The Ohio State University. How about you? With large eyes, porcelain skin, and a tapered chin, Shen Man matches the modern Chinese ideal of doll-like beauty. Her voice is usually soft, almost cooing. Shen Man confronts her online accusers. Happy now? While her song-and-chat shows are usually rather banal , Shen Man herself is whip-smart. The rule is simple for girls: Keep online and offline separate. But he said he later became fascinated by the hidden role of money, sex, and connections in subverting the supposedly populist forums.
Shen Man is one of two main characters Wu follows over the course of two years. She has rocketed to fame on YY, a YouTube-like livestreaming platform that, instead of relying on advertising, allows viewers and patrons to make online payments directly to content producers. Yes, there are plenty of camgirls in the West, but YY and its peers have achieved a mainstream presence in China that the fractured networks of American sitesβwith their often expressly sexual contentβlack.
For online hosts who play the game successfully, the financial stakes are considerable. By comparison, most amateur hosts earn a pittance. And, as with the bottom rungs of Hollywood, the lives of starlets are precarious: Even the ones who do break out often crash and burn, rapidly surpassed by fresher faces. With more than million active users the equivalent of nearly one-third of the entire U.
Its stock price on Nasdaq doubled over the past year. He finds the people who typically never appear on camera, but whose money and favoritism sway what everyone else sees. Her online fame has real-world consequences. Wu interviews the family members who have become dependent upon her unlikely income and who worry about her fading allure.
Fascinatingly, the film also takes us into the worlds of a few of the millions of off-screen fans. Pretty women singing. People in the countryside slurping noodles. But Wu fans out across China in search of devotees of these unexpected online iconsβand finds that there is a unifying factor among these die-hard fans. Yong, a thin year-old migrant worker with floppy hair and sad eyes, works as a waiter in a massage parlor and later packing motorcycle parts in a factory in Guangzhou.
