Hi there. Welcome to Active Faults.
Earlier this year, I asked an incredibly talented friend of mine to curate a cover art for this publication. We hopped on a call, rambled for a few hours and this is what she came back with:
How she managed to accurately, beautifully and tenderly capture such a abstract quest of a project is beyond me. This image of a broken dining plate symbolises Active Faults well. We loved the word play of “broken china”, envisioning the plate and colours to represent the subject matter: a nation and society with its unique kind of ideological ruptures, scattered shards of perceptions, intricate patterns of divergent thoughts as well as interwoven wounds. The fractures in dark ink came from a dissemblage of the Chinese characters “断层” (fault lines), the idea that inspired the name of this publication. Like the country, Chinese entertainment and fandom are characterised by rifts and incoherences.
My favourite Easter egg in this piece is the faint writings in the inner circle: they are quotes from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, an inside joke between us and a nod to our English Literature days. It turned out to be an apt metaphor for my personal experience of penning this Substack. I, too, feel like someone who knows “only a heap of broken images”, traversing across familiar yet eerie terrains where there’s “no water but only rock”. “These fragments I’ve shored against my ruins” can be so peculiar at times.
In 2024, Active Faults will continue to be the broken plate that it is. It will publish 2 free posts a month on the most pressing and intriguing phenomena in Chinese entertainment and fandom. They will always be as comprehensive, balanced and stimulating as possible, intended to give you a fresh outlook unavailable in academic papers or news headlines. Likewise, #wipwednesday, the Chinese fandom dictionary page will continue to update and act as a free reference tool, always.
For those of you who are eager to learn even more about China, entertainment and fandom, 3 new segments will be available to paid subscribers. They each target a fault (pun fully intended) of this publication that I’ve written about in the last issue.
First of these is “Alternate Universe”, a monthly review of a cultural artifact through which entertainment and fandom can be viewed. Whatever books, films, songs, essays and exhibitions I’ve encountered that I could make a case for them as significant to AF, I will deliver. Some of these will be highly relevant (coming up next: Y/N by Esther Yi), and some of these will sound like a mad stretch. This segment is meant to be an appetiser. I introduce it with the hope that it can draw new connections across disciplines and concepts to compensate for my fish-eye view. Through it, I’m arguing as ever that entertainment and fandom have an omnipresence that is up to any kind of interpretation.
Secondly, there will be “No Beta”, a bi-weekly digest of what’s trending in Chinese entertainment. It will be a quick breakdown of Weibo’s Entertainment hot searches and, in even simpler words, what are Chinese fans talking about as of this moment. It will address, as much as possible, the laggy-ness of bimonthly issues and provide more timely coverage on topics that are semi-noteworthy. If it becomes a longer story, this will then be fleshed out in a regular issue.
I’ve saved the best till last: “Canon Compliant” will be an occasional in-depth feature on a fan’s experience. I will interview anonymous fans to learn their thoughts on the people or content they like, as well as their interactions with other fans around them. This is me going full Field Researcher mode. Because the nature of these conversations could deter people from becoming participants, the process of data analysis could become time-consuming and I want to properly follow research ethics, updates in this segment will be irregular. I can only promise a minimum of 4-5 issues, but I think the result will really be worth a read. As Eliot writes in The Wasteland, AF will finally bring a second voice to speak about the “agony in stony places, the shouting and crying”, the “prison and palace and reverberations”. Much more personal and therefore distinctive stories will be told about entertainment and fandom, and many reflections and “reverberations” on my own writings will be kickstarted.
An honest confession is that I’d always been wary of going paid. I question whether something I write out of passion deserves to be materially rewarded. The full archive of Active Faults will always remain free, and regular issues will always be at the heart of its growth. The option of supporting me through a paid subscription will always be just an option, if you feel like it and are capable of doing so. A paywall on these segments will, I hope, better protect the identities of the people involved and allow me to better communicate with those who really love AF. I am not intending to make a fortune out of this. I don’t think I will ever stop being surprised and honoured at the fact that people will pay to hear from me.
Ask any fanfiction writer and they’ll tell you that long, heartfelt comments on their works are what kept them going at the end of the day. What will ultimately motivate me and ensure AF’s healthy maturation is interaction. I will start using the Chat function and post discussion threads to build an interactive space. Being an imperfect plate, it needs your input to become more rounded.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for reading and see you in the new year!
Faithfully yours,
Em