Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific 3031093739, 9783031093739

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Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific Edited by Louisa Mitchell · Michael Samuel

Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific

Louisa Mitchell  •  Michael Samuel Editors

Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific

Editors Louisa Mitchell Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures University of Leeds Leeds, UK

Michael Samuel Department of Film and Television University of Bristol Bristol, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-09373-9    ISBN 978-3-031-09374-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover credit: robertharding / Alamy Stock Photo. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

Introduction  1 Michael Samuel and Louisa Mitchell Part I Soft Power and Streaming Wars  17  KonMari to Queer Eye: Netflix, Soft Power, and the International Streaming Wars 19 Michael Samuel  Riding the Wavve: Platform Imperialism and South Korea’s Streaming Market 47 Daniela Mazur, Melina Meimaridis, and Daniel Rios  Reconfiguring the K-Drama Business Model: The Co-production of Mr. Sunshine by Netflix and Studio Dragon 67 Hyun-jung Stephany Noh  Short Video as Streaming Media: A Symbolic Expression of Chinese Compressed Modernity 87 Meng Liang and Song Sun

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Eastern Promise? Marco Polo and the Role of Medieval Drama in Netflix’s Strategy for Development in East Asia105 Daniel Clarke  New Kind of 2Getherness: Screening Thai Soft Power in A Thai Boys Love (BL) Lakhon125 Miguel Antonio Lizada  Content Carnival? (Re)Viewing Representation, Indianness, and OTT Culture in India145 Anmol Dutta Part II Streaming Technologies and Interactivity 161  Engagement-Based Model: Chinese Online Video An Streaming Services for Chinese Viewers163 Xiaoran Zhang  Chinese Otaku Culture and Alternative Public Spheres: A Study of Bullet Comments and Bilibili181 Dongli Chen  How Much Does a Subtitle Say?: A Critical Reception Study of Chinese Television Dramas Streamed Overseas197 Jingjing Li  Attaining #fame: Female Cover Musician’s Self-Fashioning and Socio-musical Interactions with Live Stream Audiences in Chennai and Beyond217 Nina Menezes Part III Textual Analysis 231  She Eats Well: Exploring Power and Desire Through Food and Romance in Korean Dramas233 Katy Lewis and Shelby Ragan

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 The Cosmopolitics of Asian Magical Realism: Decentralisation and Localisation of Chinese Folklore in the Global Netflix Series The Ghost Bride249 David H. J. Neo and Sanghamitra Dalal  Sounding Local? The Use of Music in Original Australian Streaming Productions265 Toby Huelin  Crunchyroll and the Webtoon-Image: Reterritorialising the Korean Digital Wave in Telecom Animation’s Tower of God (2020) and MAPPA’s The God of High School (2020)285 David John Boyd  Liminal Space Between Social Strata: Voice-­Over Narration in The Great Buddha+309 Yuan Li  Correction to: Sounding Local? The Use of Music in Original Australian Streaming ProductionsC1 Toby Huelin Index329

Notes on Contributors

David John Boyd  is a doctoral graduate from the University of Glasgow in Comparative Literature (Text-Image Studies, 2019). David’s primary field of research involves the theoretical works of Gilles Deleuze and his continental contemporaries, specifically regarding world screen cultures (comics, cinema, television, and video games). His research traces Deleuzian film philosophies of temporality, modernity, and world history alongside global visual and digital artefacts. His articles have been published on manga, anime, and Korean New Wave cinema, and he continues to research and teach in Bordeaux, France. Dongli Chen  is a doctoral student at the School of Communication and Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. She got her master’s degree in literary and cultural studies at the University of Hong Kong and her bachelor’s degree in English language and literature at Zhejiang University. Her research interests include cultural studies, youth culture, and digital media. Daniel Clarke  was awarded his PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2019. His thesis, ‘Wearing Historicity: Genre, Stardom, and American Identity in Hollywood’s Medieval Films’, examined the politicised usage of medieval Europe as imagined time and place in Hollywood cinema. Here, he asked: how do reproductions of the European Middle Ages interpreted through the American cultural imagination operate as fantasies of the social, political, and psychic? Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, his broader research interests include genre and stardom, politics and fantasy, and historicist approaches to American film culture. His work has been published in several journals, including Landscape Research, ix

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Early Popular Visual Culture, and Film-­Philosophy, and he has written a chapter for an edited collection on gender and sexuality in FX’s American Horror Story. As well as preparing his thesis for monograph publication, Daniel is investigating the significance of the ‘body swap’ genre in American film culture of the 1980s, the results of which will appear in a forthcoming edited collection from Berghahn Books. Sanghamitra Dalal  is a senior lecturer at the College of Creative Arts, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. Having graduated from the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India, majoring in English Literature, she wrote her doctoral thesis on South Asian diasporic fiction in Australia at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include postcolonial, migration, and diasporic literatures, with special interest in South and Southeast Asian literatures in English; transnational and transcultural literatures and cultures; and life writing. Her articles have been published in Scopus-indexed journals and book chapters with Palgrave Macmillan and Springer Nature. Anmol Dutta  is a doctoral student in English at the University of Western Ontario. A former Shastri fellow, her research explores the transnational implications of Netflix India’s dialogue between culture, re-presentation, and ‘protecting sensibilities’ in 2020s’ India. As Senior Editor at Re:Locations Journal, University of Toronto’s peer-reviewed graduate journal, she is co-recipient of the 2021–22 Asian Institute Richard Charles Lee Student Leadership Award. Anmol has formerly served as elected Chair of the Anti-racism Committee and co-chair of the Equity Committee at Society of Graduate Students SOGS, the graduate student government at Western. She has worked on the research project: “Courtesans of India” funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. Having published academic essays in several research compilations along with presenting at various conferences, she has also contributed pieces to The Conversation Canada and Film Companion India. Toby  Huelin  is a doctoral candidate at the University of Leeds, UK, investigating the use of library music in contemporary television. His research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) via the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH). Toby’s forthcoming publications include peer-reviewed journal articles for Critical Studies in Television, Music and the Moving Image, and the European Journal of American Culture, alongside chapters in several

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edited volumes. Toby is also a media composer: his music features in the Emmy Award-winning series United Shades of America (CNN), the documentary Subnormal: A British Scandal (BBC One), and an advertising campaign for internet brand Honey. Katy Lewis  is a doctoral student at Illinois State University, where she studies and teaches children’s and young adult literature. Her research includes examining portrayals of rape culture ideologies in young adult (YA) texts, and she is also interested in the ideological implications of narrative forms and theories as well as food studies in children’s literature. Jingjing  Li  is Lecturer in Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of Leicester. Her main research interests are audio-visual translation, political discourse and translation, and multimodality in translation and interpretation. She obtained an MSc in Translation and Conference Interpreting with distinction at Heriot-Watt University and a PhD in Translation Studies at the University of Salford. She previously lectured at the University of Salford, Imperial College London, and Nankai University. Her main publications include ‘Political TV Documentary Subtitling in China: A Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective’ and ‘New Trends of Chinese Political Translation in the Age of Globalisation’ in the SSCIindexed peer-reviewed journal of Perspectives, Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, and ‘Investigating Press Conference Interpreting from the Perspective of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis’ in CSSCI-indexed peer-­reviewed Journal of Foreign Languages in China. She is the principal investigator of a related grant under the National Social Science Foundation of China. Yuan  Li  is a doctoral researcher in Film Studies at the University of Southampton, UK.  Her research concerns authorship in Taiwan New Cinema. She received her bachelor’s degree in Film and Television Studies from Beijing Normal University in 2016 and master’s degree in Film Studies from the University of Southampton in 2017. Her research interests include transnational Taiwan cinema and languages in Taiwanese films. Meng Liang  is a doctoral researcher at University College London. She is also a visiting student in the Global Media Technology and Culture Lab at MIT. Her research focuses on examining Chinese social media history in a political and economic perspective.

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Miguel  Antonio  Lizada  is a lecturer at The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the interface between queer practices and Asian popular culture and literature, specifically on how neoliberal policies have reshaped the formation and trajectories of queer practices in globalized Asian context. Daniela Mazur  is a doctoral researcher at the Postgraduate Program in Communication at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Brazil, where she receives a fellowship from Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES). She is a member of the MidiÁsia lab, which studies contemporary Asian pop culture, and also of TeleVisões: Research Center on Television and New Media. She is working on her dissertation concerning the rise of South Korea as a peripheral and alternative globalising cultural centre and the implications thereof. Her research interests are Asian studies, Hallyu, television, non-central streaming industries, and global media counterflows. Daniela has articles on Hallyu and Korea, as “From São Paulo to Seoul: Netflix’s strategies in peripheral markets” (2021) in Comunicación y Sociedad and “K-pop, fan activism and epistemic disobedience: a decolonial glance at BTS’s ARMYs” (2020) in Logos and published a chapter in the book The Rise of K-Dramas (2019). Melina  Meimaridis is a post-doctoral researcher at the Postgraduate Program in Communication at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Brazil. She is developing research with a fellowship from Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ). Her interests include media industries, comfort series, and internet-­distributed television in national and regional markets. She is engrossed in two research projects: one, studying how TV serialised fiction constructs knowledge about social institutions and how these constructions circulate through international television flows; and the second, a study of Netflix’s transnational expansion and its impact on countries belonging to the global periphery. In 2021, she became one of the coordinators of the research group TeleVisões: Research Center on Television and New Media at UFF. Her article “Television of the future”? Netflix, quality, and neophilia in the TV debate” was published in the Matrizes journal. Nina  Menezes  was born and raised in Chennai, South India. She has performed and toured internationally as a soprano soloist. Over the years, her recording career in Chennai has resulted in creative collaborations

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with some of India’s internationally renowned film music directors such as A.R. Rahman and Ilaiyaraaja. Such opportunities have provided a unique perspective in her research on Indian film music production and its cover culture. Nina received her PhD in Music from the University of Florida (2018). She teaches world music at the University of Tampa. Louisa Mitchell  is an independent scholar and editor. Her doctoral thesis, “Disrupting Heritage Cinema: The Historical Films of South Korea,” was completed at the University of Leeds in 2019, under the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH) Doctoral Research Partnership. Her research interests include national cinemas, colonialism and postcolonialism, and issues of cultural and historical representation. Her work was published in a 2021 anthology titled Renegotiating Film Genres in East Asian Cinema and Beyond by Lin Feng and James Aston. David  H.  J.  Neo  is a senior lecturer at the College of Creative Arts, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. He received his tertiary education from both Canada and Australia, and has taught in these countries as well. His doctoral dissertation explores the significance of magical realism in cinema in relation to the politics of cosmopolitanism within postcolonial and transnational contexts. His research interests include Peranakan culture, postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism and film. His latest publication on the popular imaginary and cultural constructions of the Nonya in Peranakan culture was by SAGE publishing, in the journal Ethnicities. Hyun-jung Stephany Noh  is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Radio-Television-Film at Moody College of Communication, University of Texas, Austin. Her interdisciplinary research spans global media, media industries, and public diplomacy with a special focus on the Korean Wave or hallyu. Her interest in media studies originates from ten years of work experience in Korean television networks as a programming producer, ratings analyst, acquisition specialist, and production budget manager. She is writing her dissertation “Streaming K-drama,” which investigates the cultural implications of the transnational p ­ henomenon by researching the context of television programmes and the shifts of industry practices formed in the streaming environment. Shelby  Ragan  completed her doctorate in English Studies with a concentration in Children’s and Young Adult Literature from the Department of English at Illinois State University in May 2020. Her research interests include the intersections of gender and ethics, particularly through femi-

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nist ethics of care, as well as constructions of visibility, desire, and relationships in contemporary young adult texts. Her research theorises desire in the young adult romance genre. Daniel  Rios  is a doctoral researcher at the Postgraduate Program in Communication at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Brazil, where he receives a fellowship from Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq). Presently, he is a member of the research group TeleVisões: Research Center on Television and New Media. He is working on his dissertation regarding SVOD services’ cancelled series and the notion of success and failure in subscriber-­ funded platforms. His research interests are television studies, transnational SVOD services, serialised fiction, and TV fandoms. His articles have been published on noncentral streaming industries, such as “From São Paulo to Seoul: Netflix’s strategies in peripheral markets” (2021) in Comunicación y Sociedad, “The Streaming Wars in the Global Periphery: A Glimpse from Brazil” (2020) in SERIES, and also on Brazilian fan productions as “Honest, impolite, and wicked: an analysis of telenovela character fan pages” (2020) in Comunicación y Medios. Michael Samuel  is Lecturer in Digital Film and Television Studies at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Popular Factual Heritage Television (2022) and Northern Exposure: A Cultural History (2021), and the co-editor of True Detective Critical Essays on the HBO Series (2017). He is editing an anthology about television and empathy. Song  Sun is a doctoral researcher at the University of Science and Technology of China. He is working as a visiting student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. His research focuses on media technology and its social and political implications. Xiaoran Zhang  is a doctoral researcher in Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham and is researching the distribution and acquisition of English-language TV shows in Mainland China. Zhang’s research attempts to explore how overseas television content achieves distribution through online streaming services in Mainland China, which has been reflected in an online published journal Particip@tions: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies.

Introduction Michael Samuel and Louisa Mitchell

In winter 2021, the internet seemed to proliferate with images of numbered green tracksuits, red hoodies with anonymising black masks bearing shapes on their face, orange dresses combined with yellow T-shirts, white knee-high socks and black shoes. Social media platforms, news outlets and online marketplaces traded in images, videos, GIFS, memes, posts and threads all inspired by the South Korean Netflix series and cultural phenomena Squid Game (2021–). Squid Game is a survival game drama series in which hundreds of poor contestants face off against each other over feats of children’s games with mortal stakes to win a huge cash prize.1 Released on Netflix on 17 September 2021, the series quickly became a 1  The survival game genre is marked by films, such as Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku 2000), The Hunger Games (Gary Ross 2012) and The Purge (James DeMonaco 2013–); television anime, such as Gantz (2004); and video games, including PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (2017) and Fortnite (2018).

M. Samuel Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] L. Mitchell (*) Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_1

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hit, setting a new record for the platform by attracting 111 million viewers in its first seventeen days (Pandey 2021) and dominating much of the popular cultural discourse, online and offline. In the late 1970s, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word ‘meme’ in his book The Selfish Gene (1976/2016), when he called for the need for ‘a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation’ (2016, 249). Derived from the Greek work mimeme meaning ‘imitated’, meme was used to describe ‘an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture’ (Solon 2013). Since Dawkins’ first use of the word, memes have gained currency in popular culture, particularly global online digital cultures. While the zeitgeist of the global digital culture of late 2021 and early 2022 appeared to be dominated by Squid Game, the series being a valuable ‘unit of cultural transmission’, by the end of the first quarter of 2022, it seemed to have disappeared from the collective imagination. At the time of finalising this book for publication (March 2022), references to Squid Game had already been replaced by references to another South Korean Netflix series, We Are All Dead (2021–), about a group of trapped students at a high school which has ‘become ground zero for zombie virus outbreak’ (Netflix synopsis). While fleeting, the cultural visibility of these television series is significant, symbolic of a wider cultural fascination with Asia-Pacific culture and its cultural exports. These are not just limited to South Korean dramas, however, but exports from across the Asia-Pacific, including Japanese anime; Indian dramas and reality television series, such as Delhi Crime (2019–), Sacred Games (2018–) and Indian Matchmaking (2020–); and Chinese C-dramas, such as Word of Honor (2021) and Nirvana in Fire (2015). This book was conceived at the historical moment when Bong Joon-­ ho’s Parasite (2019) took home four awards at the 92nd Academy Award ceremony on 10 February 2020 (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and International Feature Film), making it the first foreign-­ language film to win Best Picture and Bong the first South Korean director to win an Oscar. And while Parasite’s success is thanks to the distinct vision and creative direction of Bong, its wider appeal, we, as others would argue, ‘shares some credit with the new power of the globalised sofa’ (Lewis 2020). The concept of the globalised sofa speaks to ideas of globalisation as explored by Marshall McLuhan, whose idea of the ‘global village’ (1962) characterised ‘the phenomenon of the world’s culture shrinking and expanding at the same time due to pervasive technological

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advances that allow for instantaneous sharing of culture’ (Dixon 2009). The idea of globalisation ‘involves the compression of the world in time and space in respect of its institutions (television, capitalism, industrialism) and economic and cultural practices’ (Steemers 2004, 7); the very process of globalisation, to globalise, involves the flattening of national distinctions, making ‘distinct national differences become less prominent with the media contributing to the globalisation of democratic ideas within a global public sphere’ (Steemers, 8). Can a global culture exist? Can there be such a thing as a globalised sofa? And, to reignite Greg Dyke’s provocation, can you globalise programming and make it local? (Dyke, quoted in Freedman 2000, 321). In response to such questions, Squid Game is a fruitful source for discussion. Not only does the South Korean phenomenon lend itself well to the notion of a global culture—conjuring the image of a globalised sofa uniting television viewers the world over in the shared television event—but also the series is arguably the product of that same global culture in the first place. Like Parasite before it, Squid Game is a combination of western influences and distinctly Korean themes. As Alison Roth writes, ‘Squid Game isn’t pure entertainment; it’s a parable for many pressing issues in Korea and around the world’ (2021). As well as highlighting its influences, Roth also highlights the possible tensions coded into the series, namely its local appeal and global reach. Not only is it possible to read these tensions in the series itself, through its exploration of genre, aesthetics, themes of capitalism, but also it is possible to argue that such tensions are symbolic of Netflix’s global expansion strategy: ‘We’ve always believed that the most locally authentic shows will travel best, so having a show that’s about really authentic Korean games and characters become really big not only in Korea but also globally—it’s such an exciting moment for us’ (MinYoung Kim, Netflix’s Vice President for the Asia Pacific, quoted in Brzeski 2021). Since the turn of the twenty-first century, technology has promulgated an optimistic global outlook. The conception of Web 2.0 is testament to this, from the start trafficking in the idea of connectivity and enabling a global community through new communication abilities and user-­ generated content. Permitting a high degree of interactivity, personalisation and customisability online, Web 2.0 has had a profound effect on visual media, influencing how content is produced, distributed and accessed, globally. This is particularly true in the case of broadcast media, lending to the conceptualisation of global television.

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The notion of global television is not new. Indeed, it first emerged in the 1980s in response to the possibilities of satellite technologies to transmit across national boundaries. During this period, existing broadcast technologies and practices intersected with the emerging technologies (satellite and cable) that facilitated the delivery of content to viewers worldwide. Since the early 2000s, however, television and internet technologies have not only become co-dependent but co-existent. In Television 2.0 (2017), Rhiannon Bury illustrates this mergence, considering a selection of technologies from the mid to late 2000s as a way of thinking about television’s move online: from the advent of the AppleTV in 2006, to the availability of film and television on video game consoles and personal internet devices. Technology, and specifically the connection between the internet and television, has evolved tenfold since the mid-late 2000s, with the establishment and widespread availability of a range of subscription video on demand (SVOD) services, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV+, Disney+, Hulu, NowTV and HBO Max, across a range of personal internet technologies. The transition of television from analogue to digital and the enabling of Web 2.0 technologies and capabilities have encouraged scholars to rethink the status and definition of television, in terms of both the medium itself and its content. Perhaps more important, it has encouraged us to closely consider television’s relationship with technology. With its availability across a wide reach of technologies, television content, Bury argues, ‘has been decoupled from the television screen itself as a result of digital convergence and divergence’ (2017, back cover copy). It is possible to therefore to reach the conclusion that the digital expansion of television is signalling a post-television, ‘post-broadcast’ era, to reference Amanda Lotz (2014). Not only have internet technologies emancipated content from the broadcast schedule but through these increasingly global SVOD platforms, they have, to some extent, also freed it from national constraints. While beneficial for viewers, promising an extensive catalogue of content available on demand, transnationally, the saturation of services across many territories has sparked a so-called streaming wars, which are being played out, simultaneously, on a national and global stage. One region where this has developed rapidly is India, and within the Indian entertainment industry. Netflix India provides an interesting case study in the service’s attempts to localise its platform whilst also appealing to a global audience and is notable for being one of the fastest-growing markets for streaming content. Since launching in 2016, Netflix India has

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invested heavily in local programming and production facilities. In 2022, Mumbai became home to the first wholly owned Netflix production facility that is intended to be a tentpole of the company’s international operations. Between 2019 and 2020, Netflix financed $410 million in over 40 original Indian series and films (Ramachandran 2021). This drive to populate a global streaming service with regional productions has been noted by many as an attempt to appeal to a new globalised, transnational audience. Trudie Cross, for example, draws attention to the importance of the diasporic audience in the development of streaming media, in particular, the establishment of YouTube and Netflix in the Indian entertainment sphere: Many local content creators in India began creating regional specific content by using languages popular in a specific region. This could be seen by the YouTube channel ‘Put Chutney’ as examined […] in Localizing YouTube [see Mohan and Punathambekar 2018]. They note how through the use of YouTube affordances and algorithms, regional content creators in India had easier methods to make content that had regional-specific languages. Through this method, a global platform like YouTube was localised by the use of language. When Netflix was introduced in India, through conglomerate niche strategy, they managed to capitalise on these strategies that were already used by local content creators. They did this by creating shows that showcased content that was riddled in themes of sexuality and promiscuity while using languages that were local to an Indian audience. Secondly, through their global accessibility, they addressed the demand for local content by a global Indian diasporic audience. (Cross 2019)

There is a downside to this imperative to create an ever-expanding slate of localised content. In a scathing review of the 2020 Netflix release of What Are the Odds? (Megha Ramaswamy 2019), Ankur Pathak derides the state of the streaming service’s output in the region: Netflix India has a new film out (it’s an acquisition) and it’s consistent with their strategy of stocking up their Indian inventory with a catalogue of mediocrity. Whether it’s an original TV series (Bard of Blood, [2019]) or film (Mrs. Serial Killer [Shirish Kunder, 2020]) or ill-advised acquisitions (Drive [Tarun Mansukhani, 2019]), there’s no competing with Netflix India on delivering stale goods. (Pathak 2020)

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He addresses the issue of quantity over quality that Netflix has been accused of across numerous territories over the years (see Binged Bureau 2022) and has played a major role in the notion of the streaming wars. The platform’s younger competitors have been open about their intentions to emphasise quality over quantity, with Amazon Prime Video (Shashidhar 2019) and Apple TV+ (Gill 2019) both vying to be the home of ‘high-quality content’ in the Indian streaming market. This leads on to interesting questions on the influence of new technologies on film and television aesthetics, forms, platforms and consumption practices. As discussed in detail in a later chapter by Anmol Dutta, the development of digital culture and arrival of SVOD platforms in the Indian entertainment industry has enabled a greater level of representation and freedom from censorship than in traditional forms of production and distribution. This technological shift has occurred with varying results around the world and the focus with this book is to concentrate on contemporary screen cultures in the Asia-Pacific region. In the tension between global and local, and in the intersection of traditional perceptions and practices of not only viewing but interacting with film and television, this book explores the following question: to what extent has technology disrupted traditional broadcast, distribution and consumption practises across the Asia-Pacific region? And, has technology fostered a new digital culture, or new digital cultures, with the internet and new media not only determining new ways of accessing and interacting with media, but reshaping behaviour, communication and perceptions within society? Realistically, when we embarked on this project, we knew there were no definitive answers to these questions. However, through collaborating with scholars around the world, particularly operating across the Asia-Pacific region, and giving them a platform, we get a little closer to understanding the general and nuanced impacts of digital technology on the consumption of media and popular culture.

Streaming and Screen Cultures in the Asia-Pacific While it is not a comprehensive look at the wide-reaching and diverse streaming and screen cultures in the Asia-Pacific, this book nevertheless endeavours to provide a snapshot of the impact of digital media technologies on visual consumers and practices of media consumption in several territories in the Asia-Pacific region, including China, South Korea, India, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Thailand. This book is made up of

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three sections that explore various critical approaches to new developments in screen cultures and the influence of streaming on localised industry. Part one, entitled ‘Soft Power and Streaming Culture’, is a collection of seven chapters that each address the growth and influence of streaming services and the cultures surrounding them. As discussed earlier in this introduction, SVOD platforms have had both a socio-cultural and industrial impact on various media industries around the world. These chapters continue to reflect on the issue of ‘soft power’ in specific regional contexts across the Asia-Pacific and beyond. Each chapter presents a case study focussed on a different country’s reaction to the influence of streaming culture on localised industry and audiences. To begin with, Michael Samuel explores the concept of soft power in the context of Netflix’s expansion into the Japanese streaming market. He does so with consideration of the historic relationship between Japan and the United States and the context that this provides for his discussion of the contemporary transcultural exchange of localised content. Samuel concentrates his analysis on two recent Netflix productions that have played a key part in the company’s attempt to appeal to a resistant Japanese audience; the lifestyle reality television series Queer Eye: We’re in Japan! (2019) and Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019) are used to discuss notions of digital colonialism and cultural imperialism in regard to the so-­ called streaming wars. In the following chapter, Daniela Mazur, Melina Meimaridis and Daniel Rios provide an overview of the development of streaming platforms in the South Korean market. Grounded in the continuing development of South Korean popular culture as an international phenomenon, they concentrate on the significance of streaming culture in the domestic market. Due to the particularities of the television and internet market in the country, foreign streaming companies have struggled to grow. In contrast, Korea has established itself as one of the largest national video streaming markets in Asia. With an updated literature review and analysis of trade press coverage, Mazur, Meimaridis and Rios identify and examine two significant phenomena. First, a group of local conglomerates came together to form the Wavve platform to face Netflix’s presence in the country. Second, the local industry is taking advantage of the global influence of foreign platforms to expand Korean popular culture’s reach. Their case study reveals the nuances and strategies of a rising media industry in the global periphery.

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Hyun-jung Stephany Noh continues to examine South Korea’s response to international streaming services by focusing her chapter on a specific case study, the production of the successful Netflix-distributed television series, Mr. Sunshine (2018). She opens by noting how international streaming services such as Netflix are aggressively expanding across national borders and altering local television ecosystems worldwide with respect to the production and distribution of content and the audiences for it. She also comments that global media industry scholars have researched Netflix’s distribution practices and penetration into new regional markets, but this research has tended to overlook South Korea. As such, Noh’s chapter provides a much-needed addition to this area of scholarship, investigating the impact of Netflix’s direct investment in Korean production houses on the conventional business model. Throughout the course of her chapter, Noh uses the production of Mr. Sunshine to argue that the most pervasive impact of Netflix on the Korean market has been the subversion of the power relations between the legacy television companies and production studios. Meng Liang and Song Sun move the conversation over towards China and highlight the emergence of short form video platforms in recent Chinese popular culture, in particular the service Douyin, established in 2016. They specifically explore the development of new participatory media and the business models and algorithmic distribution systems that have emerged around it. Drawing from the concept of ‘compressed modernity’, first proposed by Chung Hyung-sup in 1999, Liang and Sun analyse how users and audiences engage with these services in conjunction with the representation of current Chinese social issues. Through two case studies concentrating on local video creators, this chapter provides a critical reading on the Douyin’s narrative form and storytelling, and how it is engaged with the issues in Chinese compressed modernity. Daniel Clarke provides another exploration into Chinese streaming and screen culture, here examining Netflix’s strategy for development in East Asia. Continuing in a similar vein to Samuel and Mazur, Meimaridis’ and Rios’ respective case studies on Netflix’s influence in Japanese and South Korean territories, Clarke assesses the company’s attempts to expand into East Asian markets, and most importantly the Chinese market. In particular, he narrows his focus on the use of big budget historical productions as a means of having broad appeal and commercial promise. Clarke goes on to focus his argument around the perceived commercial and critical failures of the Netflix series Marco Polo (2014–2016) and the

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American-­Chinese co-production The Great Wall (Zhang Yimou 2016). He explores streaming and screen culture from a genre perspective and issues surrounding cultural collaboration and hybridity. Miguel Antonio Lizada concentrates his discussion on soft power and streaming culture in the television industry of Thailand. Specifically, he draws attention to the influence of fan interaction and social media in what he refers to as ‘the emergent potential of Thai soft power’. He evaluates the online popularity of the Boy’s Love (BL) genre and the recent television show 2Gether: The Series (2020) through free streaming websites such as YouTube and DailyMotion. In examining the stylistic conventions and the interactive formation of fan communities through viewing practices, Lizada argues that the power of Thai BL’s popularity lies in its potential to form a regional and lucrative queer market and to redirect the gaze of Southeast Asian viewers towards Thailand as a resource for East Asian-­ styled narratives. He suggests that these narratives are appropriated, styled, and rendered legible by more familiar cultural frameworks for characterisation, consumption, and, as illustrated by popularity of its most recent series (2Gether: The Series), regional solidarities that challenge and interrogate existing geopolitical structures in East and Southeast Asian region. In the final chapter of part one, Anmol Dutta provides an analysis of ‘Over-the-top’ (OTT) streaming culture in India. She begins by providing context surrounding the domestic media platforms in India and its implication for the development of OTT services. She argues, for instance, given that other Indian mainstream media platforms, cinema and television are subjected to copious amounts of censorship, OTT platforms in the country represent a neoliberal space for addressing urgent social and political anxieties. Analysing how negotiations of culture interact with ‘protecting sensibilities’ in twenty-first-century India, Dutta’s chapter asserts that bringing OTT platforms under the ambit of the government regulates ‘representation’, primarily for a nationalist propaganda. While the nature of content on the other streaming services in the country consciously remains ‘local’, her chapter examines Netflix India as a national space of cultural production, that is now ‘decidedly global’; analysing this need of government intervention to police representation of the country on a global platform. Looking at Netflix India as a contemporary platform engaging socio-political realities, Dutta explores the ‘Indianness’ that this space generates, while acutely remaining aware of its intersectional limitations and accessibility concerns. She highlights how Netflix India becomes the flag-bearer of an ‘amorphous sense of Indianness’ on a global

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platform, a ‘cultural exchange’ that (re)presents a fabricated Indian reality to the global audience. Part two is titled ‘Streaming Technologies and Interactivity’ and consists of four chapters, which each consider audience engagement with streaming platforms as its focus. The first three of these chapters analyse technological developments within the Chinese market, while the remaining chapter provides a personal case study regarding engagement and interactivity amongst livestream audiences in India. In the first chapter, Xiaoran Zhang presents a study of service and engagement models for domestic Chinese streaming apps. As Zhang cites, the total number of paid subscriptions to China’s three major video streaming platforms, Tencent Video, iQiyi and Youku, has exceeded 300 million whilst Netflix is reported to have 182 million subscribers worldwide. In a country where global streaming tycoons such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have not yet penetrated, the video streaming market presents a unique streaming service model that is particularly effective in the context of mainland China. By looking at the major Chinese streaming services, Zhang’s chapter seeks to understand the Chinese streaming industry with the concept of an engagement-based service model, which considers the viewers as a collective of active agents whose labour may generate alternative forms of market value. It argues that by providing a series of viewer-friendly interactive affordances, Chinese online streaming services tend to engage with viewers to achieve further branding agendas and to drive subscriptions. Following on from this, Dongli Chen also explores the characteristics of Chinese streaming culture, drawing her focus specifically on the video feature called ‘bullet comments’ on the video-sharing platform Bilibili, referring to the comments that are overlaid directly on top of the video screen. Making viewing experiences participatory and intersubjective, Chen argues that bullet comments constitute an alternative public sphere for the viewers to negotiate their experience and articulate their identity. The revolutionary dimensions of the practice of bullet comments combat the stigmatised images of the otaku community and also enrich our understanding of the notion of public sphere. Jingjing Li focuses her attention on a combination of subtitle studies and reception studies. Li’s chapter assesses the reception of Chinese translational television dramas through content analysis of the multilingual critical reviews to examine if the quality of subtitles is the determining factor to viewer ratings and to find out how other factors are at work to

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influence the reception of Chinese television dramas overseas. There has been an increasing number of Chinese television dramas being streamed overseas in recent years. When a cultural product is transmitted across national borders, it is often perceived that translation plays a dominant part to influence its reception. As Li argues, the empirical findings indicate a limited influence that subtitles exert on viewers despite its mediocre quality. Apart from the limited concerns over subtitling feed and quality, a plethora of other factors contribute to the complex topic of global reception of Chinese television dramas with varying weightings and degrees. Nina Menezes redirects the focus of this part of the book from China to India, in her case study of online fame, fandom and streaming culture. Her chapter is the result of fieldwork conducted in her hometown of Chennai in Southern India, where she explores the online music culture on streaming service #fame. At the time in 2016, #fame positioned itself as India’s largest live streaming platform, offering middle-class youth opportunities to earn a part-time income and gain visibility. Menezes’ chapter expands on existing digital social media, star and fan studies to include cover musicians and their live streaming audience. Through a case study, she chronicles how female cover artist, Vandana, fashioned her musical persona, gained wider recognition, and accrued a fan following. While most #fame performers adopted similar collective image creation and maintenance practices to attract fans and followers, Menezes argues that Vandana’s live socio-musical interactions proved crucial to a performer’s chances of attaining star status. The final part of this book, ‘Textual Analysis’, is composed of five chapters, and, as suggested by the title of this section, the text plays a key role in each. This section of the book concentrates more on the screen culture aspect to our focus. While our collection is primarily about the impact of streaming platforms on media production and consumption in Asia-Pacific territories, it is also for a broader engagement with screen culture studies and the various approaches that can be taken in this regional context. Part three begins with Shelby Ragen and Katy Lewis’ chapter on Korean dramas and the use of generic tropes. Their chapter explores the intersections of food and romance in three Korean dramas: Boys over Flowers (2009), Coffee Prince (2007) and Strong Girl Bong Soon (2017). These series present food as an important aspect of culture, relationships and desire, as the male protagonists compliment their female love interests while eating, implying that they ‘eat well’ in terms of both the variety and volume of food they consume. Ragen and Lewis analyse how these series

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use food-hunger and romance-hunger through the ‘Girl Who Eats Well’ trope. This trope reveals the power dynamics within the leads’ romantic relationship: eating well is a source of power for the female lead, which is in tension with the status-power of the male lead. Ultimately, the male lead’s exposure to the female lead’s power instigates his cognitive growth and encourages a feminist reading of the series as the female leads exercise legitimate forms of traditionally female power. David H.J. Neo and Sanghamitra Dalal provide a critical analysis of the bestselling novel The Ghost Bride (2013) and its 2020 Netflix television adaptation. In examining the translation from page to screen, they assess the production as a form of Asian magical realism that engages with the politics of metropolitan cosmopolitanism—the dynamics and politics of national, international and transnational production. Set in late-­nineteenth-­ century colonial Malacca, one of the busiest port cities of the colonial world and the British empire, within the diasporic oral culture of the Peranakan Chinese of the Straits Settlements, The Ghost Bride plays on the traditional Chinese practice of ‘ghost-marriages’ or ‘spirit-weddings’. Their study focuses on the cosmopolitan context of historical colonial Malaya; how the adaptation engages with current popular culture; and eventually with (Chinese) transnational media in an attempt to explore the complexities of global flows, and the decentralisation and localisation of a regional folkloric content. Toby Huelin’s chapter is devoted to tensions within the Australian streaming industry, between, on the one hand, a rapid increase in subscribers to international (i.e. Netflix) and local (i.e. Stan) platforms, and, on the other, a lack of original Australian content produced for these services. These tensions are typified by the use of music: specifically, the reliance on non-local popular songs complicates the distinction between supposedly regional and international productions, and this has implications for both the local reception of a series and the transnational perception of Australian identity. By examining two of the first original Australian streaming productions, Tidelands (2018) and Wolf Creek (2016–2017), Huelin’s chapter argues that the significant uses of non-Australian popular music fulfil an important narrative function in each series, relating to how they construct an opposition between notions of ‘home’ and its absence. These issues speak to wider themes concerning the musical representation of Australian national identity in streaming media. David Boyd draws attention to the global expansion of the webtoon anime phenomenon that has quickly become mainstreamed by the 2020

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partnership between the American anime streaming giant, Crunchyroll, and the South Korean webtoon platform, Naver-Line Webtoon. Marked specifically by the global simulcasts of the anime adaptations of S. I. U’s Tower of God (2020) and Yongje Park’s The God of High School (2020), the explosion of webtoon anime adaptations—conveniently marketed alongside what the streaming service describes as ‘Crunchyroll Originals’—indicates yet another fraught flashpoint within the tensely bound networked of South Korean creators, Japanese producers, American distributors and global fans. The final chapter is this section comes from Yuan Li, who discusses Huang Hsin-yao’s first feature film The Great Buddha+ (2017), which depicts the unbreakable gap of the social strata in contemporary Taiwan from different angles: classes, gender and ethnic groups. The main focus of her textual analysis is on the director’s use of Hokkien language for his narration, arguing that his voiceover reframes and refocuses the representation and narrative of the film. Her chapter analyses not only the gap between social strata portrayed by Huang both visually and linguistically, but it also highlights the narration of Huang in Taiwanese Hokkien in this film that seems to widen the gap for emphasising his own identity and stance as a member of a Hoklo ethnic group. On the other hand, despite his presence as a Hoklo person linguistically, his reframing enables the viewing for both socio-cultural groups in this film. This double voyeurism is represented through both the lens of the car dash-cam and the camera of this film. Huang’s voiceover refocuses between both views that blur the clear division of the social strata. Li’s paper argues that instead of building the border between ‘self’ and ‘others’, his voiceover presents an alternative view for examining different socio-cultural groups both within this film and in the context of Taiwan society in the digital age.

Bibliography 2Gether: The Series. 2020. GMMTV. Battle Royale. 2000. Kinji Fukasaku. Binged Bureau. 2022. “Netflix Original Movies: Quantity over Quality?” Binged, March 6. https://www.binged.com/news/netflix-­original-­movies-­quantity-­ over-­quality/. Accessed 20 March 2022. Boys Over Flowers. 2009. KBS.

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Brzeski, Patrick. “‘Squid Game’: Netflix’s Top Exec in Asia Explains the Show’s Huge Global Appeal”. The Hollywood Reporter. October 11 2021. https:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-­n ews/squid-­g ame-­s ecret-­t o-­g lobal-­ success-­1235030008/. Accessed 20 February 2022. Bury, Rhiannon. 2017. Television 2.0: Viewer and Fan Engagement with Digital Tv. Digital Formations, Vol. 102. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing. Coffee Prince. 2007. Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation. Cross, Trudie. 2019. “How Netflix is changing Indian Entertainment”, Medium, October 14. https://medium.com/the-­public-­ear/how-­netflix-­is-­changing-­ indian-­entertainment-­34288f7e16c2. Accessed 1 March 2022. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary Edition, Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2016. Delhi Crime. 2019. Netflix Dixon, Violet K. 2009. Understanding the Implications of a Global Village. Inquiries Journal/Student Pulse 1 (11), http://www.inquiriesjournal. com/a?id=1681 Dyke, Gregg in Freedman. 2000. Gantz. 2004. Fuji Television Network. Ghost Bride. 2013. David Blyth. The God of High School. 2020. Mappa. The Great Buddha+. 2017. Hsin-yao Huang. The Great Wall. 2016. Yimou Zhang. Gill, Prabhjote. 2019. “Apple goes the way of ‘quality over quantity’ in a bid to outdo Netflix.” Business Insider India, July 2. https://www.businessinsider.in/ apple-­tv-­plus-­outdoes-­netflix-­with-­fewer-­shows-­solving-­paradox-­of-­choice/ articleshow/70034870.cms. Accessed 1 March 2022. The Hunger Games. 2012. Gary Ross. Indian Matchmaking. 2020. The Intellectual Property Corporation (IPC). Lewis, Leo. “Korea Rides Netflix Wave to Win at the Oscars.” Financial Times. February 12 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/805e158e-­4cd6-­11ea-­95a043d18ec715f5. Accessed 28 March 2021. Lotz, Amanda D. 2014. The Television Will Be Revolutionized. New  York, New York: New York University Press. Marco Polo. 2014–2016. Netflix. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto, Ont.: New American Library. Mohan, Sriram and Aswin Punathambekar. 2018. “Localizing YouTube: Language, cultural regions, and digital platforms.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (3), 317–333. Mr. Sunshine. 2018. Netflix. Parasite. 2019. Bong Joon-ho.

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Pathak, Ankur. 2020. “‘What Are The Odds’ Review: Netflix’s New Movie Is As Bad As Anything Made By Them In The Recent Past.” HuffPost India, May 20. https://www.huffpost.com/archive/in/entry/what-­are-­the-­odds-­review-­ netflixs-­new-­movie-­is-­as-­bad-­as-­anything-­made-­by-­netflix-­india_in_5ec5311 2c5b6d5f53f85ef93. Accessed 1 March 2022. Pandey, Manish. “Squid Game Knocks Bridgerton Off Netflix’s Top Spot.” BBC News. 13 October 2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-­58895032. Accessed 20 March 2022. Player Unknown’s Battleground (game). 2017. KRAFTON, PUBG Coporation, Xbox Game Studios. The Purge. 2013. James DeMonaco. Queer Eye: We’re in Japan!. 2019. Netflix. Ramachandran, Naman. 2021. “Netflix to Open Wholly-Owned Post-Production Facility in Mumbai (EXCLUSIVE).” Variety, June 2. https://variety. c o m / 2 0 2 1 / s t r e a m i n g / n e w s / n e t f l i x -­p o s t -­p r o d u c t i o n -­m u m b a i -­ 1234986353/. Accessed 1 March 2022. Ramaswamy, Megha. 2019. What are the Odds. Roth, Alison. “Behind the Squid Game Phenomenon.” ProQuest. November 5 2021. https://about.proquest.com/en/blog/2021/behind-­the-­squid-­game-­ phenomenon/. Accessed 10 January 2022. Sacred Games. 2018–2019. Netflix. Solon, Olivia. 2013. “Richard Dawkins on the Internet’s Hijacking of the word ‘Meme’”. Wired. June 20, 2013. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-­ dawkins-­memes. Accessed 20 March 2022. Shashidhar, Ajita. 2019. “For Us It’s Not About Volume, It’s About Quality Over Quantity.” Business Today India, August 11. https://www.businesstoday.in/ magazine/the-­hub/story/for-­us-­it-­is-­not-­about-­volume-­it-­is-­about-­quality-­ over-­quantity-­218477-­2019-­07-­22. Accessed 1 March 2022. Steemers, Jeanette. 2004. Selling Television : British Television in the Global Marketplace. London: BFI. Strong Girl Bong Soon. 2017. Drama House, JS Pictures. Squid Game. 2021–. Netflix. Tidelands. 2018. Netflix. Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. 2019. Netflix. Tower of God. 2020. Telecom Animation Film Company, Line Webtoon, Sega. We Are All Dead. 2021. Netflix. Wolf Creek. 2016–2017. Emu Creek Pictures, Screentime. Word of Honor. 2021–. Ciwen Media, Youku.

PART I

Soft Power and Streaming Wars

KonMari to Queer Eye: Netflix, Soft Power, and the International Streaming Wars Michael Samuel

In two window seats at Chiosco by the Park, a small ice cream parlour on a side-street in Musashino, Tokyo, sit American television host and life coach Karamo Brown and Yoko Sakura, a Japanese hospice nurse in her fifties. Having shared a personal story of estrangement from her late sister’s family and her dreams of having a family of her own, Yoko is brought to tears. Embraced by Karamo for her bravery, this scene symbolises just one of many transformative moments that guests like Yoko who feature on Netflix’s 2018 reboot of Queer Eye undergo. With Karamo’s mission completed, he announces that he has a surprise in store for Yoko. Diverting her gaze through the large windowpane that looks out onto the street, pointing to a parked white vintage Piaggio Vespa scooter, he says ‘we’re going to ride that’. The two exit the parlour and mount the vehicle. A montage plays out of Karamo clumsily steering the vehicle down narrow streets, the arms of an excited Yoko gripped tightly around his waist. The montage replaces what is usually a moment of spatial transition executed through a

M. Samuel (*) Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_2

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jump cut from one location and scene to the next, a formal characteristic of the compressed narrative of a lifestyle reality television programme. This is the opening scene of the first episode of  Queer Eye: We’re in Japan! (hereafter We’re in Japan!), a 2019 spin off of Netflix’s main programme. Entitled ‘Japanese Holiday’ the Vespa scene, like many of the references throughout the episode, is a nod to Roman Holiday (William Wyler 1953); the dreamlike montage a re-enactment of one of the film’s famous scenes, with Karamo and Yoko performing the parts of Gregory Peck’s expat, Joe, and Audrey Hepburn’s crown princess, Ann. Meanwhile, in a home in Lakewood, California, a Japanese woman carefully locates a spot on the rug of a large living room and kneels, positioning herself as if for prayer. ‘First we’re going to thank the house’, the subtitles read as she speaks in Japanese to an American couple who are sat observing the ritual from the viewpoint of two large armchairs. As the woman proceeds to whisper her thanks to the house, the couple look on. Their expressions, framed through several close-up shot-reverse-shots, convey curiosity, confusion, and amusement. The sequence’s formal filmmaking elements code otherness into the popular visual aesthetic. In its mise-en-scène and cinematography, Japanese (the other) is contextualised within the American (the familiar). For those who are familiar, the Japanese woman is Marie Kondo, the internationally recognisable celebrity author of The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (2014), and the scene described above is from the first episode of her first Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019) (hereafter Tidying Up). Beyond their shared association with the lifestyle reality genre with a strong focus on either  home or self-improvement series (The Property Brothers [2011–], America’s Next Top Model [2003–]), and their production for and release on the same platform within the same year, both We’re in Japan! and Tidying Up are united by their mission to forge a dialogue between two distinct cultures—America and Japan—during a critical moment in Netflix’s global expansion strategy. And while either programme appears to televise such a dialogue—their hosts captured listening, learning, parting with unique insight—their editing, dialogue, and the conduct of their respective hosts reveal deep historical, socio-political, and cultural tensions. In We’re in Japan! and Tidying Up, both genre and the lifestyle and reality aesthetic and format operate as the playground for competing showcases of ‘cultural capital’, to borrow from Pierre Bourdieu (1984), revealing inherent national tensions and power dynamics between

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the United States and Japan since the Second World War. While it is possible to trace and locate these national political tensions to the bombing of Pearl Habor on 7 December 1941 and the Pacific War, 1941–1945, today we must equally regard them in a more recent context and conflict: the so-called streaming wars. In the streaming wars, the production and release of a steady stream of exclusive content is considered central to a platform’s success and survival. Never has intellectual property (IP) been so kingly. We see this in the competition between Netflix, Amazon, and Disney. Netflix has dominated much of the streaming landscape since its launch as an online streaming service in the United States in 2007, and has achieved and retained a similar position in Latin America, the United Kingdom, and mainland Europe over the course of its global expansion since 2010. However, with the packaging of Amazon Prime Video with Prime membership and the arrival of Disney+ phenomenon, The Mandalorian in 2019 with its star asset ‘Baby Yoda—the key to the Disney+ takeover’ (Alexander 2019)—along with slate of Marvel series— has challenged Netflix’s seat at the top. The streaming wars have not only limited to the United States but are international in scale, with subscription video on demand (SVOD) platforms and services competing with one another for subscribers globally. In a global context, platform exclusives take on multiple functions: to attract new subscribers and retain existing ones; to reflect the identity, brand, and ambitions of their studios; and to enhance their company’s and arguably their nation’s global appeal. In sum, original content is a form of ‘soft power’, to borrow a key term from American political scientist Joseph S.  Nye Jr (1990). In ‘Soft Power and American Foreign Policy’, Nye asserts that ‘Power depends on context, and the distribution of power differs greatly in different domains’ (2004b, 262). The year 2015 signalled Netflix’s entry into the Asia-Pacific and the Asia-Pacific streaming wars. The move was a significant and strategic step forward in the American company’s ambition of global expansion. As the streaming wars have played out, the popularity of Netflix’s anime catalogue and the global phenomena of South Korean dramas (Squid Game [2021–] and All of Us Are Dead [2022–]) have respectively established Japan and South Korea as ‘key battlegrounds’ for global streaming platforms (Brzeski 2021). Meanwhile, the positive reception of Disney+ in Japan—which, it is worth noting, was the ‘first market to launch Disney+ in North Asia’ and ‘high priority market for Disney’ (Szalai 2021)—has tipped the country as being the ‘key battlefront in the Netflix-Disney+ streaming war’ (Blair 2019).

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After exploring definitions of soft power and mapping Netflix’s growth as a leading streaming platform, the following chapter turns its attention to the latter of these ‘key battlegrounds’ in the Asia-Pacific: Japan. Considering the historic relationship between the United States and Japan, and its history of transcultural exchange and media practices since the Second World War (see Koichi Iwabuchi 2002 for a comprehensive exploration), this chapter explores some of Netflix’s strategic moves to attempt to persuade Japanese consumers, specifically the production of local and transnational original content (so-called Netflix Originals). Can we regard these Netflix Originals as cultural soft power assets in the international streaming wars, and certain genres as the battlegrounds on which the streaming wars are played out?

Soft Power In 1990, Joseph S. Nye Jr proposed that two different kinds of power arose from political tensions and conflicts: hard power and soft power. Reflecting on America’s international relations with the Soviet Union, its foreign policy, and political and military power at the height of the Cold War (1947–1991) and positioning it within a broader historical discourse of power since the Second World War, Nye conceived the notion of soft power in response to the idea of hard power; ‘the ability to get others to act in ways that are contrary to their initial preferences and strategies’ (2011, 11), often through force. Over the course of the twentieth-century conflicts, to more recent international conflicts that the United States has been embroiled in, hard power is reflected in the outcome of demonstrations of ‘military or economic might’ (Nye 2004a, 5). However, hard power is not exclusive to advancing the position of a country, person, political party, or social movement. As Nye highlights, it is also possible for a side to achieve their desired outcomes without the use of ‘threats or payoffs’, instead achieving them through co-opting rather than coercion (2004a). Nye regards this form of influence as soft power. That is, not to confuse soft power as being entirely the same as influence, however. As Nye argues, ‘[I]nfluence can also rest on the hard power of threats or payments’ (2004a). Likewise, soft power exceeds the definition of persuasion. While influence and persuasion are characteristics of soft power, it is worth remembering that another defining attribute of soft power is attraction. As Nye writes, ‘[S]oft power is attractive power. In terms of resources, soft power resources are the assets that produce such attraction’ (Nye 2004a);

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these ‘assets’ can be ‘the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies’ (Nye 2004b, 256). Contextualising this idea historically, Nye argues that the United States strategy and position after the Second World War and later the Cold War was sustained through its soft power, as much as through its hard power (2004b, 257). In recent years, Nye’s concept of soft power has been mobilised in the analysis of film and television within their respective industrial and cultural contexts. In studies of World Cinema, for example, soft power is used to explore how international relations are both reflected in and shaped by onscreen narratives, casting choices, and production and distribution histories. This is true in the case of European cinema and the national cinema of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) (see Dennison and Dwyer 2021; Cobb 2020; Voci and Hui 2017). As well as analysing soft power in World Cinemas and emerging national cinemas, scholars have also started to explore film and television’s soft power potential, globally, particularly across the Asia-Pacific (see Li 2019; Voci and Hui 2017). Or, as is the case with Ramon Lobato (2019), Amanda Lotz (2021) and Kevin McDonald and Daniel Smith-Rowsey (2016), they have chosen to investigate the geopolitics that shape television’s production and distribution, particularly in regard to streaming platforms and technologies. Within discourses of national and transnational Film and Television Studies, a country’s media output has often been regarded as a form of cultural soft power, especially where the assertion of identity is concerned. American films during the height of the Cold War, for example, were used to demonstrate American dominance (The Hunt for Red October [McTiernan 1990], The Falcon and the Snowman [Schlesinger 1985]). Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, since the 1980s, British national cinema—particularly what Andrew Higson coined ‘heritage films’ (1993)— has capitalised on the iconography of the country house estate, period costume, and literary narratives associated with an aristocratic white Southern Englishness of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Not only do they do so to sell an exportable version of Britishness abroad, predominantly to the American market, but to reconstruct or reinstate a sense of national identity when the country is facing uncertainty (the radical process of deindustrialisation and disintegration during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, to the turbulence post-2008 recession, postBrexit). A unifying thread running through these explorations of national film and television series is how a country sees itself and how it wants to

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be seen, and relatedly, how nations mobilise popular culture and media in the process to facilitate this relationship, especially in the context of web 2.0 and the digital revolution, or what Nye refers to as ‘the global Information Age’ (2004b).

A Brief History of Expansion The story of Netflix began with a concept: the ability to rent DVDs by selecting them from an online catalogue and receiving them by mail. In 1997, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph placed a DVD in a self-addressed envelope and mailed it to themselves. The experiment was a success, and just a year later, the mail business went online. Netflix.com functioned as both a marketplace and as a film information hub (not too dissimilar from the Internet Movie Database). In 1999, Netflix’s attention turned to converting customers into paying subscribers to their service, debuting a package that offered them unlimited DVD rentals without the fear of late fees. The evolution of the internet in the early-2000s ushered in the age of new media, resulting in an increasingly personalised internet experience made possible through the availability of personal websites, blogs and social media. This technological shift reflected in Netflix’s introduction of what it called a ‘personalized movie recommendation system’ in 2000 (Netflix website), an early iteration of the platform’s famous algorithm. Netflix’s growth in this first decade of the new millennium was exponential (in 2003, Netflix surpassed one million subscribers and in 2006 five million). However, arguably its biggest leap forward came in 2007 with the introduction of online streaming, enabling subscribers to consume content instantly through an internet browser. In 2008, Netflix expanded their service yet again, making it available on a range of online technologies, and, in the late-2000s, accessible beyond its domestic market in the United States. At first it expanded its service to Canada in 2010, Latin America and the Caribbean in 2011, and the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Scandinavia in 2012. The year 2012 was significant for Netflix for another reason; it was the year that the company ventured for the first time into the production of original content. The company’s first ‘Original’ was a recorded live performance from American stand-up comedian Bill Burr (You People Are All the Same), before subsequently moving into scripted content aimed towards an adult audience. Their first scripted series was Lilyhammer (2012–2014),

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a dramedy set in Norway. In 2013, however, Netflix was first considered as competition to leading cable companies such as HBO, FX, and Showtime, with the critical successes House of Cards (2013–2018) and Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019). As the library of Netflix Originals expanded, so did the company. At no point in its history is this truer than in 2015 and 2016, when Netflix extended its availability to much of mainland Europe, South America, and the Asia-Pacific, in the process establishing production hubs in major cities globally. The expansion reflected in Netflix’s membership figures in 2017, reaching a total of 100 million members worldwide. Since 2012, Netflix has built an extensive catalogue of original content, including television dramas The Crown (2016–), Ozark (2017–2022), and Mindhunter (2017–); non-fiction documentaries and programmes such as Tiger King (2020–), Explained (2018–), and Chef’s Table (2015–); and feature films from prestige directors, such as Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2021), David Fincher’s Mank (2020), Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019), Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2019), Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019), and Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja (2017). Producing and continuously releasing high-quality original content has been central to Netflix’s growth and success in the West. However, in the Asia-Pacific, this strategy has proven less successful. Upon its arrival in the Asia-Pacific, not only did Netflix feel the immediate competition of local television stations, other SVOD platforms, and legal and illegal online alternatives, but it was also confronted with the challenges of appealing to very different and somewhat oppositional viewing cultures, complete with different viewing practices to Western audiences. This is particularly true in the case of Japan.

Digital Colonialism, Cultural Imperialism On 17 March 2021, Netflix announced that it would lease two sound stages at Toho Studios, Tokyo, Japan. The American company would henceforth hang, albeit digitally, its signature red banner from the façade of the main building, sharing the external space with a three-story mural depicting Toshirô Mifune as Kikuchiyo in Seven Samurai (Kurosawa 1954) and a bronze Heisei era (1984–1995) sculpture of Gojira/Godzilla in the courtyard. These two murals signify the importance of Toho Studios in Japanese popular culture and cinematic heritage (see Stuart Galbraith’s The Toho Studios Story [2008] for a comprehensive history of Toho

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Studios). Toho is the home of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and the birthplace of the Gojira/Godzilla film franchise, both released in 1954. While their production almost bankrupted the company, they went on to be major box office successes. Perhaps more importantly, they immediately became, and have since been, highly influential Japanese cultural assets on the international stage, profoundly shaping European arthouse and American cinema. In one way, Netflix’s leasing of two sound stages at the historically and culturally significant studio can be seen as celebratory, as Netflix physically locating itself at the heart of what is arguably the birthplace of twentieth-century Japanese visual popular culture. This is certainly the impression given from Teiji Ozawa, Netflix’s live action manager, whose post on Netflix’s website announcing the venture in 2021 exuded personal excitement and privilege: Not many can call themselves home to Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and the Godzilla film series that quite literally took over the world. As the birthplace of both, and many more motion pictures that built the foundations of Japanese filmmaking, Toho Studio opens its doors to tens of hundreds of artists every year, as one of the largest production studios in Japan. As someone who built their career working on Japanese films and series, Toho Studio has always been somewhere I dreamt of bringing projects to. Today, we [Netflix] are taking our commitment to Japanese storytelling to a new level by leasing two of Toho Studio’s international-standard soundstages over several years.

On the other hand, Netflix’s advance on Toho Studio can be read as a power move, signalling the American streaming giant’s insertion in, and arguably its intrusion on, Japan’s cultural and cinematic heritage. Netflix’s next big move was at Tokyo’s AnimeJapan Expo on 27 March 2021, when the streaming giant declared itself as the new home for anime. Following the success of anime series Blood of Zeus (2020–), the company teased the release of 40 new anime that year alone. The line-up included The Way of the Househusband, Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop, Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Shaman King, Record of Ragnorok, and The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf. The announcement indicated the company’s strategy in the Asia-Pacific, the growth of which is ‘directly connected to the growth of [Netflix’s] anime’ (Netflix’s chief anime producer Taiki Sakurai, quoted in Lyons 2021). Netflix’s expansion is more than just a personal ambition and interest in Japan and in Japanese exports, however.

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It is business. As Kim Lyons (2021) writes, the global appetite for anime is at an all-time high, ‘The worldwide anime market reached $23 billion last year, and is expected to grow to more than $36 billion by 2025’. And Netflix is rapidly becoming the go to place for anime, globally: ‘According to the New  York Times, Netflix said the number of households that streamed its anime offerings last year increased by half from 2019’ (ibid.) Acquiring Japan’s anime back-catalogue, investing in new productions, and expanding on existing IPs from film (e.g., Ghosts in the Shell: SAC_2045 [2020]), television (e.g., He-Man and the Masters of the Universe [2021– ]), and video games (The Witcher, Castlevania, and Cyberpunk 2077) are all clear indicators of Netflix’s strategy for expansion in the Asia-Pacific and beyond. As Shirley Zhao (2021) writes, Netflix’s investment in anime signals the streaming giant ‘stepping up its fight against AT&T Inc. and Sony Corp. for original content that appeals to Asian viewers’. The move is driven by data that illustrates the popularity of anime with Netflix subscribers in Japan, where, as Zhao points out, ‘half of Netflix’s 5 million subscribing households watch an average of five hours of the shows each month’ (ibid). Anime is central to the success of Netflix and its position above its competitors (chiefly Amazon and Disney) in Japan’s domestic marketplace, but it is not exclusive. As we have seen elsewhere in Netflix’s catalogue of Japanese-produced content, the company is just as invested in the production of original programmes, from the anthology series Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories (2016–2020) to The Naked Director (2019– ), and lifestyle and reality television (as will be discussed later in this chapter). With its growth stunted in the West, attracting customers in Asia is essential to Netflix’s survival and growth as a global company. Netflix’s investment in the creation of new content is what sets the company apart from its competition, according to the President Capital Management Corp Pooh Chuang: ‘One of Netflix’s biggest advantages over its competitors is generating local, original content based on its extensive user data […] Doubling down on original anime will help this localization campaign and strengthen its users’ attachment to Netflix’ (Quoted in The Japan Times, 2021). Despite the growth of both its subscribers and content catalogue, Netflix’s global expansion, particularly in the Asia-Pacific, is not without its controversy. With its promise of ‘deterritorializing’ by aiming to be a ‘borderless’ and ‘postnational’ global platform (Tse 2020, 143), in Japan and Taiwan, for example, Netflix is viewed through a post-colonial lens,

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deemed ‘kurofune’ or ‘black ship’ by media commentators due to its ‘possible impact on their respective domestic markets’ (ibid). Black ship is a historical reference. As Yu-Kei Tse (2020, 144) explains: Originally, kurofune referred to US Navy Commodore Matthew Perry’s gunboat diplomacy and military expedition, which forced Japan to open its borders to foreign trade in the 1850s, after two centuries of isolation. In contemporary Japanese contexts, the term is often used by the public to describe the launch of a Western (usually American) product, service, or enterprise, as well as its impact on the domestic market. Depending on the intentions of the people employing the term, kurofune may imply a wary or defensive tone of uncertainty about the unpredictable impact, or it may be used in a descriptive sense.

Tse positions the kurofune discourse in response to ‘the rise of transnational satellite broadcasting’, which finds renewed currency in the move towards streaming and on demand (ibid, 144). Referencing Koichi Iwabuchi (2002, 4), Tse writes that the Japanese industry ‘can no longer enjoy a self-contained domestic market, but rather is now under threat of being forced to open its doors to the world’ (Tse 2020, 144). Here, we are granted both international and local perspectives on Netflix’s global expansion, particularly in the Asia-Pacific. While recognising its benefit to local culture, contributing to regional economies through film production and tourism, for example, such opinions as those above implore us to consider Netflix within the bigger picture of the international streaming wars, in which the company appears the cultural imperialist. The perception of a media technology’s global expansion as part of a wider project of cultural imperialism is not a new angle, but one that is situated within a wider discourse of historic ‘global media flows’ (Limov 2020, 6304). Gesturing to some of this wider literature, Brad Limov writes: Early studies into global media flows, defined as “the diffusion of media content in global markets” (Chandler and Munday 2011, p. 263), argued film and television trajectories worldwide were indicative of media, or cultural, imperialism (Nordenstreng and Varis 1974; Schiller 1976; Varis 1984). The concept is most clearly exemplified in how Hollywood has for decades dominated theatrical releases worldwide in a hegemonic, ­unidirectional manner outward from the United States (Miller et al. 2005). (2020, 6304)

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Within the context of the dominant ‘global media flows’ that form and govern the media industry, and particularly the American film, television, and video game industries, there are also ‘contraflows’ that ‘resist or run opposite of dominant flows’ (Thussu 2007). While it might be easy to conclude that Netflix represents a dominant flow, a cultural imperialist seeking to control the global media landscape, is it at the same time possible to conceive Netflix as a ‘contraflow’ to the cultural imperialism of a dominating system, which in this case is Hollywood or mainstream broadcast television? Certainly, within a discourse of broadcast ‘flow’ (Williams and Williams 1974/2003), Netflix is a disruptor, altering the ways in which contemporary audiences might access and consume content, particularly television, online. Netflix’s choice-based model confronts broadcast and subscription-based cable television models in the United States, for example, and destabilises the dominance of the national television schedule in British television culture. On the other hand, considering Netflix’s current position alongside its competition in the streaming wars conjure ideas about cultural dominance and monopoly. Netflix is a global leader and its cultural output is still largely shaped by domestic content, Western tastes, and viewing preferences. However, this is changing with Netflix’s recent forays into local productions for ‘its other national markets’ outside of the United States (Limov 2020, 6304). The company’s goal, writes Limov, referencing the work of Gomez-Uribe & Hunt (2015, 14), is ‘to commission original content across the world, licence content from all over the world, and bring this global content to the rest of the world’ (Limov 2020, 6306). To successfully deliver content to and attract new viewers and subscribers from the rest of the world to its service, Netflix must dominate its SVOD competitors, and original content is key. In a 2020 TIME article, Judy Berman argued that within the streaming wars, it is not just specific programmes, but certain genres that have proved essential to the success and survival of online streaming platforms. Considering Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+, Berman states that ‘Reality and lifestyle TV are more crucial than ever’. Like anime to Netflix’s Asia-­ Pacific strategy, since the late-2010s, streaming platforms appear to be investing in these historically perceived light entertainment genres, given their continued popularity on broadcast networks. In Berman’s article, the narrative about reality and lifestyle television not only quells the idea of the dominance of scripted ‘quality’ dramas over non-fiction television formats in the United States, but reveals the wider cultural function of such titles as The Bachelor (2002–) and Survivor (2000–) and the specialist

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channels (HGTV and the Food Network, for example) that host them. ‘Lifestyle channels such as eager-to-please Food Network and particularly HGTV […] appeal to both sides of a polarized country with shows that soothe its many anxieties’ (Berman 2018). It is of no surprise then that Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ are investing in reality and lifestyle television programmes, as well as acquiring and making available existing IPs. Such investments have proven a hit for streaming platforms: These investments have paid unexpected dividends in pandemic-stricken 2020. Whether you think of this lightweight nonfiction programming as part of a relatively benign pendulum swing away from dark, dense dramas and toward “peak comfort” or as one variety of the brain-numbing audiovisual muzak that is “ambient TV,” if not a little bit of both, there’s no denying that it was everywhere this year. With so many Americans stuck at home, in their off-hours as well as during the workday, HGTV and the Food Network saw enormous ratings jumps. Wellness TV is a thing now. And audiences ate up just about every flashy nonfiction show Netflix had to offer, from beloved stalwarts (The Great British Baking Show, Queer Eye) to supremely silly debut series such as Gwyneth Paltrow’s The Goop Lab, Indian Matchmaking and Too Hot to Handle. (Berman 2018)

While they might still be regarded as passive television genres—comforting, ambient, ‘audiovisual muzak’—reality television and lifestyle television genres have sway over audiences. In this, we can begin to explore their soft power potential and ability to persuade audiences to subscribe to specific platforms. But only when we look closely at what they have to say can we determine their power. While these series and genres are mobilised in the streaming wars, I would argue that the competition exceeds platform, and indeed reflects a clash of identities and ideologies. Arguably, these genres are embroiled in a ‘culture war’, to borrow a sociological term popularised by James Davison Hunter in 1991, used to describe the tensions between distinct social groups and the battle over values and beliefs. To illustrate this, I return to We’re in Japan! and Tidying Up.

Queer Eye: We’re in Japan! We’re In Japan! is a four-episode special of Netflix’s series Queer Eye, the on-demand platform’s 2018 reboot of David Collins and Michael Williams’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (2003–2007). In Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the original hosts, the original ‘Fab Five’ (Carson

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Kressley, Jai Rodriguez, Kyan Douglas, Thom Filicia, and Ted Allen), travelled to cities across the United States, turning their attention and expertise to the makeover of a heterosexual man usually for a special occasion, such as a proposal, a party, or an interview. With Collins once again driving the IP, the Netflix reboot situated a new Fab Five (Karamo Brown, Antoni Porowski, Tan France, Bobby Berk, and Jonathan Van Ness) in set states in each season (Atlanta, Kansas City, Philadelphia, and Austin), within which they turned their attention to the transformation of a wider range of character beyond heterosexual men. Both iterations of Queer Eye are widely regarded as revolutionary television series. As Rachel Steinberg writes in The Radio Times (2018), the existence of a series like Queer Eye on American television and in American popular culture, with five leading queer men in the public eye and on mainstream television, was a ‘groundbreaking moment’ in 2003: ‘When the first episode aired, the United States was still seven months away from its first legal same-sex marriage ceremony and queer people were almost non-existent on television’. Despite some progressions in the representation of queer characters in American dramas, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s, during what Robert J.  Thompson (1996) calls television’s ‘second golden age’ (Thirtysomething [1987–1991], Northern Exposure [1990–1995]), the landscape of television in the late-1990s and early-­2000s limited the possibilities for queer characters: marginalising, outlawing, criminalising, murdering, over-sexualising, and performing. In 2003, Queer Eye aired alongside American primetime dramas that pioneered embodied and unapologetic queer representation on the small screen, sharing the spotlight with the likes of Six Feet Under’s (2001–2005) David (Michael C.  Hall) and Keith (Matthew St Patrick), The Wire’s (2002–2008) Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), and the characters at the centre of HBO’s stage-to-screen adaptation of Angels in America (2003). Significantly though, what distinguished the Fab Five from their scripted counterparts was that their forum was reality and lifestyle television, a genre governed by the commercial and often conservative interests of their respective network television networks. The Fab Five did not have to hide. Their pride did not cause controversy, nor did it compromise their position on television. Rather, to the surprise of the network, its producers, and its cast, the series became a ratings success and has since earned lasting praise for its onscreen representation. Queer Eye was a trailblazer, a soft power asset for the queer community, creating a space for the positive visibility of queer people in American visual popular culture. Its legacy can

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be felt in its contribution to the visibility of positive, progressive, and diverse representations of complex queer identities onscreen.1 While the original series gave a voice to an otherwise mute, invisible, underrepresented, or misrepresented community on American primetime television, Netflix’s version uses that voice to engage both directly and critically with contemporary concerns primarily affecting present day America: ‘A decade later, the series’ reboot […] digs even deeper, transforming lives and communities while tackling everything from toxic masculinity to disability rights and Black Lives Matter’ (Steinberg 2018). We’re in Japan! is one of two spin-offs of the Netflix original, and what is unique about these spin-offs is that they move the discourse beyond America, where the series has always historically been rooted.2 The first of these specials was ‘Yass Australia!’, a twenty-minute episode filmed in the small town of Yass in New South Wales. Rather than featuring on Netflix alongside the main series, however, ‘Yass Australia!’ was distributed via Netflix’s official YouTube channel on 21 June 2018. The second of the specials, We’re in Japan!, consists of four episodes set in Tokyo. As Netflix’s synopsis reads, ‘The Fab Five touch down in Tokyo to spread the joy, explore the culture, and help four Japanese men and women find the confidence to be themselves’. As well as facilitating the journeys of personal transformation of their four subjects or ‘heroes’ as they are referred to in the programme, the Fab Five navigate Japan, interacting with their mostly Japanese-speaking subjects and interfacing with Japanese culture, through a mediator named Lena, who is introduced at the end of ‘Japanese Holiday’. Meanwhile, for cultural perspective, the Fab Five call upon the help of guest celebrities, their cultural guides, recognisable to the heroes and international audiences alike. These celebrity cultural guides include the American-born Japanese model and international social media phenomenon, Kiko Mizuhara, who features in all episodes, offering her perspective on fashion and style, and the comedian Naomi Watanabe,

1  Representation corresponds with the increased visibility of queer characters in television. In 2022, GLAAD reported a rise of 2.8% in the number of LGBT characters on American television, accounting for nearly 12% of characters (see GLAAD’s ‘Where We Are on TV report—2021–22’). 2  It is worth mentioning here that, as of 2022, the first international export of the series has been released—Queer Eye Germany—featuring, yet again, an all-new Fab Five (Leni Bolt, Jan-Henrik Scheper-Stuke, David Jakobs, Aljosha Muttardi and Ayan Yuruk) and a new setting (Berlin).

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herself named as one of the 25 most influential people on the internet by TIME in 2018. Japan, as opposed to America, poses an interesting challenge for the Fab Five, and this tension can be located in their central focus: the individual hero. Individualism or liberal individualism is an American ideal centred around ‘the idea that each person should have the right to think and act in a way that is largely free from communitarian or collectivist restrictions’ (Grabb et al. 1999, 513). Japanese culture, on the other hand, is historically defined as a collectivistic culture, collectivism being a ‘political belief that a country’s industries and services should be owned and controlled by the state or by all the people in a country’ (Collins dictionary definition). How does a series that embraces and celebrates individuality—an individuality so encoded in American ideology—navigate Japanese culture, its collectivist ideology, and distinct societal, generational, and gendered pressures? And could it do so sensitively, while also remaining entertaining for a presumed mainly Western television audience? Hanh Nguyen’s 2019 Salon article is useful in providing an insight into the pre-production of We’re in Japan! and in illustrating the conscious efforts of all those involved in its production to carefully tread Japanese culture sensitively: When it came time for Netflix’s hit makeover series ‘Queer Eye’ to visit Japan, the producers made every effort to not only do their research, but bring the Japanese perspective to the storytelling. The show has traveled overseas before to visit Australia, and although there was still a cultural exchange, everyone spoke the same language and had similar Western influences. The season in Japan might literally be an East meets West situation, but it didn’t need to retread any of those tired tropes.

Including an interview with Jennifer Lane, We’re in Japan!’s showrunner, Nguyen’s article reveals that the series was considered by Netflix as an opportunity to ‘test the waters’ and to see if its format would appeal to an international audience ‘beyond the United States’ (Lane, quoted in Nguyen 2019). Japan was specifically selected because of the success of Netflix’s other reality and lifestyle originals, which included Terrace House (2015–2020) and Tidying Up earlier that year (2019). In the spirit of partnership, Netflix worked with Twenty First City Inc., the Japanese production company who has a history of co-productions with the United States and United Kingdom. These include HBO’s Girls (2012–2016),

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Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle (2014–2018) and the BBC’s Giri/Haji (2019). Netflix already had an existing partnership with Twenty First City Inc., working on the stylised specialist factual series Abstract (2017–2019) and Chef’s Table (2015–), as well as the third season of Fuller House (2016–2020). Bringing only eleven crew members to Japan from the United States meant that the production was not stifled with outsider perspectives. Instead, local partners not only steered the production but provided a ‘familiar face’ for the heroes of the series, putting them at ease and enabling them to expose their vulnerabilities to ‘Japanese cameras’ (Lane, quoted in Nguyen 2019). This chapter opened with the analysis of just one of these vulnerable transformative moments from the first episode, in which Karamo facilitated an emotional conversation with Yoko. It will now briefly map her journey with the other members of the Fab Five. With chef Antoni Porowski, Yoko fulfils a lifelong ambition to learn how to make a traditional apple pie. With fashion expert Tan France, her wardrobe is given a colourful upgrade. At her home, which she shares with her business, and where she sleeps on the floor under a table at night, resident interior designer Bobby Berk creates a personal space for Yoko, while also redecorating the rest of the space. And finally, with stylist and personal care expert Jonathan Van Ness, Yoko seemingly has the least radical transformation, physically, with a haircut and a self-care regime that includes regular cups of sake. Yoko’s transformational journey in ‘Japanese Holiday’ occurs on two levels: the domestic and self. The former is facilitated by Antoni and Bobby, while the latter by Karamo, Tan, and Jonathan. But what is the significance of these, and how might they be viewed through the optic of soft power and cultural currency? The segment with Antoni not only conjures the senses associated with cooking and the romance of making and sharing a meal with someone special, but importantly traffics in nostalgia. It is not a lived nostalgia, however, but one that is imagined; prosthetic, to recall Alison Landsberg’s concept of ‘prosthetic memory’ (2004, 2). Exceeding the spatial and technological limitations of the average Japanese kitchen, the making of the pie is symbolic of a nostalgia for the fantasy of America, Americana, and for the post-war American dream as defined by the suburban lifestyle enclosed within the boundaries of the white picket fence. Like Yoko’s obsession with iconic American celebrities associated with the classical Hollywood studio and star systems, her dream pie adds to her image of, and obsession with the West, speaking to a history of popular cultural exchange between the United States and Japan since the

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Second World War. While Yoko is experiencing making and sharing a pie with Antoni, Bobby and his team of decorators renovate her home-­ business. Within the home, he creates a bedroom and personal space for Yoko, severing her personal immersion in work and community, while also redesigning the rest of the space in an American beach house aesthetic, complete with wood-panelled walls, ornamental driftwood and rope, and other nautical themed paraphernalia. The Long Island aesthetic symbolises the detachment from the Japanese domestic tradition, forging a new space for Yoko’s American fantasy to play out. While Antoni and Bobby facilitate Yoko’s fantasy of the American domestic ideal, Karamo, Tan, and Jonathan’s interactions emphasise American ideology, at the centre of which is the individual and individuality. Beyond just revealing Yoko’s obsession with Hollywood icon Audrey Hepburn and the classic film Roman Holiday, her time with Karamo really serves to spotlight and platform the self. Upon hearing her story of self-­ sacrifice and loss, repeatedly over the course of their conversation, the takeaway message from Karamo is straight out of the Western self-help playbook, stressing that Yoko must live for herself. Physically and verbally, Yoko finds this advice difficult, reminding Karamo, to the point of tears, of the philosophy or character of Japanese culture, and how his beliefs fundamentally fly in the face of the ethos of community and politeness. This argument runs over into her interactions with Tan and Jonathan, with a more gendered angle. Having heard that Yoko had ‘given up on being a woman’, which Yoko explains is common for women of her age in Japanese culture, Tan (with the help of Kiko) and Jonathan, respectively, use a combination of colourful fashion, catwalk performance, and personal styling and self-care as a means of not only heightening Yoko’s confidence in herself and her body, but as a way of emphasising uniqueness and individuality in the face of what is characterised within the diegesis of the series as a conformist, collectivist culture. We know that the Fab Five mean well. Within the series itself, this sensitivity to Japanese culture is not only a key consideration in its production—emphasised by the production partnership between Netflix and Twenty First City Inc. and the largely-Japanese production team—but is transparent within the series diegesis and in the way that the Fab Five interact with the Japanese heroes and their celebrity guides. Early in the first episode we are introduced to Kiko who acts as a guide to Japan and Japanese customs for the Fab Five. Before meeting with Yoko, the Fab Five sit down with Kiko and are informed about removing one’s shoes

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before entering the Japanese home. Tan takes the opportunity to ask Kiko about hugging prior to the Fab Five’s introduction to Yoko, and while Kiko explains that hugging is not customary in Japanese culture, she nevertheless encourages the Fab Five to greet Yoko this way, without consulting with Yoko first. It is important to consider here that, while of Japanese heritage, Kiko is shaped by her upbringing in America and her career as a global fashion icon. Furthermore, Nguyen and Lane provide insight into the pre-production process of assimilating the Fab Five into Japanese culture. Referring to the Fab Five as ‘students’, Nguyen (quoting Lane) writes: Even with Japanese experts in front of and behind the cameras, it was still important for the Fab Five to show their process of assimilating to a different culture. ‘All the guys were very keen on asking questions, so we came in just like sponges, wanting to learn and know everything,’ said Lane. ‘Do I bow? If I don’t take off my shoes, am I rude? We had to learn the very basics. It was really eye-opening.’ Some of these learning experiences are incorporated throughout the episode, such as when they’re briefed on who their heroes are, and Tan asks if he should address Yoko as Yoko-san out of respect. Or when they take a judo class as part of teaching Kae confidence. (Lane, quoted in Nguyen 2019)

Such considerations extend beyond the Fab Five. From the conversation between Nguyen and Lane, we get a sense of the producers wanting to use the four-episode special to educate the wider international Netflix audience at home. Episodes of Queer Eye end with a “‘Hip Tip’, in which one (or more) of the Fab Five leave you with something to think about or to carry out in your everyday life. For example, Jonathan might share a recipe for making a skincare product at home; Antoni might provide a cocktail recipe to entertain guests; or Karamo might encourage a daily routine to boost self-esteem. In this special, the Fab Five, along with their special guests Kiko and Naomi, use the Hip Tip to teach the audience something about Japanese culture. As Lane explains, rather than a personalised Hip Tip, what they wanted to achieve with We’re in Japan! was a ‘Cultural Hip Tip’, presenting the viewer with ‘a little piece of Japanese culture that you can take away if you’re interested in knowing’ (Lane, quoted in Nguyen 2019). Recognising that the Hip Tip was not for a Japanese audience, Nguyen and Lane highlight that the ‘cultural Hip tip’ functioned as a vehicle for the Japanese to address an international audience and culture, to say, ‘Here’s a little insight into who we are’ or insight

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‘into something that you probably didn’t know about Japanese culture’ (ibid.) Again, the aforementioned reinforces the overwhelming good intentions of the Fab Five as well as the whole production team and process behind We’re in Japan!. However, their approach to cultural sensitivity is fundamentally flawed as it appears that while recognising Japanese customs, they almost forget that their heroes are, indeed, Japanese, addressing and encouraging them to grow as if addressing Americans. This is evident in the segments in which Karamo, Jonathan, and Tan take an almost forceful approach to developing Yoko, the individual, according to a distinctly American ideological investment in individualism. While such a personal quality is widely celebrated in Western culture, such self-belief and elevation could potentially alienate Yoko in Japanese culture. Furthermore, this distinctly American form of address is explicit in the series aesthetic. Echoes of the American version of Queer Eye are burnt into the series DNA in a way that seems incompatible with its subject matter, or rather incompatible with representing Japan’s cultural ethos and character aurally and visually; quick takes and frantic editing, which are characteristic of American reality television, dictate the tone and pace of the spin-off. This is especially evident when comparing the series to other Japanese-produced reality television programmes on Netflix for a predominantly Japanese audience. Take Terraced House, for example, which adopts a slower pace, patient editing, and a muted colour grade. Furthermore, the stark differences between the America and Japanese productions are reflected in the series’ paratext, which, like many other western perspectives on the country and the city of Tokyo, traffics in stereotypes. Sat alongside Tidying Up, Blood of Zeus, and Terraced House Aloha State (2016) on my Netflix interface, for example, and I recognise that this might be different to other users, the Fab Five are visually presented in a tile along with Naomi donning karate gis. Selecting the series from ‘My List’, the trailer plays out, including scenes of Tan opening a shoji (a sliding door) and asking, ‘are you guys ready?’ in Japanese; the Fab Five crossing the famous Shibuya Scramble Crossing in Shibuya, Tokyo, dancing arm-in-arm with Miko; before finishing with a scene in a dojo—the one depicted on the Netflix interface tile. The Fab Five’s journey with Yoko, and indeed the other heroes in We’re in Japan! is symbolic of the post-war reconstruction of Japan and Japanese culture by the United States, trafficking in the cultural currency of American popular culture (Audrey Hepburn), lifestyle (the post-war

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suburban American dream), and the distinctly American ideology of rugged individualism. We’re in Japan! is produced with the intention of forging a meaningful dialogue of cultural exchange between America and Japan, an attempt ‘to reach across the Atlantic Ocean and shake hands with our friends in Japan’ (Lane, quoted in Nguyen 2019). However, I argue that the conversation is mostly one-sided, and at the heart of it lies a tension between how either culture views the other. On one side of the conversation are the Fab Five, symbolic of a happy, liberated, individualist West, and on the other the heroes, repressed by Japanese cultural and social ethos; the content of their conversation is either’s perception of one another, communicated exclusively through American popular culture, ideology, and presented through a distinctly American aesthetic.

Tidying Up with Marie Kondo Marie Kondo is a cultural phenomenon. Following the success of her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo became synonymous with the ‘KonMari’ method of organisation, which, as she explains in the first episode of the Netflix series, is defined by its ordered approach to managing and discarding personal items, starting with clothes, then books, paper, komono (miscellaneous items), and sentimental items. Tidying Up with Marie Kondo was produced by Gail Berman and Kondo, and developed by The Jackal Group, an American production group formed in partnership with the Fox Network Group. Delivered in both English and Japanese, facilitated by the use of a combination of subtitles and, like We’re in Japan!, a translator, named Marie Iida, each episode of her Netflix series follows American individuals and families confronting their possessions and hoarding habits. While the analysis of the ‘house thanking’ scene from the first episode highlighted the otherness that is coded into the film grammar, visually positioning the viewer with the American couple and persuading us to view the ritual, Kondo, and her brand of Japaneseness with quirky curiosity, the series itself equally traffics in the opposite: depicting Kondo’s impression of America, frequently capturing her response to the American home and American culture, which is less-than favourable. Distinct from the former case study, Kondo’s perspective and approach is emblematic of the same historical relationship between Japan and America, Japanese and American culture, a relationship predicated on familiarity and otherness and a cultural history of compare and contrast.

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Kondo became a phenomenon when the publication of her book The Lifechanging Magic of Tidying Up coincided with the height of the global financial recession (2008–). This backdrop arguably contributed to its success, finding currency with an international readership grappling with financial stress and the prospect of downgrading. While Kondo’s methods might be viewed as unique and modern, and her books regarded as recent phenomena, her ethos is not, and is indeed steeped in tradition. Hiroko Yoda (2021) locates Kondo historically, starting by locating her philosophy in American new age counterculture of the 1970s: ‘You must take everything out of your room and clean it thoroughly,’ a guru writes. ‘If it is necessary, you may bring everything back in again … but if they are not necessary, there is no need to keep them.’ You would be forgiven for mistaking this advice as a passage from one of Marie Kondo’s best-­ selling books. But they are the words of Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and a nourisher of the American counterculture. He wrote them in 1970, more than a decade before Kondo was born.

Meanwhile, Christopher Harding (2019) provides a valuable historical reading of the Marie Kondo phenomenon, arguing that the writer-­ presenter is symbolic of the spiritual tensions between Japanese and Americans. Harding describes ‘The tidying guru is heir to a long tradition: Japan marketing itself as spiritual foil to a soulless West’ (2019). This cultural superiority is a fascinating thread to pursue, granting us a new framework for interpreting Kondo, whether the message in her book, the content of her TED talks, and, importantly for this chapter, her conduct in the Netflix television series. Upon her approach to and entrance into the Californian home of the Friend family, Kondo remarks on the size of the home, which is a McMansion. Her first (and vocalised) impressions of the scale of American living and the scale of the family’s possessions are just a few, of many, that are translated in the subtitles in the lower section of the screen. Meanwhile, Kondo’s interpreter facilitates not only the conversation between the presenter and her subjects, but facilitates the cultural exchange between Japan and America, mediating Japanese and American culture. As Harding comments, the ‘conspicuous presence of her interpreter helps to create the impression of a cultural chasm being effortfully but productively bridged’ (2019). However, close ups via handheld camera of Kondo’s expressions, or the glancing exchanges with her interpreter, reveal another truth; an

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implicit one which, again in his article, Harding identifies aptly as ‘an artfully ill-concealed sadness at these desperate Americans, their homes and minds choked with trash’ (2019). Such gestures are private, implied, but it is evident in their responses and confessions of having too much stuff or too little space that the Americans in the series recognise them, identifying the unsustainability of their lifestyles, admitting the need for help, and thus seeking Kondo’s criticism for reasons of improvement. Again, like the Kondo phenomenon, this one is not new. The popularity of Japanese culture in the West is not only historically rooted, but has seen a recent cross-­ cultural revival, especially in literature and on television. Kondo is just one of the most recent, and possibly the most successful, examples. As Harding (2019) writes, Kondo is by far the most successful participant in a larger trend of the past few years: packaging inspirational but fairly universal lifestyle advice as the special product of Japanese soil and soul, from which Westerners might usefully learn. We’ve had ‘ikigai,’ which translates as the familiar concept of value and purpose in life.

Harding locates Kondo in this same tradition which saw ‘Japan and its culture marketed as a moderating force in a world otherwise overwhelmed by the West’ (2019). The success of Kondo could lie with context: stemming from the events and political rhetoric between the United States and Japan during Second World War, which placed an abrupt wedge between the countries, placing them on ‘opposite sides’ by ‘encourage[ing] an emphasis on contrast’ (ibid). Economically decimated, in the post-war years, Japan’s economic and cultural reconstruction and revival was facilitated by its leadership as well as by external parties who ‘encouraged a poverty-stricken population to aspire’, in turn ‘help[ing] to generate the consumer culture, and clutter, in Japanese homes that gave the likes of Marie Kondo her start in life’ (ibid.). It is of little surprise therefore that Kondo has found new popularity today, in a different but also a similar cultural context defined by the economic strain of the global financial recession, felt particularly in America, the United Kingdom, and across mainland Europe. As Harding reflects on the value of Kondo to a Western demographic: We in the West still hanker after new and exotic ways to make our lives better. And Japan still seeks to fit the bill. Its foreign policy is constrained by a

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pacifist Constitution and a one-sided alliance with America. Its economy has seen better days. But it flourishes through cultural “soft power,” offering Westerners at once a quieter life—the serene hush of forest or temple—and a quirkier, more fun one, courtesy of a world-beating pop culture. (Prime Minister Shinzo Abe went as far as dressing up as Super Mario at the closing ceremony of the Rio Olympics in 2016, promoting his country’s hosting of the Games in 2020). (ibid.)

While Harding’s reference to the Rio Olympics is laced with humour, the idea of cultural soft power is apt for this chapter and its understanding of Kondo’s Netflix special. The prime minister’s performance as Super Mario in the closing ceremony of the Rio Olympics can be read as a performance of Japan, trafficking in universally identifying character from Japanese pop culture and an arguable soft power asset. We might choose to read Kondo in a similar fashion. Performing politeness and respect, while failing to conceal her judgement of the other (in this case America and American culture). As Harding historicises in his article, this relationship between Japan and the West has origins with the civil war of 1868–1869, when: A new and forward-looking group of Japanese leaders found themselves facing a conundrum: How do you modernize without simply Westernizing? Ideas from the United States and Western Europe on science and medicine, philosophy, fashion and music were pouring in, while Japan, it seemed, was sending precious little back in the other direction. From beef to ballroom dancing, sideburns to suits, there appeared a real risk that Japan would forget its past completely, winding up a mere Asian facsimile of Western life. And so, there followed a rooting around in the cupboards in search of things that might usefully define ‘Japan,’ offering reassurance at home and material for export. The most successful of these played on the idea that the technological superiority of countries like Britain and America had been purchased at the cost of the Western soul. They were societies, as an adviser to the Japanese emperor put it in 1879, whose only values are fact-gathering and techniques.

It appears that when rooting through its cultural cupboard, Japan found Kondo on the shelf, offering that same reassurance to the Japanese home, while providing ‘material for export’; a bittersweet receipt for Western cultural influence, on it a single item: the Western soul.

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Conclusion If we are to take them at their word, Netflix is committed to stories: ‘Stories move us. They make us feel more emotion, see new perspectives, and bring us closer to each other’ (Netflix’s mission statement taken from their official website). Netflix’s lifestyle and reality television catalogue is testament to this. Wearing its heart on its sleeve, We’re in Japan! mobilises empathy and the idea of American individualism to better the lives of its Japanese heroes, while through the ethos of Japanese history and ancient philosophy, Tidying Up aims to inspire American households to downscale, organise their lives and homes, and live more fulfilled lives. Undeniably, these ambitions are positive. But on the other hand, as demonstrated earlier, they also present a transnational relationship fraught with tension. Beneath the HGTV veneer, both series highlight a dialogue between both countries and cultures. However, on both occasions the conversation appears to be  one-sided  with only one takeaway message: change, embrace your inner-American or Japanese citizen, and be happy.

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Riding the Wavve: Platform Imperialism and South Korea’s Streaming Market Daniela Mazur, Melina Meimaridis, and Daniel Rios

The streaming industry in South Korea has heated up in recent years with the arrival of new agents. South Korea today is one of the largest consumer markets for streaming video in Asia (Gupta 2019), fuelled especially by the high national insertion of video technologies and broadband internet (Kim et al. 2017, 2). The country has a developed technological infrastructure, well-designed local streaming landscape, 100% cable television penetration in South Korean homes, and cheap cable and internet bundles (Park 2018, 68; Buckthought 2020). In view of this, Netflix’s arrival in the country in 2016 was hostile. The press described the company’s presence in a combative manner: “Video-streaming war heats up in S. Korea” (Y. Kim 2019b), and “Korea online video services face uphill battle against Netflix” (Yeo 2019). These media vehicles present a narrative that places the US-based streaming company as a “foreign threat.”

D. Mazur • M. Meimaridis (*) • D. Rios Fluminense Federal University, Niterói, Brazil e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_3

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East Asian television occupies a significant part of what is currently considered a global phenomenon (Kim 2014). South Korea is the tenth-­ largest economy in the world. The country is the birthplace of Hallyu (i.e., Korean Wave), a pop culture transnational phenomenon. In 2019, for the first time, Hallyu exports surpassed $10 billion. In 2020, the South Korean government allocated $1.42 billion in incentives supporting the creation of local cultural content. It is through Hallyu that the country is cultivating its domestic market and presenting an updated image of the nation to the rest of the world, and especially to its 100 million global fans (Yonhap 2021). Netflix’s arrival in South Korea was not uncomplicated. When the company debuted, it had to compete within an existing and well-populated streaming market, as well as a strong national television system. However, as with Japan, Netflix has grown in the past few years mainly because of its strategies to adapt itself to local demands. Such accelerated growth frightened local conglomerates, who started to advocate for new regulatory policies to strengthen and protect the local streaming market. Furthermore, COVID-19 accelerated the streaming industry exponentially, seeing the global use of video streaming services and platforms increase by 51% (Jun 2020). In this context, South Korea became an essential producer and exporter of audio-visual content. The country’s audio-visual production, unlike several other markets, was not interrupted for a long time. Thanks to governmental action during the public health crisis, specifically the ordinances that managed to keep the industry functioning (Tai 2020), the entertainment industry provided new content for several streaming services around the world, including Netflix. To fight in the streaming wars, South Korean media conglomerates and the government are carrying out different strategies. This chapter aims to understand this market and its current obstacles, navigating the streaming landscape via the concepts of platform imperialism and pop nationalism (Joo 2011; Jin 2015). To examine the strategies employed by media conglomerates, this chapter revisits local trade press coverage and academic literature on the subject. We argue that the streaming wars has paved the way for two distinct phenomena: First, local media conglomerates banded together to form Wavve, a national streaming platform that has the direct goal of facing the “foreign threat” that Netflix represents to the country’s market. Second, the Korean industry is weaponizing foreign platforms’ reach to expand Hallyu globally. Thus, it is a two-way strategy in which

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the local industry is dependent on Netflix to reach a larger foreign audience but locally is hostile to the company.

The Rise of South Korean Television The South Korean television industry has flourished amidst the country’s advancing economy and major transformations in its society. The first television sets arrived in Korea in 1956, during the postwar period. Yet, it was only in the early 1960s that the regulation of television occurred. The military government instituted the rapid modernisation of the nation as a plan to sustain the government, and television was a symbol of this progress.1 In the 1960s, the country also started to produce TV Dramas, a format imported from Japan. However, the country’s audio-visual production was still very limited due to its lacking infrastructure and the governments’ censorship, which regulated the media. Television schedules then were largely composed of imported foreign products, mostly from the United States (D. Lee 2004, 38). The entrance of foreign content while on the one hand presented a moment of cultural exchange, it also raised concerns over the preservation of local culture. As a result, the government encouraged local production to reduce their dependence on these imports. Through protectionist measures and the gradual national structuring of television, from the 1980s onwards, the appeal of South Korean television grew, and consequently, the market became less dependent on foreign television imports (Y. Kim 2020, 110). Neighbouring countries also repeated this protectionist strategy. From this moment, South Korea and other East Asian countries favoured the consumption of cultural products from the region. Western inflows not only posed a threat but also became a trigger for the development of national cultural industries. Today, these East Asian entertainment industries supply their own local markets and still export products to other countries in the region and beyond. In this process, they foster new regional logics in the cultural sphere. In the 1990s, South Korea realised the economic potential of its cultural sector to national development. President Kim Youngsam’s 1  Between 1961 and 1987, South Korea was under a military dictatorship. During this time, there was intense censorship, limited freedom of expression, and multiple plans for economic acceleration. There were also violent attacks against those who rebelled against the regime.

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government (1993–1997) sought to consolidate the country’s cultural industry as part of a national economic strategy. The president enacted laws to attract investment in the film industry (D. Shim 2006; Jang and Paik 2012). He also required financial support from business conglomerates, called chaebols, to develop the local sector. These were the first steps in developing a strong and independent cultural industry. When the democrat president Kim Daejung (1998–2003) took office, one of his main goals was investing and expanding the country’s cultural potential as a local and international industry (Joo 2011; Kwon and Kim 2013). With the end of the dictatorship and the entry of private capital in local broadcasters, along with the introduction of cable television, Korean television became more diversified (Nam 2008; S. Shim 2008b). In 1990, the SBS network joined KBS and MBC, forming what is regarded as the “Big Three”—the three largest South Korean broadcast television networks. After the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, Korea restructured its cultural industry as a combative strategy with the aim of economic renewal. During this period of financial instability, it was possible to use a price reduction tactic to sell television products, placing them below the regional market’s average to attract importers (D. Shim 2008a, 25). In the late 1990s, Korea increased its production and exports of domestic cultural products and reduced foreign audio-visual dependency. In 2002, for the first time, the exports of local television programmes exceeded the imports (Jin 2007, 757–759). China was the first major importer of South Korean entertainment production, immediately becoming an essential part of the development of South Korean pop culture as a transnational phenomenon (D. Shim 2006; Joo 2011). This initial consumption occurred because Korean dramas (K-dramas, hereafter), despite being foreign productions, presented cultural representations in their narratives that were generally proximate to the Chinese culture, thus facilitating a dialogue between K-dramas and Chinese audiences (Rawnsley 2014, 224–227). For this reason, the Chinese government considered them a safer alternative to Western content. Here, the concept of Cultural Proximity (Straubhaar 1991, 39–42) is relevant. East Asian countries have a tight cultural dialogue. Centuries of exchange and dialogue due to geographical proximity, migratory flows, and political-diplomatic acts have led to a shared value system in a cultural flow, fostering a feeling of closeness and familiarity among their respective publics. East Asian audiences, therefore, are more receptive to culturally proximate products (Keane et al. 2007, 22). The cultural interconnections of these nations have eased the regional flow of audio-visual productions.

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According to Fung (2007) different East Asian audiences identify with “regionally celebrated values” (281). For this reason, South Korean cultural products circulate more freely in this regional market. Thanks to this proximity, diverse product sourcing, economic and technological development, and changes in media policies in the region, the exports of Korean audio-visual content in Asia rose (Jin 2007, 758). Today, South Korea presents itself as a vibrant centre of cultural trends and popular formats. These international cultural flows expand regionally and globally. “Hallyu” or Korean Wave is the name of this cultural phenomenon, which encompasses the flow of products and cultural influences originating in South Korea that reach different audiences worldwide (D. Shim 2006; Hanaki et al. 2007). The country’s television production is essential to understand the power struggles in and outside of Asia. It is also the first indicator of South Korea’s potential as a global producer and exporter of culture. Despite being in an unfavourable position in the face of the Western and globalising strength of the United States, South Korea poses challenges to the media hegemony displayed by the anglophone country. Recently, the local television industry started to release adapted versions of U.S. dramas, such as The Good Wife (CBS, 2009–2016), Criminal Minds (CBS, 2005–2020), Suits (USA, 2011–2019), and Designated Survivor (ABC, 2016–2019). According to Mazur, Meimaridis, and Albuquerque, South Korea is using its regional influence and the potential of the local television industry to adapt these narratives for the regional market, thus making Western stories more palatable for Asian audiences (Mazur et al. 2019, 173–175). In this way, the peninsular country challenges the United States since the legitimising authority passes from the United States to South Korea. The power to adapt a narrative to the local reality means to define oneself as the centre of a newly established order (ibid., 174). South Korean television narratives, then, are intense instruments of power. This cultural industry has become popular even outside Asia, in places such as Latin America (Min et al. 2019, 605–607), Africa (Kim 2018, 296–298) and Europe (Sung 2014, 56–61). According to KOFICE,  in 2019 South Korea profited $12.3 billion from exports of cultural products alone, an increase of 22.4% compared to the previous year (Yonhap 2020b). For this reason, the country’s video streaming market is a space of great dispute, with issues observed not only in South Korea but also likewise in other East Asian countries.

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Trends in the East Asian Streaming Market Currently, East Asia positions itself as an important region on the world stage. Several countries stand out, both for their rapid economic progress and for the consolidation of their national media industries. Japan and South Korea, for example, are effervescent centres for the production, distribution, and consumption of television content (Kim 2014, 1–24). Japanese anime and K-dramas are exported around the world. Much of the circulation of audio-visual content occurred by traditional television networks, whether via broadcasting or satellite, and through co-­ productions and format adaptations (Keane et al. 2007, 21). Yet, recently the internet has played a significant role in the distribution of this content (Wee 2016, 309–310). In the past decade, the development of streaming video platforms has made the flow of television programming in the region even more complex. East Asia is a heterogeneous territory. The region consists of a large plurality of countries, cultures, and media industries. However, we have identified two trends in the region that allow us to illustrate the current landscape of the East Asian streaming market. On the one hand, there are national initiatives for the creation of native platforms, often led by pre-­ established media conglomerates. On the other, there is also the arrival of foreign platforms, especially U.S.-based services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. These two trends bear many similarities with cases observed in other peripheral regions, such as in Latin America (Rios and Scarlata 2018; Meimaridis et al. 2020). We can observe the strength of the Chinese platform iQiyi. Commanded by Baidu, the streaming platform has been, since 2013, the main video-­ on-­demand service in China (Curtin and Li 2018). The platform uses a Freemium model, with the option to use the service free of charge with advertisements, alongside a subscription model that spares the user from integrated advertisements. iQiyi offers varied content, with Chinese and foreign productions, from East Asia and Western countries alike. Like Netflix, iQiyi also produces its own original content. In 2020, the Chinese streaming service hired Netflix’s former vice-president (VP) of Public Policy for the Asia-Pacific, Kuek Yu-Chuang, to be their new VP of international business. This move is part of iQiyi’s current expansion strategy across the Southeast Asian region (Frater 2019a). Curtin and Li contend that one of the main target audiences of iQiyi is young people, perceived as distancing themselves from more traditional television distribution and

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reception practices, consuming content online mainly via smartphones (Curtin and Li 2018). Netflix’s entry into several Asian countries stirred local industries. In Japan, for example, the local media industry started to refer to the streaming service as a “black ship” (kurofune) (Tse 2020, 143), a term that derives from a military expedition from the United States that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century that forced Japan to open its economy to the Western world. According to Yu-Kei Tse the “black ship” analogy has been “used by the public to describe the launch of a Western (usually American) product, service, or enterprise, as well as its impact on the domestic market” (ibid., 144). Despite negative connotations, the use of the term by the Japanese media is often ambivalent: while threatening the local industry, it also represents the diversification of content for the national audience.

The “Foreign Threat” As part of the expansion to Asia, Netflix arrived in South Korea in January 2016. Korea is a valuable market for Netflix, not only for its potential new subscribers but also for the possibility of exporting original content with regional particularities. According to Greg Peters, Netflix’s chief streaming and partnerships officer, “Korea is an amazing content creation and content consumption market” (J. Lee 2016). In this sense, Netflix wishes to sell its service to South Koreans, as well as owning South Korean content and exporting it to other markets in the region. From the start, the company sought to surf the Korean Wave. In 2017, Netflix invested in the feature film Okja (2017), directed by the renowned filmmaker Bong Joon-ho. With an investment of just over 48 million dollars, Netflix increased its Korean subscriber base from 70,000 to 200,000 after the release of the film (Kim and Oh 2020). Despite this success, Netflix maintained a low performance in the South Korean market in its first two years of activity in the country (Gupta 2019). At the end of 2017, the company had only 300,000 subscribers. When Netflix arrived in South Korea it found a streaming market already strengthened with big native platforms, such as the POOQ streaming platform, for example, which launched in 2011. The company was a joint venture controlled by the three largest free-to-air broadcasters in the country, KBS, MBC, and SBS. POOQ was a catch-up streaming service and had content from over 75 South Korean channels, along with films

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and TV dramas (Couto 2019). On the other hand, in 2016 the telecommunications company SK Broadband launched Oksusu, the platform born from the merger between BTV and Hoppin, both streaming services controlled by SK Broadband. Like POOQ, Oksusu offered a combination of video-on-demand content and linear television programming, yet also had an emphasis on sports championships (Kim 2016). In 2019, the POOQ and Oksusu platforms accounted for most of the national streaming consumption, when the former had ten million subscribers and the latter four million (H. Kim 2019a). Despite cable television’s dominance in the country and the strength of its free-to-air networks, the South Korean video streaming market has been rapidly growing. In 2016, South Koreans spent an average of $97 per user per year on subscription services. That same year, the average was $103 in Japan and $31 in China (Cher 2017). Since 2014 the domestic streaming market has been growing by 26.3% a year (Suh and Nam 2020) and in 2020 this market surpassed $700 million with the expansion of local platforms, such as Wavve and TVING (Lim 2021a). In 2017, local forecasts predicted that by 2021, the streaming industry in Korea would triple the figures for 2016 when it was worth $142 million. However, by 2020, the video streaming market was already estimated at approximately $658 million (Chae 2020). Netflix’s interest in South Korea is also fuelled by the need for mediation to the rest of the East Asian market. The U.S. company failed to enter China, currently the largest potential consumer market in the world and an important mediator in the region. The Chinese government imposes restrictive measures for foreign companies that intend to enter the country’s market to safeguard the local economy and culture. Due to such obstacles, Netflix gave up on the enterprise (Riley 2016). Curiously, South Korea finds itself in just the predicament avoided by China, where the foreign threat manifests itself and intimidates the local market, and the local government and industry must implement policy measures. If Netflix initially encountered some resistance from the South Korean audience, today the situation appears to be reversing itself quite rapidly. Between 2018 and 2019, the number of subscriptions quadrupled. But to accelerate growth, Netflix had to rethink its local strategies. Besides providing foreign content that was not shown on television and licensing local TV dramas, the company also invested in native original productions, like Busted! (2018–), Love Alarm (2019–), and Kingdom (2019–). Netflix also resorted to more affordable subscription prices specific to smartphones,

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given the predominance of the device in the country. By February 2019, Netflix had amassed 2.4 million subscribers. By January 2022, the number of subscribers surpassed 5 million, according to estimates by Media Partners Asia (Zhao and Shaw 2022). With the growth of Netflix Korea, the local entertainment industry became divided on how to position themselves (Seo 2018). The largest national broadcasters refused to licence their newest content to Netflix. According to the Korean Broadcasters Association, an alliance with Netflix would be the “starting point of the media industry’s destruction” (Seo 2018). In contrast, cable channels and independent production companies, such as Studio Dragon, decided to continue to sell their products to Netflix. The company’s argument was that the lack of partnerships between the South Korean cultural industry and a range of OTT platforms would weaken Hallyu. The imbroglio is a dispute between local and global economic interests in which South Korea depends on Netflix to conquer the global audio-visual flows, but still wants to protect its domestic market. Even in this turbulent scenario, Netflix does not seem to falter. The company continues to invest in local content to maintain its growth in the country and feed the global demand for Hallyu products. During the third quarter of 2020, Netflix gained 2.2 million paying customers worldwide, half a million of which were from South Korea and Japan, owing to the success of Korean content in these countries’ respective catalogues (Shin et  al. 2020). In the company’s list of top-100 television series in 2020, 10 were Korean: It’s Okay to Not Be Okay (TVN, 2020) in the 17th position, The King: Eternal Monarch (SBS 2020) in the 28th, Record of Youth (TVN, 2020) in the 41st, and Crash Landing on You (TVN, 2019–2020) in the 55th (Suh and Nam 2020). In Southeast Asian countries, K-dramas were some of the most-viewed Netflix series during 2020, stimulating the company to expand its investment in Korean productions (Boram 2020). In 2020, Netflix signed an alliance with Korea’s largest content provider, CJ ENM, and the JTBC Content Hub to produce TV dramas for the next few years. The U.S. company also recently acquired a 4.99% stake in Studio Dragon and an exclusive contract with LG Uplus (Kim and Oh 2020). Since late 2020, the company established a branch office for content in Korea named Netflix Entertainment Korea (B. Kim 2020a). In early 2021, the company announced that is establishing two production facilities just outside Seoul as an “example of our continued commitment to investing in Korea’s creative ecosystem” (Bing and Ko 2021). Netflix has invested more than $700 million in Korean content

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(Boram 2020); in 2020 alone it was almost $300 million (Suh and Nam 2020). The company predicted an investiment of approximately $500 million  in  2021, so South Korea would account for half of Netflix’s estimated $1 billion Asia-Pacific content budget for the year (Frater 2021). According to Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, “because the world loves Korean content so much, we will make a big investment in Korea as an important part of the power of the Asian region” (Kim and Oh 2020). For Netflix, it is important to guarantee intellectual property rights through investment in production costs, because the platform needs the content to be continuously distributed and available in its international libraries. The global popularity of Asian TV dramas is a significant part of Netflix’s content production strategies for the upcoming years. According to Sarandos “more than half of Asian content hours viewed on Netflix this year are viewed outside the region, so we have confidence that our upcoming slate of Asian productions will find fans in their home countries and abroad” (Lui 2018). In October 2021, Netflix investments really started to pay off after the massive worldwide success of its original K-drama Squid Game (2021–)

The South Korean Response Local markets have been responding to Netflix’s expansion and the arrival of other companies from the United States through regulatory policies for streaming platforms. In South Korea and other countries belonging to the global periphery, such as Brazil and Mexico, this issue becomes particularly relevant, in view of the asymmetries existing in the local audio-visual industries (Baladron and Rivero 2019, 113–116). In addition to historical evidence of the impact of cultural imperialism and globalisation around the world, South Korea’s governmental and industrial concern in the face of foreign forces also has roots in what Jin describes as “Platform Imperialism” (Jin 2015). Therefore, this phenomenon presents a new type of imperialism, which continues to concentrate capital and reaffirm the dominance of the West, especially the United States. As the United States continues to assert its power through online platforms (Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix, among others), Platform Imperialism highlights the role of transnational corporations who share privileges in relations of power, technological exchanges, and unequal capital flows with non-Western countries (Jin 2015, 50). From a Platform Imperialist perspective, the forms of

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domination of these countries outside the central axis by the United States are different, because intellectual property and commercial values ​​ are embedded in platforms and more effective for capital accumulation and power expansion (ibid., 12). Thus, it enhances asymmetries and the system for maintaining hegemony. Concerns about Netflix’s presence among the Hallyu industry are genuine. The exclusive contracts for content sold and produced by Netflix present new quandaries for the industry. K-drama Squid Game, for example, was very successful worldwide, but the creator did not receive financial returns in addition to the initial payment for the TV drama (Jeffries 2021), as is customary in the South Korean market. According to Choe Jeong-hwa, president of the Producers Guild of Korea, “the company (Netflix) keeps trying to exploit its position as the dominant player to lower production companies’ rates” (Suh and Nam 2020); meanwhile, Netflix presents itself as a mediator, intensifying and reframing Hallyu in the global market. Considering the discussion on Cultural and Platform imperialism, this process is quite troubling for a country that is part of the global periphery. In 2020, the South Korean industry introduced new restrictions and policy measures to curb Netflix’s growth and protect the local market. For example, the “Network usage fee,” where internet service providers (ISPs) accuse foreign content suppliers of being “free riders.” Because the ISPs must deal with the increase in traffic, they are pressuring these companies to pay extra fees (Yang 2020). So, the National Assembly of South Korea passed a revision of the Telecommunications Business Act, dubbed the “Netflix Law.” The bill requires ISPs and content providers to take responsibility for maintaining the quality of the network service and prevent excessive online traffic. Moreover, the Fair Trade Commission of the South Korean government also signalled that it would be stricter with the assessments of foreign OTT companies (Yonhap 2020c). On the other hand, the “pop nationalism” framework is also useful to understand the South Korean case. The term, introduced by Joo (2011), points to the emergence of nationalist discourses in countries that achieved success exporting their cultural products, generating a certain sense of national pride for the people. Joo was directly inspired by Iwabuchi’s work on “trans/nationalism” (Iwabuchi 2001, 2002), the latter perceived the issue in the nationalist bias in Japanese speeches when addressing exports of pop culture content to the rest of the world (Joo 2011, 489). Due to Hallyu’s reach and popularity, pop nationalism is also a worthy issue in the

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South Korean streaming market, turning the Korean landscape into an even more complex dispute. Pop nationalism influenced South Korea’s strategies to hinder Netflix’s advance in the country. Unlike other peripheral countries where the local market has several companies vying for the public’s attention, such as in Brazil and Mexico (Meimaridis et al. 2020, 73), the general decision of the South Korean entertainment industry has focused on another solution: to merge the two largest native streaming companies in the country, POOQ and Oksusu, into a single platform: Wavve. Noh Chang-hee, from Media & Future Institute, explained through a Korea Creative Content Agency report: “The South Korean media industry has been seeking ways to deal with Netflix’s expanding influence. As a result, foreign and domestic players have become business partners or competitors to deal with the fast-changing media environment” (Yonhap 2020a).

Riding the Wavve Wavve is a joint venture between telecommunications giant SK Telecom and open broadcasters KBS, MBC and SBS. SK Telecom’s CEO called the new streamer the “Netflix of Asia” (Doyle 2019). He pointed to Wavve’s expansion plans in the Southeast Asian market and the company’s focus on licensing original content abroad (ibid.). Wavve debuted in September 2019 with approximately 14 million subscribers inherited from the merger. Yet not all subscribers are paying customers, since the Fair Trade Commission only approved the merger on the condition that the three broadcasters could not start charging for the content they have already provided for free. It also established partnerships with other Asian platforms, such as ViuTV (Hong Kong), iflix (Malaysia), and iQiyi (China). Wavve strives to expand the potential of South Korean television and streaming across the Asian and global markets. The government supported the merger between Oksusu and POOQ in favour of the creation of Wavve based on strategies to protect the national market. This strategy is not unique to Wavve. The Korean search engine Naver was and still is successful in preventing Google from dominating in the country, by making its exclusive content indecipherable to Google’s crawlers (ibid.). Wavve has committed itself to not only defend the domestic market from Netflix and YouTube but also to advance abroad, competing globally through the production of original content. The company, thus, aims to win over local and regional audiences. The platform will invest more than

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$850 million to produce exclusive content by 2025 (Lim 2021b) and provide media services with local technologies of virtual and augmented reality (Frater 2019b). Added to this, the Korean cultural industry also invested, through Wavve, in agreements with international platforms to continue expanding the influence of Hallyu’s television and film content around the world. In 2020, Wavve closed a deal with NBCUniversal from the United States to export original content (B. Kim 2020b). During its launch, Wavve aimed to accumulate 5 million paying subscribers and annual sales of 500 billion won (around $422 million) by 2023. However, currently the platform still has not reached this goal. Wavve started its services in September 2019 offering three streaming plans, Basic, Standard, and Premium, costing from $6.65 to $11.70 per month. These prices are competitive against Netflix’s, which varies between $8 and $12.20, proving more affordable. In the first months, the South Korean platform maintained a lead over its competitor, as expected with the inheritance of subscribers from POOQ and Oksusu. Wavve’s monthly active subscribers stayed ahead of Netflix. The success, however, was undermined at first by the little diversity of content in the catalogue, difficulty in accessing cable channels through the platform, and instability in the service’s video quality. The number of monthly active users of Wavve decreased by the end of 2019, while that of Netflix skyrocketed, consolidating its place at the top. In February 2021, Netflix recorded 10 million monthly users in Korea, while the domestic platforms Wavve and TVING were behind, with 3.95 million and 2.65 million, respectively (Lim 2021b). In December 2019, Netflix overtook Wavve, becoming South Korea’s most popular platform. As of August 2020, Netflix had a market share of 40%, followed by Wavve with 21% (Park 2021). In 2018, 22% of Koreans used local OTT services while 12% used foreign services. Presently, 32% use foreign OTT services, while 23% use domestic services (Lim 2021a). Netflix’s recent success in this market fuelled the local streaming war, with Wavve investing even more in original content, especially targeting Hallyu fans, for instance, the first reality show of the K-pop group SuperM, entitled M-topia. The reality is a platform partnership with the oldest and largest K-pop company, SM Entertainment. SuperM is a group with a global expansion strategy since it is the result of a partnership with Capitol Records, a prestigious label from the United States. The group is also formed by big names of successful SM groups, who participate in the project in parallel with their group’s originals. K-pop idols from the groups Shinee, EXO, WayV, and NCT are part of the special group, which

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debuted with their first album on the top of the Billboard 200 list, becoming the second K-pop group in history to lead this chart in the United States. The availability of attractive content in Hallyu’s local, regional, and global market could be an essential weapon for Wavve’s real growth since Netflix is not yet completely familiarised with the phenomenon’s particularities. Otherwise, the fact that Wavve is primarily investing in the domestic market and in partnerships with foreign streamers to sell licensing rights is a strategic move considering the existing potential for South Korean cultural productions. This platform would maintain profits locally in the native market, which is a general attraction for Hallyu’s industry. Wavve’s plan is to produce “two-thirds of Korean content with commercial appeal sufficient to travel abroad” (Doyle 2019), while trying to assess and challenge the overwhelming strength of foreign streaming companies in the country. Although Netflix is strong, local platforms should not be overlooked.

Conclusion The Hallyu phenomenon is still globally expanding and remains tied to a niche consumption of users who access cultural products via the internet. South Korea is managing to export a lifestyle, an updated identity of what it means to be South Korean, through the various cultural aspects that make up the Korean Wave. The presence of K-dramas on Western channels and streaming platforms is expanding the transnational potential of South Korean television, which, despite its idiomatic and cultural limitations, is slowly gaining space in Western daily life and becoming a part of global flows of television (most recently the Squid Game phenomenon of late-2021). Researchers interested in analysing Netflix’s arrival and consolidation in the South Korean market must be prudent. The streaming company is an opportunity and a threat to the country. Because of this, Korea is hostile and cautious in the local market but sees Netflix and other foreign streaming platforms as an essential way to continue expanding Hallyu to markets beyond Asia. In view of the Platform Imperialism carried out by the United States through these companies, the South Korean entertainment industry tries to fight back and survive even with the foreign advances within its territory. Yet, to conquer more space on the international stage, the country is betting on its own foreign platforms. Currently, besides Wavve, the South Korean OTT market includes other local players, such

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as Watcha Play, TVING and Kakao TV. The Wavve case study presented in this chapter stands out because it reveals the efforts of an eastern and peripheral country dealing with the strong advances of Western and central platforms in their country. Although Wavve is in its early stages, the platform already shows us how the streaming battlefield in Korea is quickly heating up, pointing to updated strategies to survive new kinds of imperialism. Thus, South Korea is emerging more and more in global television flows and proves to be an important and complex agent of the rising global periphery.

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Sung, Sang-Yeon. 2014. “K-pop Reception and Participatory Fan Culture in Austria.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 3: 56–71. https://doi.org/10.1353/ach.2014.0011. Tai, Crystal. 2020. “Korean K-dramas and Hallyu Films Are #Alive and Well, But Bollywood Hits Rock Bellbottom Amid Coronavirus Slump.” South China Morning Post, August 5, 2020. https://www.scmp.com/week-­asia/lifestyle-­ culture/article/3096022/korean-­k-­dramas-­and-­hallyu-­films-­are-­alive-­and-­ well?utm_content=article&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echo box=1596590454. Accessed 18 February 2021. Tse, Yu-Kei. 2020. “Black Ships? Locating Netflix in Taiwan and Japan.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59: 143–148. https://doi.org/10.1353/ cj.2020.0036. Wee, C.J. Wan-Ling. 2016. “East Asian Pop Culture and the Trajectory of Asian Consumption.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17: 305–315. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14649373.2016.1184428. Yang, Sung-jin. 2020. “Netflix Faces Major Regulatory Setback In South Korea: Korea Herald Writer.” The Straits Times, May 29. https://www.straitstimes. com/asia/netflix-­faces-­major-­regulatory-­setback-­in-­south-­korea-­korea-­herald-­ writer. Accessed 18 February 2021. Yeo, Jun-suk. 2019. “S. Korea Online Video Services Face Uphill Battle Against Netflix.” The Korean Herald, August 29. http://www.koreaherald.com/view. php?ud=20190829000733. Accessed 18 February 2021. Yonhap. 2020a. “Blue Chips Rush Into Netflix-Led S. Korean Streaming Service Market.” Yonhap News Agency, November 13. http://m.koreaherald.com/ amp/view.php?ud=20201113000466. Accessed 19 February 2021. ———. 2020b. “Exports of Korean Culture Products Soar 22.4 Pct Last Year.” Yonhap News Agency, April 14. https://en.yna.co.kr/view/ AEN20200414009800315. Accessed 19 February 2021. ———. 2020c. “Korea to Tighten Grip on Global Internet Giants Amid Service Complaints.” Yonhap News Agency, December 5. http://www.koreaherald. com/view.php?ud=20201205000066. Accessed 19 February 2021. ———. 2021. “Number of Global ‘Hallyu’ Fans Crosses 100 Million Landmark.” Yonhap News Agency, January 15. https://en.yna.co.kr/view/ AEN20210115003700315. Accessed 19 February 2021. Zhao, Shirley and Lucas Shaw. 2022. “Netflix needs new subscribers. Its Korean playbook is its secret weapon.” Business Standard, January 14. https://www. business-­standard.com/article/international/netflix-­needs-­new-­subscribers-­ its-­korean-­playbook-­is-­its-­secret-­weapon-­122011400283_1.html.

Reconfiguring the K-Drama Business Model: The Co-production of Mr. Sunshine by Netflix and Studio Dragon Hyun-jung Stephany Noh

In June 2018, Netflix acquired Mr. Sunshine (2018), the tentpole television drama series of the Korean production house Studio Dragon, for an estimated deal of $27 million,1 thereby covering 70% of the initial production costs (Y.  Kim 2018b). After the announcement of Netflix’s investment, Studio Dragon’s stock price increased 40%, from 80,000 won ($70) in May to 115,000 won ($100) in June (Cho 2018). The coproduction investment price range was unprecedented, helping the producer and writer to realise their creative vision with high production values. Previously, the bulk of the investment in such productions derived from the licensing fees paid by the domestic channels, with the latter being the sole beneficiaries of the advertising income. As a result of this 1

 All financial figures in this chapter are in US dollars (USD) unless otherwise specified.

H.-j. S. Noh (*) University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_4

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arrangement, production costs remained stagnant. Netflix’s co-production of Mr. Sunshine increased the series’ visibility worldwide and marked a shift in the source of funding for production houses from advertiserbased local channels to subscription-based streaming services—in this case an international one. In other words, Netflix’s acquisition of Korean productions helped diminish the subordination of production houses by decreasing their dependence on local channels. My analysis of the financial operations behind Mr. Sunshine reveals the complicated relationships among the key stakeholders. The aggressive expansion of international streaming services such as Netflix across national borders has been changing local television ecosystems worldwide with respect to production, distribution, and audience. The global media industry scholarship has researched this phenomenon, with considerable recent interest in Netflix’s distribution practices as it penetrates new regional markets. The present study contributes to this literature a case study from South Korea (hereafter simply “Korea”), which is the largest exporter of television programming in East Asia. After entering the Korean market in 2016, Netflix introduced new forms of collaboration with existing media companies. My concern here is especially with the immense scale of investment in Korean productions developed as so-­ called Netflix Originals. I have selected Mr. Sunshine (2018) as a key case study of the changes brought about by Netflix in Korean production practices that have allowed Korean production houses to exceed conventional industry standards. Specifically, I explain how Netflix’s direct investment has been changing the conventional business model for Korean production companies by considering its role in bringing to the market Mr. Sunshine in collaboration with the Korean production house Studio Dragon. My approach involves aggregating publicly available financial data for internationally renowned K-dramas in order to track the changes in the business models for production studios leading up to the partnering of Studio Dragon with Netflix. This analysis reveals a stark contrast between the new model and the conventional business practices of independent Korean production studios in terms of their growth in scale and sales. I argue that Netflix’s direct investment in local production studios has gradually subverted the power relations between legacy television (broadcast television) and production studios, thereby changing the status of production companies within the Korean media structure. The goal of this chapter is to shed light on the business practices that Netflix has

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introduced and the cultural implications of the US company’s influence on the Korean mediascape. It is also important to note the uniqueness of Studio Dragon’s corporate structure as Netflix’s production partner. A subsidiary of one of Korea’s chaebols,2 Studio Dragon was more open to international investment than the production companies affiliated with the legacy network channels. Initially the television drama branch of CJ Entertainment and Media (CJ ENM),3 Studio Dragon was established in 2016 as a spin-off by bringing together several independent production houses with established television drama writers under contract. As a result, Studio Dragon was better positioned than any of its competitors to produce popular Korean television content. The value of well-made regional content was reflected in Netflix’s willingness to invest four times the industry standard for a comparable series in the production of Mr. Sunshine. Netflix’s strategy of aggregating Korean TV drama originals, then, was compatible with Studio Dragon’s goal of emerging as a content powerhouse for television dramas. Netflix’s decision to finance Mr. Sunshine was based in large part on the past success of writer Kim Eun-suk and director Lee Eung-bok, who had already created such cinematic-quality television blockbusters as Descendants of the Sun (2016) and Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (2016). Kim and Lee had difficulty in finding a domestic channel willing to make the investment necessary to realise the epic scale of Mr. Sunshine, which combined melodrama, period drama, and action, and featured a star cast, director, and writer well known from other Hallyu productions. The period drama, set in the early 1900s, tells the story of Eugene Choi [Lee Byung-hun], a Korean American military officer, and Go Ae-shin [Kim Tae-ri], an aristocrat’s daughter who secretly fights for Korea’s independence by night. Their love is hindered by differences in class and nationality (a common theme in Kim’s storytelling) amid Korea’s struggle against Japanese imperialism. Studio Dragon’s line-up of successful writers and Netflix’s reputation for strong storytelling made the two companies a good fit and facilitated the rapid growth of both in Korea. My analysis of Netflix’s acquisition of Mr. Sunshine accounts for the influence of the deal on Studio Dragon’s growth within the context of a general trend among  Large family-owned industrial conglomerates in South Korea.  Korea’s largest conglomerate entertainment company, with business in cable, music, advertising, digital platforms, and film, CJ ENM owns a 91% of share of Studio Dragon (Cho 2018). 2 3

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production companies of restructuring so as to emphasise creative talent behind the camera rather than Hallyu stars.

The Media Economics of Netflix’s Investment in Global Media Industries The framework of media industry studies can bridge the perspectives of political economy and cultural studies in efforts to understand media industries (Holt and Perren 2009). This combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches makes it possible to arrive at a comprehensive account of the development of media industries. The interdisciplinary nature of media industry studies also facilitates the assessment of the power relations that construct the media industry in its current form. While this is a media economics study—as I explain further momentarily—I first want to make clear that I take a micro-level approach to political economy. This theoretical framework may appear contradictory at first, but my intention is to highlight that though media industry studies covers a wide array of topics, the present research goes beyond either a critical political economy approach or a humanistic cultural approach. Thus, on the one hand, I have drawn on political economy in taking an economic-deterministic view of the effect of capital, conglomeration, and ownership when performing the analysis. In this respect, my approach is informed by Arjun Appadurai’s (1990) notion of the financescape, which describes global capital flow and is also useful for understanding global media flow, and, more specifically, by the work of Dal Yong Jin (2017) on macro-level media phenomena associated with the Korean media industry on a national level. On the other hand, however, neither a macro-level view of the overall economy or regulatory policies that shape the national media structure nor a critical political economic view is appropriate for evaluating this structure. Thus, I consider Mr. Sunshine at the micro-level, as an individual case study, and touch on the agency of production houses in a manner closer to cultural studies but without analysing either the text or audience of the series. Thus, this study is closest to media economics, a lesser-known branch of media industry studies (Napoli 2009). The economic analysis provides a basis for understanding the practical flow of media based on economic reasoning. Philip Napoli (2009) called for the study of the main incentives for economic entities to operate. For example, economic incentives can

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explain the reasoning behind the making of deals to produce more of certain types of programming that have proved successful. Media industries are a special type of dual economic entity, selling to both audiences and advertisers at the same time (163). With the advent of direct-to-consumer subscription television in the internet streaming environment, the market structure of media organisations has been undergoing considerable change. Among the many aspects of media economics, neoclassical microeconomics is most suitable for the purposes of this study (Cunningham et al. 2015). Neoclassical economics focuses on supply and demand under the assumption that “individuals engage in rational behaviour in order to maximise benefits” to both producers and consumers through engagement in free-market transactions (13). Within this context, microeconomics is the study of individual markets, whereas macroeconomics concerns the engagement of national economies in global trade. I selected neoclassical microeconomics as my methodological approach here because of my use of concrete public data to explain key stakeholders’ rational choices and the optimal price point in the production financing of Mr. Sunshine. With the advent of Netflix, the internet-distributed television (IDTV) market grew rapidly in the latter half of the 2010s. The company has taken the lead in setting and disrupting many industry standards and, therefore, has been a contentious subject among media industry scholars. As a global operation, the company has naturally attracted the interest of global media researchers. In “Internet Distributed Television Research: A Provocation,” Amanda Lotz et al. (2018) called for a reexamination of the theories, business models, and industry associated with the media industry landscape and the transformations that it has undergone. Accordingly, scholars have recently revisited such issues as regional marketing strategies, branding, censorship, “the transnational,” and policies and regulations in cross-­ national comparative studies (Havens 2018; Khalil and Zayani 2020; Lobato 2019; Turner 2018; Wayne and Castro 2020). The present case study contributes to this literature by situating the discussion of these issues in a neoclassical microeconomic framework. The analysis involved tracking the evolving production budget structure of Hallyu-scale4 Korean series (K-dramas) before and after Netflix’s entry into the Korean market. The publicly available data for the 4  By “Hallyu-scale,” I refer to large-scale Korean TV series produced with international audiences in mind, meaning that a substantial portion of the production costs is covered by international sales or co-productions.

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production budgets and profits of pioneering K-dramas, such as Winter Sonata (2002), Jewel in the Palace (2003), The Legend (2007), Iris (2009), My Love from a Star (2013) and Descendants of the Sun (2016), reveal Netflix’s distinct role in the budget structure of Mr. Sunshine. By my interpretation, international capital input was inevitable, in the form of either licensing or co-production, because the limited domestic ad-supported market was insufficient for the series’ production budget. My analysis charts the gradual shift from post-production sales to co-productions in which investment begins in the pre-production, development stage. I found that this arrangement has proved beneficial to the stability of the local production companies, freeing them from bearing the risk of failure to recoup production costs in a highly unpredictable international market characterised by licensing fees and derivatives. The stability and viability of Hallyu-scale production houses are clearly important for the continuing production of K-dramas. In assessing this relationship, rather than critiquing the neoliberal ideology of the capital-­ based influence of large corporations, I focus on the ways in which Korean production companies gained sufficient agency and leverage within the national media industry to emerge from their long-subordinate position under the hegemony of the country’s legacy television channels. This case study thus describes the operation of the global media industry within the context of free-market capitalism. The microeconomic perspective at the regional industry level, I demonstrate, can help to reveal the operation of the overarching political economy of macro-scale global capitalism.

Korean Production Companies’ Relationship with Legacy Television Celebrated as the “miracle on the Han River,” the Korean economy has boomed over the past half-century, with the Korean media industry becoming especially visible with the global popularity of Hallyu in the 1990s. Korean production companies, however, grew less rapidly than the country’s media industry overall, being dependent on various government quota programmes. Under these programmes—which resembled the

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Financial Interest and Syndication Rule in the United States5—television networks commissioned the independent production companies and were responsible for their sustainability within a given market segment (Yoon 2005). They were obligated to acquire the independent production houses’ content, which accounted for 2% of their programming in 1991 and increased steadily to 40% by 2015. During this period, the legacy television channels were the main decision-makers in terms of greenlighting shows and covered most of the production budgets. Naturally, they exerted considerable control over the production companies, limiting their individual agency regardless of the quota policy (G. Kim 2015, 4). The financial conditions of the production companies improved slowly, largely owing to the legacy channels’ practice of paying a commission determined by advertisement sales. This dual-product business model of legacy television selling to advertisers based on potential audience ratings meant that the production houses were not compensated for the actual cost of producing a particular show but had to conform to the limitations imposed by the set production fee depending on the programming time slot. Despite the increase in the range of domestic media outlets for television dramas—which includes network television, cable television, satellite television, and must-carry general channels6—the advertising sales that supported television drama production costs were saturated and thinly distributed across the expanding media marketplace, defined by the limit on the advertising income allocated for a given time slot. The international licensing and co-productions that allowed ambitious producers to realise large-scale dramas in particular helped to remove this limitation. The Hallyu-scale K-drama productions, then, overcame the legacy channels’ investment caps by attracting international sales. Thus, large-­ scale productions came to be greenlit with international sales in mind (Yoon 2005, 33). Japan and China were the main buyers of these 5  The implementation of rules by the US Federal Communications Commission in 1970 prohibiting financial interest in television programs beyond their first run and the creation of in-house syndication arms, especially in the domestic market, limited the amount of prime-time programming that networks could produce themselves. The aim was to increase programming diversity and limit the market control of the three broadcast television networks; see http://people.stern.nyu.edu/wgreene/entertainmentandmedia/FIN-SYN-RULES.pdf. 6  The general “must carry” channels on pay television were launched in December 2011 as part of the broadcasting deregulation effort to allow news companies to own television channels. The four channels granted licensing were JTBC, Channel A, MBN, and TV Chosun.

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productions through the 1990s and early 2000s, and, though international sales increased gradually, the performance of K-dramas remained difficult to predict. The production companies were thus placed in the precarious position of having to start work on large-scale productions without an international investor already in place, for the international licensors demanded at least a finished pilot and ratings track record in Korea before deciding to license a series. International funding for coproductions before work started on a show was sporadic and heavily contingent on the star power of the onscreen talent. Despite these developments, the 2017 Industry White Paper showed the operational structure of independent production houses to be little improved. From 2014 to 2016, the workforce of broadcast networks and pay-TV channels consisted of less than 10% contract workers, while the figure for the production companies was more than 50%, with a combined workforce of only half the size. The large proportion of contingent employees speaks to the unstable position of the production companies in relation to the networks. With their small-scale operations, independent production companies carried the burden of risk inherent in creative productions. While foreign investment has continued to be an important source of funding for the production of Hallyu-scale K-dramas, contributions from Japan and China have remained contingent upon both Hallyu star power, as just noted, and sensitive political relations.7 Netflix stepped in as a lucrative substitute for many deals that did not come to fruition with either Chinese or Japanese investment. Rather than contracting on a nation-by-­ nation basis, Netflix has operated on a global scale, marketing to all nations with the objective of reaching as many global subscribers as possible. Because it was already established globally, Hallyu was an attractive media production context for Netflix, which distributed K-drama in accordance with its various levels of platform penetration in each country. Simply put, Netflix’s entry into the market has led Korean production companies to adopt new business practices. In the neoliberal economy, national borders have weakened, and the culture industry has become defined by capital, rendering the production system transnational and deterritorialized (Yoon 2005, 27). Internet-­distributed television especially navigates the global market environment as if it were 7  E.g., the 2016 ban on Korean cultural products in China and “Hyum (Hate) Hallyu” in Japan.

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unified, again, irrespective of national boundaries. Direct foreign investment in domestic production companies broadened the market and gave production houses more influence over what they produce (Lee and Song 2018, 13). Netflix has demonstrated a different way of doing business in Korea, entering a rigid system and triggering expansion with programming such as Mr. Sunshine. This case study thus offers a micro-­level view of the economic operations behind Netflix’s expansion. Examples from other countries as well as Korea show that Netflix’s strategy is not a one-time capital injection but part of a trend in collaboration in local markets. The financial operations reflect, in turn, the change in the status of Korean production companies within the country’s media industry.

The Compatible Storytelling Business of Netflix and Studio Dragon Netflix had a strong motivation to build a high-premium local content library for local subscriptions (Lobato 2019). Korea is a major television production centre in East Asia and indeed worldwide, surpassed as an exporter of content only by the United States and UK (Cho 2018). In an online survey by the KOCCA of Korean drama fans conducted in November 2014, 53% of the respondents reported watching K-dramas for “good storytelling,” and 34% for their “favourite actor” (Kwon and Lee 2015, 14). Mr. Sunshine, with its star-auteur creators and cast including Lee Byung-hun, became the most anticipated show of the year. Industry discourse shows that star-level auteurs were a big impetus behind Netflix’s strong support for Mr. Sunshine. In fact, “powerful storytelling” is often used to describe the international success of K-dramas. At Netflix’s marketing event See What’s Next Asia, Ted Sarandos, the company’s CEO  and CCO (Chief Content Officer), stated that Korea “had a good infrastructure and [is] a country with powerful storytelling” (S. Kim 2018a). Rob Roy, Netflix VP of content acquisition, has stated that the writer-producer duo of Kim and Lee were the main motivation for acquiring Mr. Sunshine: “We have seen so much passion for top quality Korean stories, and the pedigree of a title like Mr. Sunshine is a significant step forward in building a strong Korean content library for our members around the world” (Frater 2018). By “pedigree,” Roy was referring to the established reputations of Kim and Lee thanks to their smash hits Descendants of the Sun and Guardian: The Great

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and Lonely God. Kim’s record of success goes back to 2004, with Lovers in Paris, and she has written twelve hit television series since. Although initially critiqued for her fairy-tale plotlines, her stories hooked audiences early on, with strong ratings doubling or tripling towards the finale.8 Kim has diversified her writing style over the years, attracting both Korean and international fans. Thus, her contract with Studio Dragon at the time proved to be crucial for Netflix’s investment in Mr. Sunshine at $100,000 per episode (Kim and Kim 2018, 318). Studio Dragon had acquired her initial agent, Hwa and Dam Pictures. When Studio Dragon split off from its mother company CJ ENM, its budget was $9 million, and its focus was on producing television dramas, licensing, OTT, and DVD sales (IFRS).9 CJ ENM gave Studio Dragon the means to conglomerate and was quite flexible, allowing its subsidiary to choose its partnerships. Studio Dragon industriously pursued smaller independent companies with creative talent, including Hwa and Dam Pictures and Culture Depot, each respectively contracted with popular romantic comedy writers Kim Eun-sook and Park Ji-eun. The combined smaller production houses brought various strengths in writing, production, and management, including the top creators in television production. Thus, Studio Dragon created an economy of scope, producing large-scale programming for the global market (Cho 2018). Studio Dragon acquired Culture Depot ($30 million) and KPJ ($13 million) in addition to Hwa and Dam ($26 million), and, in 2019, GTist, with top melodrama writer Noh Hee-kyung ($22 million; Park 2019). As a result of this conglomeration, Studio Dragon had Kim under contract through her association with Hwa and Dam. Therefore, Netflix gained access to Kim’s scripted series by contracting with Studio Dragon. The concentration of top-rank talent helped Studio Dragon to reach annual earnings of $128 million (IFRS), 60 times the average sales of independent production companies ($2 million) and 10% of the total size of Korea’s production houses in 2016 (White Paper 2017). In 2017, Studio Dragon’s sales amounted to $239 million, nearly double its first-­ year figures. In only two years, the company’s asset value multiplied 8  The Nielsen data for Mr. Sunshine (tvN, 2018) are: pilot 8.9%, finale 18.1%; for Guardian: The Lonely and Great God (tvN, 2016~2017): pilot 6.3%, finale 20.5%; for Descendants of the Sun (KBS, 2016): pilot 14.3%, finale 38.8%. 9  International Financial Reporting Standards, which include published accounting data for IPOs.

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300-­fold, reaching around $260 million in June 2018 (Cho 2018, 1), $328 million by the end of the year, and $415 million in 2019 (Lee 2020). Studio Dragon was already well on its way to becoming a mega-­ production company when Netflix’s capital input significantly increased its overseas sales. Specifically, international sales of K-dramas accounted for one-third of Studio Dragon’s sales of $86 million in 2018, nearly half of which ($42 million) were Netflix purchases (Lee 2019). Netflix invested $27 million in Mr. Sunshine, which represented 30% of Studio Dragon’s overseas sales, 64% of Netflix’s total acquisitions from Studio Dragon, and 70% of the series’ total production costs, all unprecedented circumstances for a K-drama. Netflix’s presales solidly secured the record-breaking production budget early on, significantly reducing Studio Dragon’s risks. Netflix has continued to supply stable financing for large-scale Korean productions and the companies that produce them. Studio Dragon’s corporate structure of conglomerated talent agencies and production studios with top creative writers was, then, an important consideration in Netflix’s decision to invest. Netflix provided local production companies an alternative partnership that offered them the freedom to concentrate on storytelling and benefited, in turn, from the premium content. As a result, in producing Mr. Sunshine, Studio Dragon was neither financially nor creatively subordinate to the local channels because Netflix served as its symbiotic partner.

The Netflix Factor in the Development of the Production Business Model for K-Drama Studio Dragon initially pitched Mr. Sunshine to the national network SBS, which was not able to meet the series’ first-run price offer (Cho 2018). The conventional licensing price range of legacy channels was simply insufficient to cover the high production costs without factoring in a foreign investor from the start. In the following discussion, I lay out Netflix’s role as an international distributor, unpack its financing of Mr. Sunshine, and consider its position in the overall scheme of K-drama production. Foreign capital input in the form of licensing K-drama TV series was a major force behind the development of Hallyu-scale K-dramas. When most of the regular revenue stream from China, including from the streaming service iQiyi, came to a halt in 2016 during a ban on Korean

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cultural products,10 Netflix filled the gap as a steady investor in the production of K-dramas, picking up such shows as Man to Man (2017), which was initially in talks to be co-produced with the Chinese market for international sales. Netflix both financed substantial portions of the production costs of K-dramas and distributed them worldwide, considerably increasing their exposure. The cost of an episode of a Korean television series in 2017 averaged around $450,000 (White Paper 2017). Thus, for a 24-episode season, production costs would total around $10 million, of which the first-run channel would supply 60% of the overall costs (around $6 million in this instance). The remainder would generally be recouped from domestic second-window licensing and international sales (30%), as well as through sponsorship, PPL, DVD, or OST sales (10%). A programme’s success, indicated by high ratings, brought the domestic first-run channel advertising revenue, but the production house had to recoup its costs through the long-tail market, such as second-window, VOD, international, and DVD sales. Therefore, early international investment was an important step to produce well-made K-dramas. Here, I follow the publicly available foreign capital input data for prominent K-drama productions that led the Korean Wave in the 2000s to detail this process. Since the popularity of What Is Love All About (1991) in China in the late 1990s, Korea has endeavoured to expand the Hallyu phenomenon. In the early 2000s, when first-air broadcast networks largely controlled the production and distribution of K-dramas, the Hallyu factor was evident mainly in the strong derivative market, such as international licensing, merchandise, and DVD sales, as was the case with Winter Sonata (2002) and Jewel in the Palace (2003). The production of Winter Sonata cost $2.7 million, and the broadcasters raised $6.8 million from advertising sales, while the derivative market generated gross sales of $27 million shared mainly between KBS and Pan Entertainment, the production company (Kwon 2015). The derivative sales from Japan benefited Pan Entertainment considerably after the series became a smash hit on NHK in 2003 and 2004. The production, distribution, and derivative sales of Jewel in the Palace were even more controlled by the broadcaster since MBC produced and marketed the series in-house. The cost of $6.3 10  The ban was intended to retaliate against Korea for deploying the US THAAD missile system as a defense against North Korea, which China interpreted as a threat, in July 2016 (한한령, 限韓令).

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million to produce the 54 episodes was recouped through advertising sales of $22 million, $11 million in international sales, $1.3 million in internet/ mobile sales, $2.7 million from merchandising, $2.5 million from theme-­ park licensing, and so on, for a total of $41.2 million (H.  Kim 2011). Costing around $100,000 per episode, both series yielded considerable advertising income for the first broadcaster, and the long-tail derivative-­ market sales benefited the producing entity. As expectations regarding the international market for K-drama grew, production companies tried to replicate the success of Winter Sonata and Jewel in the Palace on a larger scale by contracting international licensing during the development phase. Most pre-production buyers were Japanese and focused on the popularity of the stars in Asia (Yoon 2005). Thus, casting previously successful K-drama Hallyu stars was intended to attract Japanese investment before production began. The Legend (2007), starring Bae Yong-joon,11 the male lead from Winter Sonata, cost $36.9 million to produce, roughly $1.5 million for each of its 24 episodes. The production house, Kim Jong-hak Production, predicted the series’ success in Japan thanks to the casting of Bae. Despite the ten-fold increase in production costs compared with Winter Sonata and Jewel in the Palace ($135,000 and $116,000 per episode, respectively), the first-run channel MBC invested a mere $150,000 per episode in The Legend. The remainder was to be recouped by the production house’s derivative sales, but Kim Jong-hak Production only took in $4.9 million from licensing to Japan, and other derivative sales added up to only half of the total production costs, leaving the company $18.6 million in debt (Kim and Kim 2013). Two years later, a seemingly more realistic budget was planned for Iris (2009), starring Lee Byung-hun, another actor popular in Japan. Of Taewon Entertainment’s $18 million production cost, KBS2 licensed the first run for $2.8 million (16% of the total), and Japanese presales secured $5.4 million (30%; Cho 2017). While the main broadcaster KBS2 raised $12.5 million from Iris through advertising sales, Taewon Entertainment could not break even owing to the lack of derivative sales (H. Kim 2011). Thus, production houses were risking their viability to increase the scale of K-dramas by betting on the highly volatile derivative market. Meanwhile, the Korean broadcasting networks played it safe by increasing the licensing fee only slightly and enjoyed additional profits from increased 11  Bae Yong-joon’s role in Winter Sonata made him immensely popular in Japan and one of the first Hallyu stars.

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prime-time advertising made possible by the high production values. The international popularity and success of these series simply did not translate into sufficient returns for the production houses. The unpredictability decreased with the advent of international internet-distributed television’s co-productions of K-dramas in the 2010s. The pre-acquisition or co-production deals for global, internet-­ distributed television solidified the production budgets for larger-scale series and, in turn, allowed the international internet streaming sites to set first-air dates with a week or less holdback period. In the early 2010s, China’s internet-distributed television provider iQiyi (2010) emerged as an additional revenue source,12 licensing internet streaming rights for that country. As a substitute revenue stream, this licensing made up for the formerly strong Japanese derivative market. At first, Korean production houses considered Chinese internet-distribution platforms a modest additional revenue source. iQiyi licensed My Love from a Star (2013, 22 episodes) from HB Entertainment at $747,000, or $35,000 per episode, and then earned over $88.9 million in profit from advertising sales and subscription fees (Ha 2016). After learning that international streaming service licensing could be priced much higher, the production house NEW licensed Descendants of the Sun (2016, 16 episodes) to iQiyi’s internet-­ distribution rights for seven times the price of My Love from a Star, at $266,000 per episode, $4.3 million total, and also added a “running guarantee” based on viewership.13 iQiyi is estimated to have profited $30 million from the advertising sales and subscription fees for Descendants of the Sun (Ha 2016, 108). The production costs for the latter, $11.8 million, were recouped through domestic first-run licensing to the national network KBS for $3.6 million (31% of the total), $1.8 million in international sales to Japan (15%), and again, sales to iQiyi, this time for $4.3 million (37%; Yoon 2016). The running guarantee is estimated to have added $8 million to NEW’s net profits (Kim and Kim 2018, 109). NEW’s success in securing substantial licensing fees from both conventional channels and

12  Youku Tudou (Alibaba), iQiyi (of which Baidu owns 17%), and Tencent account for 70% of China’s OTT market (Yeolil 2018). 13  An incentive payment that, usually, gives actors a percentage of ticket sales after a film breaks even; in this case, the additional licence fee paid to NEW depended on the viewership numbers on iQiyi.

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newer distributors strengthened its budget structure.14 International licensing was starting to surpass the revenue from first runs on the once-­ dominant domestic legacy television, and this trend resulted in the restructuring of the production revenue model to the benefit of the production houses. As mentioned, when China ceased acquiring Korean cultural products in 2016, Netflix stepped in as the international co-producer for K-drama. The $39 million production costs of Mr. Sunshine were quadruple those of an average K-drama and exceeded those of The Legend ten years earlier. Netflix covered the bulk of these costs, which included the casting of star Lee Byung-hun and enlisting the creative duo of Kim and Lee, in a deal estimated at $27 million, accounting for 70% of the initial production costs. CJ ENM’s cable channel tvN paid $20 million (51% of the $39 million) for domestic-channel first-run rights, while domestic VOD sales brought in $2.7 million (7%) and PPL or sponsorship sales $1.8 million (5%; Y.  Kim 2018b). With the advent of investment from international internet-distributed television, the production companies’ profit margins have changed dramatically, with Netflix’s acquisition of Mr. Sunshine in particular setting a new standard for the production scale and revenue expectations of K-dramas. Under these circumstances, the production companies took the greatest risks in the effort to increase the production values of K-drama, while the domestic network with first-air rights risked comparatively little but benefited from local advertising sales. International sales remained unstable as production companies searched for better licensing deals through the internet streaming services of various countries. The main international sales that supported K-drama production shifted from Japanese derivative sales and network licensing in the late 2000s to licensing or co-production with Chinese internet streaming services beginning in the early 2010s and, recently, co-production with US Netflix (e.g. Man to Man, Argon [2017], Prison Playbook [2017], Stranger [2017–2020]). Netflix’s investment in Mr. Sunshine made that production possible and freed the production company from dependence on any one legacy channel. The production companies have been gaining agency to push for

14  NEW and KGCS (a KBS affiliate) joined forces to found Special Purpose Company (SPC) Descendants of the Sun Culture Business Company (태양의 후예 문화 산업 전문 회 사) and split the profits 60 (NEW)/40 (KGCS) (Ha 2016).

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better deals with internet-distributed television services and starting to make substantial profits as a result.

Conclusion This chapter presents an overview of the development of Hallyu-scale K-dramas, focusing on the influence of international capital, from the perspective of neoclassical microeconomics. The process culminated in Mr. Sunshine and the reconfiguration of the production’s budget structure by Netflix. Various industry factors underlying the development of Hallyu intersected in Netflix’s intervention in the production of Mr. Sunshine. The conglomeration of Studio Dragon, its flexibility to partner with Netflix, and Netflix’s incorporation of Hallyu-scale K-drama into its line­up shared the overarching goals of great storytelling and profitability in the production of Mr. Sunshine. And Mr. Sunshine was, indeed, profitable, bringing in a total of $51.5 million (133% of the $39 million) for Studio Dragon within its first-run period. Production houses have secured various forms of international capital with which to improve the production values of K-dramas and, thereby, expand their international market. Studio Dragon brought in K-drama’s best storytellers and Netflix as a collaborator early on to create the tentpole television series that marked 2018 as the year in which the US company emerged as a premier carrier of Hallyu-­ scale K-drama. While Netflix had previously acquired K-dramas as “Netflix Originals,” its co-production of Mr. Sunshine stood out for the prestige of the series’ creators and the scale of the US company’s investment. The sudden increase in the stock price of Studio Dragon after the announcement of its deal with Netflix for Mr. Sunshine indicates that the latter’s selection of the series also contributed to its prestige as well as its success. With Mr. Sunshine, the international actor Netflix and the domestic powerhouse Studio Dragon collaborated to cater to the established Hallyu audience and attract new viewers. From another perspective, Netflix provided an additional distribution channel outside the conventional channels in Asia (Hong 2020) to make Mr. Sunshine widely available around the world. I have used microeconomics as a framework for understanding the changes that Mr. Sunshine represents in terms of budget structure for production houses. I also detailed Studio Dragon’s acquisition of creative labour, which made it an attractive partner for Netflix. These changes brought about a gradual shift in the focus of production decisions from

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Hallyu stars to the talent behind the camera, in particular writers and directors. Of course, I could only trace the outlines of this shift within the scope of this chapter, so I have left relatively unexplored such significant issues as Netflix’s targeting of established production companies while startup independent companies with little in the way of a track record continue to find foreign investment far out of reach. After years of unsuccessful efforts by the Korean government to support outsourced production houses, Studio Dragon surprised industry researchers with the scale and speed of its growth (Cho 2018). And while the private sector has, in the manner described, given production houses greater agency, this agency was achieved through conglomeration and involved an affiliate of an already monopolistic media company. The seismic shift in the budget structure of K-drama has, thus, remained centred on efforts by that company, CJ ENM, to consolidate its domination of the Korean market. Netflix has further cemented Studio Dragon’s dominance in its role as the main foreign investor. Production houses unaffiliated with CJ ENM or Netflix, by contrast, may continue to struggle within the constraints of the conventional business model. A sensitive balance needs to be maintained, with markets sufficiently deregulated to allow the conglomeration of production companies and their growth into large corporations but sufficiently regulated to give smaller companies a fair opportunity to compete for viewers. Amid the complexity of the industry factors influencing the forces behind the production of K-drama, the joint venture between the international distributor Netflix and the domestic Korean production company Studio Dragon to create and distribute Mr. Sunshine serves as a telling case study. As I write in March 2021, Netflix’s ongoing investment in large-­ scale productions is steadily injecting foreign capital into Korean production houses, enhancing the production values of Korean content, enlarging the production market pie, and stabilising the business structure of the entertainment industry. Netflix has, in the process, made itself a major player in Korea’s production mediascape, and, across the globe, has demonstrated a similar pattern of direct investment in local production houses. This study provides empirical evidence of Netflix’s current position as an international investor in the development of K-drama. By aligning its efforts with the motivation to produce great storytelling that has driven Hallyu, the company has allowed the producers of Korean television drama to focus on the top creative talent. Netflix’s investment has increased the capacity of the producers of K-drama to create and distribute widely

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more premium, cinematic-scale series. The continuous influx of Netflix’s capital has thus stabilised the business model for Korean production companies, leaving them less dependent on legacy channels. There is no doubt that both Studio Dragon and Netflix benefited from their collaboration on Mr. Sunshine and fulfilled their respective goals. Studio Dragon’s unique organisation within Korea, based on bringing together top writers and production houses, flourished with Netflix’s investment in Mr. Sunshine. I do not mean that Netflix’s impact is entirely one-way, for my analysis indicates that the original creators were the real power behind the partnership between Netflix and Studio Dragon. The script, production, and distribution of Mr. Sunshine were all important factors in the series’ ability to reach a worldwide audience. Thus, auteur-­ focused production houses are creating new corporate structures by merging with other independent production houses and acquiring greater agency as a result. The transnational partnership between Netflix and Studio Dragon is symbiotic in that each company maintains distinct international and local roles and each is committed to creating a new mediascape. I have explored here Netflix’s market motivation and optimal price point in acquiring Mr. Sunshine, which was determined through the combined efforts of the key stakeholders—the production company Studio Dragon and the international distributor Netflix—operating in the free-market economy. This case study offers a glimpse into Netflix’s general content priorities and the logic of its business operations in Korea, which exist within the international capital flow that finances media industries. In presenting it, I hope to have provided insight into the broader trend in Netflix’s reconfiguration of the dynamic business practices of production houses in Korea.

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Kim, Yunji. 2018b. “Television Dramas Go Blockbuster with OTT.” Economy Insight, November 15, 2018. http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/PRINT/ 870310.html. Kwon, Hoyeong. 2015. Television Drama Production and Distribution. Seoul: Communication Books. Kwon, Hoyeong, and Munhaeng Lee. 2015. “Korean Television’s US Export Strategy.” KOCCA Focus 2015 (3): 1–16. Lee, Chunghui. 2019. “Studio Dragon’s Goal to Export TV Drama is 130 Million USD.” The Bell, April 22, 2019. http://www.thebell.co.kr/free/content/ ArticleView.asp?key=201904190100037100002295&svccode=00&page=1&s ort=thebell_check_time. Lee, Hazell. 2020. “Studio Dragon: Re-rating is on the Way.” October 12, 2020. NH Investment & Securities. Lee, Manje, and Yosep Song. 2018. “Change in Independent Production Market and Improvement Plans.” Korea Focus 2018 (120): 1–22. Lobato, Ramon. 2019. Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution. New York: New York University Press. Lotz, Amanda, Ramon Lobato, and Julian Thomas. 2018. “Internet-distributed Television Research: A Provocation.” Media Industries 5 (2): 35–47. Napoli, Philip. 2009. “Media Economics and the Study of Media Industries.” In Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, edited by Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, 161–170. New York: Wiley-Blackwell Park, Hohyeon. 2019. “CJ, Kakao, Naver: Three companies, Three Different Content M&A Battle.” Seoul Economy Daily, March 31, 2019. https://www. sedaily.com/NewsView/1VGSXDE0VK Turner, Graeme. 2018. “Netflix and the Reconfiguration of the Australian Television Market.” Media Industries 5 (2): 130–142. Wayne, Michael, and Deborah Castro. 2020. “SVOD Global Expansion in Cross-­ National Comparative Perspective: Netflix in Israel and Spain.” Television & New Media, 1–18. https://doi-­org.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/10.1177/ 1527476420926496 Yeolil, Ancha. 2018. “Report on OTT Video Streaming Service: iQiyi.” September 11, 2018. https://101ancha.blog.me/221356570423. Yoon, Jaeshik, and Jihye Sun. 2016. “The Sensation over Descendants of the Sun and the Appeal of K-Drama.” KOCCA Focus 16 (3): 5–7. Yoon, Taejin. 2005. “Production Structure of Popular Culture: Korean Production System of Television Serials and the Change of Power Relation among Producing Agents.” Studies of Broadcasting Culture 17 (2): 9–44.

Short Video as Streaming Media: A Symbolic Expression of Chinese Compressed Modernity Meng Liang and Song Sun

Streaming media is currently thriving as an alternative to illegally downloaded and shared files. In the past two decades, global online entertainment platforms and services such as Netflix, Apple Music, Amazon Prime, and YouTube have built up successful business models by streaming media. These growing media platforms have influenced and shaped new media viewing cultures by allowing audiences to access an expanse of content at the click of a button, thus confronting traditional consumption habits (Arditi 2021) The evolution of streaming platforms raises concerns over specific productions and, more broadly, their impact on the wider industry. On the one hand, one might consider—as Philip Napoli (2014) does—the implementation and function of artificial

M. Liang (*) University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Sun University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_5

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intelligence—specifically algorithms—in the distribution system. The Professional Generated Content (PGC) streaming media platforms are a significant focus when studying the impact of such algorithms. From Spotify to Netflix, the distribution system traces the viewing preferences of users and continuously recommends content that the viewer may be interested in. Another parallel development, along with algorithmic production, is the shrinkage in the cost of human labour in content production. This feature, largely attributed to the popularity of mobile phones and easy-to-use digital editing tools, has started to blur the boundary between the previous User Generated Content (UGC) and PGC. Such an amalgamation is even more obvious in China, where, along with the rapid development of Multi-­channel Network (MCN) companies, the concept of Professional-User Generated Content (PUGC) has emerged. PUGC content can be traced back to the broad context of the digital media industry in China: beginning in 2015, many MCN companies started to monetise services for UGC producers by providing media production guidance. The media industry proposed the term PUGC to navigate the new phenomenon. As Nie Desheng (2019), the CEO of Onion Media, one of the largest MCN companies in China, said, the term PUGC refers to MCN companies providing guidance for grassroots users to make their works more advertisement oriented, while preserving grassroots aesthetics in their videos to make it more authentic and trustworthy for their audience. The boundary between grassroots production and professional production is blurred. These new developments illustrate an automatic logic in both production and distribution within the contemporary Chinese digital media industry. The streaming media paradigm has been rooted in the practice of the global north, which always features PGC in production and a business model based on memberships or subscriptions. However, these analyses cannot perfectly describe the current development of streaming media, especially in China. Although the Chinese counterparts of these platforms include Youku, iQiyi, and Tencent Video, the Chinese streaming media market constitution is radically differentiated from that of the global north. For example, in terms of the business model, paid memberships, which is the dominating business model for Netflix covering 87% of the U.S., have slowed in China. According to the data provided by Quest Mobile (2019), paid membership only constitutes 18.8% of stream video platform users. Meanwhile, UGC such as self-made dramas and variety shows have become more popular, especially in short video format. Given

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this new development, we believe it is necessary to include the post-2016 boom in short video platforms in the broad trajectory of streaming media studies. According to the data from China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC 2021), there are more than 873 million users of short video platforms in China in 2020. Based on the ontological definition of streaming media, and following the differentiated developing trajectory outside the global north, we argue that short video platforms, such as Douyin, should be considered a new development of streaming media in China. Short video platforms, with their heavy reliance on algorithmic recommendations, create new attention economy business models, playing an influential role in the contemporary Chinese political, economic, and culture spheres. To further illustrate the detailed development in China, in this chapter, we investigate the production and distribution features of short video platforms, especially Douyin, the most popular Chinese short video platform in China: according to CNBC’s data, in Aug 2020, there were 600 million daily active users on Douyin, nearly half of the population of this country (CNBC). We also consider this development in a broad social and cultural context. We sketch the broad spectrum of compressed modern political-­ economic fabric in contemporary China as references for analysing the symbolic expression in the media works to illustrate how the symbolic expression functions in the narrative. Compressed modernity in China started in 1978 when the economic reform rebuilt the nation’s economic basis and transformed its citizens’ social relationships. Within this dynamic political-economic context, issues—from gender discrimination to employment pressure—became social hot spots. Through case studies of two popular accounts on Douyin, we investigate how these elements became symbolic expressions of the grassroots considerations of Chinese reality. We have chosen to focus on the genres of family comedy and the office/workplace sitcom; both illustrate the undercurrents of social recognition in the gender and labour agenda, while short videos represent these issues with a unique collage-making method.

Short Video Aesthetics and Condensed Expression Coinciding with the launch of Douyin and Kuaishou in 2015, short video platforms have since thrived in China. With nearly 600 million daily active users (36Kr, 2020), this chapter mainly draws on selected cases from

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Douyin. It is worth noting, however, that a Douyin producer usually posts the same videos across different platforms. There are two important features of short video platforms that need to be explained before explaining the visual culture this form has shaped. Firstly, Chinese short video platforms, represented by Douyin and Kuaishou, rely heavily on algorithmic recommendation. According to Cao Huanhuan (2019), the chief algorithmic designer of ByteDance, the parent company of Douyin, Douyin’s distribution system can tailor the stream for each viewer based on their preferences and interests. Secondly, short video platforms have complete commercial systems which facilitate the producers to monetise their works. For example, Douyin has encouraged producers to produce advertisement-oriented content via Star-Chart (Chinese: 星图), a platform allowing content producers to negotiate with advertisers and provide detailed viewing data across accounts. Although Douyin started as a participatory media platform, the vast advertisement value soon attracted a huge number of grassroots content creators to develop their careers as short video producers. As Douyin officially announced in 2020, there are more than 22 million users gaining profits from Douyin of cumulatively 41.7 billion RMB. Such a phenomenon has also made Douyin content production into a specialised and potentially lucrative job (Douyin and Juliang Algorithm 2020). The aforementioned demonstrates the ways in which the distribution system can shape the media culture on this platform. A crucial factor resulting in the change of visual culture in short video lies in the basic business logic of short video platforms: to get more audience views, and therefore more advertisement revenue. The finishing rate, that is, how much of the audience finishes half of the video, as Douyin’s official guidance has announced, is the most essential factor for the algorithmic distribution system to decide how many audience members will be shown a given video. Douyin recommends that users post videos of less than one minute in length; therefore, the story narrative in each short video needs to compete to attract the audience’s attention and thus gain more viewers. In addition to the business motivation, the condensed content and its formal representation becoming viable also result from the availability of various digitised trendy keywords, filters, digital stickers, and other components which include the common knowledge condensed into these micro-representations. As such, Douyin’s content production is a type of collage-making process. Due to these two features, Douyin’s content production further prioritises the common knowledge of the audience instead

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of constructing a whole new story. Therefore, symbols, which are usually in the form of “keywords”, override the narrative in media expression. These two conditions combine to create a short video production format which features symbolic expression that overrides the storytelling. Such an observation was made in digital media precursors. One of the famous cultural investigations explaining this phenomenon is Hiroki Azuma’s (2009) reading on Japanese otaku culture, in which he proposes the concept of the “database animal” when describing the influence of digital technology on how the audience consumes media creations—the formation of the otaku community was facilitated by the internet and generates the common interpretation of the same symbols. Such a phenomenon validates the media expression that a certain component or representation can mean a lot, conveying the profound institutional knowledge behind it. Azuma gives many examples of the database and the meaning hiding behind it. Individual elements, in the case he analysed, such as cats’ ears, green hair, or certain ways of speaking, can work as affective nodes to cater to consumers’ needs, for the previous influential anime works have constructed common recognition through these elements. He argues that such a phenomenon reflects “the decline of the grand narratives”, which attends the proliferation of derivative works, copies of fragmented original works. We adopt a similar methodology in this chapter: in Douyin’s case, such a decline in the grand narrative can be attributed to what Guy Debord (1967) described as “the spectacle”, a term which generally refers to media not as a knowledge-generating instrument and public service, but as an engine of perpetual distraction and obfuscation. Meanwhile, data and algorithms further stratify the meaning of single keywords and tags, triggering an identified imagination in the audience. “Imitation publics”, as Diana Zulli and David Janes Zulli (2020) proposed, is how TikTok, the overseas version of Douyin, motivates the imitation of others’ content and video styles with its platform design. Their arguments also illustrate how Douyin’s mechanism reinforces the same recognition in the public.

Compressed Modernity in China Many symbols used in Douyin’s creation are the key and controversial issues emerging from the changing political-economic fabrics in China; therefore, before calibrating the short video as a new form of streaming media interacting with the broad social context, we firstly outline the

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contemporary Chinese social context, especially the featured development of “compressed modernity”. The trajectory of analysing the modernisation process remains debated, as an increasing number of scholars have noticed the assumption that a universal cultural programme of modernity which originated from Europe failed. However, this assumption started to fail especially after the Second World War due to the variation in different cultural context, traditions, and experiences. Multiple modernity theory suggests the history of world modernity as a story of a multiplicity of cultural programmes. The twentieth century witnessed China’s rapid modernisation, the history of which can be traced back to the former century, when Western ideology and social theory started to be introduced into China. Recent scholars agree that the compressed modernity of China started in the 1980s after the economic reform in 1978 absorbed the free-market system into its national economy, which significantly changed every aspect of society, from its political-economic fabric to its social ethos. Urbanisation, social classes, and family structures are three keywords on which we will focus in this research, and all these changes can be traced to the historical roots of compressed modernisation in China. Serial economic forms introducing free-market mechanisms into the national economy promoted a quick transformation of the social ethos. Jing Yaoji (2004) draws particular attention to two features in the modernity transformation in China: firstly, the overlap of contemporary and traditional factors; secondly, the convergence of socialism and Western capitalism. The term “compressed modernity”, proposed by Kyung-Sup Chang (1999), can perfectly describe such a historical turning point. This term refers to the social condition wherein economic, political, and cultural changes occur in an extremely condensed manner in both time and space. The dynamic co-existence of mutually disparate historical and social changes leads to the construction and reconstruction of a highly complex and fluid social system. Following this concept, the first transformation we trace is the reshaping of the economic basis. After the economic reform, the free-market economy was introduced into the national economy. Along with this logic, private capital began to thrive in the technological industries, and the traditional state-owned companies, which were mainly concentrated in infrastructures including banking and telecommunication, started to be dismantled in various reforms. However, such an economic structure emerged from a manipulated liberalising process, which in many ways represents an inversion of the historical progression of

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Western countries. Consider the telecommunication system as an example. As Wang O (2011) indicates, the telecommunication system functioned as a bureaucratic factor in the fabric of the planned economy, and then was separated into three state-owned companies through political reforms. Therefore, market competition was deployed into the industry gradually through political power. A similar history can be observed in the banking, electricity, and various infrastructural industries in China. The commodification of land can be regarded as a result of the liberal reform in the real estate field, and later became the major motivation for urbanisation in China. As Richard Florida (2012) and his team indicate, China’s development is disconnected from the conventional wisdom of urbanisation. Following this argument, recent research (Florida et  al. 2012) suggests that commodification and development of land as a source of municipal finance was more important to the development of major cities such as Beijing and Guangzhou than the introduction of any new technology, labour market, or creative industry. The liberalising reform also deconstructed traditional social relationships, especially the domestic hierarchy between genders. Emile Durkheim’s classic dichotomy proposed that a modern society is based on organic solidarity, while a traditional society is on mechanical solidarity. In his argument, organic solidarity is based on labour division and specialisation in production. Ferdinand Tönnies shares a similar opinion, offering the concept of “community” as distinct from “society”. In his argument, rural and peasant societies are typified as communities, in which personal relationships are defined and regulated based on traditional social rules. In a community, interpersonal relationships are usually determined by natural will, while also largely confined by geographic distance. Society, in contrast, emerges along with the large industrial organisations and institutions. In this system, rational self-interest weakens natural bonds such as kinship and religion. Following Durkheim’s argument on social relationships in a different social pattern, Fei Xiaotong’s wide-ranging field work (2006) on Chinese traditional agriculture-based society has illustrated how traditional Chinese social networks are formed. In Fei’s famous book on Chinese indigenous agriculture-based society, the social relationship in Chinese traditional society is defined as “the differential mode of association” (差序格局), while Western society is defined as “organisational mode of association”. As Fei explains, in pre-modern Chinese interpersonal relationships and social networks, each individual can be regarded as a centre of multiple

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concentric circles. Their social influence and relations spread out from the centre like “ripples”; the more distant, the more insignificant, although these ripples may correlate. The constitution of these social relationships is usually based on kinship and geography. Such a pattern is different from Western societies, wherein each organisation usually has stark boundaries defining the identity of its members. In China’s current situation within the compression process, the differential mode of association is crumbling while new modern social relationships are being shaped. During this process, traditional family relationships—especially after the socialism revolution and the later economic reform—have been changed by the rising of female political status. However, it should be noted that one of the important features of Chinese feminism is what Yuzhu Peng (2021) described as “neoliberal feminism”, which refers to the “commercial objectification of men to attract women followers, amid the increase of Chinese women’s consumer power”. The agenda of Chinese neoliberal feminism can be regarded as a track in the economic transformation when commodity logic has invaded and disrupted the previous traditional family relationships. These different threads in the broad “compressed modernity” also mutually influence each other, driving the modernisation process in China in an alternative trajectory from its Western counterparts. For example, other scholars have adopted the differential mode of association in analysing the urbanisation history in China; the investigation on immigration in Hebei province in China indicates a successive migration process in which the “differential mode of association” crumbled gradually. Such a process is motivated by increased income and job opportunities. In addition, better infrastructure, such as education and medical services, constitute the basic driving force for farmers’ migration, while the cost of migration forms the primary constraint on farmers’ migration. Eric Kit-wai Ma (2012) illustrates compressed modernity by observing and analysing the living conditions of bartenders in Guangzhou. As he points out, migrants in China have been situated in the gap between an urban lifestyle and a rural one. For example, despite their experience of China’s urban modernity, many are finding it difficult to achieve upward social mobility and will have to return to the countryside when the city no longer needs their over-age workforce. Their economic conditions in the city are clearly superior to their peers in the rural countryside, but they live on the margins of labour and consumption, and their wages are also at the lowest level in urban areas. Separated from the traditional marital relationship in

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the countryside, they are barely able to settle down in cities because they do not have the housing, health care, education, and other public services to which urban residents are entitled. Based on the social context and the features of short videos, we take two cases as examples to illustrate how the short videos conceptualise and reflect the social changes, while also catering and forming an identical imagination among the audience. Through the analysis of the storytelling, content, editing techniques, and the overall design of these two accounts, we regard the content of these short videos as a highly symbolic media expression which reflects the Chinese reality, while also functioning as a provocative power and a grassroots manifestation of escapism.

A Reversed Power in Media Representation: Big Wolf Dog Zheng Jianpeng Couple Big Wolf Dog Zheng Jianpeng Couple is one of the most popular Douyin accounts, with more than 40 million followers as of August 2020. Among their 540 short videos, most of them are humorous family videos featuring Zheng Jianpeng and Yan Zhen, a Cantonese couple, and their young daughter, Lingling (Duanyuer data 2020). Yan Zhen is a beautiful but aggressive housewife, and the household chores are the husband’s work in their videos. She is the dominant character at home, and always hits her husband for playing too many mobile games or hiding money from her. For example, the first short video is a story in which Yan Zhen pulls out the plug when her husband Zheng Jianpeng is playing computer games, then hits her husband (Duanyuer data 2020). On the contrary, Zheng Jianpeng is a submissive husband, undertaking all the household chores while suffering his wife’s violence. Their videos sit between the reality television form and fictional creation. In the form of home video, Big Wolf Dog Zheng Jianpeng Couple’s videos conceptualise a “strong wife, weak husband” core family model, which is contrasted with the Chinese indigenous domestic hierarchical structure. These videos have attracted numerous female audiences—58% of Zheng Jianpeng’s followers are females, while 68% followers are 31–50 years old (Duanyuer data 2020). Here we take a closer look at how the digital symbol functions in the condensed format to construct the narrative and how these narratives interact with the compressed modernity in China. One of the symbolic expressions in the video is “family violence”, which is a trope that appears

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in nearly every video. However, behind this symbol, the video represents a reversal of the traditional power structure of the Chinese family. The Chinese traditional family order can be traced back to its root in feudal society, with the influence of Confucianism and the fundamental agriculture-­based economy. Due to the labour consumption, the division of labour between genders in China usually emphasises males as the main family providers, while wives function as caretakers. This also shapes the unbalanced social status between genders, as the female roles are dependent on the husband. The Three Obedience and Four Virtues, a traditional Chinese framework of social morality, typically reflects such a social structure (Fei 1992). It requires the wife to “obey her father, husband, and son while maintaining a modest and moral lifestyle” (Xu 1997). In this context, family violence towards the wife, who is regarded as the dependent to the male, was both ubiquitous and widely disregarded (Liu and Chan 1999). Even after experiencing radical socialism and later the liberal reform in the economy, the underlying social ethos has remained actively functional in China. In the early twentieth century, family violence was still a regularly occurring practice and only began to be recognised as a social issue since the early 2000s. In Big Wolf Dog Zheng Jianpeng Couple’s videos, this dynamic is reversed: the female character is in the traditional male social role, with the accompanying status. All the household chores are the husband’s responsibility, and he is subjected to violence if he fails to fulfil his “duty”. Another symbol which constantly appears in the video is baozugong and baozupo (包租公 and 包租婆, landlord and landlady). Zhen Jianpeng’s videos feature many points that indicate the high income generated by house rentals. For example, in one of the videos, two white collars working in Guangzhou pass by the couple and mock their shabby clothes but are shocked when the pair shows off their keyrings indicating that they own many houses and live off their rental income. This is a typical “reversal” expression on Douyin, which reinforces the “Chinese landlord and landlady” tag associated with the couple. The words baozugong and baozupo, from the Cantonese dialect, soon became popular due to Stephen Chow’s film Kung Fu Hustle (2004). In this film, the baozugong and baozupo are always rude to their tenants since they have dominating power to decide if these tenants can stay or not, while the tenants have few other choices. Since then the landlord and landlady have become cultural symbols on the internet, referring to a wealthy and relaxed life, which is acquired by luck because they or their family have the wherewithal to

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purchase real estate. Zheng Jianpeng’s Couple cleverly downplays their treatment of the tenants, but emphasises the affluent lifestyle brought by house rentals. The context of such a cultural symbol is rooted in the surge of housing prices in Chinese developed cities; Guangzhou not only witnessed the most rapid surge among the three tier-one cities in China but also witnesses an increase in average house price of around 296% from 2004 to 2014, and even 417% in the central areas, from 5340 yuan to 27,620 yuan (HopeFluent data 2014). According to an analysis of Guangzhou’s house price, several factors influence house prices in Guangzhou; aside from the development of infrastructure, the transformation of the traditional family structure is also an important factor, as the shift from extended family, multi-generational households to nuclear family households also increased the demand for housing (Sina Finance 2014). These two observations are deeply interlinked with each other and co-­ create an escapism solution for the audience. The reversed family structure and status inversion is a vital facet in attracting most female audiences by giving them a virtual space to fight against the traditional Chinese family pattern. The past two decades witnessed the thriving feminism movement in China, especially with the voice of women through the internet. Nonetheless, Chinese women have started to face new forms of oppression from the capitalism system since the reform, specifically gender inequality in the working place. This connects to Xiao Wu and Yige Dong’s discussion regarding gender discontent and class friction in post-­socialist China. In Leta Hong Fincher’s book Betraying Big Brother (2018), she depicts the awakening of feminism in China. Starting in the 1990s, gender inequality deepened as China accelerated its economic reforms, particularly when the liberalised economy started to dismantle the equal employment which was mandated by the government during the planned economy era. In 2010, urban women’s average per capita income was less than 70% that of male workers, according to the government data. Zhen Jianpeng’s videos avoid the issue of the gender income gap in the free-market system since both members of the couple in the videos are living on rental income. In one of the short videos, a reporter asks: “Many fans are curious: are these keys all house keys?” The couple answers, “No, there are also car keys”. The video ends with a slow-motion sequence to emphasise the couple’s wealth. In another video, two white-collar workers are mocking the couple for wearing shabby clothes but are finally shocked when they take out a big keyring, indicating they are living on rental

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income. These videos use cutting techniques to emphasise the wealthy lives of the family without specifying how and why they initially obtained their wealth.

A Satire on Labour and Social Hierarchy: Zhu Yidan’s Boring Life Another famous short video serial on Douyin is Zhu Yidan’s Boring Life. As of March 2021, this account has accumulated eight million followers on Douyin. Zhu Yidan’s work can be regarded as a microcosm of the status quo of a contemporary Chinese private company, in which the conflict between the capitalists and the labour can be observed clearly. Zhu Geng portrays Zhu Yidan, a powerful businessman who often calls his powerful friends to abduct people to Africa. All the videos are centred around Zhu Yidan’s life, especially his interactions with his employees and his rich friends. Zhu’s videos feature a strong idiosyncrasy in representation. Firstly, the background music, Beautiful Life, is from Stephen Chow’s From Beijing with Love (1994), a Hong Kong spy comedy film which directly spoofs James Bond films. The high frequency of this music in Zhu’s video accentuates the link between the core idea of Zhu’s video, that is, the satire on the contemporary Chinese hierarchical society and the music when many followers imitate Zhu’s video later. Secondly, there are few conversations in the videos, and most storytelling is realised by voiceover from the perspective of Zhu. The voiceover sounds emotionless, just like the title of this account, Zhu Yidan’s Boring Life. This feature constructs the image of Zhu as a rich powerful person for whom all the things in the world are “boring” because his wealth has made him nearly invincible in his world. Zhu Yidan’s Boring Life portrays a very patriarchal world—nearly all the characters in the workplaces are male. Female characters are always described as mere appendages to male characters, although this is always expressed sarcastically. For instance, in one episode, a beautiful woman is pursued for a long time by an employee in Zhu’s company, but all these efforts are in vain when the girl finally chooses a rich boss as her boyfriend. Beauty and sexual attraction are always described as forms of female capital. While designed to take advantage of young males, their “capital” is finally taken by rich capitalists.

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Class conflict is a recurrent, pervasive theme in Zhu Yidan’s videos. All the characters in Zhu Yidan’s world can be starkly categorised as two opposing sides: the cunning capitalists represented by Zhu and his friends, and the hopeless young employees on the other side. Such a narrative is also heavily constructed from individual symbols and the rich meaning conveyed therein. For example, the character of one of Zhu’s friends, Wang Busi (王布斯), represents the internet moguls in China: in addition to his name, which parodies Steve Jobs (乔布斯) in Chinese, he always advocates “wolf culture” in the videos. This originated as a buzzword inside China’s tech circle, especially in Huawei, and later became a popular word on the Chinese internet. According to Ren Zhengfei, the CEO of Huawei, wolf culture means that leaders and executives should try to push employees to overwork, and that young people should be motivated to aggressively claw their way up the social ladder. Another example is the so-called success studies (成功学). In many episodes, the bosses read a book entitled Success Studies and quote from it. Success studies can be traced as a Western import back to the 1990s. Chen Anzhi, who was inspired by Anthony Robbins, an American motivational speaker, is a vital character in this history; he established Chen Anzhi training centre (Zhou 2020). However, in the contemporary Chinese online context, “success studies” has long been a jocular term used to satirise bosses or capitalists for brainwashing their employees with unrealistic visions. This is also illustrated from one of the bosses in the video, Bao Fahu. His name literally means “new rich” in Chinese, and his money is sourced from housing demolition and relocation fees. Bao Fahu reflects another side of the history of land commodification in China. Beginning in the 1990s, China introduced the Urban Real Estate Management Law, which kicked off the marketisation of real estate and made developers the main force behind China’s urban and rural developments. In the same year, China started to reform its taxation system and local governments started to rely more and more on land commodification. The rapid urbanisation—from 17.92% in 1978 to more than 60% in 2020—made numerous “new rich” individuals with compensation from housing demolition and relocation. For example, Liede village located in Guangzhou was demolished to make way for 37 high buildings in 2007, while the original villagers were allocated five to ten houses (Wu Xiaobo 2020). Zhu’s works satirise not only the modern Chinese hierarchical society through various symbolic expressions but also the traditional elements such as social ties in China. One of the constant symbols is the culture of

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mianzi. Mianzi means face, a unique cultural phenomenon in Chinese social networks which became a focus in academic studies when China increasingly began to participate in global trade. Mianzi is an image of self, delineated in terms of approved social attributes. A similar concept is guanxi, which is based on a doctrine that sees individuals as a community, especially a family group. Therefore, the mutual commitments, reciprocity, and trust are the ground of this community and maintain the network (Luo et al. 2011). For example, Zhu also often teases distant relatives who come to ask for favours because of their nepotism. In another episode, Zhu’s sister-in-law rebukes Zhu at the company for ousting her son, saying that she could not have achieved what he has today if her father had not bequeathed a house to Zhu in the past. In the end, Zhu asks her to sign an agreement for her son to go to Africa, and finally sends him away. The deliberate portrayal of Zhu’s sister-in-law as a brutally unreasonable rural woman implies the irony of geo-kinship in rural China. Aside from the correspondence between the videos and reality, the videos themselves always adopt a sarcastic tone in the narrative. The wolf spirit, for instance, is regarded as a method to brainwash and fleece the employees. However, the video doesn’t show sympathy for employees in the company either. For example, one of the employees of Zhu Yidan’s company is a slacker who is only employed by the company because of Zhu’s nepotism. In one of the episodes, when he demands a promotion, Zhu suddenly sends him to a remote country as a punishment to demonstrate his categorical authority in the company. In this way, Zhu Yidan’s videos seem to convey a controversial attitude towards the neoliberalism system; it points out the unfairness embedded in the current political-­ economic fabric while also attributing individual failures to those who suffer them. Most of Zhu Yidan’s followers are males in Shanghai and Guangzhou (Duanyuer data 2020). The sense of powerlessness and the huge pressure on employees in Zhu Yidan’s work resonates with netizens. Most comments under his videos saying these videos reveal the “innermost feelings of shechu”. Shechu literally means “corporate slave”; the phrase originated from Japan in the 1990s, referring to “social domestic animals”, and has now become popularised as an internet buzzword in China. This word has been increasingly used as a self-mocking term since 2019, when many companies in China started to practise the 996 working hour system, which derives its name literally from its requirement of working 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, six days per week. Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma has stated that

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workers should consider 996 “a huge blessing” for workers who should appreciate the opportunity to work (Yang 2019).

Conclusion From the analysis of these two popular Douyin accounts, this chapter sheds light on how short video became a new and important form of streaming media in China and how this medium interacts with a rapidly transforming social context. In terms of the spreading of its popular content, imitation and taking advantage of memes is an important feature of Douyin’s content production. Small single elements, usually the keywords in the contemporary social debates, construct the storytelling and play a significant role in building up characters’ personality. Such a condensed expression is based on the common knowledge and common understanding of the social agenda in China. Meanwhile, with the popularity of these two accounts both on and outside of Douyin, new memes have been re-­ created based on their content. For example, there are many videos that start to use the same background music and imitate the tone of the voiceover and editing style of Zhu Yidan’s videos. Therefore, Zhu Yidan itself has become a new symbol. In addition to the cultural production on Douyin, the short video should be regarded as a unique trajectory of streaming media development. ByteDance, the parent company of Douyin, is now the most profitable mobile advertisement company in China with 60 billion RMB; the short video platform Douyin contributed 60% of the whole profit (Fortune China 2020; Liu Fen 2020). Such a development soon impelled UGC to develop towards professional production with continuous storylines and complete character designs, as well as aspiring towards the PGC business model. Therefore, the content on short video platforms, to a very large degree, should be understood as a commercialised media work instead of pure grassroots works. This also explains why the cases reflect a self-­ contradiction logic in these media expressions. On the one hand, they function as a self-mocking or escapist solution for the audience, but they hardly offer a way to challenge the systematic problems arising in the Chinese postmodernist process. In addition to censorship concerns, one of the fundamental reasons is rooted in the business model of these videos. The two analysed accounts are typically advertisement oriented. From this sense, not only can the content of the short video itself be traced to the compressed modernity in China, but indeed the whole business

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mechanism of the platform is based on a radical liberalising logic, which is an important trajectory in the compressed modernisation path. This is also an important observation in media expression, and a trajectory in observing how social dynamics interact with streaming media production.

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Eastern Promise? Marco Polo and the Role of Medieval Drama in Netflix’s Strategy for Development in East Asia Daniel Clarke

In 2014, a landmark era in the distribution of subscriber-based television content that would later be defined as the streaming wars began in earnest. It was the beginning of an era in which American industry leaders in cable, network, and online media commission and distribution faced both exponential growth and increasing competition, from one another and from new entrants into what was fast becoming a global market. That year, Amazon expanded its Prime Video service more extensively across both North America and Europe; HBO announced the roll-out of its on-­ demand online subscription package, HBO Now; Hulu, the Japanese-­ American streaming service that derives its name from the Mandarin word for interactive recording, increased its presence in East Asian markets through a distribution deal with streaming service Viki; whilst, Netflix launched a global rebrand as it became the first streaming provider to surpass the landmark figure of fifty-million subscribers worldwide

D. Clarke (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_6

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(Chatterjee 2014). Commentators are in agreement that this period perpetuated—or at least coincided with—a fundamental paradigm shift in the way consumers watched television. No longer constrained by contracts with cable and satellite providers as the primary means to access highquality television content, audiences could now subscribe to streaming services on a month-by-month basis, even sampling new content by making use of free trials. Increasingly, the streaming services offered television content with high budgets and production values, and cast star actors to rival not only their cable and satellite predecessors but also their cinematic counterparts in Hollywood.

Netflix’s Pivot to Asia: The Commercial Basis It was within this industrial milieu that Netflix partnered with The Weinstein Company to release the medieval drama series Marco Polo (2014–2016). If competing industry leaders such as Netflix had set their sights on increasing market share, then expanding into lucrative emerging markets in East Asia would become essential. In Marco Polo, Netflix had a clearly marketable product with broad appeal and promising commercial pedigree: one that focused on a history recognised in some capacity by audiences in territories East and West alike, that of Italian merchant Marco Polo and his encounter with the Mongol court of Kublai Khan during the thirteenth century. Crucially, the show also demonstrated the credentials of a genre that had proven successful in cinema across the world: the medieval epic. While scholars such as Andrew Elliott have addressed the nebulous nature of ‘the epic’ as generic nomenclature, commentators are in agreement that historical epics are united by their high-quality production values exhibited in the poetics of the screen such as setting, cinematography, and the use of star actors, to name just a few features (Elliott 2014, 4–7). For Steve Neale, who writes from an industrial perspective, the epic can be used ‘to identify, and to sell two overlapping contemporary trends: films with historical settings [such as the Middle Ages]; and large scale films of all kinds which used new technologies, high production values and special modes of distribution and exhibition’; Robert Burgoyne adds that epic films serve as ‘cross-cultural popular forms’ (Neale 2000, 85; Burgoyne 2010, 1). Neale and Burgoyne’s respective observations on production values, spectacle, and cross-cultural appeal are evident in medieval films that have proven popular in the opening decades of the twenty-­ first century, from Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005) in Hollywood

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to the wuxia films set in medieval China, such as Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (2004) and The Great Wall (2016). As the century entered its second decade, the popularity of drama set in the Middle Ages crossed not only cultural divides but also screen mediums. It was in the early 2010s that the success of the medieval epic spread into the domain of television, specifically through the release of HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019). Through the new technology of on-demand streaming, scaling down historical epics to the small screen saw innovations in ‘distribution and exhibition’ of the order that Neale describes, albeit in reverse. The exhibition of Hollywood Cinema in the 1950s deployed widescreen as a means to accommodate the epics of that decade, boasting scale, grandeur, and immersion; however, the television of the 2010s, miniaturised the epic’s sense of vastness into an altogether more intimate experience, one that was devolved rather than communal, one in which the extravagant thrills of a medieval fantasy could be enjoyed from home, even by looking into a screen held in the palm of one’s hand. By setting a series in thirteenth century China and Mongolia, boasting the panoramic vistas of the Asian steppes, the costumed battle scenes that audiences had come to expect as set-pieces of the genre, and the sumptuous splendour of regal palaces, Marco Polo could hope to capture and replicate a formula established on the big screen but successfully transferred to the small screen over on HBO.  Meanwhile, a geographical relocation to the East would provide the series with a saleable innovation, at least to Western audiences less familiar with East Asian medieval film and television drama. Beyond its generic appeal, Marco Polo had notable financial and prestige backing too. Acquired from Starz network during the development stage, it was backed by the then successful Harvey Weinstein, who would later serve as an executive producer on the series. Weinstein had been eager to break into Asian cinematic markets since the success of Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou in 1990, a co-production between the China Film Co-production Corporation and Miramax that, in the words of Peter Biskind, made Weinstein’s company some promising ‘pocket money’ (2004, 105). As Lisa Dombrowski has argued, the movie mogul recognised ‘the opportunity to market more commercial Chinese-language films to a wider audience as a means to generate crossover hits’ (2008, 1). When production began on Marco Polo in early 2014, it appeared that Weinstein was betting on television streaming as a means to prepare for new commercial opportunities in the East, one that—if successful—could lead the Weinstein Company to successful ventures in East-West co-production, something

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that continued to elude them in the cinema. In envisaging a foothold in the Chinese television market, Weinstein could have hoped to replicate the success of Rupert Murdoch. As Joseph Man Chan writes: ‘Based in Hong Kong, Phoenix Satellite TV was launched in 1996 as a joint-venture between Chinese interests and Murdoch’s STAR TV, with the former holding the major shares’ (2003, 163). When considering Netflix’s strategy for expansion into global markets, however, industry analysts, commentators, co-producers, and Netflix alike encountered a fundamental problem that persists to this day: as of 2022, the service remains officially banned in one of the largest economies in the world, China. Although viewing the service in China is possible through proxies in the form of virtual private networks (VPNs), this loophole is of little value to Netflix and its business model, which is reliant upon paid subscriptions and their reporting for market value and investment purposes. The reasons for continued embargo are essentially political: while, as Ying Zhu has discussed, foreign dramas are picked up by Chinese state television, such instances are rare. Instead, state censors tend to commission homegrown shows inspired by foreign hits, such as American Idol (2011–) or Sex and the City (1998–2004)¸ recalibrating them to conform to the values espoused by Chinese Communist Party (Zhu 2008, 69–71). Alongside its tendency to promote re-imaginings of popular international formulae, the Chinese censor exhibits a proclivity for social conservatism, one that recalls the crusade to defend a purported ‘moral decency’ as first seen in the Motion Picture Production Code of Classical Era Hollywood in the 1930s (Maltby 2003, 62). As with the censorship of early Hollywood, Chinese regulators curtail overt sexualisation. In 2015, for example, the highly popular costume drama The Saga of Wu Zetian/The Empress of China was widely speculated to have been pulled from Chinese networks for its use of sexualised imagery and, in particular, representations of cleavage that resulted from female characters wearing the courtly dress contemporary to the show’s Tang Dynasty setting (Griffiths 2016; Sun 2018). Drawing upon Zhu’s work to write on the future of the Chinese television market and its growth within a global context, Samantha Holloway has optimistically predicted: ‘If Chinese television dramas, and the medium as a whole, can overcome the strict government control, allowing for even more social discussion, viewership will increase, and external programming will become less popular’ (2009, 262). This anticipation that ‘external programming’ may become less popular constructs the image of a television market that was—at least in the first decade of the twenty-first

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century—beholden to rival Korean dramas for audience share. For Zhu, ‘Chinese trendy dramas are nowhere near as trendy as their Korean counterparts’ (2008, 91). Holloway’s analysis is also significant for the certainty of its assertion: predicting that a given set of circumstances will lead to changes in viewership and trends is only valid if those outcomes can be reliably measured. Zhu’s analysis of the popularity of Korean dramas may be equally applicable to other internationally produced content; and yet, any measurement becomes speculative in a system controlled by the state and without the transparency of reporting figures once deployed by cable, satellite, and terrestrial television in countries such as the United States and those in Europe. While the government and a select group of often domestic commercial parties have access to viewing figures for specific networks at given times, the release of official statistics is tightly managed by the State Administration for Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) (Chan 2003, 161). Meanwhile, international media research companies such as Nielsen do have a presence in China but their activity is inconsistent insofar as their remit there does not stretch anywhere near as far and wide as it does in liberal democracies, such as the United States. Companies that do report on mainland Chinese ratings figures, such as China Radio Television Sophie Media Research (CSM), rarely have access to the full scope of audience reach for channels operated by China Central Television (CCTV), a network of over fifty channels.

A Problematic Designation: Marco Polo as a ‘Flop’ Despite the gaps in knowledge posed by a heavily censored, state-­ controlled media system lacking in transparency, an intriguing parallelism emerges, one that is precisely this: much as access to the details of viewer impact in China is restricted from external scrutiny, Netflix does not report on the viewership ratings of its content, statistics that undoubtedly influence their decisions to cancel or commission content. Concurrently, in an era of mass streaming over the internet, viewing figures for pirated content are unreportable. These realities coalesce to mean that measurements of a television series’ commercial success are increasingly difficult to discern let alone quantify, certainly when compared to figures used for box office takings and network ratings in the past. In essence, then, measurements of viewership as barometers of success have become problematic due to the evolving nature of streaming consumption. Consequently, we are required to pursue other means through which to measure the reach of a streamed

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television series. Faced with such challenges, the study of reception and online fan culture provides some useful recourse through which to assess the cultural impact of any media text; in the words of Pierre Lévy, online domains become a space of ‘collective intelligence’ in which fans can explore information communally (Levy 1999, 61–65). Here, online fan discourses serve as paratext or, more specifically, an evolution of what Gérard Genette once referred to as the ‘public epitext’ (Genette 1997, 344–370). In its original incarnation, Genette’s term referred to the devices and conventions outside of the text that are produced by parties other than the author as a means of mediating between viewer and film (or any other media artefact). As more recent research on internet fan cultures has demonstrated, the public epitext can include not only the means used to package and sell the text for consumption—in the form of promotional and marketing materials—but also texts produced by the viewer themselves in the form of online reviews and microblogging (Booth 2016, 89). Analysis of such provides a useful means to navigate gaps in knowledge posed by the aforementioned contexts of streaming consumption and so will be revisited later in this chapter. The analytical challenges posed by the era of mass streaming in tandem with the government controls in a country such as China also require us to reconsider previously established models of television consumption. Dividing television history into distinct periods based upon the medium’s prevailing modes of consumption, Trisha Dunleavy has updated previous models on the relationship between television development and distribution, such as those proposed by Mark Rogers et al. (2002, 42–57). For Dunleavy, who first outlined her model in the early years of internet streaming, the move from cable and satellite subscription models on digital television, what she considers to be a period known as TVII, whereby the transition is to what Dunleavy describes as ‘a direct economic relationship between the institutions who produce drama and the viewers who consume it’ (2009, 5). This ‘direct economic relationship’ endures through to later epochs of the model, such as TVIII, one in which subscribers pay directly to individual services such as Netflix, who, in turn, use their revenue to produce dramas such as Marco Polo in house. However, it is worth developing Dunleavy’s model further, considering a new phase that one would logically call TVIV, whereby audiences can use illegal means of streaming, such as through pirate websites and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or proxies. TVIV offers a pirate model of consumption that disturbs the assumptions ‘of a direct [and thus easily measurable]

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economic relationship between the institutions who produce drama and the viewers who consume it,’ as Dunleavy assigns to TVII and TVIII. In this sense, then TVIV is more in common with TVI: whilst we can consider the economic model of TVI as one in which terrestrial television networks generated revenue through advertising, commercial breaks, and sponsors, the economic foundation of the proposed TVIV is one in which websites hosting pirated content generate clicks or ‘hits’ on a page, funded by pop-up internet advertisements. Once again, data on the audience for—or even the user traffic generated from—such websites is not available for academic scrutiny. However, it appears that there was sufficient data for media reports to designate Game of Thrones as the most pirated show in television history (Vanacker 2020). It is within this context of concealment that Marco Polo saw itself judged and ultimately cancelled by Netflix in 2016. With little hard evidence to substantiate their claims, media commentators and critics alike were quick to label the series a flop. Writing in The Hollywood Reporter, Leslie Goldberg asserted that Netflix had made a $200 million loss from the show (2016). The figure was based on unnamed sources and of questionable calculation: had the series accelerated the rate of subscription cancellations or slowed the pace at which new customers were joining the service? The report does not elaborate. Delivering Marco Polo’s post-­ mortem, The Guardian drew unfavourable comparisons with the show’s popular rivals, writing ‘for every Game Of Thrones, there’s a Marco Polo’ and then concluding that ‘the show never took off, languishing behind Orange Is The New Black and House Of Cards, the platform’s big hits at the time’ (Tait 2020). Yet, despite disparaging reviews that included the series being called ‘a middling mess, complete with random accents, slow story and kung fu mess’ by TV critic Tim Goodman, it was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for its main title music and numerous other accolades for set design and trailer (2014). Given that I have also already established the problems with measuring commercial success, rather than attempting arbitrary measures of success or failure for the show on the basis of judgements founded upon problematic or incomplete data, one should instead consider the strategic aspirations of Marco Polo as a release, the evidence for which can be discerned from onscreen representations portrayed within the series itself. From such a vantage point, one can then appreciate the series as a text designed to cater to the perceived tastes and mores of audiences East and West alike. This aspiration was one predicated on the basis of an established genre—the medieval epic as a television

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series—whilst Netflix, The Weinstein Company, and showrunner John Fusco all situated the series as a pioneering project. In this sense, the series served as a vehicle to vaunt the ambition of appealing to a diverse and international audience base, thus expanding the success of what had been perceived to work in the territories of the West to the markets of the East. For Netflix and The Weinstein Company, relocating the medieval eastwards must have been a tempting proposition, providing their product with a unique selling point in a market dominated by the medieval Game of Thrones and yet robust enough for the next big series to captivate critics and audiences alike, much as House of Cards (2013–2018) and Orange is the New Black (2013–2019) had done. On the big screen, Hollywood studios were providing case-studies on how to successfully harness the medieval genre to appeal to a broad and international audience, in territories East and West alike. In early 2015, Universal Pictures began shooting the medievalesque fantasy The Great Wall (2016). The film starred one of Hollywood’s leading men in the form of Matt Damon, who played the heroic lead alongside an ensemble cast of stars famous with Chinese audiences, including Jing Tian and Andy Lau. Directed by Zhang Yimou, the film was also notable for it marked the first major co-production between Universal and Legendary Pictures, a production arm specialising in historical fantasy, which has been recently acquired by the Chinese multinational conglomerate the Wanda Group. Through its marketing of premise and casting, the film’s rationale appeared to be one of maximising appeal to both Chinese and established Hollywood audiences—domestic and overseas. The use of the globally renowned landmark The Great Wall of China in the film’s title and posters situates the film historically, locationally, and in terms of premise. It created a broadness of appeal that continued in the film’s narrative premise, a story that saw Damon’s character collaborate rather than compete with his Chinese counterparts to defeat an external threat in the form of alien monsters, which imperil the denizens of medieval China’s Song dynasty from beyond the eponymous Great Wall. Equally, the relocation of Marco Polo to a Mongolian and Chinese setting had the added advantage of pitching towards the East Asian market, an aspiration not lost on even the show’s most discerning critics. Emily VanDerWerff writes that ‘a big attraction for people when it comes to Marco Polo is that it’s set in a world and country that not a lot of American series have ever taken stock of [medieval China]. And on that level, there’s really nothing else quite like it’ (2014). Likewise, writing in The Atlantic, Lenika Cruz heralded Marco Polo as ‘Netflix’s Critical Flop

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That Dared to Be Diverse,’ arguing that ‘viewers don’t have to like the streaming giant’s new medieval epic series to acknowledge its significant, if flawed, representation of Asian characters in television’ (2014). While these criticisms of Marco Polo do not deny its ambition, they do expose the salient flaws in representation that emerge upon viewing the series, shortcomings that delimit it as one portrayed and marketed within the derivative confines of Game of Thrones goes East.

The Representation and Marketing of Marco Polo Like Game of Thrones, Marco Polo demonstrates the propensity of producers to sexualise the Middle Ages, a treatment that evinces what Umberto Eco has referred to as a ‘shaggy medievalism,’ one that celebrates virile and brute force and in which artists present the ‘Middle Ages as a barbaric age, a land of elementary and outlaw feelings’ (Eco 2014, 69). Citing ‘the blood and nudity’ of Starz’s Camelot (2011) and ‘the violence and (problematic) sexual politics of HBO’s Game of Thrones,’ Andrew Elliott concludes that ‘in the era of cable television, the Middle Ages are often characterized by a seemingly formulaic obsession with sex, violence, power, and dirtiness’ (2015, 97). In short, for Elliott, such medieval television dramas signify that it is ‘time to put the children to bed’ (ibid., 98). Perceptions of the increasingly lewd sensibility of the televisual medieval are echoed by stars of the dramas too. When questioned about his cameo in Game of Thrones, the actor Ian McShane professed his disbelief at the popularity of the show and wryly referred to it as little more than ‘tits and dragons’ (Farndale 2016). However, these otherwise disparaging remarks made by the actor reveal the fundamental attributes that more recent medieval shows such as Game of Thrones deploy to initially appeal to their viewers. Sex, special effects, and violence promise to hook contemporary audiences in and generate excitement around the series, whilst complex and compelling characters and narratives keep them watching. From the outset, we see some evidence of this formula at work in Marco Polo, one that is—to expand Eco’s coinage—a sexualised, ‘shaggy medievalism.’ Throughout its two seasons, the show boasts a succession of scenes designed to rival the soft-core pornography that proved a staple trait of Game of Thrones. In a style characterised by mandatory displays of nude actors’ chests and buttocks, supplemented by more fleeting or obscured glimpses of the genitalia, these scenes feature a high frequency of cuts to show characters in various sexual positions. Beyond a gratuitous fulfilment

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of the genre, these scenes also serve to expose unlikely alliances between characters and the hitherto under-represented experiences of palatial concubines. As the furore surrounding The Saga of Wu Zetian suggested, however, scenes in which actors perform sexual set-pieces redolent of the Kama Sutra or those in which naked concubines are lined up to be selected for service are unlikely to find favour with the Chinese censors. Given such glaring narrative choices, then, attempts to situate Marco Polo as a pioneering project designed to seamlessly unite and combine the cultural histories of East and West appear stymied by the show’s propensity to exhibit the same eroticisation of the Middle Ages as medieval television drama of the occident. However, this eroticisation need not be a hindrance to a drama’s success, as further comparisons to Game of Thrones demonstrate. Even though sexualised content inevitably falls foul of government officials in China, limited evidence from Chinese social media indicates that it is precisely these elements that have proven popular with clandestine audiences there. Users of the Chinese microblogging site weibo have even taken to allocating nicknames to characters based on traits that they are perceived to exhibit within the series: Cersei Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen are interchangeably known as 色后 (sehou), which translates as ‘sexy queen,’ whilst Jon Snow trended as 囧恩 (Jiǒng e ̄n) or ‘embarrassed prince’ on weibo. By contrast, similar surveys of the social media sites indicate that Marco Polo generated comparatively little buzz among Chinese consumers, or at least those active on social media. While Game of Thrones fans fiercely debated character development, twist endings, and the fidelity of sex scenes on weibo, discussions of Marco Polo were comparatively stilted and tended to focus on esoteric historical details. While lauding the Netflix series as ‘more spectacular and real than the average large-scale CCTV historical drama,’ one user of the question-andanswer site zhihu asked a question that typifies the trend: ‘Why are the current historical dramas mostly shot in the Manchu and Qing Dynasty, while there are almost no historical dramas of the Ming Dynasty?’ (Anon. 2018). The answer to such a question would be the showrunner’s desire to unite East and West by using the historical premise of Marco Polo, one presumed to be broadly familiar to Eastern and Western audiences alike. Other users of Chinese social media noted the slow pace of the Netflix series, whilst its sex scenes and the treatment of its explicitly sexualised characters were scarcely mentioned. Such fan commentaries—or relative lack thereof—illustrate the differential impacts that the two television dramas had in China. Fans engaged with one another about the highly

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popular Game of Thrones, with some discussion about sexualised depiction of the calibre that they had been denied in a series such as The Saga of Wu Zetian; whilst Marco Polo generated a more cerebral response among what one can assume was a smaller and more niche audience base, certainly if there is a correlation between notoriety on social media and viewership. Beyond the sexualised content of the series, showrunner John Fusco has deployed other narrative choices through which Marco Polo holds more promise as a cross-cultural project, offering creative decisions more palatable to censors and providing cultural verisimilitude sufficient for ardent critics such as Cruz to deem ‘significant’ and for VanDerWerff to acknowledge as possessing an ‘attraction’ for audiences. Fusco has utilised generic staples reinstated by a popular medieval television series like Game of Thrones, conventions that expose the possibilities and limits of cultural representation and experience. Costumed battle sequences and the sumptuous splendour of regal palaces serve as set-pieces of the genre, a dynamic that Vivian Sobchack referred to as ‘surge and splendour’ (1990). For Sobchack, writing on the historical epic in Hollywood cinema of the 1960s, the more grandiose elements of the medieval on screen—such as a palatial setting—helped to construct ‘a discursive field in which the American, middle-class, white (and disproportionately male) spectator/ consumer could experience—not think about—that particular mode of temporality which constituted him or her as a historical subject in capitalist society before the late 1960s’ (ibid., 29). Although Sobchack’s analysis envisages texts produced decades before the Netflix series, the ethos of its reading applies to Marco Polo in a new if not radically altered context. While the historical epics of post-classical era Hollywood sought to simultaneously situate the spectator within a premodern setting that used opulence to reaffirm their status as consumerist subjects in a capitalist system, then Marco Polo uses the premodern to symbolise the geopolitical and consumer system of the early twenty-first century, a globalism in which the cultures of East and West exist within a series of symbiotic arrangements: economic, geopolitical, and social. This dynamic is evident in the series itself through narrative premise and character representation. A poetics of West meets East is apparent from the outset through the symbolic function of the show’s plaudit-receiving opening sequence, one that presents the deliquescent capacity of ink that bleeds from each side of the screen until it finally meets to form various images representative of the events to come in the show. Then, in the opening episode, Fusco introduces the audience to a narrative premise that is essentially a

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fish-out-­of-water tale, with the eponymous hero finding himself in the court of Kublai Khan. Our first encounter with the Khan sees him question three travellers (including the eponymous hero) about their impressions of his kingdom. Here, Marco Polo’s romantic appreciation of the land and its women leads enables his assimilation into the court as ordained by the Khan. When questioned ‘of all the lands a traveller passes through, which province contains […] the most beautiful women of all?’ Polo’s reply is one that exudes the multicultural, offering a supposedly Italian saying: ‘The true sweetness of wine is all one flavour’ (Fusco 2014). Fusco then consolidates the merger of cultural archetypes by introducing an element redolent of the buddy-movie subgenre, one in which two characters traverse an unfamiliar landscape and its obstacles in the fashion of the medieval knight and their squire. In this instance, such a pairing is between Marco Polo and his mentor, Hundred Eyes, played by Tom Wu, a British actor of East Asian heritage. More broadly, the casting of the show reiterates an ethos of West meets East, a medieval multiculturalism of the order observed by Cruz and VanDerWerff and later evinced within a production such as The Great Wall. Actors renowned to audiences familiar with East Asian media culture appear alongside stars notable for their roles in Hollywood films: Zhu Zhu, the presenter-turned-actress who began her career on MTV China, stars as Nergui, servant to the princess, whilst Benedict Wong is more notable for his roles in Hollywood fare such as Prometheus (Ridley Scott 2012) and Kick-Ass 2 (Jeff Wadlow 2013). Meanwhile, a relatively unknown Italian actor in the form of Lorenzo Richelmy for the lead role lends an aura of authenticity to the production, more so than a star name. With the notable exception of Sean Bean, HBO adopted this strategy to a similar extent in Game of Thrones. Despite the symbolism of casting decisions and the meanings imbued within the script, however, the charges of exoticism levelled at the series sustain, undermining the veracity of Marco Polo as a model for broad cross-cultural appeal. In this act, the series falls victim to an overreliance on a problematic yet perennial trope of the medieval epic: the Othering of East Asian characters and spaces. A medieval fantasy series such as Game of Thrones portrays broad and well-rehearsed cultural allegories concerned with enduring romantic myths of white conquest and perceptions of the medieval worlds as Caucasian spaces. Here, both Game of Thrones and Marco Polo recall paradigms of racial representation similar to those at work in a film such as Henry Hathaway’s The Black Rose (1950). In that Hollywood production, the Orient serves as a space of the Other,

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antagonistic and dangerous to American ideals as embodied by Caucasian heroes who are characterised as such by their devotion to vague moral codes of chivalry and honour (C.f. Clarke 2019, 214–40). However, constructions of the medieval Orient in Game of Thrones do not necessarily narrate specific encounters in American military history in the way that Hathaway’s film provides commentary relevant to the Korean War (1950–1953), a didactic tendency that was typical in Hollywood’s medieval fantasies until at least the 1960s (ibid.). Through his representation of the imaginary eastern continent Essos in A Song of Ice and Fire, the series of epic novels upon which HBO’s series is based, George R.R.  Martin plays upon long-­established Western cultural fantasies of the Orient as an exotic, Othered space associated with tropes of danger and darkness. For Martin, Essos is home to Dothraki hordes, a fictional counterpart to the horseback raiders commanded by Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan; it also hosts the mysterious Shadow of Asshai, an expanse of darkness that engulfs the far east of the continent. Through such characterisations, then, the writer forms an image of a medieval Orient that is simultaneously a barbaric and mysterious space—a dark continent—antithetical to the Anglicised sensibilities of Westeros, the show’s mythical substitute for Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Incorporating and expanding upon the depictions formulated by Martin, HBO’s Game of Thrones reaffirms its status as televisual inheritor to the Hollywood medieval through its continuation of the cinema’s stylistic and thematic renderings of the East. Like the far north beyond The Wall in Westeros, the ersatz Orient of Essos serves as the sort of wild and untamed space that Jeffrey Richards previously mentioned in his analysis of engrained anxieties over the East within the Western cultural psyche (Richards 2016, 1). An assessment made by the televisual version of King Robert Baratheon illustrates the fear with which the inhabitants of the show’s Occidental ersatz medieval Europe view the Orient: ‘If the Targaryen girl [Daenerys] convinces her horse lord husband to invade and the Dothraki horde crosses the Narrow Sea… we won’t be able to stop them’ (Benioff and Weiss 2011). Like the white walker ice zombies of the Westerosi northern wilderness, the denizens of Essos pose an existential threat to the feudal order of Westeros and its seat of monarchical power: The Iron Throne. Through its representation of Daenerys’s adventures in (and eventual conquest of) the Asian proxy, Essos, Game of Thrones perpetuates a white saviour narrative conducive to its nostalgic construction of Caucasian conquest in the Orient. For instance, while in the city of Qarth, Daenerys

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locks a wealthy former slave named Xaro Xhoan Daxos in a vault after she realises he has betrayed her. For Daenerys, The Mother of Dragons, her winged fire-breathing creatures—Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion— become fantastical analogues of an advanced weaponry that enables her territorial conquest of Essos. By situating the white female as conqueror, the dragon-queen dynamic progressively subverts earlier depictions of gender in the cinematic Middle Ages whilst reasserting established Hollywood conventions of the Orient as space for Caucasian civilisation to tame. Here, the representation of geographical space—albeit as a fictional analogue—has implications for audiences. With the popularity of Game of Thrones among users of Chinese social media established, it is significant that the series never delves into the East Asian proxy space that Martin alludes to in his novels: Yi-Ti. As a result, Game of Thrones successfully eschews any potentially problematic representations of East Asian culture to audiences and avoids alienating those who are based in or identify with the region. In contrasting Game of Thrones with Marco Polo, here, the key issue is that of proximity: for Chinese audiences, Game of Thrones may offer an engaging but temporally and spatially exotic tale set in an analogue of medieval Europe; whereas Marco Polo provides China with a non-­ fantastical rendering of its own history as told by Western producers. Read within the context of consumption, the latter is problematic for audiences in China and The West alike. As esoteric discussions of Marco Polo’s historical setting and details on social media suggest, Chinese fans are willing to take ownership of their history and cast a discerning eye upon issues of representation and fidelity. Meanwhile, and as commentaries from Cruz and VanDerWerff confirm, discourse in Western media also finds aspects of American narration of the Chinese past problematic. From its outset, Fusco’s series conforms to clichés of the East as a space of danger; and, in doing so, he plays into discourse on exoticist fantasies of the Orient located firmly within the locality of China. In the opening scenes of the first episode, we are introduced to a barbarian attack on a Christian missionary before being transported to a scene with the Khan, in which he expresses his irreverence for The Pope, an enduring symbol of medieval Christendom and—by extension—Western civilisation. Such representations conform to the construct of a dark and mysterious Orient of the order reiterated by centuries of discourse in the West, as previously observed by Richards, and as demonstrated—albeit tangentially—in Game of Thrones. This essentialisation of the East as a space of danger is subsequently recapitulated in the dynamics of Marco Polo’s marketing, especially

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regarding the posters used to promote the series. The main promotional poster for season one centralises the figure of the Khan, placing him amidst the signifiers of war and conflict in the background of the poster, thus associating him with the peril posed by the titular character’s travel into the kingdom of Kublai Khan. Such representations seem to have made little progress since Hollywood’s constructions of the medieval Orient in the 1950s, with Netflix’s promotional material recalling the spectre of Henry Hathaway’s The Black Rose (1950). In that film and its promotional posters, prevailing cultural narratives of ‘yellow peril’ that commentators such as Richards have identified persist. For example, the film’s promotional poster perpetuates fear of Orson Welles’s Kublai Khan derivative as Oriental Other. The premise of a clash of cultures persists some seven decades later with the marketing of Marco Polo and its inclusion of the tagline ‘worlds will collide,’ a statement that conjures connotations of discord and belligerence rather than assimilation and harmony. Likewise, the poster for the first season adopts the tagline ‘war from within,’ which suggests the conflicting cultural allegiances of the titular protagonist. It is, then, as though the appeal of such a marketing campaign for English speaking audiences is one to exploit the dramatic opportunities of cultural conflict that are so well-rehearsed within the genre. Certainly, such creative decisions in post-production undermine and imperil the more unifying aspirations that the showrunner and producers espoused during the development stages of production, undermining the extent to which Marco Polo could offer a successful assimilation of different cultural markets. Subsequent programming decisions made by Netflix only serve to reaffirm this case. The platform marketed an extended episode between seasons one and two as a ‘Christmas special,’ indicating a programming decision that clearly caters to the commercial calendar of territories outside of East Asia considering that Christmas is predominantly celebrated outside of the region.

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter has been to consider the ways in which, through the release of Marco Polo, the medieval television drama has figured within Netflix’s ambitions for expansion in the East Asian streaming market. In this task, the chapter has demonstrated how the observations made by Ying Zhu and Samantha Holloway in the first decade of the twenty-first century have endured throughout the era of the streaming

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wars in the second decade. While Zhu observed the pressures Chinese domestic television faced from foreign productions prior to 2008—‘Chinese trendy dramas are nowhere near as trendy as their Korean counterparts’—a comparable pressure to be on trend stymied Marco Polo as an exploratory effort to break into both new and existing markets for Netflix (Zhu 2008, 91). As examples such as The Great Wall have confirmed, the genre of the medieval epic is exportable popular entertainment; and, through Game of Thrones, it is also evident that the genre is not only scalable to the medium of television streaming but also capable of gaining popularity with Chinese audiences in that form. Yet, case-studies such as Marco Polo illustrate the limitations of the genre’s reach when produced by and within the parameters familiar to Western media companies, a scope that poses difficulties to assess due to the lack of reliably measurable reach among Chinese audiences, East Asia’s biggest and most lucrative consumer market. The fact that Netflix remains banned in China proves that Marco Polo did not inspire the same collaborative endeavours that Legendary Pictures demonstrated in the cinema with The Great Wall. Accusations of Fusco’s failures in cross-cultural representation have also highlighted the need to acknowledge the gaps in knowledge that the evolving contexts of consumption create with regards to streaming and piracy. Ultimately, further studies need to assess the opportunities for Netflix’s expansion in the region by evaluating any comparable models of successful co-production and cross-cultural representation adopted in the cinema through releases such as The Great Wall: a film about Chinese and Western medieval characters uniting to defeat an external (literally, alien) threat. If we can learn from cinematic co-productions that have been successful, then we can construct a criterion that may be used to propose measures for streaming companies to find greater success in East Asia as a whole by surmounting one of the greatest obstacles in modern censorship: The Great Firewall of China.

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Goldberg, Leslie. 2016. “Marco Polo’ Cancelled at Netflix After Two Seasons.” The Hollywood Reporter, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ live-­feed/marco-­polo-­canceled-­at-­netflix-­two-­seasons-­955561. Accessed 3rd February 2021. Goodman, Tim. 2014, “Marco Polo’: TV Review.” The Hollywood Reporter, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/marco-­polo-­tv-­review-­756054. Accessed 3rd February 2021. Great Wall, The. 2016. Directed by Zhang Yimou. Universal Pictures/Legendary Entertainment. Griffiths, James. 2016. “Banned on Chinese TV: ‘Western lifestyles,’ cleavage and time travel.” CNN.com, https://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/31/asia/china-­ banned-­on-­tv-­censorship/index.html. Accessed 4th February 2021. Holloway, Samantha. 2009. “Review of Television in Post-Reform China: Serial Dramas, Confucian Leadership, and the Global Television Market by Ying Zhu. London: Routledge, 2008.” In Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 259–262. http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gqrf20. Accessed 12th February 2021. Kick-Ass 2. 2013. Directed by Jeff Wadlow. Universal Pictures. Kingdom of Heaven. 2005. Directed by Ridley Scott. 20th Century Fox. Levy, Pierre. 1999. Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, 2nd edition. Translated by Robert Bononno. New  York: Basic Books. Maltby, Richard. 2003. Hollywood Cinema, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell. Marco Polo. 2014–2016. Directed by John Fusco. Netflix. Neale, Steve. 2000. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge. Prometheus. 2012. Directed by Ridley Scott. 20th Century Fox.   Richards, Jeffrey. 2016. China and the Chinese in Popular Film: From Fu Manchu to Charlie Chan, 1st edition. New York: I.B. Tauris. Rogers, Mark C, Michael Epstein, and Jimmie L Reeves. 2002. “The Sopranos as HBO Brand Equity: The Art of Commerce in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” In This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos, edited by David Lavery, 42–57. New York and London: Columbia University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 1990. “‘Surge and Splendor’: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic.” Representations 29 (1), 24–49. Sun, Luke. 2018. “Chinese drama ‘The Empress of China’ taken off air for being ‘too sexy.’” Shanghaiist.com, http://shanghaiist.com/2014/12/30/chinese-­ drama-­empress-­of-­china-­banned-­too-­sexy/. Accessed 3rd February 2021. Tait, Amelia. 2020. “‘I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it’: how it feels to make a TV flop.” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-­and-­radio/2020/ jul/04/i-­dont-­know-­if-­ill-­ever-­get-­over-­it-­how-­it-­feels-­to-­make-­a-­tv-­flop. Accessed 5th February 2021.

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A New Kind of 2Getherness: Screening Thai Soft Power in Thai Boys Love (BL) Lakhon Miguel Antonio Lizada

On the eve of the 2020 Songkran, amidst a global pandemic, Twitter users in Asia engaged in a frenzied online skirmish that pitted presumably patriotic Chinese netizens (who most probably engaged in the cyber warfare through a VPN) against their counterparts from Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and even the Philippines. The source of the conflict was not interborder disputes or military-backed sojourns in the South China Sea (though these inevitably made an appearance further down the line). In this case, the faces that launched a thousand tweets were those of Thai actor Vachirawit “Bright” Chiva-aree and his girlfriend Thai model Weeraya “New” Sukaram. Bright, along with fellow Thai actor Metawin “Win” Opas-iamkajorn, played the lead role in Grammy TV’s (GMMTV) 2Gether: The Series (2020), a lakhon (television soap opera) that became popular among Mainland Chinese and Southeast Asian audiences through free streaming sites like YouTube. The online skirmish started when Bright “liked a seemingly innocuous tweet from a Thai photographer containing

M. A. Lizada (*) The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_7

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four cityscape images, one of which was from Hong Kong,” that seemingly insinuated that Hong Kong was a “country” (McDevitt 2020). Despite tweeting an apology, Bright was still subjected to more furious online attacks. Mainland Chinese netizens discovered that his girlfriend retweeted a conspiracy theory that claims that the Covid-19 virus was manufactured in a Wuhan laboratory. They also unearthed an Instagram conversation between the couple where Bright tells New that she is as “beautiful as a Chinese girl.” New then replies that she looks more like a “Taiwanese girl,” thus implying that Taiwan is a separate country. Calls for boycott of the series eventually ensued. Thai netizens immediately came to their celebrities’ defence. Consolidated through the hashtag #nnevvy, the heated exchanges on Twitter eventually generated jokes and memes, mostly coming from Thais who used self-deprecating political humour to confuse the Chinese online offensive. When Chinese netizens deployed the term “NMSL” (which translates to “Hope your mother dies”), the Thais threw the ill wish back by saying that they have “‘20 mothers,’ a reference to King Vajiralongkorn’s purported harem of 20 women” (Banka 2020). Thai supporters would eventually find reinforcements from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. For instance, Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong tweeted “Hong Kong stands with our freedom-loving friends in Thailand against Chinese bullying! #nnevvy” (Wong 2020). This united front among the “four Asian democracies” eventually led to the online formation of the so-called Milk Tea Alliance (McDevitt 2020), a reference to the popular sweet drink produced in Thailand, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and widely consumed in the Philippines. Such an alliance was not without political overlays, as all four were caught up in serious political entanglements with Mainland China at that time. Such issues include Taiwan’s on-going sovereignty issues, the year-long escalating protests in Hong Kong, and tense territorial disputes in the South China Sea. The online squabble also came at a time when reports of 11 Chinese dams drying up the Mekong River were coming in (Eyler 2020). I begin with this anecdote as it foregrounds the issues that I address in this chapter. While this brief online skirmish resulted in the temporary forging of an online alliance that touched on serious geopolitical issues, such tensions were generated from a dynamic consumption of an emerging popular form: the Thai Boys Love (BL) lakhon. That this tension escalated from the keyboard fury of disappointed patriotic fans to an all-out comic and creative geopolitical war that teased out deeply rooted

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nationalist sentiments illustrates the burgeoning creative and political power of this popular text. The ensuing discussion thus explores how contemporary Thai BL is utilised to mobilise articulations of soft power as such a power is harnessed most especially through the use of streaming service of sites like YouTube, with a free-to-use tier, as opposed to exclusively subscription-­ based platforms like Netflix or the LGBT-themed GagaOOLala. The chapter begins with a brief survey on the interface between Thai queer cultures and cinema after 1997. A brief discussion on Thai cinema is necessary as the first Thai BL stories were told through the cinematic form. In fact, the first BL lakhon such as My Bromance: The Series (2016) and Water Boyy: The Series (2017) were adaptations of earlier BL films. Moreover, contemporary scholarship on Thai teen cinema characterises the genre as one that elucidates on the tension between nationalist paradigms and the creative frameworks of transnational cinema (Ingawanij 2006). As “queer-themed” stories aimed primarily towards younger audiences, Thai lakhon inherits and reconfigures the politics of its predecessors. The second section explores how the lakhon format, in style and thematic thrusts, absorbed and appropriated the BL form. The third section assembles these critical rubrics together and pairs these with a critical meditation on the notion of soft power in my discussion of the most successful series to date: 2Gether: The Series. While not necessarily the most original and compelling story (compared to the other BL lakhon), 2Gether: The Series merits examination for several reasons. First, as mentioned in the introductory anecdote, how 2Gether: The Series was consumed was in itself out of the ordinary; the lakhon was broadcast in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic when most viewers in Asia were confined inside their homes. Sustained engagement on the internet eventually led to increased viewership of both the lakhon and its predecessors. Secondly, the success of 2Gether: The Series in terms of viewership, critical reception, and marketing of its stars demonstrates how the mainstream commercial Thai industry has seemingly “perfected” the lucrative craft of appropriating the BL form. This brings me to the third significance of 2Gether: The Series. The series was so well-received in the Philippines that ABS-CBN, a major media conglomerate like GMMTV, acquired the rights to broadcast a Tagalog-dubbed version of the series. The growing popularity of BL also inspired local filmmakers and screenwriters to produce their own BL stories. As will be elucidated in this chapter, all three points illustrate the growing influence of Thai lakhon both as a potential alternative to South

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Korean and Japanese popular culture, and as a viable resource for cultural and economic transnational power harnessed through the democratising medium of an accessible and largely “free” streaming service (YouTube).

Interfacing Thai Queer Culture and Post-1997 Screen Culture The year 1997 was a pivotal time in Thailand. The kingdom was the ground zero of the Asian financial crisis, which started with the collapse of the Thai baht. The year 1997 was also the time of the promulgation of the now defunct People’s Constitution, which sought to, among other things, eliminate “the prevalence of corrupt patronage-based politicians” by strengthening the party system (Kuhonta 2008, 375–376), and furthermore, encourage greater democratic participation on the part of its citizens (Ratthamamarit 2003). The political and economic consequences in the aftermath of the crisis and the democratising possibilities supposedly enabled by the People’s Constitution produced a permutation of effects on queer sexual politics and queer screen cultures. The trade liberalisation demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in exchange for a billion-dollar stimulus package (Fischer 1998) increased the purchasing power of an emergent Thai gay middle class. To be sure, and as in the case of many urban-based queer cultures around the world, there has always been a link between queer cultures and capitalist economies in Thailand. Peter Jackson (2009) attributes the early formations of queer communities in Thailand in the 1970s and 1980s to the “mass circulation popular magazines” that “helped consolidate the meanings of new identities in regular columns on kathoey, gay, and tom-dee (“butch-femme” female same-sex) issues” (Jackson 2009, 363). This mass production of magazines was enabled precisely by the boom of the Thai economy during this period (376). What happened after the IMF-induced trade liberalisation policies however was the importation of a transnational mode of consumption and production into Thai queer culture. Jackson (2011) attributes this transnational turn to several factors: “new electronic media, the rise of intra-­ Asian gay tourism, the expansion of local Thai gay and lesbian markets, the political successes of NGOs and the contributing role of international HIV/AIDS agencies” (Jackson 2011, 20–21). This proliferation of emergent sexual subjectivities, however, was not without its own pushbacks.

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Thaksin Shinawatra who won under the banner of nationalism (as a response to the influx of foreign capital at the expense of smaller local businesses) implemented the Social Order Campaign, a heteronationalist campaign that supposedly addressed “middle-class concerns about teenagers engaging in pre-marital sex, consuming party drugs, drinking alcohol, and staying out late at discos, karaoke bars, and clubs” (22). While the scene post-1997 saw a proliferation of films that seemingly celebrated queer cultures (Owens and Dissanayake 2011, 141), such films still confirmed the heteronationalist paradigms advocated by the Social Order Campaign even after the coup d’etat that ousted Thaksin in 2006. An example of such queer texts would be kathoey (loose translation: transgender or lady boy) films which saw a revival after 1997. According to Serhat Unaldi (2011), in contrast to the kathoey films in the 1980s, the post-1997 ones emphasised on the role of acceptance (Unaldi 2011, 64). Moreover, in films such as Saving Private Tootsie (2002), the thematic focus on acceptance is structured within the framework of a group-­ oriented narrative that occasionally would slide into patriotic moralising. In such cases, “Thainess matters, not gender” (66). Another prominent example closer to the concerns of this chapter would be Love of Siam (2007), regarded to be the first Thai BL-oriented film (Prasannam 2019, 68). The film is a romance between two childhood friends, Mew (Witwisit “Pchy” Hiranyawongkul) and Tong (Mario Maurer), who are reunited after a tragedy sets them apart. The romance ends in a bittersweet manner when Tong tells Mew that “[he] cannot be with [him] as [his] boyfriend, but it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love [him]” before returning to take care of his mother and recovering alcoholic father. Brett Farmer (2011) argues that the creative power of Love of Siam comes from its ability to structure its narrative and thematic thrusts according to the notion of “vernacular queerness”—that is, something that “denotes not much a set of textual representations of predetermined content and value as a processual negotiation of varied possibilities, a translation of the abstract discourses of sexual modernity into accessible and legible form” (Farmer 2011, 85). For Farmer, a critical strategy utilised by Love of Siam involves importing and absorbing transnationally circulating queer narratives (in this case, the BL tradition) and redeploying these within the familiar, legible structure of the Thai family narrative. BL films that follow Love of Siam such as My Bromance (2014), Waterboyy (2015), and even the dark parody of the Twilight films, Red Wine in a Dark Night (2015) likewise

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exemplify Farmer’s notion of vernacular queerness within the context of Thai familialism. Another important aspect to highlight here is the international reach of such films. The year 1997 was the beginning of the New Thai Cinema wave. Films such as Nang Nak (1999) and Tears of the Black Tiger (2000) were screened in cinemas across Europe and the United States through the financial patronage of Miramax (Stephens 2001, 124). Both films are what May Adadol Ingawanij calls “heritage films” (Ingawanij 2007, 180). According to Ingawanij, heritage films are characterised by: an emphasis on marketing, high production values, the presentation of Thainess as a visual attraction, the pastiche of historical personages and traumatic episodes in the biography of the Thai nation, and most significantly the wishful claim to quality as films of a sakon or ‘international/Western’ calibre. (180–181)

Ingawanij’s notion of the Thai heritage film bears similarities to Andrew Higson’s characterisation of British heritage films during the administration of Margaret Thatcher (1993). According to Higson, the representation of the past in British heritage films is a “visually spectacular pastiche, inviting nostalgic gaze that resists the ironies and social critiques so often suggested narratively by these films” (Higson 1993, 109). Thai heritage films, as characterised by Ingawanij, share the same strategy of materialising nostalgia as a commodified artifice. Their functions however, operating within the context of the post-1997 political economy, are a paradox: on the one hand, utilising “Thainess” to activate some sense of lucrative nationalism, while on the other hand, crafting such cinematic forms with the global audience in mind. Heritage films supposedly contrasted the teen films that became popular in early 1990s in that such films “were reviled because the more attractively their defining signatures—the ‘music video’ rite-of-passage drama and the ‘school skirts and shorts’ comedy— appeared to appropriate the sakon vernacular of pop culture, the less thai and the more ‘imitative’ such films seemed to be” (Ingawanij 2006, 150). And yet, as Ingawanij reminds us, the vertical integration mechanism that enabled and sustained the production of teen films for a period was the same apparatus that heritage films used to advance its cinematic charge and aesthetic politics (150). As in Nang Nak and Tears of the Black Tiger, kathoey and BL films which rode on this wave enjoyed modest success in international film circuits. The first Thai film to be screened commercially

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in cinemas in the United States was The Iron Ladies (Stephens 2001, 124) a comedy drama on real-life kathoey volleyball players. Love of Siam would later replicate that same kind of transnational success through its appearances in regional film festivals such as the 10th Cinemanila Film Festival in the Philippines. The film would also catapult its lead actor, Mario Maurer, into regional fame. These characterisations regarding post-1997 Thai cinema, most especially queer-themed ones, are instructive preambles in that BL lakhon would “inherit” and adapt these concerns in their creative meditation on queer sexual politics within the structure of a reconfigured version of an East Asian popular text. Most notable of these would be the role that the transnational traffic of production and consumption would play in the formation of this new mode of creative soft power through the machinations of a well-oiled vertical integration apparatus. To understand this further, we must now turn to the format that BL narratives have since adopted after their initial popularity in the cinematic form.

Same, Same, but Different: The Rise of Thai BL Lakhon Lakhon, unlike their Western television series counterparts, typically run for “a finite period of generally no more than a couple of months with one to two-hour episodes aired in batched instalments over several nights each week” (Farmer 2015, 74). Both Western series and lakhon feature comic or melodramatic renditions of everyday concerns in the “personal and domestic spheres of everyday life (kinship, sexuality, generational conflict, marriage, birth, illness, death etc.)” with the latter’s renditions “characterised by a very high degree of formulaicism with stock plots, character types, scenarios, settings and even actors recurring from series to series in an overtly repetitive, conventional manner” (80–81). Another distinguishing feature of lakhon is its connection with literary forms. Lakhon are often based on traditional and contemporary literary works and are re-adapted and updated now and then (81). Like many popular forms, lakhon perform politicised and ideological labour. Much like teen cinema, they are “routinely disregarded as worthless trash” and as “objects of social pollution that need to be expelled or quarantined” (80–81). Upon their adoption of the lakhon format, Thai BLs eventually shared in and advanced the politics of its new medium.

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BL emerged from the yaoi culture “urban subculture” in the early 2000s with most of its content clandestinely being circulated in manga stores in Siam Square (Prasannam 2019, 66). With the proliferation of readily accessible and more affordable forms of digital technology, the fandom eventually moved online to elude the authoritarian grip of state censors (66). Early Thai practitioners of this kind of fandom maintained their connection with their Japanese yaoi roots through the shared practice of “shipping,” that is pairing up and generating all sorts of fictional romantic relationships between real-life celebrities (66). In the Thai context, this shipping fan practice paralleled the entry of the Korean Wave in the kingdom, with fans shipping South Korean pop stars with each other (68). Such fan practices are maintained in the construction of young actors in the new BL lakhon. Before proceeding further, it might be useful to clarify the distinction between yaoi and BL, given that these terms have similarities and differences. Prasannam reminds us that yaoi is an “acronym for the Japanese phrases yama nashi (no climax), ochi nashi (no punch line), and imi nashi (no meaning)” and is “connected to the Japanese slang connoting anal sex” (Prasannam 2019, 64). A typical yaoi story involves romantic and erotic encounters between a usually stronger and more masculine top called a seme and a weaker, more submissive bottom known as uke. While sharing these characteristics with yaoi, the category BL “is particularly used in the industry context referring to manga and/or anime which are available in bookshops and convenience stores” and whose obscene content had been distilled (65). Moreover, as highlighted by the prominence of “shipping” among yaoi fan communities, the texts that may be considered as yaoi include parodies and fan fiction. In this regard, BL seems to be the more appropriate category for these lakhon in that these stories are deprived of any overt sexual scenes. More importantly and in terms of marketability, these lakhon are referred to by fans and viewers as BL, and thus strengthening the identity of these texts as erotically sanitised commodities on the “shelves” of YouTube and other free streaming services. The success of Love Sick: The Series (2014) heralded the wave of BL lakhon. As in the tradition of lakhon, the series was an adaptation of a novel Love Sick: Chunlamun Num Kangkeng Namngoen (Love Sick: The Chaotic Lives of Blue Shorts Guys) (Prasannam 2019, 69). The series follows Phun (Nawat Phumphotingam), the vice-president of the high school student council and Noh (Chonlathorn Kongyingyong), the president of the school’s music club. The conflict of the series begins when Phun’s

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father insists that his son date the daughter of his business partner in spite of the fact that Phun already has a girlfriend. Phun enlists the help of his sister Pang, a BL fan girl who agrees to help him change their father’s mind under the condition that he enter a fake relationship with a boy. As luck would have it, Noh fails to submit the budget for the music club on time and begs Phun to ensure that the club would not be disbanded. Both boys then proceed to enter a fake relationship and eventually develop real feelings for each other. Aside from being the first BL lakhon, Love Sick: The Series is significant in that it eventually functions as a transitory text that enabled BL to vector out from the cinematic genre and enter the political entanglements of the lakhon format. Thomas Baudinette (2019) argues that one of the creative tasks that Love Sick: The Series performs is introducing the uninitiated viewers into the BL conventions while simultaneously ensuring that such queer engagements are contained within the parameters of Thai heteronormativity (Baudinette 2019, 123). Baudinette identifies several ways in which such parameters are seen. First, as in the other lakhon that will succeed it, the romance of Noh and Phun is embedded within a multi-­ character narrative involving heterosexual relationships (122). Another would be the extensive use of the kathoey and tut (effeminate gay men) characters who are “deployed throughout the series to further cement the heteronormative characterisation of the male leads” (125). It is helpful to note that kathoey characters are no longer present in more recent BL lakhon. Love Sick: the Series thus performs a transitory function in a sense that it retained some features familiar to Thai audiences as far as stereotypical (and heteronormative) queer representation is concerned while simultaneously introducing a new form. To this end, Baudinette argues that the character of Pang is significant as it is she who functions as the series’ fujoshi (translated as “rotten girl” or someone who is immersed in BL fandom), whose purpose is to “educate viewers about fujoshi practices” within the series’ diegesis (126). In the wake of the success of Love Sick: The Series, different media companies began exploring and capitalising on BL’s lucrative potential. Most notable of these is GMMTV which in recent years has been at the forefront of producing BL lakhon. Such lakhon reveal the appropriations rendered by the emerging industry. The success of GMMTV’s first lakhon, SOTUS: The Series (2016) relied heavily on its ability to upset the typical seme-uke dichotomy. In this series, Prachaya “Singto” Ruangroj plays Kongpob, an Engineering freshman undergoing a week-long hazing ritual

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headed by Arthit (Perawat “Krist” Sangpotirat). In a typical BL story, the senior and more visibly muscular Arthit would be in the dominant role while the skinnier and younger Kongpob would be on the submissive end. In SOTUS however, it is Kongpob who actively pursues and flirts with Arthtit and who takes care of him when he gets sick. Such dismantling and disruption of roles was a “legacy” of Love Sick: The Series which also utilised a confusion of uke and seme conventions (Baudinette 2019, 124). Later BL lakhon would also illustrate the energised tensions brought about by the traffic of transnational capital and popular content. An example of this would be Theory of Love (2019) where the romance between a couple played by Atthaphan “Gun” Phunsawat and Jumpol “Off” Adulkittiporn is patterned after prominent commercial romance films from Hollywood. As in their cinematic predecessors, BL lakhon also creatively document critical changes in contemporary Thai queer sexual politics in relation to the shifts in economic geopolitics. Dredge Byung’chu Kang (2017) argues that the sexual aspirations of primarily urban middle-class Thai gay men have shifted from farangs (white foreigners) to so-called White East Asians—that is, “Thais of Chinese descent and East or white Asians, namely Japanese [or] Korean” (Kang 2017, 188). Kang attributes this change in preference to the tilting of the balance in economic power. As he puts it: “White Asians represent modernity and middle-class consumerism specifically tied to the Asian region and Asian bodies” (189). Actors who have visibly Sino-Thai or mixed ethnicity facial features and are cast in BL lakhon (e.g. Bright, Krist, and Gun) illustrate this shift. Such casting choices do not just confirm contemporary Thai popular culture’s affinity with the Korean Wave; they also subtly reveal shifting economic paradigms that are encrypted through performances of a mode sexual politics that is legible and lucrative. It is important at this juncture to state that the content produced by major entertainment conglomerates like GMMTV do not simply refer to the television series but to the total, all-encompassing commodity package that includes fan meets with the stars and offscreen adventures. Using the case of the Dark Blue Kiss (2019) couple (Tawan “Tay” Vihokratana and Thitipoom “New” Techaapaikhun) as an example, Thomas Baudinette (2020) argues that the stardom construction of actors who launch and accelerate their career through the so-called Boys Love machine is patterned after the construction of celebrities in Japan and South Korea. According to Baudinette, such actors go through seven stages: after being successfully scouted (Stage One), the actors debut in a BL lakhon (Stage

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Two). In these performances, their homoeroticism is consistently punctuated with product placements (Stage Three). The popularity of the series is further enhanced by hashtags on social media (Stage Four). From there, the actors host fan meets where they perform their homoeroticism scenes “out of character” (Stage Five). They eventually appear in “variety programmes” such as travel and food blogs (Stage Six). The final stage sees the actors performing in more BL lakhon where new couples are introduced and the current couple “graduates” into playing “heterosexual roles” (Baudinette 2020). As demonstrated by Baudinette, we begin to see how the BL narrative slowly but surely is capitalised and harnessed to be a source of unique economic power. It is also important to note that the three pairings I mentioned—Singto and Krist (#SingtoKrist), Off and Gun (#OffGun) and Tay and New (#TayNew)—are affectionately regarded by fans as the “holy triumvirate” of BL lakhon. During their construction, GMMTV perfected a lucrative scheme—a commercialised techne whose means of proceedings will be applied to the heirs of this triumvirate. 2Gether: The Series, as one of the latest lakhon, continues and mobilises the creative and ideological labour foregrounded not only by Love Sick: The Series but the other queer-themed texts that have since deployed the seductive and lucrative power of on-­ screen sexual politics to marshal forms of soft power.

The Quarantine Couple: The Case of #Brightwin 2Gether: The Series begins with shots of Tine (Win), a university freshman, in a series of unsuccessful dates with girls. Tine discovers later that he has a tut admirer named Green (Korawit “Gun” Boonsri) who chases him all over the campus and showers him with gifts. To ward Green off, Tine’s friends advise him to seek out the mysterious campus heartthrob Sarawat (Bright) from the music club and ask him to stand in as a fake boyfriend. Tine eventually develops romantic feelings for Sarawat. It is also revealed in a later episode that Sarawat has had a crush on Tine since bumping into him in a concert the previous year and has since been looking all over the place for him. Tine and Sarawat’s story is accompanied by other romantic storylines: between Sarawat’s best friend, Man (Chinnarat “Mike” Siripongchawalit) and Tine’s older brother, Type (Jirakit “Toptap” Kuariyakul), Green and the music club president Dim (Sivakorn “Guy” Lertchuchot), and Sarawat’s rival Mil (Sattabut “Drake” Laedeke) and Sarawat’s younger brother Phukong (Thanatsaran “Frank” Samthonglai).

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Drake and Frank are also another BL “couple” who have their own series. The five-episode sequel, Still 2Gether (2020) also introduces a heterosexual love story between Sarawat’s friend Boss (Chanagun “Gunsmile” Arpornsutinan) and the cheerleading team member Pear (Pattranite “Love” Limpatiyakorn). 2Gether: The Series utilises certain tropes and strategies from previous BL lakhon, most notably the narrative of “fake boyfriends turning into real relationships” popularised first by Love Sick: The Series. Moreover, like most of its predecessors, the lakhon reconfigures the conventional seme-­ uke dynamics with the aspiring straight playboy Tine eventually assuming more feminine roles and the football star athlete Sarawat gushing over his long-time unnamed crush like a lovesick schoolgirl. Such upsetting is shared by other characters. The supposedly more masculine college student Man is positioned as the economic inferior to his white-collared and employee-of-the-month-prototype partner, Type. This relationship between Man and Type somehow replicates the turbulent romantic substory between Sun (Supakorn “Bod” Sriphotong) and Mork (Gawin “Fluke” Caskey) in Dark Blue Kiss: The Series. In the latter, Sun is an entrepreneurial no-nonsense coffee shop owner who takes in and cares for Mork, a juvenile delinquent who gets involved in gang-related violence. As in SOTUS: The Series which featured a heterosexual love story in its sublot, the eventual inclusion of a heterosexual love story in the lakhon’s sequel distils the transgressive potential of the BL into sanitised levels. The economic power of 2Gether: The Series lies precisely in this unoriginality and reliance on established formulas. Reviewers from across the lakhon’s regional reach attribute the success of the series to its easily digestible plot. Kenn Anthony Mendoza writes that one definitive reason for the series’ success can be found in its “light and simple plot,” where the focus is “on Tine and Sarawat’s romance alone… [providing] a much-needed escape, packed with cheesy and comedic moments between the two to elicit smiles from its audience” (Mendoza 2020). This is in contrast to lakhon like Kiss: The Series (2016) and Kiss Me Again (2018) where the BL storyline is absorbed or is treated as a substory within a larger heterosexual plot. In another review from the Philippine side, Chuck Smith also praises the series for its simplicity (Smith 2020). The successes of 2Gether: The Series and its stars who are now identified through the hashtag #BrightWin demonstrates GMMTV’s mastery of both the BL narrative and the structure that guarantees stardom success. If we follow Baudinette’s formulation on the trajectory of Thai stardom structure through the so-called

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Boys Love machinery, we can see that Bright and Win have achieved the necessary milestones at an unusually accelerated pace. Much like the socalled Holy Trinity of Thai BL that trailblazed the paths for them, Bright and Win have appeared in global meets and variety shows where they tease the fans with a smart balance between their on-screen homoerotic chemistry and the homosocial bond that still preserves their real-life heterosexuality. A visit to their Instagram pages (Chiva-aree 2020; Opas-­iamkajorn 2020) will lead one to a gallery of advertisements and endorsement of products—some of which made appearances as overt product placements in the lakhon itself. The modes of streaming are instrumental to the lakhon’s success. The lakhon remains to this date the most widely viewed Thai BL lakhon on YouTube. As of this writing, its first episode has clocked in at 16 million views and its final episode has close to 5 million views (Thongjila 2021a). It is highly likely that the significant drop in viewership can be attributed to the decline in the number of Mainland Chinese viewers after the Milk Tea Alliance online war. In spite of this, the viewership numbers for both the first and final episodes are still higher compared to GMMTV’s maiden BL lakhon, SOTUS: The Series (at 10 million for the first episode) (Samajarn 2020). The excitable multilingual conversations (Thai, English, Tagalog, and Bahasa, among others) in both the comments sections and the chat boxes during the series’ live broadcasts confirm the international reach of the series’ popularity. The lakhon’s international reach is amplified furthermore by the fact that the Philippine media conglomerate ABS-CBN earned the rights to broadcast a Tagalog-dubbed version of the series through its iWant streaming platform and thus granting easier accessibility to a wider audience. Bright was subsequently invited to perform the dubbed version’s theme song: a cover of a popular Filipino love song “With a Smile” by the Eraserheads (dubbed the “Beatles of the Philippines”). This, however, was not the first time a Thai actor would collaborate with ABS-CBN. In 2012, following the international success of the Thai film Crazy Little Thing Called Love (2010), the German-Thai actor Mario Maurer was invited to co-star in the Filipino romantic comedy, Suddenly It’s Magic (2012) opposite local pop icon, Erich Gonzales. Maurer was also invited to be a model of the local clothing brand Penshoppe. There are key differences between Maurer’s collaboration and BrightWin’s success. First is that while Maurer was already known among the Filipino gay audiences through his portrayal of Tong in Love of Siam, it was his performance in a heterosexual

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romcom that led to these transnational collaborations. Bright and Win on the other hand became popular because of a gay-themed story. Another is the fact that unlike Maurer, Bright and Win never had to leave Thailand. While this may be attributed to the fact that such collaborations happened during a worldwide pandemic, the fact that such a collaboration (the Tagalog dubbing and the recording of the theme song that was done in Thailand) could even exist confirms the role screen culture has in the installation and advancement of Thai economic power. In the next section, I explore the deployment of such emergent soft power more intimately through an examination of its application to the Philippine case.

#Sanaall: Thai Soft Power and the Philippine Case The increase in the popularity of Thai pop culture parallels Thailand’s rise in terms of soft power. Joseph Nye Jr. in his seminal book Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2003) defines soft power as one that “rests on the ability to shape the preferences of others” (Nye 2004, 5). He identifies culture, political values, and foreign policy as viable sources for the harnessing of such power (11). In his book, Nye investigates the various ways in which the United States in particular wielded such power in their geopolitical conflicts. On the aspect of “culture,” Nye explores the ways in which the United States utilised facets of their popular culture (products such as Coca-Cola and jeans, films, and rock-and-roll songs) to reinforce their ideological paradigms and defeat the Soviet-led Communist juggernaut during the Cold War (48–49). Indeed, popular culture, when realigned with a nation-state’s domestic and foreign policies, can be a powerful force in the deployment of soft power. In recent years, emerging Asian economies such as Japan, South Korea, and now, Thailand have been activating their cultural apparatuses to harness and strengthen their countries’ soft power for political and economic gains. According to The 2019 Soft Power Report prepared by the University of Southern California’s Centre for Public Policy, Thailand ranks sixth in terms of Asian soft power, following Japan (first), South Korea (second), Singapore (third), China (fourth), and Taiwan (fifth) (McClory 2019, 67). Kavi Chongkittavorn argues that despite the prevalence of corruption and inequality, the kingdom draws much of its economic power from the tourism and entertainment industries that have since taken advantage of the growing East Asian market (Chongkittavorn 2020). In both style and form, BL lakhon exemplifies this flexing of soft power—from its easily

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consumable narratives to its product placements that showcase Thai products, to its deployment of the affluent East Asian as the ideal cosmopolitan body. In his analysis of East Asian soft power, Chua Beng Huat argues that “to achieve soft power, the exported pop culture must be able to shift its audience’s perceptions, preferences, interpretative frameworks and emotions, i.e., a set of cognitive processes, towards a generally positive disposition and attraction to the exporting country, which is the applicant of soft power” (Chua 2012, 121). The post-reception influence of 2Gether: The Series, most especially in the Philippines, demonstrates this. Not only was the series and its prized actor imported virtually to the shores of the archipelago; it also encouraged filmmakers and screenwriters to craft their own BL narratives based on what they have seen on GMMTV’s channel. An example of this is Gameboys (2020) which has been screened and has won awards in international film festivals. What is notable in the Philippine reception of 2Gether: The Series and the locally made BL series is how such consumptions are viewed within the context of self-identification and emancipation as queer subjects in a predominantly homophobic Catholic country. As Smith puts it, it is a way of saying gay men finally have their own story (Smith 2020). Baudinette calls this reaction of the Philippine case a form of “aspirational consumption” linking this notion to a popular Taglish phrase and frequent hashtag used by Filipino netizens: “Sana All” (Baudinette 2020). In the Filipino language, sana is an expression of wish, hope, or desire. The phrase “Sana All” is affectionately and comically uttered in the face of another party’s success with a wish that the same good fortune can happen to anyone as well. “Sana All” is chanted in BL fan meets, typed up in YouTube chat boxes, and used as a hashtag in the trailer of the dubbed version of 2Gether: The Series. Thus, while I agree with Baudinette’s notion of how the phrase within the context of the reception of BL lakhon’s sexual politics is elevated into a rallying call for emancipation, I also argue that “Sana All” is a confirmation of the position of BL lakhon as an emerging channel for soft power. By uttering “Sana All” in the face of a seemingly foreign but legible queer narrative, Filipino viewers implicitly import and accept the frameworks generated by lakhon as the structure by which their narratives of emancipation may hinge on. In doing so, BL lakhon actively promotes Thailand as a site for utopian visions for sexual fantasies and as a regional centre where privileged narratives may spring from. In the Philippine context, Sana All speaks of a mode of regional solidarity where sexual politics becomes both a rallying point for new alliances and a resource of economic power.

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Conclusion As in its post-1997 cinematic predecessors, BL lakhon functions as both creative documentation of the dynamism between Thai queer politics and transnational capital as well as a resource in which this dynamism could be advanced in lucrative ways. As demonstrated by the case of GMMTV’s BL lakhon, most notably 2Gether: The Series, the use of free streaming services increased BL lakhon’s regional reach and multiplied Thai soft power exponentially by way of its meticulous and surgical appropriation of the BL form for its domestic and international audiences. While time can only tell if Thai popular culture can truly stand as a rival and a viable alternative to Japanese and South Korean popular culture—of which it has extracted its stardom constructions from—its bourgeoning popularity and growing influence as both a marketable commodity and as framework for sexual politics cannot be ignored. Going back to the anecdote I began this chapter with, such a popularity speaks not just of enjoyment but also of a potential political tool for regional solidarity in the face of complicated geopolitics.

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Content Carnival? (Re)Viewing Representation, Indianness, and OTT Culture in India Anmol Dutta

As our reality moves increasingly towards the virtual, as exemplified by Meta’s (née Facebook) proposed “metaverse,” digital platforms enable the vision of a fluid world, one that has widened “the range of our imaginary geography” as we vicariously experience “the other” worlds (Buonnano qtd. in Lobato 2019, 9). It could be argued that ours is a streaming generation—with everything that we want, literally at our fingertips: fast fashion, prime delivery, five-minute crafts, quick cooking, live music; we are a generation driven by immediacy and impermanence. Following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in late-2019, global lockdowns have produced a harsh hindrance on our fast-tack lives, further solidifying the prevalent streaming culture and its most compelling aspect: the video OTT (or over-the-top) culture. Media scholars Amanda Lotz, Roman Lobato and Julian Thomas contend that “over-the-top”

A. Dutta (*) University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_8

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essentially represents “internet-distributed television services” that are SVOD (subscription-based video on demand) such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney Plus (Lotz et al. 2018). Stream media is transforming patterns of the dissemination and consumption of content, globally. Despite mirroring several aspects of the steady expansion of the industry, globally, the growth of Indian OTT platforms remains peculiar. One cannot overlook the restrictive accessibility of the digital culture to large sections of people in the country. “The availability of smartphones that are cheap with the internet has increased the participation in the digital culture”; however, the prevalent “digital divide in India has to be kept in mind while understanding that the technical expertise and the infrastructural resources are still not available to many people” (Chatterjee 2018, 45). Despite the confounding controversies surrounding the speedy growth of Netflix in India, it is imperative to acknowledge that the target audience consciously remains the privileged, English-speaking, urban middle-class. Netflix was launched in India in 2016, and as Netflix executive John Sakari informed the Times of India, it catered only to the English-speaking elites, “who travel abroad, are wealthy and want to watch the latest shows that are being launched in the US” (Sarkari qtd. in Lobato 2019, 99). Conceptualising the relationship between the global and the national, most scholars have engaged the global predilections of Netflix asking the question: “Is Netflix a global service with local versions, or a collection of national services tied together into a global platform?” (Lobato and Lotz 2020, 135). To delineate these possibilities that enable or limit the scope of Netflix, I explore the regional, national, geo-political conflicts that penetrate the terrain specifically of Netflix India. When I use “Netflix India,” I specifically mean Indian original content on Netflix in Hindi, English/ Hinglish: where the Indian tongue speaking English attempts to domesticate the language, “making it their own.” It is noteworthy that Netflix also has several regional Indian language titles. Netflix India announced its first Telugu language original titled Pitta Kathalu on January 20, 2021, an anthology movie set to release on the platform on February 19, 2021. As the pandemic relinquished the movie-theatre experience, Netflix India churned out thirty different Indian original movies on this streaming giant in 2020. Roman Lobato notes “intensely local popular cultures across India have established channels alongside the exotica of foreign content that lures urban elites to Netflix” (Lobato 2019, 142). According to a recent article in The Hindu, “India has the highest viewership of films on

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Netflix globally” (Bhargava 2020). Owing to the class divide and the nature of content, plans for a monthly membership of Netflix in India range anywhere from Rs. 199 to Rs. 799. Despite its cost, “over the last year, 80% of Netflix’s members in India chose to watch a film every week” reported The Hindu.

Netflix Indian(ness), Diaspora, and the “Global Flows” The sort of urgent cultural discourse that puts India and, more importantly, an “Indianness” on the global map? In a scene from the recent Netflix film, The White Tiger, Indian businessperson Ashok (Rajkumar Rao), returning to India from the United States, and his driver, Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), dig into a simple North Indian meal at a Delhi dhaba, as Ashok informs Balram of “the real India.” For Balram, as it likely is for a large portion of the country, a “simple meal,” or perhaps a sparser version of it, is their reality (Ramadurai 2021). To Ashok, this meal is one more step towards understanding the puzzle that his home country is. Meanwhile, for the international audience for The White Tiger, this is perhaps emblematic of “the real India.” While the depiction of India in The White Tiger is arguably demonstrative of the “real India,” the question remains: what is the “real India?”—a question that is impossible to determine an answer to, for India is defined by a myriad of people, caste, religion, varied beliefs, and intersectional realities. Rather, the India that is broadcast and consumed is therefore a factitious depiction of India—of different Indian realities. Films and television series in the West often perpetuate a limited binary of the Indian representation: the “exotic India” as gazed upon in the likes of Slumdog Millionaire or the “spiritual India” as “experienced” by the lead in the popular novel to film adaptation Eat, Pray, Love. It is worth noting that the films that do garner attention for India, like Slumdog Millionaire or The White Tiger, are usually adaptations from books, written in English: that are primarily geared towards an international audience. Hence, the most popular motifs either involve situating India as a place of spiritual awakenings, or indulging in what is known disparagingly as poverty porn […] It hardly needs saying that the ‘real India’ is much more than these themes. (Ramadurai 2021)

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The Western market, it can be argued, might not be fully ready to embrace everyday Indian stories that present varied Indian realities on the big screen. Aswin Punathambekar suggests that if the American audience, for example, engages Indian content on Netflix, as the streaming giant “throws up more Indian content based on the viewers’ history, [the audience] may explore more regular Indian content. But I don’t think they are likely to pay for tickets to watch such content at the theatre” (Punathambekar qtd. in Ramadurai 2021) Netflix India enables the creation of a contemporary space rife with hyper-mobilities, harbouring an Indianness that shapes the platform, and in turn, gets shaped by it (Marwah 2017, 1). “Indianness in general and diasporic Indianness in particular, is constantly subject to redefinition and reinvention” (Marwah 2017, 1). India, as it might exist in the imagination of the Indian diaspora, has been strongly informed by mainstream Hindi cinema, popularly known as Bollywood. Since Netflix becomes the contemporary hub for “global flows” (Kavoori and Punathambekar 2008, 8), the diaspora largely consumes the content on Netflix India, thereby fuelling constructions of the homeland. Netflix India offers “one of the most tangible links to the homeland” (Bhatia 2018, 5) allowing the diaspora, old and new, to “stay in touch” with home. Promoting a “socially embedded set of practices […] as implicated within diverse modes of sociality” (Singh qtd. in Kavoori and Punathambekar 2008, 3), Netflix India becomes an “ambivalent nation-space” paving way to “a new transnational culture” (Bhabha 1990, 4). Mediating diasporic negotiations riddled with nation-ness and cultural heritage in a global space, Netflix India (re)fashions the “national imaginary,” inherently becoming a “project of nationhood” (Sarkar qtd. in Clini 2018, 247). The elite India’s language of choice continues to be English: the stories they tell rely increasingly on Hollywood style, English-dependent discourse of storytelling. However desi the stories might feel, there is a shift in the register of storytelling. The shift in the narrative style, the focus on English, or Hinglish, becomes a marker of an important cultural moment in the Indian entertainment world. While most mainstream Hindi cinema in India heavily invests in an aesthetic “that combines Western consumerist ideals and sentiments with the distinctive Indian features like dances and weddings,” platforms like Netflix and Amazon abandon the desi style altogether and tell desi stories in a nondesi Western way. Sustained efforts are being made by Netflix originals to stray away from the stereotypical, much hyperbolised “Indian” style

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of narration and the artifices that come with it. This is Netflix India, and it is certainly not Bollywood. Netflix India “is capable of affording us crucial insights into the changing modalities of Indian national identity in a globalizing world.” The content on Netflix India reproduces itself “for a market that demands its perpetuation as a source of cultural identity” becoming a marker of Indianness. While other Indian OTT players like Voot, Disney+, Hotstar, MX player, Alt Balaji, and Zee Plus cater specifically to the local audience, Amazon Prime Instant Video and primarily, Netflix, being a global OTT giant, becomes the face of “new India”: an India that lays out the story of multiple Indian realities for a global audience in English. The most prominent examples of this being Sacred Games (2018), For India (2020), and The White Tiger. The nature of content on the other streaming services outside of Netflix in India consciously remains “local,” while the cultural geography of Netflix India becomes “decidedly global” (Kavoori and Punathambekar 2008, 1). Sacred Games, based on Vikram Chandra’s eponymous novel, is Netflix India’s first original series; it was after this show that the rhetoric of Netflix started imbricating furiously in Indian popular culture. The arrival of Sacred Games on Netflix India marked a shift in the kind of content that was being consumed and disseminated by the audience in India. It became a landmark and a rather proud moment for Netflix India’s historic genealogy as it became the first Indian show to tell an Indian story on such a global platform, released in “190 countries, breaking all barriers of language and culture.” The internationally recognised stand-up comic, Vir Das, is the only Indian comic to have five specials on Netflix, proving to be a driving force in this “cultural exchange.” In For India, he pays homaseek partners from their “ownge to “his India”: an India that has been his reality. A substantial section of the audience is non-Indian, “seated in their very special section, just like the airport” (Das 2020, 0.56–0.58) as he “periodically through the show takes time to explain references and context,” representing and carefully communicating his India to his international audience. The most recent show on Netflix India to create a buzz globally is Indian Matchmaking (Smriti Mundhra 2020). The premise of the show is rooted in the centuries-old custom of arranged marriages, in which families match a couple, usually based on caste and religion. The show features Sima Taparia, the famous matchmaker who sparked a deluge of memes

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after the show was released, setting up strangers as she shuttles between the United States and India (primarily Mumbai), roping in astrologers and face readers to “accomplish” the marriage. Not only is the show a “cringe fest” (Dhapola 2020) for the kind of regressive “Indianness” that it propagates, but it has also been vilified for turning a blind eye to the existing class disparity, silencing the women on the show, and being blatantly ignorant to the intersectional realities of the country. The reason the show remains problematic is not only because it elevates the regressive practice of caste-based arranged marriage in India but also portrays this skewed reality as a universal “Indian” reality (Bhabha 1990, 5). The content communicates the country’s “culture” to the diasporic/“foreign” eye by fabricating the “image of the nation” and fostering an “international perspective” (Bhabha 1990, 1). Tarun Pathak, a New Delhi-based associate director with Counterpoint Research said: “streaming platforms have been trying to gain mindshare by tailoring content with a deep connection to regional audiences […] Even if Netflix viewers don’t entirely relate to the matchmaking series, it’s still got them talking.” Despite its problematic representation, Indian Matchmaking is considered one of the primary shows to pin Netflix India on the global map, specifically after it received an Emmy nomination (Dutta 2021). Its relevance based on its popularity is a cause of concern and warrants further attention. The show conveniently erases any Muslim representation, exploring “Indian” matchmaking, where “Indian” becomes a substitute for essentialist Hindu portrayals. Relaying right-wing fantasies espoused by Hindutva, the show, by not addressing any Muslim presence, perpetrates the idea that Muslims are misfits in the Hindutva definition of a Hindu India (Drabu 2018, 2). What is striking is that a show like Indian Matchmaking that heralds an absolute Hindu truth, negating all/any Indian presence, released when the Hindu right is in absolute power in the country; eventually making its way to the International Emmy nominations. Indian Matchmaking tightly knits caste ideology and Hindu supremacy together, further manifesting India’s brand of fascism: Hindutva. The show’s project lies in maintaining a religious “purity,” as couples seek partners from their “own culture” (Dutta 2021). Evoking Halls’ “associational identification,” seeking familiarity in this case is heavily informed by regulating the purity of religion and their upper caste. Retaining of this “purity” is propagated by the idea of “return to the roots,” which is branded as the redeeming factor despite the dislocation, as Indians in the American diaspora yearned for a partner

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“from home.” The idea of marrying someone from “home,” thus becomes “not only of primary importance but is a crucial component” in the “propagation of ‘Indianness’” fabricating a nostalgia charged rhetoric in a diaspora-destined individual, who is as foreign to the homeland as the foreign gaze watching the show (Kavoori and Punathambekar 2008, 10). Indian Matchmaking breeds a variation of the “nationalist ideology of tradition and modernity.” It brings the NRI decisively into “the center of the picture, as a more stable figure of Indian identity than anything that can be found indigenously” as the NRI is depicted as “the sole guardian of the Indian identity than anything that can be found indigenously.”

“Hurting Religious Sentiments”: Religion, Regulation, and Representation The Government of India, on November 11, 2020, declared that all OTT platforms, including Netflix, along with other digital media spaces in India, will be regulated under the ambit of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. As for the government regulations announced on February 25, 2021, the regulation rules “borrow heavily from the existing regulations and structure governing the television media, including content codes and grievance redressal structure” (A.N.  Dutta 2020). The sudden urgency to regulate these platforms in 2020 can be tied to the incessant need of “safeguarding” Indian culture. The trajectory from cultural policing to regulation is not an occurrence in vacuum; it shapes particular truths that negotiate “protecting cultural sensibilities” in 2020s’ India. The rhetoric of “Make India Great Again” has been actively seeping into the “national (un)conscious” of the people of the country. This move is worrying as it brings the government dangerously closer to the action of surveilling all media and exploiting digital platforms, primarily for a nationalist propaganda. Since all other Indian mainstream media platforms, cinema, and television have copious amounts of censorship, OTT platforms in the country become a neoliberal space for addressing urgent social and political anxieties. Before this ruling, Netflix India primarily functioned as an “over-the-top” platform, becoming a Bakhtinian carnivalesque excess as it introduced shows and films that challenged power, transgressing conventions, and becoming a representative cultural emblem on a global space. The platform—“once hailed as the harbinger of

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change—is today becoming a part of a bunch of mediums under intense scrutiny and regulation.” The inciting anxiety of “hurting religious sentiments” (Scroll 2021) of Hindus has reigned over popular culture, art, and media giving rise to socio-­ political tensions across the country—what would it mean to “submit to [this] new reality—or to resist it?”1 (Smith, Intimations) In October 2020, Netflix India released A Suitable Boy based on Vikram Seth’s novel. A few weeks later, following the government’s declaration of Netflix and other OTT platforms falling under the Ministry of Culture ambit, this mini-series came under fire; accused of “hurting religious sentiments” (Scroll 2021). Furore erupted on November 22 because of an on-screen kiss shared between a Hindu girl (Lata) and a Muslim boy (Kabir) against the backdrop of a temple. Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Hindu right-­ wing party in India, currently in power, called for a ban on the OTT platform. Soon enough, the #BanNetflixIndia campaign was trending on Twitter. The regulation, hence, has been taking the form of the toxic “Cancel Culture” of the West. Debangana Chatterjee writes, “India’s cancel culture coupled with the dogma of Hindutva politics has taken a malicious turn” (Chatterjee 2020): Under this precarious political climate, anything that antagonises the Hindutva ideology faces indelible wrath. Needless to say, the politics of Hindutva, at the behest of both the ruling-BJP and its cultural counterpart RSS, is strongly backed by an online army that has been carefully manufactured over the years. (Chatterjee 2020)

While Delhi Crime’s Emmy Award for the Best International Series in 2000 gave much cause for celebration among the Indian netizens, the outcry for a ban on Netflix India did not cease. As the praise for Delhi Crime poured in, so did the condemnations for Netflix India’s “inappropriate” content, pitting #BanNetflix against #DelhiCrime. Reports suggested that #BanNetflixIndia had been trending on Twitter months before this kiss against the temple backdrop controversy caused a stir. It started in 2019 after the release of the second season of the widely popular, Sacred Games, in August 2019, with Ramesh N. Solanki, who identifies as a social worker, Hindu activist and a member of the Shiv Sena IT cell, filed a 1

 Smith uses this phrase in Intimations, specifically to refer to the pandemic.

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complaint at a Mumbai police station. His complaint called out the American streaming giant for “trying to paint an incorrect picture of Hindus and India globally” and urged the police to “take necessary legal action” against the streaming platform: “Almost, every series on Netflix India is with the intention to defame the country on a global level. It is with deep rooted Hinduphobia that the platform is portraying the nation in a bad light,” read the complaint. Scared Games goes beyond just “a vast sweep of organized crime in Mumbai,” evoking sharp religious commentary, right from the very first scene of the first season in which Ganesh Gaitonde (played by the Muslim actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui) begins to tell his story, asking the viewer: “Bhagwaan me maante ho? Bhagwaan ko l*nd farak nahi padta”/“Do you believe in God? God does not give a fuck.” Gaitonde’s provocation—a Muslim questioning a Hindu God—was the catalyst for the #BanNetflixIndia campaign. To contextualise, in August 1947 India gained independence from British colonial rule. While it was an episode that marked a triumph at the time, over the years, it has come to be recognised for its association with India’s traumatic past and for its detrimental impact on the landscape of India, as the “national border” drawn onto northern India which fragments Punjab from Pakistan, and separated eastern India into West Bengal and Bangladesh. Thus, although India has globally sought to define its post-colonial identity in “secular, multiethnic terms, characterising itself as a country where diverse faiths, languages, and cultures co-exist peacefully within the boundaries of a single state” (Khilnani 1997, 151), the country’s history and cultural memory is marked by violence based on religion, the tremors of which can be felt, or rather have been aggravated today. The other lead character in Sacred Games, Sartaj, a Sikh police officer (played by the Muslim actor Saif Ali Khan), is painfully aware of this nature of religious “populist anger” that ravaged his community, and which remains a part of the fabric of the country’s violent memory. Sacred Games “reserves its fury, its most powerful moments, for sequences interrogating the genesis and meanings of religious fundamentalism in the country,” where “religion is a buffet that consumes all” as Gaitonde narrates (Thakur 2019): “Hindu Hotel se apun seekha ki dharam ke naam par janta ko kitna chutiya banaya jaa sakta hai”/ “From Hindu Hotel I learnt, how religion can fuck anyone over” (quoted from the episode “Halahala”). Solanki’s complaint further cited examples of shows such as Ghoul, the second Netflix Indian original exploring the chilling dystopian horror genre, and Leila, a dystopian

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thriller depicting the horrors of living under the “regime” of the far-right—commentary on religion became the cornerstone of both these narratives. Solanki’s complaint also lashed out at the Indian-American comic Hasan Minhaj for his show Patriot Act (2018–2020), where Minhaj often used the political comedy genre to talk about the political climate and issues encircling India. Until recently, OTT platforms followed a mandate of self-regulation. As Des Freedman observes, “Libertarian or not, one issue on which many internet activists continue to agree is the desirability of self-regulation and the use of non-state institutions for internet governance.” For Esther Dyson, the founding chair of the domain-naming organisation ICANN, Des Freedman writes, the question has always been on “how to focus the public’s imagination on a better solution—not government regulation or even industry self-regulation, but an environment where consumers themselves can exercise their power and control their own information” (Dyson qtd. in Freedman 2012, 96). Owing to the current politically charged discourse in India, it is safe to infer this vision seems nothing less than utopia. Freedman, however, acknowledges the role that national(ist) governments play as “traditional gatekeepers” in regulating internet spaces: “national governments continue to play key roles in shaping, populating, and enforcing the various agencies and mechanisms involved in the regulation of online networks.” The regulation of online spaces started to be taken seriously in 2000 “when governments realize the threat posed by cybercrime” (Castells qtd. in Freedman 2012, 110). Meanwhile in India, according to a recent update, OTT platforms will not disseminate content that is “against the sovereignty and integrity of the country, endangers security of state, which is detrimental to India’s friendly relations with foreign countries, and content, which is likely to incite violence or disturb public order” (A.N. Dutta 2020). According to a January report, Prakash Javadekar, the I&B Minister informed the media that they had received a “lot of complaints against some serials available on OTT platform” (India Today 2021). Before the federal regulations are fully conceptualised in the country, this self-­censorship on the steaming platforms has consciously been stringent than ever before; as makers and producers “keep themselves in check,” scripts are being “read and reread” as streaming platforms vet content “for anything that they see as a red flag” in a “culturally sensitive India.” It is particularly noteworthy to witness a democracy take a nationalist stance. But in India, democracy is “delegative” (Rao 2018, 5)

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rather than a choice, which explains this recent uproar of “policing” content, culture, and eventually, democracy on a global forum. Steering away from Netflix, it is worth looking at a similar turn of events that took place on Amazon Prime Instant Video on January 19, 2021. The Amazon show Tandav (2021–), a political thriller directed by Ali Abbas Zafar, starring again, actor Saif Ali Khan and Dimple Kapadia, is a series loosely based on real political incidents set against the backdrop of rising Hindu nationalism. It has come under scrutiny for “hurting religious sentiments” and being “anti-Hindu” (Joshi 2021). Soon after it aired, the show received flak from members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over its depiction of Hindu deities (Joshi 2021). Following a second meeting with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and after several complaints filed against the show by various right-wing groups, the makers of Tandav publicly apologised, eventually editing the web series by dropping certain scenes (BBC News 2021). In a statement issued by the cast and crew of the show, the makers have thanked the ministry for its “Guidance” on the issue. Regulation based on religious fundamentalist policing that becomes “guidance” threatens the fabric of democracy and freedom of expression in the nation. The makers and the actors, all mostly Muslim: director Ali Abbas Zafar, producer Farhan Akhtar, actors Saif Ali Khan, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, and Aparna Purohit were named in the FIR, “charged under Sections 295 A (deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings), 298 (utters any word or makes any sound with deliberate intent to wound the religious feelings of any person), 153 A (wanton vilification or attacks upon the religion, race, place of birth, residence, language etc), and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) of the Indian Penal Code” (Scroll 2021). In a recent Feminism in India article, Shyaonti Talwar criticises this censorship debate in a tongue and cheek manner: I just love censorship. I am happy that Tandav was slapped with an FIR. Quite deserving, if you ask me. I think censorship is extremely important in the decadent times we are living in and more so because the world is so overpopulated by vermin of a certain kind who are just accelerating that decadence. I just so love the idea of snipping and trimming and making smaller things disappear for bigger things to be clean and “proper” […] How else are we supposed to uphold the values of this 5000-year-old civilisation otherwise? (Talwar 2021) [Added emphasis]

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Of course, Talwar mentions this sarcastically; the problem here is—most of the country thinks, believes, protects, and performs this.

Looking Back, Moving Forward In mainstream Hindi cinema, the people of Muslim faith have often been ostracised, exoticised, demonised, and heavily othered. The country’s biggest superstars, however, are the Khans, hence the Hindi film industry itself remains “one of the few sites in India where Muslims are not marginal and even enjoy some success” (Ganti 2004, 24). When one looks at some of the content on Netflix India, the Muslim is not only othered, but is mostly absent. This daunting presence of the absence is felt heavily in Indian Matchmaking, a show while conveniently erasing any Muslim representation, explores “Indian” matchmaking, “where ‘Indian’ becomes a substitute for Hindu traditionalism” (Dutta 2020, 58). The show’s focus remains the Hindu diaspora in the United States, and the elite Hindus in Mumbai, with one remote Sikh instance, a barely noticeable Christian mention, and a glaring Muslim absence. This “amorphous sense of ‘Indianness’” (Chadha and Kavoori 2009, 131) is flawed, detrimental, and has the potential to corrode the diversity of the Indian landscape. The 2020 film Indoo ki Jawani (Abir Sengupta) makes a juvenile attempt at invoking a Hindu-Muslim love story with the tired premise of Indian (Hindu) girl meets Pakistani (Muslim) boy. As the characters lack gravitas and indulge in adolescent humour, the makers make a “churlish” attempt to “humanize the rivalry of nationality” (Sharma 2021) between both countries. The recent, critically lauded film Pagglait (Umesh Bist 2021), however, attempts to tap into the silent presence of Nazia, the Muslim friend of the protagonist, Sandhya (Saniya Malhotra). As Nazia offers support to the young widow, Sandhya, her presence generates evident discomfort among the elder male members of this traditional, small-town Hindu family. “Nazia Zaidi”: the first revelation of her name, and its anxious reiteration, as she “invades” the space of the pious Hindu household, reckons the layered anxieties that burden the traditional Hindu joint-­ family system in small-town India. What remains special in the film’s dealing of Nazia’s identity among its other issues is that it is a refreshingly subtle take on the problems that arise with a person’s death in most Hindu families, commenting on the inherent religious friction, never overindulging it. A recent Firstpost article, however, accuses Pagglait of “pay[ing] lip service to secularism through an underwritten Muslim character devoid of

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agency” (Sharma 2021). The article argues that the “poke at religious friction feels like tokenism, a mere tick in the possibly large list of small-town issues.” I argue that although she is not the protagonist, the normalcy and ease with which Nazia’s character is represented offers a new meaning to the Muslim in Indian cinema. One could relegate this representation as a start: a refreshing one at that; a start where the Muslim is not an abstraction of their religion with over-the-top religious markers; not doing, but just are. The mention of a Muslim identity, while humanising the persona, can be seen in Vir Das’ 2020 stand-up special For India. Taking his audience on a joyride through “his India,” Vir Das recollects Mumbai’s 26/11 terror attacks in 2008, which continues to remain an important cultural memory in India’s recent history. Acknowledging a moment of conditioned hatred, while remembering the fateful night, Vir Das draws from his own and his manager, Babu’s experience of the night: As Mumbai burned, me and Babu and this crew of actors shot stand-up comedy sketches together and laughed all night long. I have worked with Babu every year for a decade now. I didn’t know this then, but I know this now. His full name is Kabir Mohammad Husseini […] On the night when my friend was gunned down, on the name of what terrorists call Islam, but real Muslims know has nothing to do with Islam, me and Kabir Mohammad Husseini laughed together all night long, because both of us were broke and we needed to eat tomorrow. That’s why, they will never win. (Das 57.00–58.34) [Added emphasis]

The ways in which India “knows” Muslims is largely through the context of this monstrous Other: seeped into the collective memory by mainstream popular culture and mass media; the ways in which non-Indians in Das’ special “know” Muslims is through Said’s definition of the Oriental and more recently, through 9/11. Instead of “fixing” these imagined constructions, he addresses their gaps through this brief anecdote, offering a fresh possibility of telling stories where “they will never win.” I do not propose to understand what is happening, as multiple variables are still in process. This chapter attempts to look back at what transpired in India in the last few months, what is still in progress, and what will only be materialised in the future. We, as Indians, are often told “what India is, by the people in power” (Das 1:10:30–1:11:10). As the political and digital realities in the country are speedily shifting, the world gets a glance of what makes/breaks India through this global giant, Netflix. As the

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American hegemon ships money, dreams, and realities, Netflix in India has the potential to change the narrative from wanting representation to manifesting a representation that challenges the structures of stereotypical imagination. The burden lies on the receiver to extrapolate and offer meaning to it, as reception and representation are the two sides of the same coin. Das, in his special, relaying a significant cultural anecdote, believes: “he who has the biscuits, gets to tell the story.” For years, mainstream Hindi cinema has churned people’s dreams and realities in the country, while also swiftly making its way abroad. But this is the new India, an India that cherishes Bollywood nostalgia and demands stories that thrive on immediacy—Netflix India, with or without (stringent) regulation, has the potential to realise an India which is “more sensible, edgier, funnier, more respectful.” The question remains: is this a utopian India or the India of our dreams—only time will tell.

Bibliography Anon. “Tandav: Amazon drama apologizes for Hindu offence.” BBC News, Jan 20, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-­arts-­55716959 Bhabha, Homi, ed. 1990. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge. Bhargava, Yuthika. “India has highest viewership of films on Netflix Globally.” The Hindu, December 10, 2020. https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/ movies/india-­h as-­h ighest-­v iewership-­o f-­f ilms-­o n-­n etflix-­g lobally/article33297005.ece Clini, Cleila. 2018. “From Bollywood to ‘Hindiendent’ Films: Narrating the Indian Diaspora.” Beyond Borders and Boundaries: Diasporic Images and Re-presentations in Literature and Cinema, edited by Nilufer Bharucha, Sridhar Rajeswaran, and Klaus Stierstrofer. New Delhi: NavVishnu Publications. Bhatia, Nandi. 2018. “Introduction: Bollywood and the South Asian Diaspora.” Topia, 26 (5): 5–13. Chatterjee, Ankita. 2018. “Humour in Narendra Modi Memes on New Media.” South Asian Popular Culture 18 (3): 45–55. Chatterjee, Debangana. 2020. “Calls for Netflix Bans: The Perils of India‘s Own Cancel Culture.” The Wire, December 8, 2020. https://thewire.in/culture/ netflix-­india-­ban-­perils-­india-­own-­cancel-­culture Freedman, Des. 2012. “Outsourcing internet regulation.” Misunderstanding the Internet, edited by James Curran, Natalie Fenton, and Des Freedman. London: Routledge. 95-120. Dhapola, Shruti. 2020. “Indian Matchmaking: Guess what? This cringefest is actually what our arranged marriages are all about.” The Indian Express. July

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18, 2020. https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/life-­style/indian-­ matchmaking-­arranged-­marriages-­sima-­taparia-­netflix-­show-­6525190/. Drabu, Onaiza. “Who is the Muslim? Discursive Representations of the Muslims and Islam in Indian Prime-Time News.” Religions 9, no. 9 (2018). Dutta, Amrita Nayak. “This is how Modi govt’s new rules will regulate digital media and OTT content.” The Print, February 25, 2020. https://theprint.in/ india/this-is-how-modi-govts-new-rules-will-regulate-digital-mediaand-­ott-­content/611909/. ———. “Netflix’s Indian Matchmaking at Emmys: The Problems with Nominating this Indian Reality.” The Conversation. September 16, 2021. https://theconversation.com/netflixs-indian-matchmaking-at-the-emmys-the-problemswith-­nominating-­this-­indian-­reality-­167011 For India. Directed by Das Vir. Netflix, 2020. Ganti, Tejaswini. 2004. Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. London: Routledge. Indian Matchmaking. Directed by Smriti Mundhra. Netflix. 2020. Joshi, Shamani. 2021. “Yet Another Amazon Prime Show is being Called ‘Anti-­ Hindu’.” Vice Media, January 19, 2021. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ bvxp8z/yet-another-amazon-prime-show-is-being-called-anti-hindu-­tandav-­ censorship-­religion Kaushik, Abhilash, and Mary Baruah. 2020. Postcolonial Praxis: Ramifications and Intricacies, Chennai: Notion Press. Chadha, Kalyani, and Kavoori, Anandan. 2008. “Exoticized, Marginalized, Demonized: The Muslim “Other” in Indian Cinema.” Global Bollywood, edited by Aswin Punathambekar and Anandan Kavoori. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press. 133-145. Khilnani, Sunil. 1997. The Idea of India. London: Penguin Books. Lobato, Ramon. 2019. Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution, New York University Press. Lobato, Ramon, and Amanda D.  Lotz. 2020. “Imagining Global Video: The Challenge of Netflix.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59 (3): 132–136. Lotz, Amanda, Ramon Lobato, and Julian Thomas. 2018. “Internet-distributed television research: A provocation.” Media Industries 5 (2): 1–13. https://doi. org/10.3998/mij.15031809.0005.203 Marwah, Sangeeta. 2017. “Kehte Hai Humko Pyar Se Inndiawale: Shaping a diasporic Indianness in and through the Bollywood Song.” South Asian Popular Culture 14, (2–3): 1–12. Pagglait. Directed by Umesh Bisht. Netflix, 2021 Ramadurai, Charukesi. 2021. “Will Hollywood ever show us the ‘real India’?” BBC Culture, January 22, 2021. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210121-­ will-­hollywood-­ever-­show-­us-­the-­real-­india.

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Rao, Shakuntala. 2018. “Making of Selfie Nationalism: Narendra Modi, the Paradigm Shift to social media governance, and Crisis of Democracy.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 42 (2): 5. Sacred Games. 2018. “Ashwathama” and “Halahala”. Directed by Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya. Scroll.in. 2021. “Bengaluru: FIRs Against ‘Tandav’ makers, actors for allegedly hurting religious sentiments.” January 24, 2021. https://scroll.in/latest/984984/bengaluru-fir-filed-against-tandav-makers-actors-for-allegedlyhurting-religious-sentiments. Sharma, Manik. 2021. “How Netflix’s Pagglait pays lip service to secularism through an underwritten Muslim character devoid of agency.” Firstpost, April 1, 2021. https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/how-­netflixs-­pagglait-­ plays-­lip-­service-­to-­secularism-­through-­an-­underwritten-­muslim-­character-­ devoid-­of-­agency-­9486071.html. Smith, Zadie. 2020. Intimations. UK: Penguin Random House. Talwar, Shayonti. 2021. “The Legacy of Disrespecting Hindu Gods That ‘Tandav’ Followed…& We Somehow Missed.” Feminism in India, February 1, 2021. https://feminisminindia.com/2021/02/01/tandav-­controversy-­lord-­shiva/. Thakur, Tanul. 2019. “Sacred Games Probes the Mechanic of a Peculiar Indian Insanity.” The Wire, Sept 20, 2019. https://thewire.in/culture/sacredgames-­netflix-­review.

PART II

Streaming Technologies and Interactivity

An Engagement-Based Model: Chinese Online Video Streaming Services for Chinese Viewers Xiaoran Zhang

Advancements in Internet technologies since the early 2000s have shifted the consumption of television from the traditional broadcast model to on-­ demand via personal internet devices exponentially, and this is especially true for viewers in mainland China. As of March 2020, the total number of paid subscriptions to China’s three major video streaming platforms— Tencent Video, iQiyi, and Youku—exceeded 300 million, whilst Netflix is reported to have grown to 182  million subscribers worldwide (Frater 2020). In a country where platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have not yet penetrated, the video streaming market in China is dominated by three internet companies: Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba. Chinese viewers access their favourite television series—those produced both domestically and internationally—via such services, daily, through their laptops, smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs; an experience

X. Zhang (*) University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_9

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facilitated by various user interfaces. Chinese streaming services allow viewers to not only stream videos but also conduct multiple online activities via these interfaces. One such activity which this chapter is concerned with is real-time communication between viewers via so-called bullet screens. By focusing on the development of Chinese streaming services in particular, this chapter explores the extent to which a unique Chinese streaming service model has been developed, one that exploits and has structured the limited media space of streaming service interface to enable interactive viewing experience. Building on scholarly work on Western video streaming services, namely Netflix and YouTube, this chapter asks how does the Chinese streaming service model distinguish itself from its Western counterpart, and to what extent has this model been influenced by the country’s online television viewing culture. Through the analysis of the business model and interfaces of major Chinese streaming services Tencent Video, iQiyi, and Youku, this chapter seeks to understand the Chinese streaming services through the optic of an engagement-based model, which sees the viewers as a collective of active agents whose labour may generate alternative forms of market value. It argues that by providing a viewer-friendly multifunctional streaming interface, Chinese online streaming services tend to enable viewers with multiple interactive affordances to achieve further business agendas and to drive subscriptions.

China’s Online Video Streaming Industry In early 2020, a Chinese information consulting company BigData-­ Research published its annual report on China’s online video streaming industry. According to the report, the industry had developed a market that was worth 170 billion Chinese yuan ($26.3 billion), an increase from 24.88 billion in 2014 (BigData-Research 2020). Since 2004, the development of China’s online streaming industry has undergone several phases, challenged by various market players over the course of its journey. Back in the early 2000s, China’s most influential web portal Tencent was already providing its users with online videos embedded in its news outlet website. However, in 2004, LeTV launched its website as the first specific online streaming service for licensed film and television content. This marked the beginning of the development of China’s online streaming industry (Zhang and Jia 2015, 11). LeTV started by establishing its content library through purchasing the legal streaming rights of

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numerous films and television series, both domestically produced and imported. As the industry pioneer, with nearly 10,000 hours of legal content in its library, LeTV quickly became the largest copyrighted film and television streaming service in mainland China. In December 2006, the Chinese imitator of YouTube, Youku launched its website, catering for Chinese internet users’ need for an interactive video-sharing platform. Youku shortly became the most popular and largest user-generated content platform, along with its competition, Tudou, absorbing the market share of other small-scaled video-sharing websites. Entering 2008, whilst rapidly developing, the online video industry underwent two significant reconstructions, both of which had a considerable impact on the changes in the industry structure (Zhang and Jia 2015, 12). The first reconstruction originated from the introduction of 2007’s Administrative Provisions on Internet Audio-Visual Program Services jointly issued by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and the Ministry of Information Industry, which established a licence system for online video website operations and shut down a number of online video websites that were either unlicensed or offering non-copyrighted content. The second reconstruction was a result of the financial crisis in 2008, when financing appeared to be an issue for more than 400 online video websites (Zhang and Jia 2015, 12). As a result, only the financially competitive ones, such as Youku and Tudou remained. After an industry-wide structure, more and more players were stepping into the market competition. In the end of 2009, China Central Television (CCTV) launched China Network Television (CNTV) as its own internet-­ based television provider, offering a host of news and feature programmes from CCTV’s foreign channels. Even with its innate advantages, including its state-owning identity and huge content library, CNTV’s development was not quick, due to its lack of an innovative consumer-driven service model. Comparatively, mainstream commercial video streaming websites were holding most of the market share. In 2010, major Chinese internet companies started to get involved in the streaming industry. Baidu, one of China’s biggest internet technology companies, founded the streaming service Qiyi, which was renamed as iQiyi in the following year. Together, iQiyi, Youku, Tudou, and Sohu Video formed China’s online video streaming industry in the late 2010s. The final and most competitive Chinese streaming service appeared on the stage in early 2011. China’s largest internet company Tencent extended its business into the online video streaming industry by rebranding its

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former live television service as Tencent Video, a video streaming platform that focuses on film and television content. In 2012, Youku and Tudou announced plans to merge. After the merger, the two websites both remained separate, with Tudou being totally transformed to a video-­ sharing platform whilst Youku adjusted itself to a mainly streaming-driven service. Furthermore, in 2015, the company was acquired by Alibaba, another Chinese internet company. Meanwhile, Western streaming services were also starting to expand on a global level, with companies such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video extending their reach to most parts of the world, except for a few countries and regions, including mainland China, due to the country’s nationwide blocking of international websites, such as YouTube and Facebook. Within the context of a heavily censored online media market, free of competition from external, international global platforms, the domestic market for Chinese streaming services has flourished (Zhao 2018, 108). Moreover, thanks to the technological and financial support from China’s largest internet companies, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba, Tencent Video, iQiyi, and Youku have become China’s three major video streaming services, each of which has more than 500 million monthly active users (Big-Data Research 2020). With their parent companies’ resource integration capability, these streaming services have started to evolve into a more stable and profitable state.

Chinese Online Streaming Services’ Business Model The business model of China’s online video streaming services is based on two revenue sources: advertising sales and paid subscriptions. Prior to the early 2010s, most of these services did not adopt a subscription model, however, but were only funded by advertisers. As the number of Chinese netizens surged and smartphone use increased, online streaming services started to accommodate more and more users. With major Chinese internet companies stepping in, the fierce competition between different services resulted in each service’s aggressive investment in original and exclusive premium content, requiring the services to cover their expensive operational cost with funds from other divisions of the conglomerate (Curtin and Li 2018, 346). Hence, after more than ten years of development and improvement, the whole online streaming industry has been gradually readjusting its business model to a both advertisement-based and subscription-based one. As of 2019, two of China’s largest streaming

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services, iQiyi and Tencent Video, have proven that the proportion of paid subscriptions in overall revenue has been steadily increasing, with paid subscriptions continuing to grow. iQiyi had more than 105 million paid subscriptions which takes up more than 50% of its overall revenue, whilst Tencent Video had a total of more than 100 million subscribers (BigData-­ Research 2020). The subscription plan Chinese streaming services have adopted caters to local Chinese subscribers’ consuming habits. Unlike Western streaming services’ subscription plans, which are paid monthly (e.g. Netflix or Disney+) or annually (e.g. Amazon Prime Video), Chinese streaming services’ subscription plans are based on different periods of validity. For example, Tencent Video offers six different subscription plans: one month, three months, one year, recurring monthly, recurring every three months and recurring yearly. The prices for recurring plans are usually lower than for non-recurring ones, which subtly encourages users to subscribe to recurring ones. In another case, as a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, Youku offers a discounted price plan for Alipay users. Like Apple Pay, Alipay is a mobile and online payment platform also owned by Alibaba Group. By making purchases via Alipay, users earn member points, which can be redeemed for a Youku subscription. This integrated business strategy exploited by Alibaba in a way resembles Amazon Prime Video’s business model. As a technology company specialising in e-commerce like Alibaba, Amazon’s Prime subscription provides its users with not only video and music streaming services, but also one or two-day delivery of goods and many other online services. Karen Petruska argues, ‘Amazon’s television content inspires Prime subscriptions and subsequent purchases meant to take advantage of that membership’ (2018, 358). In this sense, users of Youku and Alipay are encouraged to build a relationship with other services within Alibaba’s business sectors. Tencent video also incorporates its numerous internet services, from video games to social media into its streaming service’s interface. Chinese streaming services’ subscription model not only allows viewers access to exclusive content but also provides multiple user privileges. Unlike Netflix’s various price plans, which are determined by the number of screens users can watch on at the same time, all Tencent Video price plans enable users to access the service via unlimited devices at the same time, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops, with all the streaming-­ content-­related features they can enjoy, such as 1080p resolution screens, Dolby Vision, and the ability to download content for offline viewing. The most appreciated privilege is that subscribers can choose to skip the spot

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ads appearing at the beginning of a film or television programme, which can last up to ninety seconds. More user-led and less related to the streaming content, subscribers are granted the ability to customise their user profile pages, altering design and backgrounds, and displaying a badge next to their avatar signalling their VIP status. Such customisations virtually distinguish subscribers from non-subscribers, creating a user hierarchy and thus motivating users to subscribe. Compared to Western subscription models, in Chinese the subscription model is much more concerned with the user, their status, and the privileges and user experience(s) that status grants when they choose to pay for streaming content.

Content Library and Branding Agenda Both Western and Chinese streaming services share a mutual business focus on expanding their content libraries—a result of the severe competition among streaming services in both Western industry and Chinese industry. According to BMO Capital Markets, Netflix  is expected to invest  up to $26 billion  in content expanding (Spangler 2020). As an advertisement-free streaming service, the large library of original and exclusive content is Netflix’s key selling point, with a number of reputable in-house productions and successful international exports, such as House of Cards (2013–2018), Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019), The Crown (2016–) and Stranger Things (2016–). Likewise, Amazon Prime Video has found similar success Transparent (2014–2019) and The Marvellous Mrs Maisel (2017–). Meanwhile, in 2018, China spent a total of 73 billion yuan ($10.9 billion) on content production. As Joseph O’Halloran writes, ‘the growth in China’s TV programming spending was largely due to what the analyst said was ‘aggressive’ content investment by online companies Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent who have upped their spending on content origination and acquisition for their respective video platforms iQiyi, Youku and Tencent Video’ (2018). China’s investment was not only in original television dramas but also in reality television and a variety of formats. Tencent Video has made a local edition of the South Korean reality show franchise Produce 101 (2018–), and online exclusive Qing Dynasty costume drama Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace (2018), both of which have helped strengthen its leading position in the Chinese market. Meanwhile, iQiyi’s original online drama Story of Yanxi Palace (2018) received over 15  billion views (Wu and Jiang 2018). iQiyi also launched a male idol group competition show, Idol Producer (2018), which garnered over

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100 million viewers for its first episode (Wang 2018). By providing extensive exclusive streaming contents, as major streaming services, Tencent Video and iQiyi managed to draw more and more paid subscriptions and further upgrade their business model from purely advertising-based to subscription-driven. The expanding content libraries of Chinese streaming services coincide with growth of interest in branding opportunities. Chinese online video streaming services usually divide their contents into categories: ‘films’, ‘TV series’, ‘reality shows’, ‘sports’ and ‘news’. The contents offered under the categories ‘TV series’ and ‘reality shows’ can be either the ones acquired from Chinese regional television stations and production companies, or the ones produced by the service itself. The self-produced original contents are specifically marked as ‘Exclusive’ or ‘Self-produced’, which is very similar to ‘Netflix Original’. Rather than being a mere platform for streaming content, Chinese streaming services realised the significance of branding themselves as quality content producers, which is in sync with Netflix’s globally branding strategy of emphasising original content. Netflix has strongly expressed its commitment to competing with traditional linear television, attempting to position itself as the replacement of linear television. As Michael L. Wayne argues, ‘For Netflix, linear television networks are competitors whose brand identities reduce Netflix’s own brand equity’ (2018, 1). Hence, to implement this strategy, like networks such as HBO or AMC, Netflix has invested considerably in its original productions and promoted them as Netflix exclusive content and always releases new television series in one go, which enables viewers to binge-watch. However, when competing within the streaming industry, Netflix also needs to employ traditional television network’s channel branding strategies. Timothy Havens proposes a brand hierarchy for broadcast, cable, and streaming television channels, including a corporate brand at the highest level, and subsequent levels of family brand, individual brands, and brand modifiers (2018, 322). In the case of Netflix, the corporate brand is Netflix itself and the family brands are different categories and genres of streaming content. The individual brand is each television programme and film, especially ‘Netflix Originals’. The modifier is then the franchises and spin-­ offs of any television programme and film. This branding hierarchy considers Netflix as a television network and each category or genre as a channel. However, for Chinese streaming services, its brand hierarchy more closely resembles traditional television network’s brand hierarchy.

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As formerly mentioned, Tencent Video has specific second-tier display pages for different categories and genres. For example, American television series are put on the Tencent American TV page, where viewers are enabled to glance at the content library of all the American television series provided by the service. Tencent American TV even has its own official accounts on different popular Chinese social media. Tencent American TV page can be seen as the Tencent Video network’s special channel for this content. The same branding hierarchies are also found on other streaming services, for example, Youku has a specific page for British television series. Havens believes this kind of channel dividing can benefit the whole streaming service, ‘what makes television channels useful, as a concept, is their capacity to brand program content at the broadest possible level, a level of generality beyond those offered by directors or genres or even production houses’ (2018, 321). By creating these ‘channels’, Chinese streaming services can present a platform that can encompass the wide diversity of content and each second-tier display page targets a different niche audience, which further enhances the service’s branding agenda. Another way for Chinese streaming services to brand themselves is to exploit the brand effects of certain producers. One case is the firm alignment of HBO and Tencent Video. As HBO’s only official distributor in mainland China, Tencent Video has been trying to brand itself with an already globally acclaimed HBO production, Game of Thrones (2011–2019), as its exclusive streaming content for subscribers, aiming to draw non-subscribers into its membership scheme (Zhang 2019, 238). The premium American cable television network’s branded content to appeal to Chinese English-language television content viewers has been proved to be valuable. In another case, Youku obtained the exclusive online distribution rights of Sherlock (2010–2017) and further established a partnership with the BBC.  Many BBC productions (e.g. Doctor Who [2005–] and Luther [2010–2019]), including Sherlock, helped Youku harness the viewers who initially accessed the content via illegal means. In these two cases, Chinese streaming services exploit the media hype resulting from globally popular television series to achieve their own branding agenda.

Interactive Streaming Service Interface By examining Netflix’s interface (without the use of any extension apps, such as Netflix Party), one would fail to find any functions that can enable a viewer to leave any comments or engage with other viewers. In fact,

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Netflix only allows its users a limited degree of interactivity within the platform. For example, users can search for content by various categories. The homepage also updates its recommendation banners and flags up new releases or customised themes based on the user’s viewing interests. In terms of interface design, what distinguishes the Chinese streaming services from their Western counterparts is that they include more interactive affordances. As Catherine Johnson states, ‘Interfaces utilize user-experience design to display the content on offer within online TV services and to facilitate certain forms of user behaviour over others’ (2019, 109). This assertion emphasises the expected user experience as influenced by a streaming service’s interface, and this is how most Western online TV platforms are designed. For example, after choosing a certain television series or film on Netflix, users are then directed to the player page, which is simply a screen that enables viewers to pause, adjust the progress bar, turn on subtitles, and so on. The interface provides very little information about the content, such as the title and plot summary. By comparison, Amazon Prime Video, for example, after acquiring IMDB, has embedded IMDB data within the player page, so that when users pause the screen or enable a setting, such information (such as the name of an actor in a scene) appears on the screen. For Western streaming services, the interactive affordances and extra informational content are very limited. Again, by comparison, Chinese streaming service interfaces are far more complicated and incorporate multiple additional features. To watch streaming content on a Chinese streaming service, Chinese viewers typically need to go through two or three tiers of web interfaces: the first tier is the home interface, the gateway page of the streaming service; the second tier, a designated display interface, the page concentrating only on recommending and introducing a certain type of content, such as television series or films; the third tier, the content player interface and the page with a screen that the content is played on. The third-tier player interface is the actual page on which viewers access the chosen content, where multiple additional interactive and informational features are provided. Considering Tencent Video’s Game of Thrones as an example, on its third-tier player page, viewers are given copious information about the series. Right under the screen is displayed ‘view amount’, indicating how many times the series has been watched; ‘real-time viewers’, showing how many viewers are watching the series at the same time; relevant information including region of origin, year of release, genre, ratings; likes and dislikes, like what Instagram and

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Twitter provide, but include both positive and negative options. Furthermore, there is a direct link to click for viewers to share the series on other major social media platforms. Further down, there is even more relevant information, including ‘plot summary’ and ‘cast & crew list’. All these informational affordances cover most things that viewers might want to know about the series, a feature designed to retain viewers’ attention and prevent them from leaving the interface to access other websites or platforms to seek out further information. This practice is like Amazon Prime Video’s incorporation of IMDb hyperlinks but includes much more information within the interface. Hence, Chinese streaming services both mirror features of dominant global services (Amazon) and incorporate local ones. More notably, Chinese viewers are given the opportunity to write reviews. Scrolling down the player page, viewers can produce or read reviews in two forms: long reviews and short reviews. The section of viewers’ reviews takes a significant proportion of the interface. There is even an invitation written by the service saying, ‘if you have something to say about the plot, lines, characters or anything relevant, please share with us’. In addition to reviews, the interface also showcases fan-made videos by placing them in the ‘relevant video list’. On the one hand, these interactive affordances can retain the viewers by guiding them to conduct various activities even after they have watched the series. On the other hand, by providing user-generated content, the streaming service presents not only the series’ own narratives but also other peer viewers’, which enhances viewers’ participation in a broader conversation about entertainment culture. Moreover, Tencent Video offers hyperlinks related to the soundtrack of the series. If viewers click on these hyperlinks, they will be directed to QQ Music, Tencent’s own music streaming service. This design echoes Amazon’s approach, which encourages the users to stay within the company’s interface and ecosystem. As China’s biggest internet company, Tencent has the capacity and incentive to integrate all its services together, which echoes Alibaba’s service integration argument earlier. In addition to the features detailed earlier, Chinese streaming services have adopted a unique comments function that is not seen on major Western streaming services: the bullet screen (also sometimes referred to as shooting comments). Widely adopted by East Asian online video platforms, the bullet screen is a function that enables viewers to comment in real time or to have conversations with others while they are watching the streaming content. Viewers type their comments in a designated comment

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area and click ‘send’, and the comments will then flow from one side of the screen to the other side, overlaying the actual streaming content. This effect makes the comments look like an array of flying bullets, which is how the name was created. The bullet screen was first adopted by a Japanese video streaming website called Niconico, in 2006. Two years later in 2008, Chinese video-sharing website Acfun introduced it to Chinese netizens and then other online video websites, including live stream and video-sharing ones, such as Bilibili, also employed this function within their player interfaces. As of the late 2010s, after more than ten years of the popularisation of the bullet screen, almost every Chinese major video streaming service has featured this function. The effect of watching a video with the bullet screen switched on can be best described by Xueqing Li as, ‘words in different colors suddenly appear out of nowhere and swoop across the screen, bombarding the viewer with jokes and snarky remarks about the video they are watching’ (2016). The description specifically emphasises one very popular use of the bullet screen: to produce secondary texts deriving from the primary texts of the streaming content. For instance, the bullet screen was first used to subtitle Japanese animated series by some language savvy users for their peers who did not have any Japanese language skills. These Japanese animated programmes were often related to a specific Japanese online culture, otaku, which refers to maniacal collectors of comics and Japanese anime goods. This subculture has penetrated many Chinese user communities. Otaku fans encourage the spread of their favourite anime content by adding sassy or funny comments via the bullet screen and then inviting others to watch the same content on the same site. Otaku is not the only type of subculture that can be observed from bullet screen comments. In fact, any genre of viewing content or any specific film or television series can generate a certain fan community that manifests in bullet screen comments. Another interesting example is that many fans of the Chinese Qing Dynasty costume drama Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace re-watched the drama’s prequel Empresses in the Palace (2011). With the use of the bullet screen, fans posted the connections they discovered between the two dramas in terms of shared characters and related plotlines, even though they have two totally different casts. Hence, the bullet screen is an accessible way for viewers to display their knowledge of a specific culture by producing texts that are associated with the streaming content. The interactive viewing feature also allows viewers to establish personal communications with others and praise or criticise the video, which can

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suggest an experience of simultaneous viewing among viewers. For instance, some viewers might post the date and time when they watch the video and even ask if other viewers are watching at the same time. However, because the bullet screen retains all the comments that have been posted ever since the video was uploaded, the communication between viewers is not always instant. Most comments are responded to in a delayed temporal manner. In addition, the viewers’ username and profile information are not presented, so comments are mostly anonymous except when the identity is deliberately stated in the comments by the commenters. Hence, this anonymity allows a relatively less regulated online space for viewers to express themselves. The aforementioned text shows the ways in which the bullet screen functions as an interactive and participatory tool for viewers to engage in the process of viewing, with most of the interactive activities (conversations, stating opinions) influenced by the content being viewed. Putting it in the context of television consumption, the bullet screen fits into the concept of ‘media-meshing’, described by Ofcom as ‘doing something else but related to what they’re watching on TV’ (2013). James Blake refers to ‘media-meshing’ also as ‘second screen’ and argues, ‘“second screen” is best understood not as an object or a media device, but an experience […] It is the act of engaging with related media content on two screens concurrently’ (2017, 1). Even though the bullet screen is not physically a second screen, it still fulfils the duty of ‘a second screen’ by providing viewers a platform to conduct activities that are related to the content shown on the first screen. The bullet screen technology combines the viewing screen and the activity screen into one screen, which makes the engagement even more related to the content itself, especially because the function is only activated when the content is being streamed. Indeed, the nature of the second screen viewing experience echoes the idea of using the bullet screen. To understand the implication of second screen, Hye Jin Lee and Mark Andrejevic argue that: viewing itself needs to be turned into something that shares the logic of the event: a sense that others are participating at the same time and are interested in sharing their thoughts and responses, at a pace that includes the time and space for interacting, sharing, and reflecting—or simply typing, reading, and navigating a second interface. (2014, 42)

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Similarly, the use of the bullet screen can make viewers feel that they are participating in the ‘event’ of watching a specific television series or film with numerous viewers at the same time from all over the country, which can also be called ‘group viewing’ (Wohn and Na 2011). The bullet screen creates a sense of ‘liveness’ especially since it is also used for live stream events in China. Even though the online streaming content is not live streamed, emulating the feeling of sharing a televised event, the bullet screen results in new forms of ‘live’ moments. However, it is worth acknowledging that some viewers choose to turn off the bullet screen, because they do not desire this kind of second screen activity and might find the bullet screen distracting. As Blake writes, ‘Even where multiscreen engagement is linked to the television (the first screen) itself, it can still be a significant distraction, pulling viewers’ attention away from the main program itself’ (2017, 3). This leads to an assertion that the viewers who keep the bullet screen switched on are those who are either more interested in engaging with other viewers or less concerned about the distraction resulting from the bullet screen, or both. There are also viewers who do not post comments but only read comments. Hence, the bullet screen function is provided as an option for viewers if they think it helps enhance viewing experience.

An Engagement-Based Service Model Chinese streaming services’ interactive affordances could be partially explained by their unique service model compared to Western online TV services. Defining Western online TV services as ‘closed’, Johnson explains, ‘Netflix, BBC iPlayer and Now TV do not depend on the participation of users for the video content that they offer; nor do they operate open platforms that enable any user to upload content to their service’ (2019, 39). In this respect, instead of being closed one-way video content providers, most Chinese streaming services also serve as open platforms for users to upload and share self-made videos, which further distinguishes them from Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. This service model has been retained ever since it was adopted by Chinese streaming services in the early 2000s. Most Chinese online streaming services were initially online video-sharing platforms designed for amateur video creators, an idea inspired by the worldwide popularity of YouTube. However, due to the reconstruction and rearrangements within China’s internet industry, online video-sharing platforms were forced to reconsider their service model. The increasing

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demand for audio-visual products and the rapid development of digital technologies then triggered the transformation of these video-sharing platforms. As of the late 2010s, major Chinese streaming services, including Youku, fundamentally focus on providing licensed streaming content, but their platforms remain open for users to upload videos, which resulted in the current hybrid service model. Considering the open service model that enables user participation, Chinese streaming services share more similarities with YouTube instead of Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. Interestingly, YouTube has been widely considered an online social media platform, studied for its association with online media engagement and the online community since its launch in 2005. Jean Burgess and Joshua Green define YouTube as a site—a location or meeting place—of participatory culture; ‘participants approach YouTube with their own purposes and aims and collectively shape YouTube as a dynamic cultural system’ (2009, vii). The participants include not only the video contributors but also the audiences. For audiences, the site offers multiple possibilities of interaction and participation during the viewing process. Viewers can actively comment, subscribe, and share on the display page of a video, while conversations between viewers happen. Even though not every user might be interested in exploiting these social network functions, and might just want to watch content, to active users, YouTube is a social network site. Confirming this assertion, Dana Rotman and Jennifer Preece further investigate YouTube users and argue that to those users, YouTube is an online community that serves as a platform for communication and interaction rather than a mere broadcasting application. They point out that ‘The opportunity for personal interaction changed users’ perception of YouTube from a broadcasting tool to a place where personal relationships can be built’ (Rotman and Preece 2010, 326). When viewing videos on YouTube, certain viewers who have the desire to use YouTube as a participatory tool are enabled by YouTube’s interactive interface. This very much echoes the earlier discussion of Chinese viewers’ use of the bullet screen and other interactive features. Rather than being mere content receivers, viewers are enabled to produce texts, create narratives, and share them with others. Both viewers who use these features or just observe the bullet screen and reviews are involved within this kind of online social activity that happens on the streaming service’s interface. This sort of online social activity gives the viewers an impression of user autonomy which is not limited to browsing

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content. In other words, viewers of Chinese streaming services are given a higher degree of user autonomy than viewers of Netflix. The user autonomy achieved on Western streaming services is understood as an illusion of user agency. As Johnson argues online TV interfaces have three functions: ‘(1) to create an illusion of abundance and plenty; (2) to minimise interactivity while creating an illusion of user agency; (3) to orient user behaviour towards viewing’ (2019, 113). The first and third functions clearly apply to Chinese streaming services, as the informational affordances offer many texts to occupy viewers and nurture user loyalty towards the content or the service. The second function, however, appears to be contradictory to the open Chinese streaming service model. In this sense, Chinese online streaming services encourage viewer interactivity and enable user agency. Yet, the fact is that all the interactive affordances including the bullet screen are embedded within the player interface, which means viewers are given the illusion that they can engage with each other and the service freely, yet in a walled garden. Hence, Chinese streaming services can be seen in part as a social media platform like YouTube. As discussed earlier, Chinese streaming services first emerged as video-­ sharing websites. Generally, Chinese viewers have been accustomed to this kind of interactive service model. Jean Burgess argues that user practices on media platforms like YouTube should be considered as a continuum of cultural participation situated in everyday life (2011, 326). Chinese viewers conduct online social activities on different social media platforms, such as Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter). Statistics regarding the age range of China’s online streaming users as of 2020 show that the majority (83.9%) of these users are in the age group between twenty and thirty-five (BigData-Research, 2020). The most active social media users are also in the same age group. Hence, Chinese streaming services adopted a service model that enables multiple interaction and participation means to cater to Chinese viewers’ constant demands to interact with each other. Another reason for the open streaming service model is that the user-­ generated content could still benefit the services’ current business model. Even though Chinese streaming services hardly depend on user-uploaded videos to generate direct revenue, they still welcome the potential traffic brought by these videos. More noticeably, streaming services exploit these user-uploaded videos and texts for the promotion of their licensed streaming content. As aforementioned, Tencent Video encourages viewers to watch fan-made videos related to Game of Thrones by listing them right next to the player screen of each episode. The utilisation of user-generated

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videos and social media components, such as reviews and commentaries, have proven to be powerful forms of promotion, especially for imported content since most of the foreign production companies lack the capacity for conducting campaigns in China (Curtin and Li 2018, 346). In other words, the Chinese streaming service model considers viewers not only as subscribers from whom revenue can be directly generated but also sources of labour that either actively or passively help enhance viewership. For example, the view amount and viewer rating of a certain television series or film shown on the interface could indicate how popular the content is, which further helps a new viewer decide whether the content is worth watching.

Conclusion In the context of television online, and in the age of the multi-screen, television viewing is no longer achievable only via the traditional broadcast model but also many newly emergent technological media. Besides the rapid expansion in online streaming services owned by major Chinese internet companies, traditional Chinese television channels have also been trying to set foot in this market, such as one of China’s leading provincial satellite TV stations, Hunan TV.  Including Hunan TV’s online video streaming service, Mango TV, almost every Chinese streaming service considers original content investment as the key branding strategy, which is also the branding logic employed by Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. In this sense, online video streaming services are not merely platforms but also symbolic of various, distinct brands. However, based on this chapter, the significant difference between Chinese and Western streaming service models is also obvious. If all the various branding identities are eliminated, we can see a highly identical engagement-based service model in every Chinese streaming service: a model that enables viewers with multiple interactive affordances (especially the bullet screen function) and uses user-generated texts. While watching streaming videos, Chinese viewers are accustomed to engaging in the viewing experience as active agents, which is an essential feature of an engagement-based Chinese streaming service model.

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Chinese Otaku Culture and Alternative Public Spheres: A Study of Bullet Comments and Bilibili Dongli Chen

China’s visual mediascape has attracted, and continues to attract, an increasing amount of attention, both locally and globally, its various video portals, with their diverse user demographics, manifesting unique cultures with unique practices of viewership and interaction. Bilibili stands as the most favourable video-sharing platform among young people (Chiu 2021). Boasting millions of users of Generation Z, who make up nearly 80% of the demographics, the site publicises itself as an iconic brand of youth culture in contemporary China. Compared to traditional streaming platforms, Bilibili is distinguished by a feature called “bullet comment,” or danmu (弹幕). Bullet comments enable users to communicate and to post their thoughts and responses to the content being viewed directly onto the interface, where they proceed to fly across the screen, overlaying the original content, for all to see. While a distraction for some viewers, bullet

D. Chen (*) Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon City, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_10

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comments have gained immense popularity among young people and have become a default setting of major video sites. As millions of Chinese online audiences choose to watch films, television dramas, animated series, and even news videos with overlaid comments, bullet comments present a new and novel way to consume visual media. Bullet comments were first launched on a Japanese video-sharing platform Nico Nico Douga in 2007, and later employed by Chinese sites Acfun and Bilibili in 2008 and 2010 respectively. After the success of Bilibili, mainstream video portals like Youku and iQiyi also started to adapt the bullet feature to their applications, making them a distinctive part of the internet culture in China. Nowadays, watching videos with bullet comments is second nature for younger generations in China, inviting further examination into the phenomenon while considering its potential as an alternative screen culture situated in the cultural context of contemporary China. By way of a case study of Bilibili and an investigation of the phenomenon, charting its history, as well as considering the experiences of the participants, this chapter argues that bullet comments help to construct a public sphere of the subcultural community on the platform, which opens up possibilities for online viewing to be participatory, connected, and collective.

The Cultural Specificity of Bullet Comments Notwithstanding their popularity in the Asian countries, bullet comments are still excluded from major online video platforms in the West. A reason for the exclusive popularity of bullet comments in China and Japan is potentially due to the succinctness of Chinese characters, as four characters can construct a whole sentence that can be understood at a glance. However, bullet comments do have counterparts in Western countries, with the most prominent examples being the live comments on Facebook and YouTube, or the recent “parties” feature on Netflix. The differences between bullet comments and live comments, though, are evident. First and foremost, live comments are only available on live streams; their purpose is to facilitate communication between the viewers and the streamer. On Bilibili, however, bullet comments are not a vehicle for the viewers to speak to the video maker. Rather, bullet commenters chat among themselves about (and sometimes not about) the video. The video thereby

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functions as a screening seminar, but the discussions are far more casual and fragmented, and they go on while the video is playing. Secondly, instead of being overlaid on the top of a video, live comments are displayed in a designated space below or aside the video, keeping the video intact from the intrusion of bullet comments. Finally, live comments are “live,” which means they cannot be re-read by other viewers unless the stream gets recorded. In contrast, bullet comments remain accessible for viewers who playback the content later, thus enabling asynchronous conversations. In a word, live comments and bullet comments are similar but not the same, functioning differently. Placing the bullet phenomenon into the social and cultural context in China, the Chinese audience’s affinity to bullet comments could find more grounds. In China, the prevalence of subtitles could be a contributing factor to the success of bullet comments. Since accents in China vary, region-­ to-­region, viewers, generally, require the assistance of subtitles to fully understand dialogue in film and television, and help reduce the ambiguity caused by homonyms in Chinese. From a historical perspective, China’s affinity to bullet comments has roots in Chinese cultural traditions such as inscriptions on paintings and in-text annotations of vernacular novels in the eighteenth century. Cao Xueqin’s The Dream of the Red Chamber (approximately 1717–1763), for instance, was usually read with commentators’ annotations, and these commentaries create different versions of the novel that circulate among readers. In the same way that bullet comments are displayed simultaneously with the video, the annotations operate in tandem with the original lines written by the author to create a unified experience. As for more recent history, film projections in rural areas contributed an important part to youth culture in the 1960s (Clark 2012, 44–45). The projections provided venues and opportunities for people to gather and interact, which became the shared cultural experience of the generation. For the viewers, the most attractive aspect of film projections was not necessarily the films themselves but the process of collective viewing. By creating a space for audiences to watch videos together, bullet comments enable people to go through the experience reminiscent of open-air film projections that were celebrated by their older generations. Although bullet comments are a new thing to Chinese history, the youth dispositions expressed in and through the media are rooted in its cultural heritage.

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The Transnational History of Bullet Comments Despite echoes of bullet comments in Chinese history and cultural traditions, the feature itself is an import from Japan. In 2007, a Japanese ACG (anime, comic, and games) video-sharing website Nico Nico Douga (ニコ ニコ動画, also known as “Niconico” and “Nicovideo”) pioneered the bullet-comment feature. Boasting thousands of fan-made videos on the theme of comics, anime and computer games, Nico Nico Douga provides a gathering place for Japanese otaku communities. The Japanese site attracted increasing users in China, leading to the creation of Acfun, an imitation website in 2007. Two year later, Bilibili was launched by a user of Acfun as an alternative to its predecessor. With a more user-friendly website layout and better content management, Bilibili largely replaced Acfun and became the biggest bullet-comment website in China in 2010. By 2020, Bilibili had made its way into the mainstream with soaring user numbers and increasingly diverse content; however, anime, games and comics largely populate the site. Bullet comments in Chinese are called danmu (弹幕), which comes from the Japanese word danmaku (弾幕, literally means “barrage”) with the same characters. In the Japanese context, the overlaid comments on videos are simply called “comment” (コメント), while danmaku is used by the Nico fans to characterise the vast quantity—the barrage—of bullet comments covering the screen at a given time. Noticeably, although being a military term, danmaku actually derives from a shooting game series Touhou Project (東方 Project) and is used as a game jargon. The genealogy of the platforms and the term’s etymology manifest bullet comments’ embeddedness in anime, comics, and games (ACG) culture and Japanese culture. Asia went through a wave of “Japanization” (Iwabuchi 2002, 9) in the 1990s when a variety of popular cultural products, including pop music, comics, anime, and video games, circulated in East and Southeast Asia with great popularity. In China, Japanese popular culture was especially well-received among young people, especially the post-1980s and post-­1990s generations. According to a survey conducted by Weibo in 2020, China has more than 200 million fans of anime and comics. Japanese ACG have inspired a distinctive subculture in China. The Chinese ACG culture is integrally related to the Japanese otaku phenomenon. Generally, otaku refers to the fandom of ACG products, yet the term is loaded with stereotypes and stigmatisation of the group. According to Misuko Ito

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et  al. (2012), the semiotics of the term otaku date from the 1980s. Translating as “your house” in Japanese, the term can also be used as an honorific second-person pronoun. In a 1982 anime Macross, the protagonists use otaku to address each other, and the word thereby became a subcultural slang among the fans of the anime. Otaku was first used as a social category by columnist Akio Nakamori in 1983 to describe the young men who are addicted to ACG products, and critically deployed to condemn them as being out of touch with social reality. In 1989, the image of otakus dramatically deteriorated after the case of Tsutomu Miyazaki, who cruelly abducted and murdered four young girls, sexually molesting, and dismembering their corpses. After his arrest, Japanese police found an extensive collection of pornographic and horror anime videotapes and comics in his house. Miyazaki thereby became “the otaku murderer” in the media, arousing a public moral panic against the social group. Otaku culture has been thereafter associated with violence, sex, and immaturity, until the mid-1990s when Toshio Okada and other scholars started to argue for a positive image by emphasising community and the innovation of its fandom. The equivalent of otaku culture in Chinese is zhai wenhua (宅文化, literally “house/home culture”), which also conjures negative connotations of being socially inept. A similar expression to zhai wenhua is er ciyuan (二次元, literally “two-dimensional world”), indicating that the fantasy world in anime and comics are two-dimensional versus the threedimensional reality. Both the terms allude to the isolation, even escapism, from social reality. Originating from and embedded in the subcultures of ACG fandom and otaku culture, the bullet phenomenon is, nevertheless, celebrated in scholarly discussions for its characteristics of sociality and intersubjectivity.

Previous Studies on Bullet Comments As an emerging phenomenon, bullet comments have attracted increased attention in academia. Starting with the question over why viewers watch bullet comments, Yue Chen, Qin Gao, and Pei-Luen Patrick Rau conducted a quantitative study in 2017. Their research found that the main motivation for viewers to use bullet comments was mainly the desire to seek entertainment, additional information, and a sense of belonging. The findings also suggested that introverts tend to be more engaged in bullet comments due to the anonymity of the practice. These findings are echoed

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by other researchers in Cultural Studies. Based on a study of the comment feature on Nicovideo, Daniel Johnson (2013), for example, notices that the visual mixture of writing texts and moving images alters the viewing experience and creates a feeling of “live” viewing through “pseudo-­ synchronicity” (301). Focusing on the Chinese context, Zheng Xiqing (2016) further elaborates the idea of “pseudo-synchronicity,” suggesting that the feeling of synchronous communication “creates a sense of community and interconnection” (342) that the introvertive otakus seek online, and the practice of bullet comment constitutes a social ritual that confirms the identity of being an otaku (319). Zhen Troy Chen (2020) also highlights the significance of the bullet practices in identity construction. According to Chen, anonymous bullet comments provide a milieu for a “live and wired masquerade” (12) in which the fans perform their identity. Acknowledging the roles of bullet practice in constructing community, Yin Yiyi and Anthony Fung (2017) shift the focus from youth identity to political engagement, arguing for the potential for grassroots democracy of bullet comments and Bilibili. However, this radical claim is countered by several researchers. Tessa Dwyer (2017) points out that Bilibili is not an enclave from state propaganda and censorship (582), and Seio Nakajima (2019) notices that the contents of bullet comments are usually apolitical. Nevertheless, Nakajima insists “sociability itself has political dimensions” (111), and bullet comments, which epitomise the sociality of connection, have their political indications and significance. Bullet comments have not always been an online phenomenon, however. With the increasing popularity of the feature, bullet comments entered offline cinema in 2014, and “bullet cinema” (弹幕电影) became a buzzword at the time. Several films, including Guo Jinming’s Tiny Time 3 (2014), set special screenings equipped with the bullet service, so that audiences could post comments onto the silver screen via their phones. The advent of bullet cinema triggered a discussion about the impact of bullet comments on film spectatorship. Peng Ting (2015) argues that the feature of bullet comments shifts the scopophilic spectators to the exhibitionist audience through distancing, and spectators’ communication via bullet comments facilitates a better expression of their intersubjectivity. Liu Xiaoping (2018) suggests that bullet-comment cinema indicates the struggle for discourse power between consumers and filmmakers, and it hinders the fulfilment of audience’s aesthetic demands, which was the reason for the final failure of bullet-comment cinema. These two researchers both think the transference of bullet comments from online platforms to

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offline cinema demonstrates a shift from the online otaku culture to participatory public activity, yet such an argument overlooks the possibility of the convergence of the two. With a focus on the lived experiences of the bullet-comment practice, I argue that bullet comments create an alternative public sphere, whose political connotations do not go against but are intrinsically related to the spirit of otaku culture. Examining bullet comments as an otaku-cultural practice will also enrich our understanding of the theoretical concept of the public sphere.

Public Sphere: From Sociology to Film Studies The concept of a public sphere was proposed by Jurgen Habermas in 1962. Contextualised in a discussion of the society of eighteenth-century Europe, Habermas sees the public spaces (such as coffee houses) as the fourth kind, preceded by the state, the marketplace, and the family. Centring on the idea of participatory democracy, Habermas’s conceptualisation emphasises the potential of public discussion to form public opinion and generate political actions. This concept on the one hand marks a historical turning point in society, and on the other hand provides a normative standard for political critique. Ideally, a public sphere should allow free access and exchange of ideas. Habermas is largely concerned with the bourgeois public sphere, overlooking the marginalised groups like the working classes and women. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1988) develop Habermas’s conceptualisation by introducing a “proletarian public sphere” as a category of negation, indicating an alternative or counter public, which underlines the heterogeneity and volatility of the category of public sphere. According to Alexander Kluge (cited in Hansen 1991, 13–14), film is also a public sphere. Firstly, film creates “relationality” through montage. By juxtaposing and connecting texts from disparate realms and registers, montage arouses a relational experience in the spectator. Secondly, cinema functions as an alternative public sphere through the reciprocity between the film and the spectator. When consuming the narratives of the films, the spectator organises his or her social experience in and through the film, endowing film viewing with dialogism and sociality. Miriam Hansen uses the term “public sphere” to denote “a discursive matrix or process through which social experience is articulated, interpreted, negotiated and contested in an intersubjective, potentially collective and oppositional form” (1993, 201). According to Hansen, early

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cinema provides such a public sphere. Different from classical cinema that “has eliminated the conditions of participation, interaction, and self-­ representation” (Hansen 1991, 13), early cinema constructed a space, in which the spectators expressed and negotiated their intersubjectivity and experience. Such specificity of early spectatorship was determined by the exhibition mode of early cinema. When displaying films in fairgrounds or nickelodeons, a showman had a series of short films to show, while the order of the exhibition was to his determination. Therefore, the actual screening programme might vary from time to time and place to place. The contingency and unpredictability of the film exhibition of early cinema thus created live performances. The spectator’s viewing was structured by the specific situations of the exhibition together with their “social horizon of experience” (Hansen 1993, 207). The viewing experience is grounded in a broad context of living with a blurred boundary between the private and public domains. Moreover, the variety of film exhibitions in early cinema preserved an arena that allowed the coincidence of diverse reception with regional and cultural specificities. The uneven mix of disparate publicity in early cinema enables it to cater to peripheral social groups, especially those with traumatic experiences of territorial and cultural displacement, such as immigrants and women. During the process of watching, viewers re-appropriate the film texts in their own ways and according to their own needs, so that they could negotiate their personal experience in the public sphere, no matter whether they talk to others or not. In her essay “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Permutations of the Public Sphere” (1993), Hansen indicates a regressive tendency of new media. Cinema in the digital era not only demonstrates a set of formal similarities to early cinema but also reveals the transition of the public sphere in a technologically mediated world. In the twenty-first century, the internet is usually regarded as an eloquent example of this transition. With new technologies affording ordinary people with the capability and freedom to access information and make their voice heard, cyberspace seems the ideal version for a public sphere. Nevertheless, while the internet opens an alternative space for social discussion, it also segments people through echo chambers and enforced stereotypes, impeding the exchange of ideas between different social groups. Moreover, as censorship goes increasingly subtle and covert (Bunn 2015), whether the internet will facilitate or obstruct public discussion becomes a question again. In the Chinese context, studies of the online public sphere are chiefly from the disciplines of communication and politics. Focusing on cases like

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online forums (Li 2010) and social media (Wang 2021), researchers mainly evaluate the potential of the public spheres in promoting citizen’s political engagement and espousing democracy. However, concerning the real-life experiences of every single participant, the significance of a public sphere could be more subtle and nuanced.

Bullet Comments as a Mediated Public Sphere Evaluating early cinema as a public sphere, Hansen highlights the spatiality shared by both the concepts. Likewise, Walter Benjamin compares film to architecture ([1935] 2010, 1069), alluding to distraction in the reception of both forms of arts. Today, within the digital era, bullet comments crystalise this comparability. Through bullet comments, viewers enter the architecture and leave their mark. Bullet comments appropriate the videos just as graffiti appropriates public spaces, but the bullet sphere is mediated by the internet. As the practice of bullet commenting relies on the video platform, users’ experiences and practices are greatly influenced by the characteristics and functions of the technology. The public sphere created by bullet comments is situated in the infrastructures of Bilibili. It is worth noting that the bullet comments feature on Bilibili is not obligatory but optional for viewers. Users can enable bullet comments as they want, which means the bullet sphere stands open for the participants to join and leave. Bilibili also endows viewers with freedom to personalise their usage of bullet comments. For example, if one wants to watch a video with bullet comments but finds it disturbing when they fully cover the video screen, they can, for example, limit the numbers of the comments on display at a given time. Also, the degree of transparency of the comment texts is adjustable. It is even possible for the users to set their own filters by blocking certain keywords or specific commenters. Instead of being overwhelmed by the flood of comments, viewers reserve the options to adjust the flow rate and even close the valve. To this extent, the public sphere is also private, as users dwell in separate yet connected bubbles, where they enjoy certain autonomy to decide their degree of engagement. While there are several reasons one might want to limit or disable the bullet-comment feature altogether, there are equally sufficient reasons to keep the function on. Firstly, the dynamics of viewers’ responses make the video feel “live,” thereby bringing a novel dimension to the experience of viewing. Because the capacity of loading bullet comments on the Bilibili

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player has maximum limits that vary with the length of videos, and new comments would replace older ones as the number of comments increases, viewers may see different bullet comments at different replay times. Like the exhibitions of early cinema that vary from time to time, videos with bullet comments also demonstrate the fluidity and ephemerality of live performance. More importantly, the practice of posting bullet comments involves creative participation in the visual dimension of the video. Bilibili offers different fashionable settings to encourage the innovative use of bullet comments. The default setting is white texts flying from the right side to the left on the top of the video. For higher-level users who have registered for a longer time and been more active on the platform, they are able to personalise the font and movement of the comments. For example, level two users can change the font colour, meanwhile level three users are able to post top/bottom comments that will stay in place on the screen for a few seconds. Thanks to the feature, commenters may creatively “interact” with the video. Additionally, Bilibili also supports a feature called “advanced bullet comments,” which allows viewers to post comments in bigger fonts and flexible positions for a more powerful visual impact. With these diverse settings, bullet comments transcend the limits of textual words and gain the tactility of moving images. Commenting is not only a practice of speech but also an exercise of creation and innovation. Making the viewing experience creative, participatory, connected, and collective, bullet comments foster an alternative public sphere for the viewers to communicate about their viewing experience and express their sense of identity.

Participatory, Connected, and Collective Viewing Bullet comments are a hybrid of two types of video paratexts: captions and comments. Facilitating viewers to understand the content, captions constitute a component of the video, while comments are added by the viewers as the “extra” to the original text. Bullet comments combine the modality of the former and the messages of the latter. Displaying users’ comments as subtitles, the feature situates comments inside the screen frame but outside the video’s narrative. By doing so, the bullet-comment feature enables the audience to contribute to the video text directly. The video is no longer a closed system that anticipates and manipulates the audience reception but more like a venue for the viewers to express and produce.

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Different from the traditional way of making comments, in which viewers comment after they finish the video, bullet comments respond to the video simultaneously while it plays. When posting comments at certain playback times, the audience often needs to pause the video, thus fragmenting the viewing experience. Bullet commenting interrupts the continuous narrative of the video with the viewers’ instant thoughts triggered by certain plots, images, or sounds. Instead of being absorbed into the flows of information, the viewers actively absorb the video when they recontextualise the text (the film or television programme). For example, there is a scene in the film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), where Harry’s aunt surprisingly finds anonymous letters inside eggs. One bullet comment went “Great Chu will rise again! Chen Sheng will be king!” which refers to a Chinese historical story and has nothing to do with the film. By linking the film text to a disparate context, the viewer deconstructed the film text, which shifts the role of spectators from passive receivers to active participants. What is noteworthy is that the participatory dimension of video viewing is not mechanically created by bullet comments. Instead, the entries for viewer participation have been left there by the original video narratives. Although the bullet feature is available on every video on Bilibili, certain types of videos usually have more comments than others. Generally, videos such as popular animated series and user-generated funny videos have more bullet comments than classic films. The videos that attract more bullet comments are usually “producerly texts” that invite contributions and re-writings from the readers (Fiske [1989] 2010). Derived from Roland Barthes’s distinction between the reader texts and the writer texts, a producerly text, according to John Fiske, combines the easy accessibility of the former and the openness of the later. Being producerly, videos that welcome bullet comments are characterised by relatively loose narrative and light-hearted themes, so that the users would find it easy to chip in. Where the video exposes its “vulnerabilities, limitations and weaknesses of its preferred meanings” (Fiske [1989] 2010, 84), bullet comments fill in the cracks and reproduce the video. As Chen (2020) claims, bullet practice is a way of “tactical prosumption” (4) of the video texts. It epitomises readers’ agency in consuming popular texts. In addition to enabling viewers’ participation, bullet comments also forge connections among viewers. As comments posted on different dates are played on the same playback time, viewers share a “pseudo-­ synchronous” sense of time when they watch the video (Zheng 2016,

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330). When a viewer articulates his or her response to the video in bullet comments, it becomes visible to the other viewers, and this has the potential to shape their viewing experiences and facilitate connection (perhaps via a shared opinion to a celebrity or a narrative plotline). Viewing becomes a collective activity, which creates an intersubjective horizon based on but not limited to the video text. Through the collective activity of viewing and rewriting, viewers share thoughts and emotions, formulating heterogeneous but cohesive identities of online micro-cultural communities. Bullet comments thereby connect the spectators’ viewing experiences, adding an intersubjective dimension to spectatorship. The sense of connectivity is further illustrated by the anonymity of bullet comments. Compared to the traditional comments that identify the commenters, bullet comments on Bilibili are displayed without the names nor the pseudonym of the user. Also, different from traditional comments that value originality, bullet comments always duplicate. Comments, especially the witty responses with a sense of humour, might be posted by different users many times. Some bullet comments go viral, appearing as online memes, but it is almost impossible to identify the author and the origin. The individual commenters are invisible, whereas the anonymous mass is spotlighted. With each participant identifying with the community, the connected reviewers form a collective whole, which has the potential to be monolithic and exclusive. In some cult videos, viewers may repeatedly post one same comment, just as fans shouting slogans at the concert of their favourite star. In this ritual-like performance, viewers confirm their sense of belonging by submerging their subjectivities into the vibrant mass. The bullet sphere is not inclusively accessible, as some bullet comments on Bilibili may confuse and discourage outsiders who are unfamiliar with the culture. For example, a prevalent comment is “awsl,” which is the abbreviation of “A wo si le” (啊我死了, “Oh, I died”) that expresses a strong affection for cute things. “Awsl” has variants like “a wei si le” (阿 伟死了, “Jacky died”) and “a wei chu lai shou si” (阿伟出来受死, “Prepare to die, Jacky”). Intentionally or not, these increasingly confusing comments prevent the outsiders from understanding the comments and enter the community. The cipher-like jargons identify “us” from the “others,” intensifying the solidarity of the subcultural community. However, anonymity also makes bullet comments more vulnerable to censorship. As the “voices” are disassociated from the speakers, commenters might be less responsible for their comments. As such, Bilibili has a set of strict regulations about “etiquette about bullet comments (弹幕礼仪).”

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“Improper” comments, including abuse, spam, trolling, and even “meaningless” comments, might be reported by other users and get removed. As comments appear immediately after users post them, the platform adopts keyword filters to pre-censor bullet comments. Comments containing offensive or sensitive words are not able to be posted and shown to other viewers, and the commenter will not be informed about the failure of commenting. The censorship based on the mechanism of user reporting and keywords filter can easily be excessive. Although people may not directly exchange their political opinions and discuss public issues via bullet comments, the shared experience and connected spectatorship correspond to the public sphere argued by Hansen. Bullet comments, to a degree, draw the spectatorship back to the age of vaudeville and fairgrounds, where film exhibitions were held as live performances. The online viewers “attend” the video and make their presence. Even for the viewers who do not post comments, they still belong to the collective audience and share the experience. The sense of connectedness and togetherness generated by bullet comments are especially significant for the young Chinese netizens, especially concerning the cohort under the One-child policy. While being referred to as “the most self-centred generation” (Liu 2011, 141), these young people build communities online and represent a collective self through innovative media practices. Through bullet comments, Chinese otakus construct an alternative public sphere for communication and participation, negotiating their social experience and articulating their identity. Although remaining indoors and facing only electronic screens, otakus are participating in social reality actively and creatively.

Conclusion: Reconsidering Public Sphere in the Post-globalisation Age Originated as a sociological category in the Western context, the concept of the public sphere is politically loaded with a vision of participatory democracy. When used transnationally in the Chinese context, the concept itself inevitably alters and evolves. Different from the political public sphere that emphasises the freedom of citizens to access and express, the public spheres on Bilibili are exclusive to the community members. With a shared otaku disposition, the users of bullet comments fervently seek identities within the community, while the people who are not familiar

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with the culture are excluded. The “public” hence becomes a pseudo notion as it does not include all the citizens. However, who are the public? Is there really a space for all the people to participate and communicate? Just as Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere does not include certain marginalised social groups, the public sphere for the marginalised otaku communities does not welcome the mainstream. What we witness in the multifaceted digital era is the transformation of the public sphere to “public spheres” in a plural form. Other than democracy, identity politics is equally or even more crucial to the notion of the public sphere. If “public sphere” is a politically loaded term that connotes Western hegemony, bullet comments and Bilibili are the illustrations of Japanisation which seemingly decentres the dominant America, globally. However, as argued by Koichi Iwabuchi (2002), Japanese culture’s transnationalism is achieved not only through exporting indigenous culture but also through localising American popular culture. It may resist westernisation and at the same time assist it. In the Chinese context, bullet comments as a localised import exhibit Chineseness and signify transnationalism. As the cross-­ boundary consumption shapes the identity of Chinese youth (Fung et al. 2019), it further complicates the boundaries between the indigenous culture and foreign influences. With China branding itself as an alternative power in the global arena, the duality of bullet comments reminds us of the intricacy of national/local culture in the age post of globalisation.

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How Much Does a Subtitle Say?: A Critical Reception Study of Chinese Television Dramas Streamed Overseas Jingjing Li

We live in a digitally mediatised world where the boundary between television and online streaming video series has blurred. Internet technologies have impacted the way people entertain themselves, as well as interact with others, with choice and personalisation defining the viewing experience and disrupting traditional distribution and reception (Simons 2014), and on demand facilitating the shift from a “passively consuming audience” (Morley 1993, 13) to “engaged audience” (Simons 2014, 2225). Traditionally, audiences consumed television as it was broadcast—at a specific time and on a specific channel. Limited only by the quality of the internet connection, streamed media has arguably liberated content from the traditional broadcast structure. Moreover, as well as choosing what to watch and when, interactive online interfaces increasingly enable viewers to not only customise their viewing options but also post their feedback

J. Li (*) University of Leicester, Leicester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_11

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through diverse channels of viewer interaction. Over the years, these trends have led to a dramatic increase in online viewing. In the UK, for example, a recent Ofcom survey (Ofcom 2018) illustrated that the revenues generated from pay television began to dip for the first time in 2018 after years of sustained growth, while television streaming services like Netflix have overtaken traditional pay television in terms of UK subscriptions, marking a major shift in the UK’s viewing landscape.

Reception of Transnational TV Dramas and Subtitling Streamed media content alters the texture of our lives. It enables information to travel instantaneously, enabling people to quickly access various forms of local and international content online. Meanwhile, the flow of media information breaks up “fixed territories and national structure” (Athique 2014, 2), fostering the formation of transnational audiences. As transnationalism is broadly seen as an umbrella term for the most globally transformative processes of our time (Vertovec 1999, 459), the transnational audience takes the spatial form of increasingly interconnected virtual communities enabled by online video streaming platforms. At the heart of the notion of the transnational audience lies the tacit bond between the audience and their engagement with online streaming networks. The awareness of multi-locality amongst the translation audience even stimulates their sense of connection to share some experience or feelings conjured up through viewing (Gilroy 1992; Vertovec 1999). In other words, transnational bond in the age of cyberspace is cemented by a “shared imagination” or “imaginary coherence” (Hall 1980) as activated by the shared media products, rather than through migration or other forms of physical socio-political movements (Cohen 1996, 516). As the most influential “narrative media artefact” (Athique 2014), transnational television drama is seen to be a mode of cultural reproduction of the source media text and its reconstructed interaction with the audience in the target context. Reception studies is divided between the study of transnational media content and subtitling. The former often aligns with cultural studies using qualitative ethnographic approaches to explore how audiences negotiate media content against their knowledge network and life practice (Briggs 2006; Adriaens 2014; Wood 2006; Zaborowski 2016), whereas the latter has been predominantly focused on

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the reception of subtitles based on the premise that linguistic difference is the first and foremost barrier for any audience to access the media text across national borders (Díaz Cintas and Sánchez 2006; Pérez-González 2007; Fernández Costales 2012; Orrego Carmona 2015). In comparison with dubbing, subtitling is the most economical and efficient form of audio-visual translation for television dramas. Subtitling involves rendering the original verbal message and other useful multimodal information into the written target language that normally appears at the bottom of the screen; the visualised script, interpreted, facilitates non-native speaking audience’s comprehension of a film or television series alongside their original audio track. Given the widespread availability of audio-visual material and subtitling tools, there has been an increase in the production, distribution, and consumption of non-professional subtitled media (Orrego Carmona 2016). Fan or “prosumer” groups (Tapscott and Williams 2006) take on the role of translators, interpreting and, via the internet, distributing subtitled material in different languages. That has led to the study of the reception of fan subtitled content, often exposing misinterpretations or translations; comparing professional and non-professional subtitling practices (Bogucki 2009; Orrego Carmona 2016); or considering non-professional subtitling in its own right (Pérez-­ González 2013; Orrego Carmona 2014). The existing research has yielded useful findings as to how to create the optimal format of subtitling for viewers. However, the fundamental gap of the present reception study on audio-visual translation rests on the presumption that viewers tend to pay prior attention to subtitles in their viewing practice, the validity of which has yet to be addressed. Translation as a social activity is enacted in various forms to make communication possible. It is therefore meant to be studied in the system of socio-cultural production. Likewise, as subtitling is only part of the process of audio-visual production, reception studies of audio-visual products are not expected to fully home in on the reception of subtitles. As Adrian Athique (2014, 9) points out, although certain aspects of transnational media content may achieve popularity through practices such as subtitling and dubbing, there is no purely linguistic account for this and therefore we must turn our attention to the cultural component of this phenomenon. Subtitling is a useful activity that enables audiences the world over to understand content in another language other than their own, therefore it only makes sense to have it examined through the lens of audience reception of media studies. This chapter intends to bridge this gap by situating the study of

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subtitling reception within the broader area of media audience reception theory in order to inform and re-calibrate the future course of subtitling studies. It contends the prevalent assumption that subtitling quality is the predominant concern for transnational reception and sets out to identify the factors that determine audience reception of transnational Chinese television drama.

Understanding “Oppositional” Audiences Since the 1970s, television studies has been intrinsically bound up with cultural studies (Zaborowski 2016). The transnational flow of media content has remoulded the view of culture into “the subset of these differences that has been mobilised to articulate the boundary of difference” (Appadurai 1996, 13). In the “imagined community” (Anderson 1983/2006) where diasporic (multi-ethnic) audiences are exposed to foreign content, they tend to see culture as those differences that either express or shape their group identities. This perception has transformative potential in a virtual media community, where audience participation encourages individuals to imagine themselves as “part of larger and more abstracted social formations” (Athique 2014, 5). The collective symbolic imagination has transformed the reading of media artefacts into subjective articulation of their responses to media content. Despite being seen as individuals, diasporic media audiences are also seen as globally connected, representing unique “human geographies” (Athique 2014, 4), where the sophisticated international media consumption sits alongside “long-­ distance nationalism” (Cunningham 2002, 273). It thus remains a central question as to how audience research is to be carried out to understand the motivations of audience participation in the reception of transnational media content and television dramas. Stuart Hall (1980) embarks on the tradition to take into account audiences in television studies in the study of readings and meanings generated in the consumption of television series. Contemporary technologies invite audiences to become active participants, thus challenging former modes and understandings of audiences as passive spectators (Ang 2006, 179). In response, Hall (1980) proposed a means by which we could theoretically understand the process by which audiences receive and interpret images (Hall 1980, 134). Building on the foundation established in Hall’s work, David Morley (1992) analysed the links between the interpretative capacity of television audiences and their individual backgrounds. Meanwhile,

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John Fiske (1989) draws on a range of cultural theories to investigate the guerrilla activity of the audience as a means of resistance to the dominant power bloc. As such, the formation of “a hermeneutics of audience activity” was largely fuelled by Hall’s theoretical breakthrough (Stevenson 2002, 116), which is still considered as being highly influential in audience reception theory today (Gray 1999; Stevenson 2002). It is thus important to draw on Hall’s contribution to active audience research to shed light on audience participation in the diasporic media communities. The main proposition of Hall’s theory is known as the encoding/ decoding model. Coding is a way in which socio-cultural signs are written into a system of meaning which can be legitimised and contested by a cultural order. The point is that what is being written constitutes a “dominant cultural order” (Hall 1980, 134) whereby the taken-for-granted knowledge is imparted into social structures. This is what Hall terms a “hegemonic” viewpoint that “carries with it the stamp of legitimacy” (Hall 1980, 137) and appears deceptively natural and taken for granted by the general public. Hall argues that television news or relevant series are encoded with this viewpoint through which verbal language and visual images are mobilised to disseminate this natural knowledge. Likewise in cultural content, certain licensed cultural streaks can be encoded into the production of television dramas and ready for reception by target groups. The next element of the model is how the hegemonic viewpoint can be decoded by the audience. Hall proposes three positions (1980, 136). The first is the preferred reading where the audience is supposed to decode the message as expected by the text producer. The second is the negotiated position in which “adaptive and oppositional” elements coexist (ibid). Here, a viewer’s own background or beliefs may oppose some elements in the encoded content, whilst endorsing the hegemonic view or dominant order in general. The third position is termed as the oppositional code. The viewer decodes the message in a globally contradictory fashion, whereby the original content is reproduced into a divergent reading from the producer’s expectations. Central to the reception research is the decoding stage. Scholars have tried to understand the conditions under which people oppose or reject a television message. Hall believes that people who live within the hegemonic order tend to accept the encoded ideology and take it as common sense. But Morley (1980) observes that those living within the order might be aware of the alternative views and recognise the preferred message. Therefore, they may want to deconstruct the encoded message by

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proposing a more balanced picture with alternatives without necessarily opposing the hegemonic view. Greg Philo made further endeavours to account for the conditions where the encoded message is opposed. He recognises the sophistication involved in the decoding process, stating “it is clear that how actions are perceived and the legitimacy of different positions can be dramatically affected by the context in which they are understood and the information which is given” (2008, 540). The premise is that audiences are aware of the different positions or alternative views. By proposing the importance of the “alternatives,” Philo contends with a misconception of the active audience theory regarding how audiences can reject television messages (2008, 537). It is not always because a media text is “polysemic” (Boyd-Barrett 2002, 45); it could generate diverse readings among different audiences. Rather, some people choose to criticise or reject the encoded message in relation to the alternative positions which they hold dear, although they are aware of the preferred reading. These later developments of Hall’s audience reception theory would not only enable our understanding of audience participatory behaviour but also broaden our horizon as to the conditions under which viewers’ oppositional choices are made.

Chinese Television Dramas on Rakuten Viki The past two decades have seen China’s “Go Global” policy (1999) take effect, with the steady increase of domestic television series being exported abroad, even though the proportion of exported television drama only began to rise in the past few years following the extended broadcasting coverage and burgeoning demand of the film and drama market. The Chinese Film and Television Import and Export Association was established in 2017 to broaden the marketing and broadcasting of film and television drama series abroad. In 2018, the association expanded the total number of member companies to fifty-eight and rolled out further financial benefits and preferential tax measures to accelerate the dissemination of Chinese dramas overseas (TMTPOST 2019). On the other hand, the saturation of the domestic television drama market propels production companies to promote the productions to foreign audiences “in the hope that they should at least be curious about the content they created” (ibid). The television series analysed in this chapter are sourced from Rakuten Viki, a streaming site for East Asian television dramas and films. Owned by the Tokyo-based e-commerce company Rakuten, Viki provides an

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extensive catalogue of television series and movies, mainly from South Korea, Japan, and China. It plays on the mixed words “video” and “Wiki,” alluding to its resemblance to Wikipedia with respect to the user-­generated content, such as subtitles (Klinge 2020). The reasons for selecting this site are threefold. Firstly, recent years have seen the surging demand for Asian dramas in the global market. Boasting three of the four most in-demand East Asian television series, Viki has surpassed Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and YouTube in the US market. Secondly, it maintains high traction among viewers by constantly innovating its interactive features, the most recent being the launch of the Watch Party function in May 2020, which, unlike Netflix Party, offers a customised virtual space for any of its users to connect with each other across screens (ibid). Thirdly, Viki has created a sizable community for fansubbers (Dwyer 2012), a collection of viewers and volunteers who subtitle content in more than 130 languages. Subbing team is clearly displayed for each series with details of the multilingual subtitles provided. It is fair to say that viewer interactivity and transparency of subtitling alongside its rising popularity make Rakuten Viki a suitable choice to study the viewing experience and subtitle reception from the viewers. The proliferation of communication channels on streaming platforms such as Viki propelled the development of Chinese television dramas in the global market. It is therefore important to investigate the set of factors underlying the reception of contemporary Chinese television dramas among the global audiences and account for the habits and patterns of viewer perception. The aim is to find out whether the quality of subtitles is a concerning element that influences viewers’ reception of the dramas. Content analysis is employed to answer the above questions presented in this research. This method is an unobtrusive qualitative research measure to study the “cultural artefacts” (Abbott and McKinney 2012, 44) that are materials created to tell us about meanings and patterns, offering detailed and in-depth description of communication content. Such analysis enables viewer perception and response to be observed unobtrusively without the direct involvement of the researcher or participants to achieve neutral and objective outcomes. It involves specialised procedures for processing the data in a bid to give “the systemic and qualitative description of the manifest content of communication” (Mustaffaa and Salleh 2014, 204). The first procedure is to define the criteria of data selection. As discussed earlier, the steaming giant Rakuten Viki has stood out as a reliable

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site to source our exported Chinese television dramas. The dramas under discussion encompass the ones that attract the largest fanbase. Viki publishes the list of top-rated series in real time. It would be cogent to go for the releases up until 2019 to allow the 2020 series to mature in rating, although some very recent releases have proved to be a smash hit already in the domestic market. According to the recent survey (Soompi 2019), despite hundreds of Chinese dramas being released every year, the crop of televised dramas came out strong in the last couple of years. It is worth noting that fanbase should also be considered in assessing the ratings given that some dramas exhibit a relatively low number of reviews despite the high ratings. This phenomenon may indicate the undue viewer attention caused by limited or overdue exposure to viewers. Therefore, the data for this study consists of the most highly rated dramas with sufficient fanbase (over 10,000 reviews) released between 2017 and 2019 on Viki. When considering genre, costume dramas and contemporary series are among the most popular genres of Chinese productions released on overseas streaming websites (Li 2018). Among the most popular dramas are The Untamed (2019), Legend of Fu Yao (2018), and Princess Agent (2017). Both genres are officially endorsed by the National Radio and Television Administration of China for overseas promotion for global audiences to “develop an interest in the country and want to know more about Chinese history and customs” (Ji 2018). Another reason to incorporate the two genres is that the top list of the highly rated dramas published on Viki is mainly composed of the costume and contemporary dramas, which reiterates the rationale of this typology. After setting out the selection criteria and genres of data, we will move on to define the unit and categories of analysis. Given the scope of this chapter, the discussion will focus on three top-rated dramas from each genre. Viki provides a rating-salient viewing environment that has the potential to influence not only the viewer’s choice of what to watch but might also motivate them to contribute their feedback to the fanbase. This study examines the critical reviews to delve into the reasons behind their choice of television dramas and the conditions under which may influence their decisions to accept and reject the encoded values in the series. Critical reviews account for viewer feedback arranged from low to high ratings. The continuum of ratings is indexed with the number of stars whereby the one-star reviews are deemed to be extremely critical. The reviews between two and three stars are very critical, while those between three and five stars are mostly critical, mixed with some positive notes. Five-to-nine-star

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reviews tend to be mostly positive, and ten-star reviews are almost unanimously positive. It would be interesting to see these initial observations fit neatly into Hall’s three-tiered decoding process. The viewers rating one to five stars are generally considered oppositional viewers who decode the original message in a globally contradictory fashion. Those rating five to nine stars belong to the category of negotiated viewers who come in to oppose some elements in the encoded content, whilst endorsing the dominant order in general, with the remaining being the preferred viewers who accept the encoded messages in total. The central question would be to investigate the conditions and motives that underpin the aforementioned viewers’ choices. It is worth noting that online reviews feature varying degrees of textual heterogeneity favoured by viewers. Some of the reviews are intersected with emojis and exaggerated twists of punctuation marks and words. These modes of expression all speak for the viewers’ feelings and beliefs and should therefore be considered, albeit with critical distance. In view of the sizable body of data, the main units of the study rely on the critical reviews from one to five-star ratings. The rationale is that this category of critical reviews tends to involve more reasoning and logic from the viewers (Philo 2008) and would be more suitable for the purpose of the study in terms of its information and consultation to the media industry.

Critical Reviews of Costume Dramas The empirical analysis shows that critical reviews in one-to-five-star ratings can be broken down into seven categories that the overseas viewers of Chinese television dramas are mainly concerned with. They are storyline, acting, actors/characters, cinematography, special effects/CGI, adaptation from original novel, subtitling issues. Storyline is the most widely concerned area. As users are being critical about the specific aspects in storytelling. The majority of the reviews are pointed at the lengthy storyline, which is found to be repetitive, draggy, slow pacing so that the interest of viewers has dried out in the middle or even at the start of the series. Most viewers giving one-to-three-star ratings have not managed to complete over 50 episodes of each drama. Under these conditions, it is natural that some more “sober” viewers have gone to some lengths to point out the plot holes, fillers, flaws, and unreal plots. These viewers can fit into the type of more intellectual media users whose feedback goes beyond the level of intuitive emotional participation

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and sets out to “deconstruct” (Morley 1980; Philo 2008) the content. The last subcategory draws attention to Legend of Fu Yao, which exhibits much higher attention than the other two. Some viewers express a love-­ hate sentiment towards this drama. Some admit to being fans of Yang Mi, the female lead, and get hooked to the end of the series despite the difficult plot, only to find the ending surprisingly disappointing. On the one hand, it can be inferred that the ending is an important point of concern to overseas viewers who would expect a round-off ending. On the other hand, negative reviews do not necessarily entail the audience rejection as some viewers may well take the chance to voice a personal displeasure of some point of the plots. The category of characters sees fewer negative views for Legend of Fu Yao, mainly due to the support from the fans of Yang Mi. In the category of acting, The Untamed and Ashes of Love are given similar outcomes, albeit for different reasons. Many viewers show discomfort with the interaction between two main male leads to varying degrees in The Untamed, while the “whiny,” naïve female lead takes much blame for the negative reviews. The technical aspects in terms of cinematography and special effects are mostly addressed as side comments, and do not seem to constitute the focus of attention. It needs to be noted that comments on cinematography for Ashes of Love and Legend of Fu Yao are mostly positive, despite the overall dissatisfaction with plot or actors. In the category of book adaptation, some viewers expressed dissatisfaction with the television content adapted from the original fantasy web novel which has garnered millions of followers. They felt that the drama had undergone drastic changes and some even pointed out that the high rating was because of the “adaptation from a much loved novel.” The success of the novel attracted viewers even though they were being critical about the drama throughout their viewing. Finally, most reviews in the category of “subtitling” are on the call for subtitling in multiple languages, such as Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish, and Indonesian. Most viewers expressed disappointment and opted out in the middle due to the incomplete subtitle feed. Some showed stronger emotion to the point of feeling frustrated or offended by the lack of their linguistic representation. Only a small proportion of viewers targeted the issue of quality. One viewer pointed out some basic typo mistakes and called for correct sentences in subtitles. For instance, what originally means “at the same level” was typed in as “at the some level” in the translation. A few viewers were concerned about the long subtitles that affected

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their reading. It is not considered user-friendly to have a full first line and an abruptly short second line which contains only one or a few words, as it requires the viewers’ eyes to span across a longer distance and may reduce the attention to the images (Pedersen 2011, 139; Ivarsson and Carroll 1998, 157). Another drawback is the higher content density compared with the original Chinese subtitles. The English translation sometimes merged two one-liners in two consecutive subtitles into one, which would potentially heighten the expected reading speed and put more pressure on viewers.

Critical Reviews in the Genre of Contemporary Drama Critical reviews of Chinese contemporary dramas tend to focus more on the performance of lead characters above other aspects, while the comments on storyline are more general and therefore are not further divided into subcategories. For contemporary dramas, a great amount of attention has been paid to the female and male leads as well as their acting. Female characters and their acting attracted the most criticism in the reviews. They were described as “stalkers,” being “submissive” and “passive,” and desperate for “one-­ sided” love. Concerning their acting, it was viewed as “ingenuine” and “pretending to be cute.” Most viewers are also interested in the interaction between the female and male leads. The chemistry between the lead characters also attracted great attention. As shown in the other genre, some viewers looked beyond the individual dramas and demonstrated oppositional attitudes towards the cultural “otherness” by pointing out ways in which certain series conformed to the Eastern stereotyped female characters and gender hierarchies. Whereas others offered more rational but poignant observations that such themes and representation could potentially promote emotional bullying of women. As for the category of storyline, it is almost unanimously criticised as being uninteresting, clichéd, repetitive, or predictable, although, at twenty to forty episodes, the length of series is much shorter than that of costume dramas, which usually run for anywhere between fifty and sixty episodes. It is worth noting that some viewers, though small in number, identified some propagandist elements and showed discomfort towards this type of “patriotism.” As all the three contemporary dramas are themed on e-sports, a booming

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industry with increased government support, the dramas would inevitably be ideologically subversive as a means of evading censorship. Encoded messages as such can be easily taken for granted by domestic viewers but are likely to encounter the contraflow in reception when it comes to the global sphere which mostly comprises the negotiated or oppositional viewers. It is notable that subtitling has gained a larger scale of attention in the genre of contemporary dramas. Still, most reviews fall on the need for subtitles in Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, and Korean. There has been a surge of calls for translation in multiple languages. Some viewers voiced their dissatisfaction of having to bear with the delay for new subtitles to be added in their languages, such as Portuguese and Spanish. With most of these reviews sitting between one- and three-star ratings, the degree of dissatisfaction is more obvious, especially among the subscribed users who pay for the service. As a one-star review reads: “one star is not for the drama, but for Viki, until the problem is resolved.” In terms of the quality of subtitles, two reviews are devoted to this aspect. One is on the visibility of subtitles as the small size and white colour of the captions can be difficult to read. According to Díaz Cintas and Remael (2014: 84), most subtitles are white, but the characters are always shadowed or black contoured to solve legibility problems when the subtitles appear against a very light background. To improve legibility, one of the solutions is to encase them in a grey or black box. A grey box is preferable because it stands out and is less obtrusive than black. However, it is reassuring that Viki has offered a series of customised options for viewers to choose the font, text size and background of the subtitles to their preferences. Therefore, the white subtitles would have been made more viewer-friendly if contoured in black or encased in a grey box to improve legibility. The reasons for this complaint may well be that some viewers are not aware of these options in place or that these options are not available to them due to local technical constraints. Other concerns consider the linguistic quality of the subtitles as “primitive.” Viki fan-made subtitles are often criticised for being too literal in their translation. Subtitling conducted by Viki fansubbing teams is literal in a sense that it carries over the surface wording of the original Chinese into English. There could be a dual effect to this approach. Viewers could dip a toe in the original flavour in terms of how things are linguistically re-enacted in a transnational culture. On the other hand, some viewers are likely to interpret it as being “primitive” and thus underrate the quality of

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the subtitles. In the framework of active audience theory, however, the audiences may still be divided when it comes to receiving the literal subtitles depending on how the message encoded by the subtitler and translator is decoded by the target viewers. For instance, if they hold the belief that translation should read like the natural and idiomatic target language, they are nevertheless the oppositional viewers and would review negatively, however novel and refreshing the subtitles may seem to the preferred type of viewers.

Discussions: Audiences and Subtitling Reception The reception of the two genres of Chinese television dramas demonstrates two trends of involvement. The reviews of costume and contemporary dramas tend to focus on storylines and characters respectively. The temporal and spatial gaps presented by the historical dramas play a part in drawing the viewers into the mix of beautiful costumes, historical settings, fascinating choreography, and soundtrack in Chinese costume dramas. Thus, viewers are prone to cast more attention to the storyline or narrative development. Involvement with the narrative derives from the theory of transportation that requires not only attention, but also feelings and imagination from the viewers (Green et  al. 2004). Viewers are perceived to experience a mental process in which they are engrossed into a narrative world (Green and Brock 2002). By comparison, the reviews of contemporary dramas point to the involvement with character, which is “an overarching category” to describe the audience’s “perceived connection and psychological interaction” with the fictional characters (Lu et  al. 2019, 2). Moyer-Guse (2018) and Murphy et al. (2011) elaborate on a list of audience identifications, ranging from the perceived similarity and affection towards a character to wishing to be a character. Involvement with the narrative and with the character are both distinguishable and related (Lu et al. 2019). Involvement with the narrative focuses on the audience’s immersion into a general narrative, while involvement with characters targets on the audience’s perception of certain characters in the narrative (Murphy et al. 2011; Lu et al. 2019). But both are constituents of the scenario of viewer reception, as character design is interwoven into the storyline development and storyline underpins the development of characters. But to explain the critical reception as shown in this study, we need to draw on the three activities (Green and Brock 2002) viewers are supposed

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to be engaged in during the process. Firstly, the temporal and spatial distance created in costume dramas takes up many cognitive resources for viewers to process the information about the fictional world. Some viewers may cease to invest in the process for a variety of reasons and end up giving negative responses to supposedly account for the result. Secondly, imagery created by the fanciful storyline in the costume dramas can make the viewers transport themselves into the virtual world. If the plot development did not fit into their expectations, oppositional attitude would thus arise. Thirdly, empathy with the characters is more likely to be developed in contemporary dramas when viewers try to understand the experiences of characters and interact with the world in the same way as characters. This perspective explains the negative responses to the lead characters especially the female leads. Viewers tend to react negatively to the design and development of the characters when they feel they could not relate themselves to the characters due to the lower level of identification for various cultural and personal reasons. In a bid to improve the reception of transnational dramas, efforts can be invested in line with the aforementioned three aspects of audience mental process. Firstly, the narrative of costume drama may attempt to develop a more engaging and coherent storyline to ease viewers’ cognitive efforts. Secondly, plot development alongside the ending can be improved to facilitate viewers’ transportation into the fictional world. Thirdly, characters are developed differently on screen to provoke an empathetic relationship between the viewer and the onscreen characters. In terms of the reception of subtitles, the majority of viewers’ responses are directed to the undersupplied subtitles in multiple languages, rather than the formatting and linguistic quality (although the quality could also constitute an issue as shown in the analysis). Viewers’ engagement with subtitles on Viki and other platforms is an integral part of their reception of the content, be it a film or a television series. Given viewers’ appetites for international media, often over local content, there is a higher need for more television series to be translated into multiple languages (Kirk 2019, 18). Despite Viki’s commendable ambition to provide “a staggering assortment of multilingual subtitles” for mutual understanding between multiple cultures and communities (Dwyer 2012, 220), the main concern among viewers is the inconsistent feed of subtitles in some European and Asian languages, and the lengthy delay in their updates. These issues may evolve into emotional reactions to media content. As shown in the findings, most of the comments on subtitles dwell on the most negative end

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of the rating spectrum. Some expressed grievances of having to give up the drama due to the absence or slow feed of subtitles; some felt a sense of cultural negligence due to the lack of representation of their languages; and others voiced direct complaints against Viki for the insufficient subtitling supply. As for the quality of subtitles, further efforts can be channelled to improve the legibility and readability of the subtitles, though there is only a small proportion of concern from the viewers. It is advised that a default format be set with white subtitles contoured in black or encased in a grey box to solve the legibility issue although options are available to customise viewers’ choice. In terms of the literal strategy adopted in subtitling, it appears synonymous with the foreignising approach that has played a vital role in the development and spread of fansubbing media products (Dwyer 2012). In retaining the word order and imagery in Chinese, the subtitles preserve the original linguistic and cultural flavour, although such an approach runs the risk of dividing the viewers.

Conclusion The reception of subtitles of translational television dramas remains a distinguishable area of audio-visual translation studies. This chapter takes a holistic approach to integrating the subtitling research into the reception of the media content. It has examined the translational viewers’ reception of the Chinese television dramas on the streaming site Rakuten Viki based on two most popular genres: the costume drama and the contemporary drama. Considering the active audience theory, its focus has been on identifying and explicating the critical reviews by coding them into different categories. An array of factors in each of the two popular genres have been explored to account for the oppositional reactions encountered among global viewers, in a bid to provide new insights and to enhance the reception of translational Chinese television dramas. It is also found that the inadequate feed of subtitles has a unique bearing on the negative reception of the dramas. The quality of subtitles is not so much addressed as the variety and efficiency of subtitling service provided by the platform. In response to the surging demands of global users, fansubbing research can no longer afford to be an insulated undertaking. Nor does it have to be under comparative scrutiny with professional subtitling. The future course is to be charted towards exploring ways to increase the multilingual subtitling production on such “real-time and collaborative” (Dwyer 2012, 222) media platforms as Viki.

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Funding Acknowledgements  This work is supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China [17BYY189].

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Attaining #fame: Female Cover Musician’s Self-Fashioning and Socio-musical Interactions with Live Stream Audiences in Chennai and Beyond Nina Menezes

Film songs of popular regional language Tamil film songs dominate the soundscape of city life in Chennai, South India. Every morning during the month of margazhi (a period of spiritual renewal from mid-December to mid-January based on the Tamil Hindu lunar calendar) devotional film songs blare from loudspeakers erected at the temple. During election season, political parties blast film songs containing emotionally charged lyrics to appeal to voters. From dawn to dusk, the lilting voices of film singers resound from transistor radios installed within coffee stalls. In peak hour traffic, pulsating rhythms of film hits reverberate from car stereos. Within the comfort of their homes, homemakers ease the monotony of daily chores by singing along to film songs played on the radio or television. And a film song-and-dance session marks the highlight of any social or cultural gathering. But beyond such unconscious processes of

N. Menezes (*) University of Tampa, Tampa, FL, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 L. Mitchell, M. Samuel (eds.), Streaming and Screen Culture in Asia-Pacific, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09374-6_12

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enculturation, ambitious teenagers and young corporate employees emulate recordings of their favourite film singers and participate in music competitions with the yearning that they might someday gain entry and fame into India’s film music industry. Over the past decade, scholarship on stardom within India’s film music industry has focused on the voices of popular female film singers (Majumdar 2009; Weidman 2006; Indraganti 2016). This chapter expands on their work to include the unheard voices of ordinary female youth who perform Tamil film song covers as a means of gaining visibility. In 2016, when I conducted fieldwork in Chennai, the Tamil film song cover scene was at its pinnacle. A variety of live and recorded spaces—concert halls, clubs, pubs, malls, small-scale recording studios, YouTube, and music reality television series—provided amateur singers opportunities to perform film cover songs. A week after I met Vandana, a self-taught live and studio cover artist in her thirties, she called to inform me of a “cool, new online gig” she wanted to pursue. “It’s going to be the next big thing in entertainment!” she exclaimed with excitement. In the short time I had got to know Vandana, I had glimpses into her creativity; this new cover performance opportunity piqued my interest. As soon as Vandana hung up, I signed-up for a #fame account and downloaded the mobile web application. A quick online search for “#fame” revealed media articles that described how CEO Puneet Johar raised USD 10 million in 2014 to launch Fame Talent League—#fame. The company’s mission was to identify local “emerging talent in their journey as content creators and help them reach and engage with their audiences wherever they are and whenever they want” (Forbes India 2015). Within a year, #fame had established itself as India’s leading digital live-streaming entertainment application. However, until November 2015, #fame had targeted a predominantly North Indian Hindi-speaking audience. By the end of 2015, #fame’s popularity prompted Johar to expand its network to include other Southeast Asian countries and two South Indian regional languages: Tamil and Telugu (Adgully Bureau 2015). By mid-January 2016, #fame established its regional office in Chennai. #fametamil’s talent manager, Dipthi, selected twenty-five middle-class Tamil-speaking youths between the ages of eighteen and thirty for its first batch of live stream performers. Each performer was required to create a brand based on a specific category: film music, dance, comedy, live events, fashion, technology, food, astrology, and citizen journalism. For up to an hour, seven days a week, these performers would earn a part-time income

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from live-streaming Tamil language-based entertainment content. From January to August 2016, I conducted virtual and face-to-face ethnography with these live streamers; a large majority were female and performed covers of popular Tamil film songs. Unlike the parasocial nature of traditional celebrity, largely controlled by media, convergent media provided #fametamil performers with opportunities to fashion their identities and find ways to create and develop a fan following. During my research, only a handful of female performers attained online fame. Vandana’s exceptional performance and creativity gave her the unique distinction of attaining stardom. For her, performance was a collaborative game, one which involved a combination of learned image creation and maintenance strategies, as well as a set of performer-audience rituals. This chapter chronicles her rise to stardom on #fametamil.

Female Self-Fashioning on #fametamil On the afternoon of 25 January 2016, I logged into #fametamil. Within the confines of their domestic spaces, young women used their mobile phones to sing a capella renditions of Tamil film hits and interact with their live stream audience via an integrated chat screen. Around 9:30 p.m., Vandana went live. Unlike her female counterparts who adhered to instructions and performed only Tamil film songs on this new regional network, Vandana sang “Jiya Jale,” film music director A.  R. Rahman’s popular hit from Hindi language film Dil Se (1998). That evening, Vandana’s opening selection proved an instant success among her predominantly North Indian male audience. Moreover, while her peers sang into their mobile phone headsets, without any instrumental accompaniment or pre-recorded track, Vandana capitalised on her family-owned recording studio. Her affable personality combined with the professional image—of her singing into the talkback mic, accompanying herself on the keyboard in a studio—distinguished her from her peers. Vandana was on her way to becoming a #fametamil star. While it may appear Vandana engaged in self-fashioning, it is important to note that #fametamil required all performers to follow a set of collective image creation and maintenance practices. At the orientation I attended with Vandana, Dipthi, #fametamil’s talent manager, had requested each performer to submit twenty high-resolution photographs and five videos for their portfolios. Dipthi explained #fametamil would use their images and footage to promote each performer on social media on a regular basis.

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Later, in a WhatsApp group message to all the performers, Dipthi emphasised the importance of projecting a professional image: “Plz take ur beam seriously […] at the same time enjoy it […] be presentable […] Talk in Tamil […] make sure ur background is gud […] be energetic when u go live” (Menezes 2018, 267). Hours ahead of a live stream performance, #fametamil required performers to log into the website and “schedule their beam.” This allowed the app to curate a list of performances for the day and send notifications to fans and followers when each performer went live. Since the app was deeply integrated with leading social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, Dipthi encouraged performers to “share” their schedule across these sites to attract a wider audience and fan following During my research, I had several opportunities to interview #fame performers in person. One disgruntled #fame male performer claimed female performers had a wider appeal among the site’s largely male audience owing to their glamorous promotional “selfies.” A study of #fame performer’s profiles revealed how women pursed their lips to make the “duckface” expression and emphasise flattering angles of their appearance. Media scholars whose work focuses on social media selfies argue that although the genre of “selfies” has the power to create narcissists, it also provides empowerment for those who lack confidence (Twenge and Campbell 2009). Female #famestars I interviewed were of the consensus that #fame’s self-promotional strategies gave them the confidence to brand themselves as cover artists and increase their online social capital. For most Indian women, a “fair complexion” remains a prerequisite and epitome of a glamorous personality. Vandana succumbed to these pressures of perceived beauty norms. Vandana confessed she sought out skin lightening treatments to transform herself into a “fair girl” (Vandana Mazan, Interview with the author, 26 March 2016). I frequently witnessed her manipulate her promotional selfies with mobile phone editing apps and camera filters to present a lighter, flawless complexion. As she transformed her image, she exclaimed, “Nina, see, now I look like a fair, glamorous girl!” (Ibid.) Vandana needed to reproduce these idealised impressions of herself on her live streams, so she experimented with a variety of light settings, including a DIY portable photography studio light umbrella to enhance her complexion. As she made these aesthetic adjustments, she explained, “Nina, you see, I have to do something different from everyone. Only then can I attract more fans and followers” (Ibid.) Vandana’s efforts were not in vain. Later that night, one of her regular

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viewers remarked: “U r looking like sun rising today.” Another fan compared her to local film actress Navya Nair. Vandana gracefully accepted the compliment saying, “Navya Nair is so beautiful, thank you!” (Menezes 2018, 275). Similar comments on her appearance bolstered her self-image and encouraged her to be more creative with her setting. While on a personal level self-promotion proved beneficial among female #fametamil performers, it created a corrosive culture defined by unhealthy competition. To counter tension and build a sense of camaraderie, Dipthi advised performers to “like,” “share,” and “re-tweet” their peers’ posts on social media. She also encouraged them to collaborate on live streams suggesting that this would not only help them build their networks, but also add novelty. When Vandana collaborated, she performed with male musicians within and outside her #fametamil network. Another female performer who had recently made her début as a film singer in Tamil cinema preferred to collaborate with her sister. These female performers had carefully crafted their public personas; their selective collaboration on #fametamil helped preserve their reputation and facilitated collaborations with professional musicians within the wider cover scene. Over time, Vandana’s musical and social life demanded that she adopt different locations other than her family’s professional studio setting. When on tour with her band, she frequently streamed from the green room of the concert hall, providing a snapshot of what preparation and life was like for her as a live performer. One evening, after attending a popular film singer’s concert at one of Chennai’s leading malls, Vandana performed her live stream at the mall’s food court. On another occasion, on her way back from a religious pilgrimage, she and her friend live streamed cover songs as they waited to board their plane at the airport. In this manner, mobile live streaming facilitated a personal citizen journalism style of performance, allowing Vandana to create unique live streams. Such authentic experiences enabled novelty, provided snapshots of her life as a freelance musician, and helped her capitalise on her relatability with her audience, thereby boosting her online status. So eclectic was her choice of settings when compared to her peers’ predictable live streams from within their domestic settings, that one of her ardent fans marvelled: “Wow! Everyday a new place!” while another follower commented: “So creative! I want to leave my corporate job and be just like you” (Menezes 2018, 276). In this manner, Vandana experienced a small fraction of stardom and admiration from her online audience that professional film singers in Tamil cinema typically command from their fans and followers.

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Embracing the Roles of #famestar and Audience Through Socio-musical Interactions For ordinary middle-class youth like Vandana who dream of becoming famous singers in the film industry, #fametamil provided opportunities to mimic the roles of celebrities and their audience. Although Vandana enjoyed the adulation of being a #fame performer, she still struggled in her everyday life to come to terms with the fact that she may never become a famous film singer in Tamil cinema. Nevertheless, from her very first performance, Vandana embraced the role of the #famestar as she carefully fashioned her image to distinguish herself from her female peers. In the following sections, I reveal the socio-musical interactions that helped Vandana and her audience enact the celebrity-fan roles on #fametamil live streams. In a typical live concert, a performer resorts to a variety of strategies to connect with their audience. As a performer makes their way on to the stage, audiences greet them with vocal shouts, yelps, and whistles. The performer acknowledges their audience with “Hello! Are you having a good time?” On #fametamil, performers and audience recreated similar yet different interactions. Every evening when Vandana logged into #fametamil, her followers received notifications. As each viewer entered, their screen name appeared in the chat box announcing their arrival. The following transcript exemplifies a typical performer-audience interaction at the beginning of a #fame live stream: VANDANA: [Visible and audible on the main screen]: Hi Ashraaf! Welcome to my beam. Hi Rishon, Welcome, welcome! Nalla kekuda? (is my voice audible?). RISHON: [Types within the chat screen]: Volume is gud! VANDANA: Ok I’ll sing ‘Vennilave’ now… [Vandana sings film music director A.  R. Rahman’s ‘Vennilave, Vennilave’ from Minsaara Kanavu (1997). At the end of her performance, she scrolls through the comments and acknowledges compliments] VANDANA: “Hi GokulRanger! Are you a biker? Hi Dhoni Reddy. Welcome! Ashraf, thank you for the stickers. So much love. People are very encouraging. Thank you!” Over time, as she gained familiarity with individuals, she made a personal connection with each fan and follower. Following the performance of the

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first song, she scrolled through comments within the chat box, acknowledged compliments, and welcomed audience members who joined during the performance. A similar pattern repeated until the end of the hour. At the end of the live stream, she thanked her audience for their support and reminded newcomers to click the “follow” button to receive notification of her performance schedule. Such scripted, mechanically repeated pieces of text served as rituals that brought structure to the performance. Vandana capitalised on her convivial personality. She entertained her audience with improvised, impromptu conversation that made interactions appear less scripted. Occasionally, she would engage in deeper conversations concerning popular songs, her life as a musician, and even her audience’s everyday life, which helped build an engaged audience and a regular fan following. #fametamil performers were required to perform only Tamil film songs. Unlike her peers, Vandana occasionally performed Hindi songs to appeal to a broader viewership or the demographic on her live stream on a particular day. Overall, her repertoire proved successful; it fostered a positive mood and ensured the flow of communication among her online audience. However, seldom did her repertoire reflect her choices alone; fans and followers made song requests. If an audience member was dissatisfied with her selection, they provided immediate feedback or left to join another performer’s live stream. The adaptive feedback loop encouraged a collaborative, participatory environment between Vandana and her audience, and helped strengthen the performer-audience bond. Such collaborative social cohesiveness with an emphasis on a “participatory performance” model facilitated performer-audience interaction that appeared less “scripted in advance” and more free-flowing (Turino 2008, 43). As for the role of audiences’ song requests, they not only became crucial in co-creating content but also helped unite participants with similar tastes and maintain a positive, fun, vibrant ambiance throughout the event. Although #fame’s audio-visual design privileged the performer, it was impossible for Vandana to constantly be the focus of attention. Disembodied audiences who mostly interacted with Vandana via messages and emoticons in the chat screen employed various strategies to draw attention to themselves. While Vandana sang, her audience frequently interacted with each other within the chat box. Some drew attention to themselves with quirky screen names. The audience’s crosstalk sometimes focused on their personal lives and had little to do with her performance. On one occasion a regular member joined the live stream and announced it was his birthday. Vandana spontaneously sang “Happy birthday,” while the audience flooded the chat

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box with greetings. This follower was ecstatic that his favourite #fame performer made his birthday special. Fans vied not only for her attention but claimed status by referring to themselves as “Vandana’s biggest fan.” By drawing attention to themselves momentarily, viewers (un)consciously overturned the performer-audience power dynamics. Such moments recall live performance within pubs and bars when listeners’ conversations happen synchronously, and the music recedes into the background. Occasionally, the exchange between the live stream audiences revealed the otherwise hidden power dynamics, typically absent in other modes of live performance. In this manner, Vandana was sometimes at the centre, sometimes in the background. When the audience focused on her, it helped boost her image and star status. When their attention was divided, it fostered among them a sense of belonging to the online community. Musicians frequently employ humour as a strategy to entertain and connect with their audience. Vandana regaled her audience with anecdotes and jokes, which allowed her to connect with individuals, create a relaxed, light-hearted atmosphere, and foster a shared communal experience. On one occasion a handful of followers who identified as “rowdies” good-­ humouredly teased Vandana. An ardent fan interpreted this as disrespect and came to her defence. While most #fame performers took offence to teasing, Vandana sportingly played along with such awkward situations. By joining in with the “rowdies” she diffused tension and restored a light-­ hearted mood to her live stream. Later she confessed to me: “Some of the other performers get angry and lose their temper; I want to keep my audience happy. If I get angry then the audience will get upset. I am not just a performer. I am an entertainer. I have to show I can handle these types of situations. I have to show I am different.” Apart from building rapport, one of the ways Vandana created intimacy with her audience was by describing her authentic experiences. On one live stream, after singing her rendition of Tamil film composer Ilaiyaraaja’s “Kodai Kala Katre,” she explained, “Ilaiyaraaja’s songs will take me inside, other songs I will have to go inside. This is my humble inner feeling. So, in other songs, I will have to involve myself, but Ilaiyaraaja’s songs will pull me inside.” Such revelations which are not delivered within typical live stage performances provided opportunities for the #fame audience to access Vandana’s inner world—her mind, emotions, life, and musical practice. For instance, a regular #fame fan once asked her after she performed a song: “How can you manage the on-stage pressure?” To which she responded: “I’m a performer. I’m meant to perform in front of people.

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You can’t say that I’m scared of the crowd. Recently I realised when I sing for my soul the magic happens. When I bother about the people around me that feeling goes. So, from the last few performances, I decided to sing for myself.” Vandana frequently repeated such unscripted anecdotes or narratives. Newcomers listened captivated, while her regular fans and followers basked in the privilege of access to these moments. A #fame audience enacted intimacy in various other ways. For example, one of Vandana’s close friends extended his familiarity from the real world into the online realm. Rather than communicate in honorifics, he addressed her in informal, colloquial Tamil, which is typically employed among family and close friends. Since he was acquainted with her propensity for funky chord progressions, he made a song request and joked: “Play with the proper chord progression… serri, serri, vassi de pattu! (ok come on now, perform the song girl!).” Such rare, but authentic interactions, revealed much about Vandana the performer and her relationships offline. Acknowledging friends and sharing intimate moments became crucial to a #fame performer’s public image. I observed how another female #fame performer depicted exuberance when she interacted with her college juniors and seniors on her live stream. As for Vandana, she sought deeper connections. She dedicated a song to her friend and his fiancé to congratulate them on their recent engagement. Her fans and followers who witnessed such familiarity found her even more accessible. She rewarded two of her biggest fans with a lunch appointment for their loyalty. One of those fans posted a selfie on his Facebook profile with the caption, “A long due meet with one of the coolest musicians I have met in recent times :D wowww