The Writeup

Thanks for the interest! As promised, I've come out of retirement for one (1) day to do this writeup about the intense things going on in the Nezha 2 fandom.

Once more, this is NOT about the people who happened to watch the movie, the people who are just interested in box office stats, the people who really enjoyed the movie, or the people who just really admire Nezha. This will be about the fandom fandom, the truly invested, the elaborate fanons behind certain ships that will make you go "wait what?", the rabid Ao Guang discourse that will also make you go "wait what?," the brainrot (affectionate) in its purest unfiltered form. This is a post about brainrot for those also suffering from brainrot.

This is a collection of patterns mainly from lofter, but also from douyin, weibo, bilibili, and xhs (I'm grouping everyone together because most artists/authors repost to multiple sites or have their content shared on multiple sites, so everyone ends up looking at the same things if they follow the relevant tags on each site). I didn't filter out or blacklist a single tag. I stared directly into the sun to collect this information!

Disclaimer: I genuinely have no idea how to warn for some of the things mentioned here, so just a blanket note of caution- if you click "read more," you are prepared to read about anything and everything. If you are OK with all this, then- let's go! 命由我不由天!

The movie has been out in China in for roughly 3 weeks. In those 3 weeks, all of this has happened in the deepest layers of fandom.

The Writeup (Part 2!)

(From Jiaozi's Nezha doodle celebrating the 2.6 billion record on 2/2.) *In CN, it's common to say "my tendon pulled!" when you get a cramp in your limbs.

Translation:

Literally the day after I published this post, new developments cropped up in the Nezha 2 fandom :D I thought it best to wait and see if anything ELSE could happen before updating this. Thankfully, I waited because things did happen. They sure did happen! So I'm popping in out of retirement (again) for one (1) day (again) to update this before the first fandom writeup becomes completely out of date. I appreciate all the interest given to the previous writeup and I'd feel bad for leaving it outdated for everyone that supported it! So here's part 2 to catch you up on what's happening deep in Nezha 2 fandom.

4-5 weeks in, and we have already have new shipping lore, shipping stat updates, and new fuel for the Ao Guang discourse battles. And it's somehow just as long as writeup part 1 🤣

Guangying shippers have apologized to everyone they harassed, acknowledged the error of their ways, and now get along well with fans of other ships...NOT. Click below to see updates on fandom lore, Ao Guang discourse, doubling down, conspiracy theories, drama in the Nezha cosplay world, and a total lack of self reflection from guangying fans ft. more images and links than last time

ooooo 🌀🌀🌀 youre falling for my bisexual hajime hinata agenda ooooo 🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀 youre falling for it so bad oooo 🌀🌀🌀 you now support it

Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.

Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.

I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.

I am very glad this has been going around so folks learn the Lore, but also let’s encourage it because then we get to say “bang paths” more often.

I'm not a prayin' man, but the night I found out my at-the-time-fiancé had been sending sex horny nasty horny sex asks to my friend on THIS VERY WEBSITE, I sat in the car in the parking lot of an abandoned church and watched a family of deer play in the snow, and it didn't quite feel like a sign because that part of Pennsylvania was mostly deer and abandoned buildings and snow, but it felt nice, and once the tears stopped, I looked down at my phone and my other friend had sent me a text that said, "HE'S TRYING TO CHEAT ON YOU ON THE ONE DIRECTION IMAGINES WEBSITE?" and I realized that life is all about your curated experience. A real choose-your-own-adventure deal. I have never seen someone post about One Direction on here in my life.

some sketches of my fav guys