06. Sound the Horn(y)
Fandom Word-Twisting and Audio Porn Manipulation
Hi there. Welcome to Active Faults.
As I concluded last time, a language barrier can be deliberately left intact and exploited by the fans to create a different kind of psychological affinity. If you remember this iconic incident where a Swedish television channel accidentally put cartoon subtitles over election footage, it is the perfect metaphor for this issue.
Fanquan uses audio engineering (sometimes with AI too) to fabricate scenarios for their own needs. Most of the times, it’s clearly framed in an innocuous context for pure giggles. But as I’m about to show you, things can escalate so quickly.
Here’s a simple example to start us off. Fans have noticed that SEVENTEEN’s Jeonghan has got the personality of Snowball the bunny from the animated film The Secret Life of Pets. They then matched Jeonghan’s voice to clips of Snowball and it’s cuteness overload. Here, language is irrelevant because a satisfactory persona, Jeonghan the cute bunny, is achieved despite it.
Then, we’d get to the comedic adaptations. A lot of content these days is being used as “Electronic Pickles” (电子榨菜) for “Rice-Depleting” (下饭) purposes, meaning mealtime entertainment. In fact, this new norm of ours in the digital age has spurred on a specific genre of content that is lively, light-hearted and, most importantly, trivial enough to be played as background noise. No plot needs to be diligently followed. Minimum attention and emotional investment are required. Variety programmes become the best picks, but reality shows in a foreign language defeat the purpose. In come the Chinese voiceovers done to free viewers from checking the subtitles while eating their food. Sometimes, they are done in a dialect for extra hilarity.
Here’s SEVENTEEN’s group reality show with a Dongbei voiceover.
Meaning is not distorted in these manipulations yet. Fans either overlay the original audio with a different visual representation, or another identical sound spoken in a different language. From here on out, we reach the world of reinterpretation.
Let’s talk “缺德字幕”, or “amoral subtitles”. The concept of the Amoral Fan (缺德粉) is a paramount one to know, especially for the upcoming Fan-Talk issue of this Substack. By being someone who’s “amoral” in fanquan, it is implied that you’re a bit of a wild card, a rogue, an unconventional fan who’s a rule breaker. If the goody-two-shoes Fan is about unconditional and consistent support, immaculate behaviour and speech, sufficient monetary investment, seniority and active protection of the Idol’s image, the amoral Fan is the opposite. Their support is conditional and their allegiance is dubious. They express their infatuation inappropriately and perhaps sexually. They take pride in “白嫖”, “free-whoring” or literally “not paying prostitutes”, meaning that they enjoy the celebrity (in every sense) without financial contribution to their career. They are lethargic with the “duties” of a fan and Utilitarians regarding the Idol. I don’t worship you as much as I make use of you.
Amoral subtitles are therefore, to borrow a very apt British phrase, taking the mick out of the celebrities by hyperbolically and outrageously reinventing their words. Remember the ABO universe where men can get pregnant if their secondary gender is an Omega? This is a video of SEVENTEEN playing the Mafia game, but set in the ABO universe. instead of finding the killer, it is re-subtitled into a search for who wants to get knocked up. The creator, with their own shipping preferences, paired up a few couples who are fictionally (just need to re-emphasise) having a lot of unprotected sex to produce a child. What’s hilarious is how sometimes there’s no need for a fictional subtitle -- the actual words the idols say fit into, add to and complete the engineered narrative.
Because of its obvious falsehood, amoral subtitling are generally “not that deep”. It is entertainment for entertainment’s sake, and therefore disregarded as faff. But I invite you to dig a little deeper: what does the action of reinterpretation itself mean to fans with a different mother tongue? How can one reconcile with the disconnection, if not abandonment and despair they feel when they can’t understand their idol?
I keep mentioning SEVENTEEN not out of vested interest but because the immensely popular K-Pop group and its fandom are the breeding grounds for such novel phenomena. It is also amongst SEVENTEEN fans that I first saw Dreamgirl (梦女) re-subtitling. A hyperspecific psychological positioning of (female) celebrity fans, being a Dreamgirl entails a “dreaming” and fantasization of a real-life engagement with the (male) idol. And like all psychological positionings in fandom, Dreamgirl is a spectrum. There are the occasionally “delulu” ones, who indulge in a piece of content of a celebrity that particularly screams Boyfriend Material. On the other end, you’d find the avid Y/N fan fiction readers, the serial fan sign participants with their oddly invasive questions or requests, and most extremely the saesangs (stalkers fans) to which the term owes its bad press.
If you search a foreign, and most commonly Korean celebrity’s name plus the key word “梦女” on Bilibili, you’d come across a video like this:
This idol doing a fan live stream in his bed is NCT Dream’s Park Jisung. Speaking entirely in Korean, fans see the Dreamgirl potential of this snippet and re-subtitled it into a flirtacious foreplay in first-person POV, taking into consideration his hand movement, tone variations and facial expressions while crafting the narrative. On the side panel, you’d see again how this is an ongoing series with over 260k views.
When Chinese fans tune into the livestreams and fail to understand what the idol is saying, two mechanisms sub in for the thwarted comprehension process in our brain: an unusual preoccupation with their physical appearances, and an imagination going haywire. Pay close attention to on-screen comments in Chinese during these live streams, and you’ll know what I mean.
As I browse these Dreamgirl videos, the sheer variety of kinks and the smutty-ness of the subtitles shock me. Publish any of these transcripts as a written piece on Weibo and you’ll watch it disappear into the void immediately. There are scenarios with mild BDSM dynamics, humiliation, edging/orgasm control and so, so many pet plays. It seems to me that as long as certain explicit words are avoided completely, these videos can escape the manual screening procedures of Bilibili.
Dreamgirl re-subtitling is only made possible by the language barrier. Its obvious falsehood becomes a shelter that provides plausible deniability: we might come off as delusional, but its clearly unserious. It creates the cognitive distance for a fantasisation widely regarded as hysterical, corrupt and taboo to be safely actualised. Miscommunication is being harvested to excuse and forgive a trespass.
For more niche narratives done in a professional calibre, fans can straight up scout for “daican” audio porn that has a resemblance to their idol. Add the search word “马文” (short for “种马文”, equivalent of the fan fiction genre “PWP” or Porn Without Plot) to the formula and you’ll find even racier stuff. They’d be Korean clips featuring monologues of porn actors with a similar voice to the celebrity and Chinese subtitled translations for convenient imagining.
And if we talk audio porn, it is mandatory that I mention the ASMR industry in relation to entertainment and fandom. ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response or, more colloquially, “cranial orgasm” and deep relaxation that helps with insomnia and anxiety. Prominent ASMR Youtubers and Bilibili accounts earn up to millions of views for how they can creatively stimulate the response with sounds that are “tingly”. Slime, dried flower petals, soap shaving -- anything and everything can be tapped, played with and scratched to bring about ASMR. Human sounds created with our mouths, tongues, hands are where ASMR can take a suspicious turn towards soft porn.
Because of the popularity of ASMR in South Korea, celebrities start to do what they call “Tingle Interviews”, whisper-answer questions and create satisfying sounds. Celebrities ASMR become rife everywhere. Fans of the naturally skilled celebrity ASMRists use this as an unique selling point and promote their work riding on this high tide, like in the case of Felix from Stray Kids.
Now, we’re back at square 1. Language ceases to matter again because the ASMR elicited by the sounds provides satisfaction. Knowing that the idol is doing this to entertain and pleasure me the viewer is enough of a comfort and dopamine hit.
In a way, fandom studies where the idol and the fan speak the same language are perhaps inevitably limited. The problem of language is one about connection, identity and emotional investment, the pillars and essence of a celebrity-fan relationship.
I hereby present to you a new entry point.
I knew this was going to be a good one when I saw the pun in the title 😂