestler’s real names and career histories, how various promotions began and folded, who won every Wrestlemania ever. Smart fan informants defined a Mark specifically as someone who responds to wrestling in the way intended by the people who write the storylines (the bookers), describing Marks with statements such as “Kids are Marks.” or “We were all Marks when we were kids.” Smarts view Marks with scorn. (169)Perhaps feeding on the antagonistic binaries drawn by WWE programming, there exists an “us vs them” binary in smart fan communities. Previous research has shown that fan communities often rigidly police the boundaries of “good taste”, and use negatively constructed differences as a means of identity construction (Fiske 448; Jenkins, “Get a Life!” 432; Theodoropoulou 321). This ritual Othering is especially important when supporting the WWE. Smarts are aware that they are fans of a product denigrated by non-fans as ‘trash TV’ (McKinley, n.p.). As Matt Hills finds, fandom is a mode of performative consumption. It is ‘an identity which is (dis)claimed, and which performs cultural work’ (Hills xi). Belonging to the SomethingAwful smart community, thus, exerts its own pressures on the individual smart. There, the smart must perform ‘audiencehood, knowing that other fans will act as a readership for speculation, observation, and commentaries’ (Hills 177). Wrestling, then, is not just to be watched passively. It must be analysed, and critically dissected with reference to the encyclopaedic knowledge treasured by the smart community. Mark commentary has to be pilloried, for despite all the ironic disaffection characterising their posts, the smarts display mark-like behaviour by watching and purchasing WWE programming under their own volition. A near-existential dread is hence articulated when smarts become aware of points where the boundaries between smart and mark overlap, that ‘the creatures that lurk the internet ...carry some of the same interests that we do’ (rottingtrashcan, n.p.). Any commonalities between smarts and marks must thus be disavowed as a surface resemblance: afterall, creatures are simply unthinking appetites, not smart epicures. We’re better than those plebs; in fact, we’re nothing like them any more. Yet, in one of the few forms of direct address in the glossary of smart newsletter PWTorch, to “mark out” is ‘to enthusiastically be into [a storyline] or match as if you [emphasis added] were “a mark”; to suspend one's disbelief for the sake of enjoying to a greater extent a match or [a storyline]’ (PWTorch, n.p.). The existence of the term “marking out” in a smart glossary points to an enjoyably liminal privileged position between that of defensively ironic critic and that of credulous dupe, one where smarts can stop their performance of cooler-than-thou fatigue and enthusiastically believe that there is nothing more to WWE than spontaneous alarms and excursions. The bodily reactions of the Legends in response to Jericho's physical assault helps foster this willing naiveté. These reactions are a distressing break from the generic visual conventions set forth by preceding decades of professional wrestling. As Barthes argues, wrestling is as much concerned with images of spectacular suffering as with narratives of amazing triumphs:the wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel (an arm- lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; like a primitive Pieta, he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly contorted by an intolerable affliction. It is obvious, of course, that in wrestling reserve would be out of place, since it is opposed to the voluntary ostentation of the spectacle, to this Exhibition of Suffering which is the very aim of the fight. (17)Barthes was writing of the primitively filmed wrestling matches of the 1950s notable for their static camera shots. However, WWE wrestlers yet follow this theatrical aesthetic. In the match immediately following Jericho’s bullying of Superfly, Kane considerately jumps the last two feet into a ringside turnbuckle after Mike Knox pushes him into its general vicinity. Kane grunts at the impact while the camera cuts to a low-angled shot of his back—all the better to magnify the visual of the 150 kg Knox now using his bulk to squash Kane. Whenever Jericho himself traps his opponent in his “Walls of Jericho” submission manoeuvre, both their faces are rictuses of passion. His opponent clutches for the safety of the ring ropes, shaking his head in heroic determination. Audiences see Jericho tighten his grip, his own head shaking in villainous purpose. But the Legends do not gyrate around the set when hit. Instead, they invariably slump to the ground, motionless except for weakly spasming to the rhythm of Jericho’s subsequent attacks. This atypical reaction forces audiences—smart and mark alike—to re-evaluate any assumptions that the event constitutes a typical WWE beatdown. Overblown theatricality gives way to a scene which seems more related to everyday experiences with pain: Here's an old man being beaten and whipped by a strong, young man. He's not moving. Not like other wrestlers do. I wonder... The battered bodies of these Legends are then framed in high angle camera shots, making them look ever so much more vulnerable than they were prior to Jericho’s assault. Hence the smart statements gushing that ‘gently caress me Jericho is amazing’ (Jerusalem, n.p.) and that Jericho’s actions have garnered a ‘rear end in a top hat chant [from the crowd]. It has been FOREVER since I heard one of those. I love Chris Jericho’ (Burrito, n.p.).Jouissance and “Marking Out”This uninhibited “marking out” by normally cynical smarts brings to mind Barthes's observation that texts are able to provoke two different kinds of enjoyment in their readers. On one hand, there is the text which provides pleasure born from familiarity. It ‘contents, fills, grants euphoria; [it is] the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading’ (Barthes, Image-Music-Text 14). The Knox-Kane match engendered such a been-there-done-that-it's-ok-I-guess overall reaction from smarts. For every ‘Mike Knox throwing Mysterio at Kane was fantastic’ (Burrito, n.p.), there is an ‘Ahahaha jesus Knox [sic] that was the shittiest Hurracanrana sell ever’ (Axisillian, n.p.), and a ‘Hit the beard [sic] it is Knox's weakpoint’ (Eurotrash, n.p.). The pleasant genericity of the match enables and necessitates that these smarts maintain their tactic of ironic posturing. They are able to armchair critique Knox for making his opponent's spinning Hurracanrana throw look painless. Yet they are also allowed to reiterate their camp affection for Knox's large and bushy beard, which remains grotesque even when divorced from a WWE universe that celebrates sculpted physiques.By contrast, Barthes praises the text of rapturous jouissance. It is one where an orgasmic intensity of pleasure is born from the unravelling of its audience’s assumptions, moving them away from their comfort zone. It is a text which ‘imposes a stage of loss, [a] text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to crisis his relation with language’ (Barthes, Image-Music-Text 14). In addition to the atypical physical reactions of the Legends, WWE cynically positions the Jericho-Legends segments during Raw events which also feature slick video montages highlighting the accomplishments of individual Legends. These montages—complete with an erudite and enthusiastic Voice-of-God narrator— introduce the long-retired Legends to marks unfamiliar with WWE's narrative continuity: “Ladies and gentlemen! Rrriiiicky “The Draaagon” Steeeeamboat!”. At the same time, they serve as a visually and aurally impressive highlight-reel-cum-nostalgic-celebration of each Legend's career accomplishments. Their authoritative narration is spliced to clips of past matches, and informs audiences that, for instance, Steamboat was ‘one of the first Superstars to combine technical skills with astounding aerial agility ... in a match widely regarded as one of the best in history, he captured the Intercontinental title from Randy Savage in front of a record-breaking 93 173 fans’ (“Raw #636”, WWE). Following the unassailably authentic video footage of past matches, other retired wrestlers speak candidly in non-WWE stages such as outdoor parks and their own homes about the Legend's strengths and contributions to the industry.The interesting thing about these didactic montages is not so much what they show —Legends mythologised into triumphant Titans — but rather, what they elide. While the Steamboat-centred package does reflect the smart consensus that his Intercontinental bout ‘was a technical classic, and to this day, is still considered one of the greatest matches of all-time’ (NPP, n.p.), it does not mention how Steamboat was treated poorly in the WWE. Despite coming to it as the widely-known World Champion of [the NWA] rival promotion, WWE producers ‘dressed Steamboat up as a dragon and even made him blow fire. ...To boot, he was never acknowledged as a World Champion and [kept losing] to the stars’ (NPP, n.p.). The montages, overtly endorsed by the gigantic WWE logo as they are, are ultimately pleasant illusions which rewrite inconvenient truths while glamorising pleasant memories.Jericho’s speeches, however, sharply break from this celebratory mode. He references Steamboat’s previous success in the NWA, ‘an organisation that according to this company never even existed’(“Raw #636”, WWE). He then castigates Steamboat for being a real-life sellout and alludes to Steamboat having personal problems unmentioned in the montage:It wasn't until you came to the WWE that you sold your soul to all of these parasites [everyone watching] that you became “The Dragon”. A glorified Karate Kid selling headbands and making poses. Feeding into stereotypes. And then you eventually came to the ring with a Komodo Dragon. Literally spitting fire like the circus freak you'd become. It was pathetic. But hey, it's all right as long as you're making a paycheck, right Steamboat? And then when you decided to retire, you ended up like all the rest. Down and out. Broken. Beaten down. Dysfunctional family ...You applied for a job working for the WWE, you got one working backstage, and now here you are. You see, Steamboat, you are a life-long sellout. And now, with the Hall of Fame induction, the loyal dog gets his bone. (WWE)Here, Jericho demonstrates an apparent unwillingness to follow the company line by not only acknowledging the NWA, but also by disrespecting a current WWE backstage authority. Yet, wrestlers having onscreen tangles with their bosses is the norm for WWE. The most famous storyline of the 1990s had “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and the WWE Chairman brutalising each other for months on end, and the fifteen minute verbal exchange mentioned earlier concerns one wrestler previously attacking the Raw General Manager. Rather, it is Jericho’s reinterpretation of Steamboat’s career trajectory which gives the storyline the intensely pleasurable uncertainty of jouissance. His confrontational speeches rupture the celebratory nostalgia of the montages, forcing smarts to apply extra-textual knowledge to them. This is especially relevant in Steamboat’s case. His montage was shown just prior to his meeting with Jericho, ensuring that his iconic status was fresh in the audience’s memory. Vera Dika’s findings on the conflict between memory and history in revisionist nostalgia films are important to remember here. The tension ‘that comes from the juxtaposition of the coded material against the historical context of the film itself ...encourages a new set of meanings to arise’ (Dika 91). Jericho cynically views the seemingly virtuous and heroic Steamboat as a corporate sycophant preying on fan goodwill to enrich his own selfish ends. This viewpoint, troublingly enough for smarts, is supported by their non-WWE-produced extra-textual knowledge, allowing for a meta-level melodrama to be played out. The speeches thus speak directly to smarts, simultaneously confounding and exceeding their expectations. The comfortingly pleasant memories of Steamboat’s “amazing aerial prowess” are de-emphasised, and he is further linked to the stereotypical juvenilia of the once-popular The Karate Kid. They articulate and capitalise upon whatever misgivings smarts may have regarding Steamboat’s real-life actions. Thus, to paraphrase Dika, ‘seen in this clash, [the Jericho-Legends feud] has the structure of irony, producing a feeling of nostalgia, but also of pathos, and registering the historical events as the cause of an irretrievable loss [of a Legend’s dignity]’ (91). “C’mon Legend! Live in the past!” taunts Jericho as he stuffs Superfly’s mouth with bananas and beats him amidst the wreckage of the exactingly reproduced cheap wooden set in the same way that “Rowdy” Roddy Piper did years ago (“RAW #637”, WWE). This literal dismantling of cherished memories results from WWE producers second-guessing the smarts, and providing these fans with an enjoyably uncomfortable jouissance that cleverly confounds the performance of a smart disaffection. “Marking out” —or its performance at least—results.The Giving WrestlerLastly, the general physical passivity of the Legends also ties into the ethos of the “giving wrestler” when combined with the celebratory montages. In a business where performed passion is integral to fan enjoyment, the “giving wrestler” is an important figure who, when hit by a high-risk move, will make his co-worker’s offense look convincing (McBride and Bird 173). He ‘will give his all in a performance to ensure a dual outcome: the match will be spectacular, benefiting the fans, and each wrestler will make his “opponent” look good, helping him “get over with the fans” (McBride and Bird 172). Unsurprisingly, this figure is appreciated by smarts, who ‘often form strong emotional attachments to those wrestlers who go to the greatest lengths to bear the burden of the performance’ (McBride and Bird 173). As described earlier, the understated reactions of the Legends make Jericho’s attacks paradoxically look as though they cause extreme pain. Yet, when this pathetic image of the Legends is combined with the hypermasculine images of them in their heyday, a tragedy with real-life referents is played out on-stage. In one of Jenkins’s ‘abrupt shifts of fortune’ (“Never Trust a Snake” 81), age has grounded these Legends. They can now believably be assaulted with impunity by someone that Steamboat dismisses as ‘a snotty brat wrestler of a kid[sic] ...a hypocrite’ (“Raw #636”, WWE), and even in this, they apparently give their all to make Jericho look viciously “good”, thus exceeding the high expectations of smarts. As an appreciative thread title on SomethingAwful states, ‘WWE Discussion is the RICKY STEAMBOAT OWN [wins] ZONE for 02/23/09’ (HulkaMatt, n.p.) ConclusionThe Jericho-Legends feud culminated the day after the Hall of Fame ceremony, at the WWE’s flagship Wrestlemania event. Actor Mickey Rourke humiliated Jericho for the honour of the Legends, flattening the cocky braggart with a single punch. The maximum degree of moral order possible was thus temporarily restored to an episodic narrative centred around unprovoked acts of violence. Ultimately though, it is important to note the three strategies that WWE used The Legends were scripted to respond feebly to Jericho’s physical assault, slick recap montages were copiously deployed, and Jericho himself was allowed candid metatextual references to incidents that WWE producers normally like to pretend have “never even existed”. All these strategies were impressive in their own right, and they eventually served to reinforce each other. 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IntroductionWhat can we learn about anomaly from the strangeness of a puppet, a lifeless object, that can both bleed and die? How does the filming process of a puppet’s death engage across media and produce a new media genre that is not easily classified within traditional conventions? Why do these fighting and bleeding puppets’ scenes consistently attract audiences? This study examines how Pili puppetry (1984-present), a popular TV series depicting martial arts-based narratives and fight sequences, interacts with digital technologies and constructs a new media genre. The transmedia constitution of a virtual world not only challenges the stereotype of puppetry’s target audience but also expands the audience’s bodily imagination and desires through the visual component of death scenes. Hence, the show does not merely represent or signify an anomaly, but even creates anomalous desires and imaginary bodies.Cultural commodification and advancing technologies have motivated the convergence and displacement of traditional boundaries, genres, and media, changing the very fabric of textuality itself. By exploring how new media affect the audience’s visual reception of fighting and death, this article sheds light on understanding the metamorphoses of Taiwanese puppetry and articulates a theoretical argument regarding the show’s artistic practice to explain how its form transverses traditional boundaries. This critical exploration focusses on how the form represents bleeding puppets, and in doing so, explicates the politics of transmedia performing and viewing. Pili is an example of an anomalous media form that proliferates anomalous media viewing experiences and desires in turn.Beyond a Media Genre: Taiwanese Pili PuppetryConverging the craft technique of puppeteering and digital technology of filmmaking and animation, Pili puppetry creates a new media genre that exceeds any conventional idea of a puppet show or digital puppet, as it is something in-between. Glove puppetry is a popular traditional theatre in Taiwan, often known as “theatre in the palm” because a traditional puppet was roughly the same size as an adult’s palm. The size enabled the puppeteer to easily manipulate a puppet in one hand and be close to the audience. Traditionally, puppet shows occurred to celebrate the local deities’ birthday. Despite its popularity, the form was limited by available technology. For instance, although stories with vigorous battles were particularly popular, bleeding scenes in such an auspicious occasion were inappropriate and rare. As a live theatrical event featuring immediate interaction between the performer and the spectator, realistic bleeding scenes were rare because it is hard to immediately clean the stage during the performance. Distinct from the traditional puppet show, digital puppetry features semi-animated puppets in a virtual world. Digital puppetry is not a new concept by any means in the Western film industry. Animating a 3D puppet is closely associated with motion capture technologies and animation that are manipulated in a digitalised virtual setting (Ferguson). Commonly, the target audience of the Western digital puppetry is children, so educators sometimes use digital puppetry as a pedagogical tool (Potter; Wohlwend). With these young target audience in mind, the producers often avoid violent and bleeding scenes.Pili puppetry differs from digital puppetry in several ways. For instance, instead of targeting a young audience, Pili puppetry consistently extends the traditional martial-arts performance to include bloody fight sequences that enrich the expressiveness of traditional puppetry as a performing art. Moreover, Pili puppetry does not apply the motion capture technologies to manipulate the puppet’s movement, thus retaining the puppeteers’ puppeteering craft (clips of Pili puppetry can be seen on Pili’s official YouTube page). Hence, Pili is a unique hybrid form, creating its own anomalous space in puppetry. Among over a thousand characters across the series, the realistic “human-like” puppet is one of Pili’s most popular selling points. The new media considerably intervene in the puppet design, as close-up shots and high-resolution images can accurately project details of a puppet’s face and body movements on the screen. Consequently, Pili’s puppet modelling becomes increasingly intricate and attractive and arguably makes its virtual figures more epic yet also more “human” (Chen). Figure 1: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Killing Blade (1993). His facial expressions were relatively flat and rigid then. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.Figure 2: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Nine Thrones (2003). The puppet’s facial design and costume became more delicate and complex. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.Figure 3: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Fantasy: War of Dragons (2019). His facial lines softened due to more precise design technologies. The new lightweight chiffon yarn costumes made him look more elegant. The multiple-layer costumes also created more space for puppeteers to hide behind the puppet and enact more complicated manipulations. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.The design of the most well-known Pili swordsman, Su Huan-Jen, demonstrates how the Pili puppet modelling became more refined and intricate in the past 20 years. In 1993, the standard design was a TV puppet with the size and body proportion slightly enlarged from the traditional puppet. Su Huan-Jen’s costumes were made from heavy fabrics, and his facial expressions were relatively flat and rigid (fig. 1). Pili produced its first puppetry film Legend of the Sacred Stone in 2000; considering the visual quality of a big screen, Pili refined the puppet design including replacing wooden eyeballs and plastic hair with real hair and glass eyeballs (Chen). The filmmaking experience inspired Pili to dramatically improve the facial design for all puppets. In 2003, Su’s modelling in Pili Nine Thrones (TV series) became noticeably much more delicate. The puppet’s size was considerably enlarged by almost three times, so a puppeteer had to use two hands to manipulate a puppet. The complex costumes and props made more space for puppeteers to hide behind the puppet and enrich the performance of the fighting movements (fig. 2). In 2019, Su’s new modelling further included new layers of lightweight fabrics, and his makeup and props became more delicate and complex (fig. 3). Such a refined aesthetic design also lends to Pili’s novelty among puppetry performances.Through the transformation of Pili in the context of puppetry history, we see how the handicraft-like puppet itself gradually commercialised into an artistic object that the audience would yearn to collect and project their bodily imagination. Anthropologist Teri Silvio notices that, for some fans, Pili puppets are similar to worship icons through which they project their affection and imaginary identity (Silvio, “Pop Culture Icons”). Intermediating with the new media, the change in the refined puppet design also comes from the audience’s expectations. Pili’s senior puppet designer Fan Shih-Ching mentioned that Pili fans are very involved, so their preferences affect the design of puppets. The complexity, particularly the layer of costumes, most clearly differentiates the aesthetics of traditional and Pili puppets. Due to the “idolisation” of some famous Pili characters, Shih-Ching has had to design more and more gaudy costumes. Each resurgence of a well-known Pili swordsman, such as Su Huan-Jen, Yi Ye Shu, and Ye Hsiao-Chai, means he has to remodel the puppet.Pili fans represent their infatuation for puppet characters through cosplay (literally “costume play”), which is when fans dress up and pretend to be a Pili character. Their cosplay, in particular, reflects the bodily practice of imaginary identity. Silvio observes that most cosplayers choose to dress as characters that are the most visually appealing rather than characters that best suit their body type. They even avoid moving too “naturally” and mainly move from pose-to-pose, similar to the frame-to-frame techne of animation. Thus, we can understand this “cosplay more as reanimating the character using the body as a kind of puppet rather than as an embodied performance of some aspect of self-identity” (Silvio 2019, 167). Hence, Pili fans’ cosplay is indicative of an anomalous desire to become the puppet-like human, which helps them transcend their social roles in their everyday life. It turns out that not only fans’ preference drives the (re)modelling of puppets but also fans attempt to model themselves in the image of their beloved puppets. The reversible dialectic between fan-star and flesh-object further provokes an “anomaly” in terms of the relationship between the viewers and the puppets. Precisely because fans have such an intimate relationship with Pili, it is important to consider how the series’ content and form configure fans’ viewing experience.Filming Bleeding PuppetsDespite its intricate aesthetics, Pili is still a series with frequent fighting-to-the-death scenes, which creates, and is the result of, extraordinary transmedia production and viewing experiences. Due to the market demand of producing episodes around 500 minutes long every month, Pili constantly creates new characters to maintain the audience’s attention and retain its novelty. So far, Pili has released thousands of characters. To ensure that new characters supersede the old ones, numerous old characters have to die within the plot.The adoption of new media allows the fighting scenes in Pili to render as more delicate, rather than consisting of loud, intense action movements. Instead, the leading swordsmen’s death inevitably takes place in a pathetic and romantic setting and consummates with a bloody sacrifice. Fighting scenes in early Pili puppetry created in the late 1980s were still based on puppets’ body movements, as the knowledge and technology of animation were still nascent and underdeveloped. At that time, the prestigious swordsman mainly relied on the fast speed of brandishing his sword. Since the early 1990s, as animation technology matured, it has become very common to see Pili use CGI animation to create a damaging sword beam for puppets to kill target enemies far away. The sword beam can fly much faster than the puppets can move, so almost every fighting scene employs CGI to visualise both sword beams and flame. The change in fighting manners provokes different representations of the bleeding and death scenes. Open wounds replace puncture wounds caused by a traditional weapon; bleeding scenes become typical, and a special feature in Pili’s transmedia puppetry.In addition to CGI animation, the use of fake blood in the Pili studio makes the performance even more realistic. Pili puppet master Ting Chen-Ching recalled that exploded puppets in traditional puppetry were commonly made by styrofoam blocks. The white styrofoam chips that sprayed everywhere after the explosion inevitably made the performance seem less realistic. By contrast, in the Pili studio, the scene of a puppet spurting blood after the explosion usually applies the technology of editing several shots. The typical procedure would be a short take that captures a puppet being injured. In its injury location, puppeteers sprinkle red confetti to represent scattered blood clots in the following shot. Sometimes the fake blood was splashed with the red confetti to make it further three-dimensional (Ting). Bloody scenes can also be filmed through multiple layers of arranged performance conducted at the same time by a group of puppeteers. Ting describes the practice of filming a bleeding puppet. Usually, some puppeteers sprinkle fake blood in front of the camera, while other puppeteers blasted the puppets toward various directions behind the blood to make the visual effects match. If the puppeteers need to show how a puppet becomes injured and vomits blood during the fight, they can install tiny pipes in the puppet in advance. During the filming, the puppeteer slowly squeezes the pipe to make the fake blood flow out from the puppet’s mouth. Such a bloody scene sometimes accompanies tears dropping from the puppet’s eyes. In some cases, the puppeteer drops the blood on the puppet’s mouth prior to the filming and then uses a powerful electric fan to blow the blood drops (Ting). Such techniques direct the blood to flow laterally against the wind, which makes the puppet’s death more aesthetically tragic. Because it is not a live performance, the puppeteer can try repeatedly until the camera captures the most ideal blood drop pattern and bleeding speed. Puppeteers have to adjust the camera distance for different bleeding scenes, which creates new modes of viewing, sensing, and representing virtual life and death. One of the most representative examples of Pili’s bleeding scenes is when Su’s best friend, Ching Yang-Zi, fights with alien devils in Legend of the Sacred Stone. (The clip of how Ching Yang-Zi fights and bleeds to death can be seen on YouTube.) Ting described how Pili prepared three different puppets of Ching for the non-fighting, fighting, and bleeding scenes (Ting). The main fighting scene starts from a low-angle medium shot that shows how Ching Yang-Zi got injured and began bleeding from the corner of his mouth. Then, a sharp weapon flies across the screen; the following close-up shows that the weapon hits Ching and he begins bleeding immediately. The successive shots move back and forth between his face and the wound in medium shot and close-up. Next, a close-up shows him stepping back with blood dripping on the ground. He then pushes the weapon out of his body to defend enemies; a final close-up follows a medium take and a long take shows the massive hemorrhage. The eruption of fluid plasma creates a natural effect that is difficult to achieve, even with 3D animation. Beyond this impressive technicality, the exceptional production and design emphasise how Pili fully embraces the ethos of transmedia: to play with multiple media forms and thereby create a new form. In the case of Pili, its form is interactive, transcending the boundaries of what we might consider the “living” and the “dead”.Epilogue: Viewing Bleeding Puppets on the ScreenThe simulated, high-quality, realistic-looking puppet designs accompanying the Pili’s featured bloody fighting sequence draw another question: What is the effect of watching human-like puppets die? What does this do to viewer-fans? Violence is prevalent throughout the historical record of human behaviour, especially in art and entertainment because these serve as outlets to fulfill a basic human need to indulge in “taboo fantasies” and escape into “realms of forbidden experience” (Schechter). When discussing the visual representations of violence and the spectacle of the sufferings of others, Susan Sontag notes, “if we consider what emotions would be desirable” (102), viewing the pain of others may not simply evoke sympathy. She argues that “[no] moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching” (41). For viewers, the boldness of watching the bloody scenes can be very inviting. Watching human-like puppets die in the action scenes similarly validates the viewer’s need for pleasure and entertainment. Although different from a human body, the puppets still bears the materiality of being-object. Therefore, watching the puppets bleeding and die as distinctly “human-like’ puppets further prevent viewers’ from feeling guilty or morally involved. The conceptual distance of being aware of the puppet’s materiality acts as a moral buffer; audiences are intimately involved through the particular aesthetic arrangement, yet morally detached. The transmedia filming of puppetry adds another layer of mediation over the human-like “living” puppets that allows such a particular experience. Sontag notices that the media generates an inevitable distance between object and subject, between witness and victim. For Sontag, although images constitute “the imaginary proximity” because it makes the “faraway sufferers” be “seen close-up on the television screen”, it is a mystification to assume that images serve as a direct link between sufferers and viewers. Rather, Sontag insists: the distance makes the viewers feel “we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence” (102). Echoing Sontag’s argument, Jeffrey Goldstein points out that “distancing” oneself from the mayhem represented in media makes it tolerable. Media creates an “almost real” visuality of violence, so the audience feels relatively safe in their surroundings when exposed to threatening images. Thus, “violent imagery must carry cues to its unreality or it loses appeal” (280). Pili puppets that are human-like, thus not human, more easily enable the audience to seek sensational excitement through viewing puppets’ bloody violence and eventual death on the screen and still feel emotionally secure. Due to the distance granted by the medium, viewers gain a sense of power by excitedly viewing the violence with an accompanying sense of moral exemption. Thus, viewers can easily excuse the limits of their personal responsibility while still being captivated by Pili’s boundary-transgressing aesthetic.The anomalous power of Pili fans’ cosplay differentiates the viewing experience of puppets’ deaths from that of other violent entertainment productions. Cosplayers physically bridge viewing/acting and life/death by dressing up as the puppet characters, bringing them to life, as flesh. Cosplay allows fans to compensate for the helplessness they experience when watching the puppets’ deaths on the screen. They can both “enjoy” the innocent pleasure of watching bleeding puppets and bring their adored dead idols “back to life” through cosplay. The onscreen violence and death thus provide an additional layer of pleasure for such cosplayers. They not only take pleasure in watching the puppets—which are an idealized version of their bodily imagination—die, but also feel empowered to revitalise their loved idols. Therefore, Pili cosplayers’ desires incite a cycle of life, pleasure, and death, in which the company responds to their consumers’ demands in kind. The intertwining of social, economic, and political factors thus collectively thrives upon media violence as entertainment. Pili creates the potential for new cross-media genre configurations that transcend the traditional/digital puppetry binary. On the one hand, the design of swordsman puppets become a simulation of a “living object” responding to the camera distance. On the other hand, the fighting and death scenes heavily rely on the puppeteers’ cooperation with animation and editing. Therefore, Pili puppetry enriches existing discourse on both puppetry and animation as life-giving processes. What is animated by Pili puppetry is not simply the swordsmen characters themselves, but new potentials for media genres and violent entertainment. AcknowledgmentMy hearty gratitude to Amy Gaeta for sharing her insights with me on the early stage of this study.ReferencesChen, Jasmine Yu-Hsing. “Transmuting Tradition: The Transformation of Taiwanese Glove Puppetry in Pili Productions.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 51 (2019): 26-46.Ferguson, Jeffrey. “Lessons from Digital Puppetry: Updating a Design Framework for a Perceptual User Interface.” IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology, 2015.Goldstein, Jeffrey. “The Attractions of Violent Entertainment.” Media Psychology 1.3 (1999): 271-282.Potter, Anna. “Funding Contemporary Children’s Television: How Digital Convergence Encourages Retro Reboot.” International Journal on Communications Management 19.2 (2017): 108-112.Schechter, Harold. Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005.Silvio, Teri. “Pop Culture Icons: Religious Inflections of the Character Toy in Taiwan.” Mechademia 3.1 (2010): 200-220.———. Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan. Honolulu: U Hawaii P, 2019. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.Ting, Chen-Ching. Interview by the author. Yunlin, Taiwan. 24 June 2019.Wohlwend, Karen E. “One Screen, Many Fingers: Young Children's Collaborative Literacy Play with Digital Puppetry Apps and Touchscreen Technologies.” Theory into Practice 54.2 (2015): 154-162.

Fig. 1: "Xiao Ming (little Ming) and xiao meng (little sprout/cutie)", satirical take on a popular Chinese textbook character. Shared online Introduction: Cuteness, Online Vernaculars, and Digital FolkloreThis short essay presents some preliminary materials for a discussion of the social circulation of contemporary Chinese vernacular terms among digital media users. In particular, I present the word meng (萌, literally "sprout", recently adopted as a slang term for "cute") as a case in point for a contextual analysis of elements of digital folklore in their transcultural flows, local appropriations, and social practices of signification. One among many other neologisms that enter Mandarin Chinese from seemingly nowhere and gain a widespread popularity in everyday online and offline linguistic practices, meng belongs to a specific genealogy of Japanese animation fansubbing communities, and owes its rapid popularisation to its adaptation to local contexts in different syntactic forms. The resulting inclusion of meng in the changing repertoire of wangluo liuxing ciyu ("words popular on the Internet")—the online vernacular common among Chinese Internet users which is often the target of semantic or structural analyses—is in fact just the last step of processes of networked production and social signification happening across digital media and online platforms.As an anthropologist of media use, I aim to advance the thesis that, in the context of widespread access to digital media, vernacular terms popularised across online platforms and making their way into everyday linguistic interactions are not necessarily the epiphenomena of subcultural formations, nor can they be simply seen as imported aesthetics, or understood through semantic analyses. Rather, “words popular on the Internet” must be understood as part of a local digital folklore, the open repertoire of vernacular content resulting from the daily interaction of users and digital technologies (Lialina & Espenschied 9) in a complex and situated media ecology (Fuller). I argue that the difference between these two approaches is the same passing between a classical structural understanding of signification proposed by Lévi-Strauss and the counter-Copernican revolution proposed by Latour’s quasi-objects proliferating in collectives of actors. Are incredibly pervasive terms like meng actually devoid of meaning, floating signifiers enabling the very possibility of signification? Or are they rather more useful when understood as both signifiers and signifieds, quasi-objects tracing networks and leading to collectives of other hybrids and practices?The materials and observations presented in this essay are part of the data collected for my PhD research on Chinese digital folklore, a study grounded on both ethnographic and archaeological methods. The ethnographic part of my project consists of in-depth interviews, small talk and participant observation of users on several Chinese online platforms such as AcFun, Baidu Tieba, Douban, Sina Weibo and WeChat (Hine). The archaeological part, on the other hand, focuses on the sampling of user-generated content from individual feeds and histories of these online platforms, an approach closer to the user-focused Internet archaeology of Nicholson than to the media archaeology of Parikka. My choice of discussing the term meng as an example is motivated by its pervasiveness in everyday interactions in China, and is supported by my informants identifying it as one of the most popular vernacular terms originating in online interaction. Moreover, as a rather new term jostling its way through the crowded semantic spectrum of cuteness, meng is a good example of the minor aesthetic concepts identified by Ngai as pivotal for judgments of taste in contemporary consumer societies (812). If, as in the words of one of my informants, meng "just means 'cute'," why did it end up on Coca-Cola bottle labels which were then featured in humorous self-portraits with perplexed cats? Fig. 2: "Meng zhu" (Cute leader, play on word on homophone “alliance leader”) special edition Coca-Cola bottle with cat, uploaded on Douban image gallery. Screenshot by the author Cuteness after JapanContemporary Japan is often portrayed as the land of cuteness. Academic explanations of the Japanese fascination with the cute, neotenic and miniaturised abound, tackling the topic from the origins of cute aesthetics in Japanese folkloric characters (Occhi) and their reappearance in commercial phenomena such as Pokémon (Allison), to the role of cuteness as gender performance and normativity (Burdelski & Mitsuhashi) and the "spectacle of kawaii" (Yano 681) as a trans-national strategy of cultural soft power (683). Although the export and localisation of Japanese cultural products across and beyond Asia has been widely documented (Iwabuchi), the discussion has often remained at the level of specific products (comics, TV series, games). Less frequently explored are the repertoires of recontextualised samples, snippets and terms that local audiences piece together after the localisation and consumption of these transnational cultural products. In light of this, is it the case that "the very aesthetic and sensibility that seems to dwell in the playful, the girlish, the infantilized, and the inevitably sexualized" are inevitably adopted after the "widespread distribution and consumption of Japanese cute goods and aesthetics to other parts of the industrial world" (Yano 683)? Or is it rather the case that language precedes aesthetics, and that terms end up reconfigured according to the local discursive contexts in ongoing dialogic and situated negotiations? In other words, what happens when the Japanese word moe (萌え), a slang term "originally referring to the fictional desire for characters of comics, anime, and games or for pop idols” (Azuma 48) is read in its Mandarin Chinese pronunciation meng by amateur translators of anime and manga, picked up by audiences of video streaming websites, and popularised on discussion boards and other online platforms? On a broader level, this is a question of how the vocabularies of specialised fan cultures mutate when they move across language barriers on the vectors of digital media and amateur translations. While in Japanese otaku culture moe indicates a very specific, physically arousing form of aesthetic appreciation that is proper to a devote fan (Azuma 57), the appropriation of the (originally Chinese) logograph by the audiences of dongman (animation and comics) products in Mainland China results in the general propagation of meng as a way of saying 'cute' slightly more fashionable and hip than the regular Mandarin word ke'ai. Does this impact on the semantics or the aesthetics of cuteness in China? These questions have not been ignored by researchers; Chinese academics in particular, who have a first-hand experience of the unpredictable moods of vernacular terms circulating from digital media user cultures to everyday life interactions, appear concerned with finding linguistic explanations or establishing predictors for these rogue terms that seem to ignore lexical rules and traditional etymologies. Liu, for example, tries to explain the popularity of this particular term through Dawkins' neo-Darwinian theorisation of memes as units of cultural transmission, identifying in meng the evolutionary advantages of shortness and memorisability. As simplistic treatments of language, this sort of explanations does not account for the persistence of various other ways of describing general and specific kinds of cuteness in Mandarin Chinese, such as ke'ai, dia or sajiao, as described by Zhang & Kramarae (767). On the other hand, most of the Chinese language research about meng at least acknowledges how the word appears under the sign of a specific media ecology: Japanese comics and animation (dongman) translated and shared online by fan communities, Japanese videogames and movies widely consumed by Chinese young audiences, and the popularisation of Internet access and media literacy across China. It is in this context that this and other neologisms "continuously end up in the latest years' charts of most popular words" (Bai 28, translation by the author), as vernacular Mandarin integrates words from digital media user cultures and online platforms. Similar comparative analyses also recognise that "words move faster than culture" (Huang 15, translation by the author), and that it is now young Chinese digital media users who negotiate their understanding of meng, regardless of the implications of the Japanese moe culture and its aesthetic canons (16). According to Huang, this process indicates on the one hand the openness and curiosity of Chinese youth for Japanese culture, and on the other "the 'borrowist' tendency of the language of Internet culture" (18). It is precisely the speed and the carefree ‘borrowist’ attitude with which these terms are adopted, negotiated and transformed across online platforms which makes it questionable to inscribe them in the classic relationship of generational resistance such as the one that Moore proposes in his treatment of ku, the Chinese word for 'cool' described as the "verbal icon of a youth rebellion that promises to transform some of the older generation's most enduring cultural values" (357). As argued in the following section, meng is definitely not the evolutionary winner in a neo-Darwinian lexical competition between Chinese words, nor occupies a clear role in the semantics of cuteness, nor is it simply deployed as an iconic and rebellious signifier against the cultural values of a previous generation. Rather, after reaching Chinese digital media audiences along the "global wink of pink globalization" (Yano 684) of Japanese animation, comics, movies and videogames, this specific subcultural term diffracts along the vectors of the local media ecology. Specialised communities of translators, larger audiences of Japanese animation streaming websites, larger populations of digital media users and ultimately the public at large all negotiate meng’s meaning and usage in their everyday interactions, while the term quickly becomes just another "word popular on the Internet” listed in end-of-the-year charts, ready to be appropriated by marketing as a local wink to Chinese youth culture. Fig. 3: Baidu image search for 萌 (meng), as of 28 February 2014: the term ‘cute’ elicits neotenic puppies, babies, young girls, teen models, and eroticised Japanese comic characters. Screenshot by the author Everything Meng: Localising and Appropriating CutenessIn the few years since it entered the Chinese vernacular, first as a specialised term adopted by dongman fans and then as a general exclamation for "cute!", meng has been repurposed and adapted to local usages in many different ways, starting from its syntactic function: while in Japanese moe is usually a verb (the action of arousing feelings of passion in the cultivated fan), meng is more frequently used in Chinese as an adjective (cute) and has been quickly compounded in new expressions such as maimeng (literally "to sell cuteness", to act cute), mengwu (cute thing), mengdian (cute selling point), widening the possibilities for its actual usage beyond the specific aesthetic appreciation of female pre-teen anime characters that the word originally refers to. This generalisation of a culturally specific term to the general domain of aesthetic judgments follows local linguistic patterns: for example maimeng (to act cute) is clearly modelled on pre-existing expressions like zhuang ke'ai (acting cute) or sajiao (acting like a spoiled child) which, as Zhang & Kramarae (762) show, are common Mandarin Chinese terms to describe infantilised gender performativity. This connection between being meng and setting up a performance is confirmed by the commentative practices and negotiations around the cuteness of things: as one of my informants quipped regarding a recently popular Internet celebrity: "Some people think that he is meng. But I don't think he's meng, I think he's just posing." Hence, while Japanese moe characters belong to a specific aesthetic canon in the realm of 2D animation, the cuteness that meng indicates in Chinese refers to a much broader scope of content and interactions, in which the semantic distinctions from other descriptors of cuteness are quite blurred, and negotiated in individual use. As another informant put it, commenting on the new WeChat avatar of one of her contacts: "so meng! This is not just ke'ai, this is more ke'ai than ke'ai, it's meng!" Other informants explained meng variably as a more or less performed and faked cuteness, as regular non-specified cuteness, as a higher degree or as a different form of it, evidencing how the term is deployed in both online and offline everyday life interactions according to imitation, personal invention, context and situation, dialogic negotiations, shared literacies, and involvements in specific communities. Moreover, besides using it without the sexual overtones of its Japanese counterpart, my research participants were generally not aware of the process of cross-linguistic borrowing and specialised aesthetic meaning of meng—for most of them, it just meant 'cute', although it did so in very personal ways. These observations do not exclude, however, that meng maintains its linkages to Japanese cultural products and otaku fandom: on the same online platforms where meng was originally borrowed from the lines of fansubbed Japanese anime series, its definition continues to be discussed and compared to its original meaning. The extremely detailed entries on Mengniang Baike (MoeGirl Wiki, http://zh.moegirl.org) testify a devoted effort in collecting and rationalising the Japanese moe aesthetics for an audience of specialised Chinese zhainan (literally 'shut-in guy", the Chinese word for otaku), while Weimeng (Micro-Moe, http://www.weimoe.com) provides a microblogging platform specifically dedicated to sharing dongman content and discuss all things meng. The recent popularity of the word is not lost on the users of these more specialised online platforms, who often voice their discontent with the casual and naive appropriations of uncultured outsiders. A simple search query of the discussion board archives of AcFun, a popular zhainan culture video streaming website, reveals the taste politics at play around these vernacular terms. Here are some complaints, voiced directly by anonymous users of the board, regarding meng: "Now I really detest this meng word, day and night everywhere is meng meng meng and maimeng but do you really understand what do these words mean?" "Don't tell me, alternative people think that watching anime is fashionable; they watch it, learn some new word and use it everywhere. Last time I was playing videogames I heard a girl saying Girl: 'Do you know what does meng mean?' Guy: 'I don't know' Girl: 'You don't even know this! Meng means beautiful, lovely' Fuck your mom's cunt hearing this I wanted to punch through the screen" "Anyway these 'popular words' are all leftovers from our playing around, then a bunch of boons start using them and feel pleased of 'having caught up with fashion', hehe" Fig. 4: "Don't tell me, alternative people think that watching anime is fashionable…", anonymous post commenting on the use of meng on the AcFun message board. Screenshot by the authorConclusion: Do Signifiers Float in Media Ecologies? The choice of examining the networks traced by a slang term signifying cuteness was determined by the conviction that the "minor aesthetics" described by Ngai (812) play an important role in the social construction of taste and judgment in contemporary consumer societies. This is especially significant when discussing digital folklore as the content produced by the everyday interactions of users and digital media: cuteness and the negotiations around its deployment are in fact important features of the repertoires of user-generated content shared and consumed on online platforms. In the case of this essay, the strange collective included green sprouts, textbook illustrations, cats, Japanese anime characters, selfies, and Coke bottle label designs. Summing up the overview of the word meng presented above, and attempting a critical response to Ngai's linkage of the minor aesthetics of cuteness to national contexts which make them "ideologically meaningful" (819), I suggest the recuperation of Lévi-Strauss’ concept of floating signifier as developed in his analysis of Melanesians’ fuzzy notion of mana. This theoretical choice comes almost naturally when dealing with pervasive terms: as Holbraad explains, “part of the original attraction of mana-terms to anthropologists was their peculiarly double universality – their semantic breadth (‘mana is everywhere’, said the native) coupled with their geographical diffusion (‘mana-terms are everywhere’, replied the anthropologist)” (189). Meng seems to be everywhere in China as both a term (in everyday, online and offline interactions) and as cuteness (in popular culture and media), thus making it an apparently perfect candidate for the role of floating signifier. Lévi-Strauss deployed Mauss’ concept as a reinforcement of his structuralist conception of meaning against a surfeit of signifiers (Holbraad 196-197), "a symbol in its pure state, therefore liable to take on any symbolic content whatever [...] a zero symbolic value […] a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains" (Lévi-Strauss 63-64). Moore’s framing of the Chinese ku and the American cool as “basic slang terms” (360) follows the same structuralist logic: extremely pervasive terms lose in meaning and specificity what they gain in supplementary symbolic content (in his case, generational distinction). Yet, as shown through the examples presented in the essay, meng does in no case reach a zero symbolic value—rather, it is “signifier and signified (and more)” (Holbraad 197), meaning different kinds of cuteness and aesthetic judgement across more or less specialised usages, situated contexts, individual understandings and dialogic negotiations. This oversimplified rebuttal to Lévi-Strauss' concept is my attempt to counter several arguments that I believe to be grounded in the structuralist theorisation of series of signifiers and signified: the linkage between aesthetic categories and national contexts (Ngai); the correlation between language and cultural practices or aesthetics (Yano); the semantic analyses of slang terms (Moore, Bai); the memetic explanations of digital folklore (Liu). As briefly illustrated, meng’s popularity does not necessarily convey a specific Japanese aesthetic culture, nor does its adaptation mirror a peculiarly Chinese one; the term does not necessarily define a different form of cuteness, nor does it confront generational values. It could be more useful to conceptualise meng, and other elements of digital folklore, as what Latour calls quasi-objects, strange hybrids existing in different versions and variations across different domains. Understood in this way, meng traces a network leading to: the specialised knowledge of fansubbing communities, the large audiences of video streaming websites, the echo chambers of social networking platforms and participatory media, and the ebbs and flows of popular culture consumption. To conclude, I agree with Yano that "it remains useful for Asia analysts to observe these ebbs and flows as they intersect with political frameworks, economic trends, and cultural values" (687-88). Meng, as scores of other Chinese slang terms that crowd the yearly charts of ‘words popular on the Internet’ might not be here to stay. But digital folklore is, as long as there will be users interacting and negotiating the minor aesthetics of their everyday life on online platforms. The general theoretical aim of this brief discussion of one vernacular term is evidencing how the very idea of a "Internet culture", when understood through the concepts of media ecology, online vernaculars and quasi-objects becomes hard to grasp through simple surveying, encyclopaedic compilations, statistical analyses or linguistic mapping. Even in a brief contextualisation of one simple slang term, what is revealed is in fact a lively bundle of practices: the cross-linguistic borrowing of a specialised aesthetic, its definition on crowdsourced wikis and anonymous discussion boards, the dialogic negotiations regarding its actual usage in situated contexts of everyday life, and the sectorial dynamics of distinction and taste. Yet, meng just means 'cute'.ReferencesAllison, Anne. “Portable Monsters and Commodity Cuteness: Pokémon as Japan’s New Global Power.” Postcolonial Studies 6.3 (2003): 381–95. Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009. Bai, Lin. “Qianxi Wangluo Liuxingyu - Meng [A Brief Analysis of a Popular Internet Term - Meng].” Wuyi Xueyuan Xuebao 31.3 (2012): 28–30. Burdelski, Matthew, and Koji Mitsuhashi. “‘She Thinks You’re Kawaii’: Socializing Affect, Gender, and Relationships in a Japanese Preschool.” Language in Society 39.1 (2010): 65–93. 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