02. I Should Have Taken More Photos
temporality in entertainment (or the lack thereof)
Hi there. Welcome to Active Faults.
The talk of town right now is the historical drama “Swords into Plowshares” (太平年), an extremely graphic series based on real records from the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (AD 907 - 960). It focuses on issues of borders, poverty, wavering allegiances and unification through violence, revolving around court politics, machinations and messy personal affairs of ruthless men. My friends back home said that it’s a refreshing balm of a watch from the now-tedious historical romances (古偶). It is classified as a “正剧”, also known as Serious or Proper Media, the rise of which I have predicted almost two years ago. I had an inkling then that people are fatigued by tropes and talking-stages, and it won’t be long until they start to seek out more mentally stimulating content with elaborate plot lines.
What I did not expect is our current obsession with the past. I am pretty sure that the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period has never been brought onto centre stage like this. It was most certainly never graced by a cast of A-listers like Zhu Yawen and Bai Yu, who are better known for their roles in contemporary thrillers, crime series and dangai. Neiyu, and the wider cultural scene in China is going through a collective time dysmorphia.
Today, let’s talk about temporality in entertainment.
Like Andrew from Cold Window Newsletter, I was intrigued by Douban’s Top Books of 2025 and the general public’s reading habit the list reflects.
The No.1 most highly commended book last year was “九诗心”, a practical criticism anthology of nine poets from ancient China and how their writings inform our lives today. This is admittedly a genre that I rarely pick up in a bookstore, traumatised by how much practical criticism (or prac-crit as we used to call it) I had to do in university, as well as how uninspiring they tend to sound. Yet I was thoroughly blown away by the clarity with which the author Huang Xiaodan writes. Her words are subsumed with such a deep emotional resonance with the poets they almost vibrate, and it is then that an understanding of meaning could be metaphysically imparted onto us.
I understood Qu Yuan (屈原) for the first time, a textbook regular so often celebrated that the average student would feel repelled by his omnipresence. Our guy from 339 BC is so often associated with exams instead of poetic mastery, with forced recitals instead of poignancy. Huang has restored the impression he’s supposed to evoke by giving us his backstory and showing us the incredible relevance of his ruminations. As someone who stopped learning Chinese after primary school and thought she lost her connection with her mother tongue, I cried at how I could never, in fact, lose anything. How someone so far removed could feel so close to heart, so transparently relatable by intuition.
Qu Yuan’s primary concern was time. Huang argued that most of Qu Yuan’s lamentations are rooted in his failure to accept linear time, and by association, our mortality as humans. In the prehistoric, paganistic and mythical abyss that precedes Qu Yuan, time is circular and interwoven. I loved this passage Huang quoted from the Book of Rites (礼记) that dates roughly back to 475 BC:
（季春之月）桐始华，田鼠化为鴽，虹始见，萍始生。……
（季夏之月）温风始至，蟋蟀居壁，鹰乃学习，腐草为萤。……
（季秋之月）鸿雁来宾，爵入大水为蛤，鞠有黄华……
（孟冬之月）水始冰，地始冻，雉入大水为蜃，虹藏不见。……
In the month of spring the parasol trees start to flower, and the voles become quails. Rainbows start to appear and duckweeds come to live.
In the month of summer, warm winds start to blow. Crickets live in the walls and eyass have yet to learn how to fly. Rotten grass turns into fireflies.
In the month of autumn, the wild geese pay their visits. Canaries jump into the ocean and become clams. Chrysthanmums bloom a bright yellow.
In the month of winter, water starts to become ice and land starts to freeze. Roosters jump into the ocean and become shellfish. Rainbows hide.
When they speak of “becoming”, it isn’t metaphorical but literal. Ancient Chinese did believe that everything transforms into everything else in a larger, invisible cycle, not unlike the Ovidian world of endless metamorphoses. By the time that “time” reaches Qu Yuan, his world deflated into a flat line on an ECG. Wars and plagues raged on and humans never returned in any form. So much of his writing, then, took on this desperate and distressed tone to convey a desire to transcend our limitations. So much of his writing hit a tender spot in our modern consciousness, in the wake of a fatal pandemic and en route to climate catastrophes.
It is placed in this context that the success of 太平年 becomes less surprising. We crave confirmation from histories that we’re not alone in our despair. That what we’ve been confounded by has nothing special to it, not one single note unheard of in this epochan symphony which we simply cannot outlive. We need the comfort of knowing all of this will pass.
The twist is in how the message is spelt out, how these historical productions formulate this provision of comfort. I stumbled across this newbie podcaster on Xiaoyuzhou who made an episode entitled “I finally created a podcast just to bash 太平年”. His main point is that so much of the violence portrayed in “Swords into Ploughshares” is illogical and unnecessary. The show opened with cannibalism. Apparently, people were so impoverished that they killed humans and chugged them into a (expensive, hand-made, gigantic) blender to feed on. It also featured a gang rape scene (where they subsequently hung the dead woman by her foot on top of the city market), suspiciously-clean skulls after a massacre, and so on. Audiences say that it’s a miracle to have gotten past the censors, but I fear it is anything but accidental. The message sounds like “stop bitching about your life when we used to have it so much worse”.
太平年 literally translates to the Year of Great Peace. I can’t help but feel like the public’s organic turn towards the past is being co-opted. Our harkening back of those troubled days is so that we cope with modern grievances, but instead it is used to coerce us into gratitude and appreciation.
A brief browse on Weibo has led to my discovery that Yang Mi, another A-lister actress is projected to star in a Tencent and National Television Administration-backed historical drama, 江山大同. It is set to begin shooting next month, featuring three protagonists from the Wei dynasty, which is a yet-to-be adapted historical period. The provincial news channel in Shanxi has aired a dedicated segment, praising the extensive field work carried out by the writers to ensure “historical accuracy”. Here’s my prediction: 2026 will probably be a year of retrospection in entertainment. These series based on gimmicky historical periods and lesser-known chronicles will be majorly pushed, which is at least partly for the purpose of keeping us from rioting about the present.
Meanwhile, we also seem obsessed with the future and so are our neighbours. This past Spring Festival Gala is unprecedentedly robotic—just like I guessed the year before—and K-Pop has fully leaned into AI for a while. I’m starting to see idols split into respective camps: the pro-GPT and the anti-GPT. Discographies of groups are starting to sound less and less human, and by that I mean there is a genuine lack of melodic singing. HYBE’s CORTIS surprise-dropped a previously unreleased track, “Young Creator Crew”, and I saw a tweet asking them to “un-release the unreleased”. It exploded on Weibo for how awful it sounds, with its tasteless repetition of lyrics, random squeals and heavily autotuned backing track. I felt the same with KATSEYE’s so-called zucchini song, or LE SSERAFIM’s Spaghetti. BLACKPINK’s highly anticipated group comeback dropped yesterday, and it credited “AI VFX” in its music video.
I am half-expecting China to develop an idol group with robots that will follow suit in making these “art” of mechanical noises and psychedelic, form-over-matter visual stimulations. The intention remains the same: to keep us from dwelling too much on current affairs. We need to rave about the next century to ignore what can be done to unemployment and “斩杀线”, “the kill line”. We need to be so forward-looking to dream of relocating to Mars, getting OpenClaw to run your start-up and achieving immortality with a brain chip, so that we’re not arresting pedophilic presidents, condemning a genocide and protesting illegal detentions.
Speaking of pedophilia, you should read Dr Stacey Patton’s piece on the slow release of the Epstein Files and how it is deliberate psychological conditioning.
This “dripping”, by-batch, staggered exposure of heinous crimes committed by the most powerful people on earth has turned it into a fandom spectacle, something akin to the buildup before an idol group comeback. She correctly points out that it breeds teasers, theories, imageries, coded language, speculations and discourses. What I’ll also add is that it creates suspense, anticipation, and, most importantly, a phase-out. A comeback is never about what we’re perceiving at hand but about instilling in our psyche a sense of recurrence, binding us to the future and the “always-coming-back” so that we ask little of the now.
The only media we consume in the present tense is, unfortunately, reels or short form videos. I’ve recently noticed on numerous occasions that clips I first saw on Instagram would reappear in my Bilibili algorithm four hours later, fully subtitled and translated. There are barely any lags or inconsistencies in what’s viral across continents. Virality threads through every second of our immediate reality, while television yanks us towards the past and music fandom pulls us towards the future. The modern netizen lives in this preposterous rift of time, neither here nor there, endlessly stimulated and poked by 15-second skits while the world slips past. You look up from your screen and an entire season would change.
A couple of weeks ago I turned my phone off for 24 hours. I still went out for errands and bought groceries, while completely dropping off the grid and out of the worldwide web. What I noticed immediately was how differently time moved. Because I didn’t have any time-keeping device on me, I relied on store receipts and train station clocks like I was a Victorian lady. Throughout the day, I consistently took less time than I thought I’d need completing each task. I stopped noting time, and it started moving slower. I existed in abundance instead of haste. Time gets more scarce the more you keep track of it.
By the time I got to Hampstead Heath for a walk, I lost all human contraptions. I resorted to estimate time by my hunger signals, my thirst level, changes in humidity and warmth, the way daylight shifted between treetops as it tried its hardest to pierce through the low clouds. I spent many mornings here this winter, and without carrying my demonic brick, I discovered to my surprise that I was navigating this ancient woodland like an animal, the way God intended. I recognised slopes and ditches, certain clusters of pines, outlines of a pond. I remembered curvatures of paths, changes in elevations, density of shrubberies, forks and fences. My sense of direction was sharpened, the most primal and intuitive one, where you gauge your position through contextual clues, knowing you are but one part of the landscape. Both space and time became embodied, and therefore highly legible. I leaf through my surroundings with the ease of reading my own handwriting.
I can’t remember most of the reels I doomscrolled past and neither can you. But on a phoneless hike, you’d remember most of the thoughts that occurred, which corresponded to everything you saw and every moment lived. Technology doesn’t help us remember. It only helps us recall, in the sense that we make a note of something in our Notes app and cast them away. Remembering only happens in the flesh, when our bodies experience time in motion. That’s why I force myself to stop recording concerts. I want time to be etched on my being instead of written into binary codes. My idols themselves sometimes joke that nowadays they are performing to a sea of screens, but I can tell there’s real hurt behind a softened complaint. I would be equally disheartened if my fans paid five or six figures just to get barricade footage and post the clips on Twitter.
The inability to feel time, measure time with our bodies, and place ourselves into the mechanism of time has a harrowing consequence: it takes us out of “因果”, or causality. When there are no causes and effects, your action stops feeling like it will incur a consequence. That’s why you feel like everybody is becoming meaner, either through hostility or callousness. That’s why we’re seeing an increasing number of direct fan-idol conflicts, and I’m talking about actual wrestlings and throwing—ironically—demonic bricks that are their phones at each other.
A veteran from Idol Producer, Ling Chao, got very physical with a stalker of his at a gaotie station a while ago, yanking her hair and pushing her to the ground after she shoved her phone into his face. According to the rest of his fandom, the girl is a notoriously relentless sasaeng who has harassed him and his family for years. Some of the sasaeng’s Wechat Moments got leaked and her statement on the situation is “hehe Ling Chao smells so nice [when he wrestled me]”. Over at K-Pop, the whole mess with BTS’ Jongkook supposedly dating aespa’s WINTER has led to both parties getting death threats, attacked on livestreams and boycotted at award-shows. Among fans, there are racially charged wars and fist-fights in the concert pits. In my time of being a fan and a fandom observer, this space has never been this spiteful, rude and foul-mouthed, towards each other and the celebrities.
Part of it has to do with the trodden line between the public and the private. As I wrote in the last issue, we have offered so much of ourselves up to the feasting of the internet. People film and post their childbirths, what they eat in a day, how they shower and commute. I know a girl from university who got married for what feels like a whole year, with multiple ceremonies in different locations, alongside a thousand pre-post-rehearsal-warm-up party-shower-dinners with geo pins that were completely photographed, videoed and made available on Instagram stories. Celebrities post their “get-ready-with-me”s, their “behind-the-scenes”, their way to work and off work vlogs-plogs-diaries-livestreams. When we volunteer more and more information, we’re also eroding the idea of invasion, intrusion and trespass. We almost allow people to stalk, extrapolate and blurt out their unsolicited takes. What happened to Ling Chao is an outward manifestation of a systemic flaw.
I have opinions about celebrities that I will always keep unpublished. I also swerve much of my personal life away from Substack, despite me knowing that a little bit of parasociality is what builds my “following” and “fanbase”. I’ve been in this game long enough to know how much monstrosity I will unleash if I let the boundary blur, how much my sanity will take a toll if that happens. As a “timeless” cultural space increasingly blurs the lines between what’s personal and what’s visible, we will eventually stop treating each other as humans.
Perhaps this explains the appeal of Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, more commonly known as Bad Bunny. I’ve been trying to put a finger on his enduring popularity, and the way he swept across the Millenial-Gen Z spectrum regardless of ethnicity. He’s an incredibly temporal musician. The kind of ahistoricism that’s so prevalent in the brat-showgirl-espresso pop world these days is a privilege he does not enjoy.
He sings a lot about the past, personal and national, the impossibility of it, the regrettability of it. Thanks to native Spanish speakers on Reddit, I’ve discovered that he’s deliberately messing with the tenses in the 1.5 billion times streamed “DtMF”. The lyric “debí tirar más fotos de cuando te tuve” literally means “I should have taken more photos when I still had you”, where the longing in the present is so powerful you can almost feel that time will move backwards until it becomes the reality. The next line “debí darte más beso’ y abrazo’ las vece’ que pude” means “I should’ve given you more kisses and hugs in the times that I could”, but when you translate it into English, it could say “I should’ve given you more kisses and hugs whenever I could”. Longing for the past in the present moment that will undoubtedly extend into the indefinite future thereby making it eternal, all in one line.
Time is circular again, weblike as Borges wrote, “the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – [this web] embraces every possibility.” We (starting from Qu Yuan) crave it and feel seen by it, even if we don’t understand the words to it. We still experience the joy and the pathos of it in the hidden parts of our very human, very worldly bodies, trying to turn into a clam like a canary.
I for one am interested to see the political engineering potential of Grimdark With Chinese Characteristics.