The best time for Wanwan was ten years ago and now

In today's rapidly evolving Internet disciplines, "late learning" as a unique cultural phenomenon has not only not faded out of people's sight over time, but has instead been revitalized on various platforms. From the first generation of Internet celebrity discussions on Douban to the full blossoming of Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and Douyin, late learning has become a cross-platform, multi-angle, and deeply interactive Internet phenomenon. This article will explore why late learning has been able to flourish, as well as its performance and influence on different platforms.

Internet disciplines are upgrading so fast that even Mr. Hard Candy, who is surfing on 5G, finds it a bit difficult.

Before we have finished learning Teacher Wanyan Huide's series of ethics (lonely) courses, Ms. Xie Bingyi gave birth to Xiaobingxue because of her fake character setting; celebrities covered their mouths on stage, which caused a backlash among the public, and "Ruxue" became a popular course on the Internet; at the same time, the conflicts among guests in farming variety shows were extended to "Daoxue" for students who have spare time.

Fortunately, it is common sense that Internet celebrities and Internet celebrity culture will be popular for two weeks each. Even if you can't keep up with the pace, you can just bear with it for two weeks and the limelight will pass. But there is something that challenges common sense and almost makes me wonder if I am in an information cocoon - that is Wan Xue!

Who can ask: Apart from those of us who secretly learned how to dress from the goddesses on Douban, who is the one who keeps Wanxue going strong? Especially recently, Wanwan and his wife have started to make a living by live streaming. Wanxue has also produced a large number of new courses, attracting a large number of new students, and has even gone beyond Douban to become popular on Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and Douyin.

The life cycle of internet celebrities is obviously getting shorter and shorter, so how come Ms. Wanwan, who has been famous for nearly 20 years, can still be the subject of research and interpretation? How come those new netizens who have not experienced the "unsolved case of thick eyebrows" and "castle wedding" are fascinated by this classical subject? Let's learn about the pinnacle of the history of co-creation of internet celebrity culture!

1. All platforms have different focuses

"Wanxue" was probably born in 2017, with its base in Douban, which is also where Wanwan's dream of becoming the first generation of Internet celebrity began.

At first, Douban users only discussed Wanwan sporadically, mainly exposing her. It started when Wanwan posted a microblog post about the wedding anniversary gift her husband Lin Han gave her, which was discovered to be a soft advertisement for a brand. Then some people started to follow the clues and found that the socialite life of Douban's literary goddess did not stand up to scrutiny.

This group of netizens was also the earliest Wanxue scholars. In order to gossip with less restrictions, Wanxue scholars set up a special group to speak freely. After the special group was bombed, the Xiang group, which specializes in discussing Internet celebrities, became the base camp of Wanxue scholars.

As the activity of Douban groups generally declined, late scholars no longer stick to their own little piece of land, but began to preach on various platforms, and different schools of thought emerged depending on the temperament of the platforms.

Xiaohongshu's algorithmic recommendation method and information flow arrangement characteristics have allowed it to replace Weibo to some extent and become the first front line for people to eat melons. Wanxue here mainly uses pictures, texts and short video clips, focusing on being short, flat and fast, suitable for old students to get the first-hand dynamics, or for new students to get started.

Because of the platform algorithm, as long as you search for "晚学" or other related words on Xiaohongshu once, your homepage will be dominated by Wanwan and Lin Han for the next 3-5 days, and it will be difficult to avoid it.

On Bilibili, the "big learning community for young people", Wanxue has lost its gossip flavor and has taken on a strong academic flavor. Students who have a preliminary understanding of Wanxue on Xiaohongshu can go to Bilibili for more in-depth and comprehensive learning.

Among the Wanxue teachers on Bilibili, the courseware of AKA Huanqiu Daren is the most academic. The classic Wanxue jokes such as "Lei Wanying, you are my grandma" and "Let's fall in love" are all disassembled in the same way. Each class has a theme, relevant learning materials, blackboard writing while teaching, small questions in class, and homework and extended questions, which completely imitates the online class model for college students. Moreover, in the comment area of ​​each "Wanxue Online Class", there are really studious people who hand in their homework, focusing on a fully simulated immersive learning.

There are also some late scholars active on Douyin, but the content is not very original, and they mainly integrate content from multiple platforms. Of course, Douyin people love to be abstract, but the related imitation shows have not yet become popular.

In general, the current popular platform courses have not changed much from the original Douban version. In addition to the accidental death of a worker at the M Woods Museum in 2021, the "core crimes" of the Wanwan couple are still the old-fashioned vanity, lying, and bragging about small amounts of money.

But Douban was relatively closed back then, and Wanxue's influence was limited to a small circle. Now Wanxue is flourishing everywhere, and Wanxue, which has been overused by Douban users, has become a new thing in other places.

Especially the young people today are very particular about rituals, or in other words, they are looking for topics to talk about. When netizens fight with internet celebrities, the most feared thing is that the netizens shout for a long time while the celebrities remain silent. However, the Wanwan couple not only confronted netizens during the live broadcast, but also often blocked netizens on various platforms, which greatly enhanced the interactivity and participation of this Internet entertainment activity.

Being blocked by Wanwan, being called "graduated" by Wan's scholars. Some netizens, even if they don't have such sincere feelings, still study the course seriously and go to the comment section to poke people's hearts, striving to get the qualification of "graduation" and then have something to talk about.

2. Female Internet Celebrities Who Are Not Beneficial to Him

Although contemporary netizens are keen on judging, they are also prone to pity the poor and the weak. Many Internet celebrities have experienced a resurgence in their reputation. For example, Wanyan Huide's reputation has made a big comeback with the launch of the official Douyin documentary and the broadcast of the variety show "I Love Me, Great" co-recorded by her, Yu Xiuhua, Su Min, and Deng Jing.

Interestingly, since the moment Wanxue was born, Wanwan's public reputation has been on a downward trend. It is said that negative reputation will eventually rebound, but Wanwan's downward trend seems to have no end. Hard Candy summarized the public opinions on various platforms and believes that there are two reasons.

First, as an internet celebrity, Wanwan has almost no altruism.

People are emotional animals, and social relationships are built on the basis of exchange. If you give me a gift, I will give you a gift. That’s when everyone is doing well. Especially in the era of mobile Internet, the relationship between people and stars and celebrities has been infinitely shortened, and this altruism has become more important.

Wanwan is a completely altruistic person. Wanwan's popularity was due to the dividends of the times. At that time, Internet celebrities only needed to provide enough imagination space. But now it is different. Netizens pay more attention to the process of "exchange".

For example, before becoming famous, most Internet celebrities would appear as "good friends" or "good sisters" -- I use my knowledge to bring real changes or happiness to netizens, such as teaching everyone how to put on makeup, how to dress, etc. Regardless of whether it is true or false, at least they are releasing goodwill, "I don't want to make money from you, I really want to help you."

But Wanwan is different. Her main slogan is “I am different from you. You can’t learn my style.”

In the early years, when she was still popular with the public, someone asked for the lipstick color number, Wan Wan said, "It's not for sale, I mixed it myself"; when asked for the link of clothes, she replied, "I knitted it myself." Of course, Wan Wan has now lowered her status and started live streaming to sell goods. It is said that she earns at least hundreds of thousands of yuan per show. How can people not be annoyed and believe that she is sharing sincerely?

This brings us to the second point: Wanwan is actually living a pretty good life, but it’s far from enough to be “pitied” by netizens.

Although in the Wanxue courseware, Wanwan is a poor noblewoman who cannot afford Hermès and lives in a self-built house and owes rent. But to be fair, Wanwan has indeed made a transition to a certain extent. According to the quotation of Xiaohongshu Dandelion platform, Wanwan's pictures and texts are 150,000 and videos are 200,000, and her commercial value is not low. Now may even be the time when she can directly generate commercial value.

Yu Ma has a "grandmaster" theory in "The Sideburns Are Not Begonia Red", which is very appropriate here. The general idea is that when you are a little better than others, they just want to step on you. But when you become a grandmaster, everyone will love you and worship you.

The towel princes and leather shoe princesses on the Internet celebrity rich second generation track may not be flawless. But they are too far away from us ordinary netizens, and there is no point in judging them. Instead, netizens are willing to regard them as "Internet connections" and "rich friends I have never met."

How can we not be angry about the fact that Wanwan and his wife are better off than the masses, and they have caught the trend of the times without any altruism and continue to attract the attention of netizens and turn the popularity into cash? "Master Wanliu" or "ordinary people" have the opportunity to get people's applause, but "former colleagues" who are lucky and feel good about themselves cannot.

3. Love and Hate of the Same Group of People

Back to the original question, why can late learning continue to flourish?

First of all, it is because the two protagonists are unwilling to be forgotten and are always active in front of the stage to provide the latest materials. Goffman believes that most of a person's life is spent acting, with the purpose of winning the audience's recognition and even applause. Ordinary people like you and me also have to edit the pictures before posting on WeChat Moments. The long-term ridicule of the Wanwan couple is that they perform an elite image in front of people, but it is far from their actual life.

In this tug-of-war between acting and reality, there are always various flaws, which makes the couple in a twisted and funny state for a long time. This attracts the attention of many "evil people", who don't love or hate, but just want to have fun.

What is more noteworthy is that changes in the trends of the times are also adding fuel to late learning.

When Wanxue was first launched in 2017, everyone was into gossip. Because Douban’s original style was “everyone can be exposed, everything can be exposed”, it was more of a desire to pry into the private lives of celebrities and reveal their secrets than to say that they had any likes or dislikes for them.

As a witness to the birth of Wanxue, I even feel that most people at that time were fond of Wanxue. The reason why they gossiped about her and found all kinds of evidence that Lin Han was not good was because they were angry at her for not fighting, and hoped that she could live her own life without breaking or building.

The M Woods Museum incident in 2021 was a watershed. Wanwan said in an interview with Jiang Sida that it was the year she felt the most maliciousness from the Internet. It is true that the public's hostility was related to her frivolous "someone died" remarks, but more importantly, the public really needed an outlet for their emotions.

Judging from the trend of public opinion on the Internet, entertainment is the main outlet for the public's negative emotions. When celebrities are becoming more and more well-behaved like AI, only Internet celebrities, preferably those who came from the PC Internet era, are well-known to the public and have left many unrestrained words and deeds, and are most suitable to be the emotional targets of the public.

Especially as economic growth slows down, since upward mobility has become quite difficult, the elites are no longer the objects of admiration and learning, and deconstructing the elites is the source of happiness. "A noble lady from a poor family" and "an internet celebrity couple who owes rent and is being asked to pay" are examples of this process, and class differences are temporarily smoothed out.

Why are people keen on deconstructing Wanwan instead of other "upper class" people? Because her identity is untenable, she is a self-glorifying pseudo-elite. So when she is poked in the sore spot by the public's deconstruction, her reaction will be more intense and easier to break down.

The breakdown of Wanwan and her husband’s defenses, in turn, means the victory of ordinary netizens over the elite. In addition, Wanwan has “original sin” (the M Woods Museum worker incident), so when deconstructing and judging her, the psychological burden is even smaller, because no matter what, they are on the side of justice.

In fact, the people who watched Wan Wan ten years ago and imagined the literary and fashionable poetry and distant places, and those who now complain about Wan Wan and expose the elite mask, may not be the same group of people, but they are generally people of the same class and type. Everyone yearns for a better life in a higher class and is not completely satisfied with their current situation. When wealth and honor are available, everyone competes to learn and help each other. When wealth and honor are not available, it is also a playful thing to see the fake elites break through their defenses.

For Internet celebrities, being black and red is also red, and traffic is money. After studying several live broadcasts of Wan Wan selling goods, I even think that the couple is deliberately cueing controversy, causing public sentiment to rebound, and harvesting traffic by playing the role of Internet clowns. So, whether it is true art or pseudo-upper class, a cat that catches mice is a good cat. Isn't this the case with Wan Wan, who is engaged in business?