Bullet Time

In the end, I had to watch the video twice, as I often do on the social video site Bilibili: once with the bullet comments turned off so that I could follow the source material, and once more for the real experience, the chitchat obscuring the content.Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute. A recent industry report estimates that there are 300 million self-identified ACG fans in China, and that 97 percent of them were “post-’90s” and “post-’00s”—the generations defined by being born after 1990 and 2000, respectively.When a Japanese site called Niconico invented the idea of writing comments directly on top of YouTube videos in 2006, it took less than a year for a clone of the platform to appear in China. ACG content still dominates the site, but Bilibili’s hordes of bullet commenters can now react to just about everything else too: makeup tutorials, documentaries, music videos, vintage commercials, and “Kichiku,” a Niconico-originated genre of manic Auto-Tune’d parody remixes such as the one of Zhao Benshan mentioned above.Bilibili isn’t China’s biggest video platform by a long shot, but it does maintain an unusually tight grip on youth culture: over 90 percent of Bilibili’s 93 million monthly active users are under the age of twenty-five. During the opening sequence of the first episode, the bullet comments are a blizzard of check-ins from high schools and colleges around the country.As the rest of the Chinese media industry tries to replicate Bilibili's success with the coveted post-’90s demographic, bullet comments have spread from platform to platform as if by airborne spores. But after enduring it for another thirty minutes, he found that he had developed the ability to switch his attention between the comments and the underlying video at will—a sort of Magic Eye trick for processing content and commentary at the same time.Tech leaders like Li are willing to risk eye strain to pay attention to bullet comments because the fast-paced conversations and roasting sessions they enable beget many of the memes and trends that eventually infect Weibo, WeChat, and the rest of the Chinese internet. Even for people fluent in Chinese, deciphering a video’s worth of bullet comments can be a crash course in internet tropes, rudimentary Japanese, Chinese history, regional stereotypes, and continuously updated pop culture references. But it is the very strength of its capacity for re nao that makes bullet comments a politically risky format: a crowd, no matter how anime-obsessed, just needs the right spark to become a mob.Christina Xu observes internet cultures and social behaviors around technology, especially in the US and in China.