19. Faults in Our Stars
Neiyu, the occult and our psyche
Hi there. Welcome to Active Faults.
It is characteristic for Divas on the Road (花儿与少年) to cause commotion and uproar, and the latest season is no exception. Netizens have been condemning actress Zhou Yutong’s problematic behaviour that affected the cast and disrupted the team camaraderie. Her presence apparently has not only soured the travel reality’s feel-good dynamics but ruined its reputation and branding that the previous season strained to salvage.
Viewers, or the Diva Scholars (花学家), pointed their magnifying glasses towards every frame of the show. They cited instances where Zhou allegedly bullied her female cast mates, played the victim and threw herself onto another actor pretending she couldn’t swim.
I’ll leave you to form your judgments about Zhou, but here’s what I think you should pick up on instead. Many diagnosed her with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, so much so that “周雨彤 npd” was trending on Weibo, and attributed everything to her MBTI type being an INFP.
Today, let’s talk everything occult in Chinese entertainment and fandom.
You might not expect this, but entertainment is probably the most superstitious industry out there. Rumours about actresses keeping voodoo dolls and casting spells on their competitors never stopped. A semi-religious ceremony must mark the first day on set for all films and series, where food is offered to the Visual Arts Gods and incense is burnt. Any crew that doesn’t complete this important ritual, rumoredly, end up getting into accidents, scandals or anonymity. There are still extremely sexist customs that ban female crew members from resting on empty equipment crates during breaks. We’ve only found out about these unspoken nonsense rules because Jia Ling, the world’s highest-grossing female director, broke these traditions on her set, and her female crew came online to applaud her.
Celebrities used to rely on mysticism for foresight, because popularity is too elusive of a concept. What constitutes “star quality” is as unpredictable and ephemeral as a meteorological phenomenon. The vogue changes and poof, gone is your ride. I’d imagine J.P. Morgan regularly consulted a psychic for similar reasons because he too was predicting, essentially, the next thing people would like.
But somewhere along the way, a shift has occurred. The demand for the occult no longer traces back to the celebrities, but the fans instead. Fanquan becomes a proactive participant in the industry, wielding “higher powers” for meaning-making and assessing. They start to seek answers, construct narratives and rationalise celebrity actions using the only available tool for approximate-truths. At the same time, they want to evaluate whether a celebrity can succeed and become a worthwhile investment. Approximate-truths are knowledge, and knowledge is power.
Accounts like “Kisskill塔罗” on Weibo breed off of that existential anxiety. She’s an oracle, a high priestess for the bewildered masses. Anyone can DM her questions, and she would draw a few tarot cards on it before posting the result.
Here’s are some of her posts, which is modernist poetry in its own sense:
Will SMTown concerts come to China?
Is Chen Zheyuan seeing anyone?
How are the solo job opportunities looking like for Ding Chengxin from TNT Boys?
How’s the health of Riku from NCT Wish?
Public reception of Wang Yuan’s new film? Projected revenue?
Is BTS leaving Hybe?
I started following her in 2021 when I too had my hang-ups. Is my ship still talking to each other? Or worse, have they fallen out? In a relationship with women? With other men?
I never sent in anything, but I was astounded by the attention she receives that reflects a genuine emotional need. Her posts, inboxes and comment sections bear the profound weight of our desire to know when we love, and our fear at the loss of it.
It would be utter stupidity to let this business opportunity slide. She’s been offering private tarot readings for individuals at an unknown rate that probably increases after her readings materialise, which is more often than you’d think (so far, about 600). From that, she has accumulated her own patrons who would trend her onto Weibo’s hot searches when she gets the future right. She’s pan-celebrified, like the South Korean shamans who got their own dating reality. On Bilibili, you’d find another host of these tarot readers monetising the content they create.
Boundaries diffuse. Bu Fan, an ex-YH Entertainment idol, apparently converted into a Taoist master, and reached the peak of his career with the exit of it. In controversies as recent as HYBE’s dispute with Min Heejin, the latter has been accused of using “black magic” and commissioning a shaman to coach her on company management. In this case, it’s more casual misogyny in a witch trial, demonising Min by claiming her association with the so-called demons.
Notice how superstitions, occult practices and religion are dangerously synthesising and homogenising in the entertainment sphere. Perhaps it’s a cultural disposition since the days of 聊斋志异, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (1740). Circling back to Zhou Yutong, the latest addition to this cauldron is pseudo-science, like MBTI.
Loosely inspired by Carl Jung, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is a self-assessment questionnaire devised by a mother-daughter duo in America that really only took off in two countries: China and South Korea. It sorts people into sixteen categories based on four sets of metrics: introversion or extroversion (I or E), sensing or intuition (S or N), thinking or feeling (T or F), judging or perceiving (J or P). If teen magazines and Buzzfeed still had a footing, they would’ve never shut up about it.
You can look anywhere to see how wide the MBTI pandemic has spread in China. It’s in the headlines, dedicated meme accounts and more. I suspect there will soon be speed-dating shows based on it. Stereotypes form when prevalence grows. INFPs are known as the sensitive crybabies, the little butterflies. ENFPs are golden retrievers. ENTJ are your authoritative, ruthless bosses at work, and so on.
Knowing celebrities’ MBTI and attaching them to stereotypes is an efficient way of understanding them. Idols’ personal information pages online nowadays would include their MBTI, alongside their blood type and astrological sign, the Holy Trinity of someone’s behavioural makeup. Because I’ll never truly know them, I must know everything I can before the house falls and I get hurt. It’s also why you’d see MBTI on Hinge or in job interviews. I must “sus you out” and gauge compatibility from the get-go using four letters that sum up your entire being, because uncertainty and risk are to be minimised.
What’s really concerning, to me, is how psychology is now associated with the occult, like in the case of Zhou. Fanquan diagnosed her on the basis of her (performed) persona, which is assembled by an assortment of arbitrary indicators. They could well be correct, but this default thought process should ring some alarm bells.
In today’s age clinical terms like Narcissistic Personality Disorder are already thrown into online chatter like buzzwords. They risk becoming misunderstood and trivialised, especially if the context is entertainment. It doesn’t help that portrayals of mental health issues in media are insufficient, inaccurate, oversimplified and subjective. It also doesn’t help that therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists are trying to be influencers and celebrities themselves, appearing on dating shows as part of the “expert panel”, live-stream selling, therapy-speaking or doing brand deals while concealing their sex offender past. Too many unhelpful, if not harmful, correlations are created: expertise with fame and clout and therefore inauthenticity and mistrust, vulnerability with click-baiting and attention-seeking, trauma with spectacle.
Sure, it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. My life coach friend told me how tarot reading leads to more introspective sessions with her clients because it is an engaging and light-hearted gateway into self-reflection. It provides people with an impetus to act, a belief system for comfort, and a language to express our inner worlds that we desperately lack.
But oh beware. The conflation of the occult with psychology is why mobile applications like 测测 can label themselves as a “情感心理分享平台”, “emotion-psychology sharing platform”. I lack the vocabulary to describe exactly what it is, because it has morphed so drastically and disturbingly. Probably “all-in-one personality-fate interpreter” and “bogus counsellor”. Rising and moon signs are rudimentary information on there. You can find out your Four Pillars of Character (生辰八字), Purple Star Astrology (紫微) or your Mayan Totem. Don’t ask me what those are. You can match your charts with someone else, if you know where and what time they were born, to see how you’ll vibe. Of course, you can also match two celebrities together to “磕糖” and ship them.
On 测测 there are guided meditations, life guidance, sandbox exercises, well-being questionnaires, and actual therapists that you pay-by-minute to chat with. The forum feature allows you to post selfies and, you guessed it, flirt with those whose charts match yours. It’s an even worse version of BetterHelp mixed with Headspace and Co-Star Astrology, with a chat function. It doesn’t surprise me that some of its seed funds came from 百合网, China’s OG dating site, and had over 2 million registered users in 2017. The number should be a lot higher these days.
I’m ending this issue with this ghostly screenshot that’s very on-theme for Halloween. The front page of 测测, offering instant therapy with AI chatbots that have their own characterisation. I should probably ask them where is neiyu and fanquan heading next.
amazing piece!!