Unmasking the Frenzy: Why Young Fans are Obsessed with ‘Dream of Red Mansions’ Imitation Makeup Videos

Original title: Readers pay tribute to classics and express themselves in new ways, but they must avoid superficiality and homogeneity (lead)

Why are young people so keen on imitating makeup videos of Dream of Red Mansions (Topic)

Text/Beijing Youth Daily reporter Zhang Enjie

In the digital age, readers have a variety of ways to access, understand, interpret and recreate literary classics. The popular makeup imitation videos of Dream of Red Mansions among young people on the Internet are one of them. On September 21, the Youth Academic Seminar on “Literary Inheritance and Development in the New Media Era” was held at Capital Normal University. Che Huilin, a master’s student at Capital Normal University, made a detailed analysis of this phenomenon and accepted an exclusive interview with Beijing Youth Daily.

Che Huilin believes that this is a way for young people in the digital age to participate in cultural creation. The production and popularity of such videos are not only a way for young people to express themselves and pay tribute to classic culture, but also reflect the characteristics of visual consumption in the Internet era and the audience’s new interpretation of “Dream of Red Mansions”. “But at the same time, we must also be wary of the labeling and flattening of roles and the superficiality and homogenization of content faced by secondary creations in the dissemination of characters in the Dream of Red Mansions,” she said.

investigation

Type “Dream of Red Mansions” and “makeup” to get 99+ videos

Che Huilin found that if you type the keywords “Dream of Red Mansions” and “makeup” on popular video websites and click on the search button, 99+ videos will pop up immediately, some of which have hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. In the videos, creators use their makeup skills to dress themselves up as characters in “Dream of Red Mansions”. Some people simply act out their roles, possessing a character in a certain plot in “Dream of Red Mansions”; some people make teaching videos, presenting the entire makeup process to the audience and explaining it; some people are closer to “secondary creation“, placing the characters in the Red Mansions in scenes unrelated to the original work, performing “Dream of Red Mansions” in their own minds.

Readers left comments and comments after watching the video. “If Daiyu had a happy life, she should look like this, with a healthy complexion and a little chubby. Even if her eyes are a little coquettish and melancholy, you never know if she will smile in the next second… I really miss her.” “Wow, this makeup and expression and behavior are particularly like Fengjie’s fair face and graceful manner, and her little movements are so cute. Most importantly, she is so beautiful. This is definitely a Wang Xifeng whose appearance matches the description in the book!” “In the Jia Baoyu imitation competition, Jia Baoyu won the second place!”

analyze

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Related searches show that Lin Daiyu is one of the main objects of imitation makeup in “Dream of Red Mansions”. When readers sigh for Daiyu’s fate, they can’t help but imagine a Daiyu born in modern times, healthy, and retaining the beauty of “wind, dew, and clear sorrow”. As a result, videos imitating Daiyu’s makeup but not based on the original work came into being. Among them are “Daiyu Studying for a Doctorate”, “Daiyu, the Most Popular Professor of Classical Literature in Our Department”, “Wow, I Met Lin Daiyu at the Music Festival!” and other videos that rank among the most viewed “imitation makeup” videos in “Dream of Red Mansions”.

In these videos, the creators dressed up as Lin Daiyu, but she no longer shed tears in front of Xiaoxiang Pavilion. Instead, she transformed into a doctoral professor full of poetry and books, a tourist having fun at a music festival, and even linked with “Water Margin” to become the heroic “Master Lin”. The audience commented: “I like it so much. There is a sense of relief that we met in a parallel world. She is so free to see this moment.” “Everyone is loving Daiyu in a new way.”

In Che Huilin’s opinion, this type of video, like many fan fictions about Lin Daiyu’s counterattack and changing her fate, plays the role of making up for readers’ regrets and expressing their emotions. However, due to the special nature of the video medium, they do not need to carry out long-term foreshadowing and process descriptions like humanities, and can also ignore the fate of other characters. They only need to show fragments of the life of “healthy and lively Lin Daiyu”, and the audience will automatically complete the story or ignore various background details.

In addition to Daiyu, beauty bloggers have also created Qiaojie who was able to grow up successfully in the Jia family, Xue Baochai, the daughter of a wealthy businessman born in the 2000s, the “career elite version” of Wang Xifeng, and so on. The formats of these videos or blog posts are mostly similar, with only a few photos of a character or a short video of more than ten seconds, and the rest depends entirely on the author’s few sentences of narration and the reader’s “imagination”.

“These works reflect the popular and daily interpretation and acceptance of A Dream of Red Mansions in the Internet age when visual consumption is prevalent,” said Che Huilin.

think

When readers become video operators, they still need to avoid labeling and flattening

Che Huilin believes that readers in the Internet age should perhaps be called “consumers”. They are no longer just passive receivers of information from literary works, but are more involved in the creation and dissemination of content, becoming active performers. The level of readers’ understanding of the original literary works and literary images directly determines the level of video interpretation.

“For most makeup imitation video bloggers, the clearer the boundaries of the character design and the more labeled it is, the better, because it is more conducive to consumers’ secondary creation and dissemination.” Che Huilin believes that this has led to the fact that although the era background and social scenes of the characters in Dream of the Red Chamber on the Internet have changed, the characters themselves have a tendency to be labeled and flattened. Lin Daiyu’s “sickness”, Jia Baoyu’s “passion”, and Wang Xifeng’s “spicy” are the main characteristics of the characters, but the complexity of the character traits and life experiences is far beyond that.

Che Huilin reminded that when secondary creations spread the characters of Dream of the Red Chamber into simulacra that can be mass-produced, it will inevitably eliminate the depth of the original work. She suggested that fans of such videos, while appreciating the external forms of the characters shown in the video, should not ignore reading the original work and pay tribute to the classic from a deeper level.

Co-ordination/Li Yang