B Station "Creates" Hupu Goddess

This article starts with the voting for the Hupu Goddess Contest and analyzes how the B-station anchor Zhan Ying won the title of Hupu Goddess. She attracted audiences with her endless "memes", and her journey from an unpopular Go player to "breaking the circle". This also indirectly reflects that abstract culture has occupied an indispensable position in the lives of contemporary young people.

When it comes to scoring goddesses, the straight men on Hupu have also lost some of their say.

At the just-concluded 8th Hupu Goddess Contest, B station anchor Zhan Ying first eliminated G.E.M. with more than 170,000 votes, more than twelve times the votes of Ni Ni, and then defeated Alyssa Chia with 89% of the votes in the semi-finals, and then fought against Hupu straight male white moonlight Gao Yuanyuan, and won the goddess contest championship, creating a dramatic situation of "film and television goddess lost to abstract anchor".

Every year, the Hupu Goddess Contest can be regarded as a large-scale observation window for straight male aesthetics, but this year, the "fun people" on B station clearly deconstructed the event with abstract culture. In the few days when Zhan Ying quickly "attacked" for the first championship, some people posted on the forum in confusion, "Who is Zhan Ying, why is the vote so high", and some people excitedly canvassed for votes, "I didn't plan to participate, but seeing Mr. Zhan, I had to vote for him."

1. War Eagle "attacks" Hupu Goddess

Although there is some overlap in user portraits, the straight men of Hupu have their own aesthetic portraits for the definition of "goddess". The previous champions are well-known film and television actresses such as Jia Jingwen, Gao Yuanyuan, Liu Yifei, and Qiu Shuzhen. Although Hupu people have had a tendency to "make a living", they finally stick to the route of "serious beauty pageant". As a Go anchor, @棋手战鹰, on the one hand, the external image is far from the "unworldly" that Hupu straight men love. On the other hand, from the "breaking defense of Tieba" the gears of fate began to turn, to the achievement of 1,000 ships on Christmas Day, and then to being promoted to the goddess of Hupu, the popularity of Zhanying's live broadcast room is inseparable from playing memes and making a living. The birth of famous scenes such as "ham sausage shooting big eagle" and "clamp you clamp you" made her regarded by users as a "natural abstract anchor."

As she frequently "doubled" her opponents with high votes in PK, "War Eagle won the game, and the winner was G.E.M." "The top four in the Goddess Contest are a civil war in Jin Yong's universe: Little Dragon Girl, Zhao Min, Zhou Zhiruo, and The Legend of Condor Heroes." Countless hot memes were also created in turn and circulated among various platforms.

Although it is not appropriate to simply summarize Zhanying's victory as "Bilibili's fun people conquering Hupu's old man's spiritual territory", it is not difficult to imagine that Hupu JRs probably want to ask Bilibili's straight men, "Don't you have your own goddess competition?"

2. Chess player Zhanying, "flash attack" Hupu

The victory of Zhanying may be regarded as an Internet wonder created by abstract enthusiasts, but it also depends to a large extent on the official strategy change of Hupu. This year, Hupu has opened five major tracks, including sports, Internet celebrities, and games. The purpose should be to expand the "goddess" candidates and inject a little freshness into the goddess competition, which has been declining in popularity year after year. Although from the results, in addition to the rise of Zhanying in the sports track, the finalists are still the Jin Yong film and television actresses favored by Hupu straight men. But as a platform, Hupu can be called "a long drought meets a sweet rain" - after all, the champion Li Qinshang of the previous year won 92,839 votes in the finals, and last year's champion Liu Yifei only won about 20,000 votes, and the highlight role was still Zhao Linger. In contrast, when PKing Ni Ni, Zhanying, who received 430,000 votes, not only broke the record for the highest number of votes in a single game, but also won the record for the largest score difference.

Users who voted for Zhan Ying have their own logic of "having fun": "If you vote for a celebrity, the celebrity won't react, but if you vote for Zhan Ying, you can watch her go crazy in the live broadcast room." In terms of the number of fans, Zhan Ying cannot be called a top-tier anchor. His main base, Bilibili, has only 1.28 million fans, and his Douyin account has just over one million fans. However, live broadcasting has shortened the distance between the anchor and the user. The anchor, separated by a screen, is more "visible" than a celebrity, and real-time and close interaction deepens fan stickiness.

On the other hand, one of the characteristics of the straight males on Bilibili is "anti-value narrative" and they are keen to create their own discourse system. One of the manifestations is that the platform is dominated by content with good looks, but the ones that users are willing to support are those who are good at making fun of others and playing with memes.

At the same time, during the "Sisters Who Make Waves 4" competition, Mei Yi Li Ya and "The Pure Land of Bliss" were promoted to the front row, which shows the strong voting ability of B station users. Driven by the spirit of "looking for fun" and "anti-elitism", the traffic snowball of many fans, fun people, and abstract lovers is rolling bigger and bigger, and it is almost inevitable that the female stars will "lost" to Zhan Ying.

Abstraction is the synonym of Zhanying's live broadcast room. Looking back at his broadcasting career, Zhanying, who joined Bilibili in 2021, is a professional Go player of the second dan. Due to the small circle of sports such as Go, the Go explanations and comments he released in the early stage were almost ignored.

The turning point of fate occurred in October 2022. During a live broadcast, Zhan Ying was instigated to read comments on Tieba. At first, he confidently expressed that he was familiar with the attack routines of the brothers on Tieba. Under the post "As we all know, a stronger Ye 5 can beat Zhan Ying", he was able to respond with "tempering mentality and accepting the beating of society". However, with the strong entry of Jay Chou's BGM, he was completely defeated when he saw the comments "Zhan Ying is not a talented chess player" and "He just doesn't work hard and wants to increase traffic by live broadcasting. Otherwise, what can he do? He can't play chess better than others. If he doesn't make some money from live broadcasting, he will starve to death." He left the broadcast in tears.

War Eagle Live

Now, under the relevant "reset version" slice of Bilibili, this record of breaking the defense has been filled with users' "the gears of fate began to turn", and his experience of becoming famous has also been jokingly called "no one cares about me talking about chess for three years, but everyone knows about my breaking the defense in one day."

As the popularity of the live broadcast room increased, in the subsequent live broadcasts, Zhanying endured various mocking labels thrown by users with a relieved attitude, such as "2-16", "Eight Determination King" and "Old Lady Ao", and naturally created more and more "new activities" in the interaction to maximize the program effect. Among them, "Eight Determination King" is a joke that it took her eight years to complete the determination at the age of 19; "2-16" comes from her record of "2 wins and 16 losses" in the 2021 Women's Go Championship A League, and "Old Lady Ao" also comes from the league. Zhanying won one of the games against 58-year-old Rui Naiwei. The duel between the two sides lasted for 7 hours, so this game was given the funny name of "Old Lady Ao". Although it is jokingly called "Ke Jie's abstraction is half in the audience, and Zhanying relies on himself for 99%, but putting aside the fan filter, it is not only Zhanying who is abstract, but also the users themselves who concoct various slices and ghost animal secondary creations of the "famous scenes" in Zhanying's live broadcast and get fun from them.

For example, when facing the evaluation of being a "marginal chess player" by Wang Tianyi, the number one chess player, Zhan Ying clarified and denied it during the live broadcast, and his argument was that "his home is very close to Ke Jie." Netizens complained that "being a marginal chess player has nothing to do with you being close to Ke Jie's home, and you don't deliver food to Ke Jie." However, he was awarded the title of "Rider Zhan Ying", and related videos quickly began to circulate.

In a live broadcast, Zhanying held a green crocodile toy and tried to "crush" the audience while saying "Zhanying, Zhanying, how old are you?" The "crush gate" was quickly created; he unpacked a sausage because he suddenly felt hungry, but his face turned hideous because the casing was difficult to remove. This scene, which was like a scene in The Legend of the Condor Heroes, was captured by the audience and was called "Although I am old, my arrows are still sharp"...

These famous scenes are also reflected in the Hupu Goddess Highlight Collection. Different from the highlights of the film and television works of previous champions, Zhanying's name is associated with countless abstract memes born in the live broadcast room, such as "Ham Sausage Shooting Eagle", "Gate Clamp", and "Zhanying Zhanying, you won the big one". Tens of thousands of users gave these famous scenes a high score of 9.8.

Highlights of the War Eagle Tiger Goddess

And on Christmas Day of 2022, with the "Get a Photo on Board" event, the number of live broadcast captains of the War Eagle exceeded one thousand, making it one of the "Thousand Ship Anchors".

3. Abstract culture makes Go anchors famous

Abstract culture originated from the 6324 "Abstract Studio" opened by Li Gan in Douyu in the early days. It was later promoted by anchor Sun Xiaochuan and spread through social media such as Tieba and Weibo. Most of the early abstract content was notorious and was labeled as "low-level". Today, as a special subculture active in the male group, abstract culture is difficult to have a precise definition. In a broad sense, no matter what the appearance is, "deconstruction" may be regarded as the core of abstract culture.

Although at first glance it seems to have nothing to do with the chess game of Go, in the Go world of Bilibili, abstract culture can be said to be "going crazy".

To a large extent, Zhanying's popularity is also due to the popularity of Ke Jie, the eight-time champion of "Sharp Comments". The story of Ke Jie's "broken heart" in the battle with AlphaGo has been widely circulated on Bilibili. In fact, before Zhanying's "abstract live broadcast" came out, Ke Jie was the first person in the abstract live broadcast of Go. After switching to Bilibili live broadcast, he created an image for himself that was different from the "world champion": fans in the live broadcast room called him "Jie Bao", and then began a period of abstract interaction.

He has also firmly grasped the password to traffic. One user commented, "I didn't know how abstract he was before. The first time I clicked into his live broadcast room, I saw him fighting against QQ's robot Xiaobing. He asked to fight against Xiaobing offline, and then he boasted that he had defeated AI by a huge margin."

Some of the clips that Ke Jie talked about most include that the title of his live broadcast room was "Only Playing Go", but he was actually playing the League of Legends' "Teamfight Tactics"; during the live broadcast, he said frankly that he hated people who used Apple phones, and when asked about his mobile phone model in the barrage, he took out his Apple phone and called it "Huawei 13Pro Max."

Another person who was once praised by Abstract Live was Lian Xiao, a professional nine-dan Go player. Lian Xiao, who signed a contract with B Station Live earlier, was more of a technical player. He worked diligently to broadcast Go in the live broadcast room, but it was difficult to break through the traffic bottleneck of this sport, so he terminated his contract with B Station. Driven by Zhan Ying and Ke Jie, Lian Xiao awkwardly started the "lifestyle" live broadcast. As the popularity of the collaboration increased, the three of them also established the 299 Go Studio.

299 Go Studio

During the New Year's Day, Lian Xiao, who was not familiar with the live broadcast rules, promised to "give a signed fan to those who board the ship", and finally achieved the achievement of 2641 captains in one night and became a hot spot in the live broadcast of Station B. The collective breakthrough of the "three-man team" once made the audience mistakenly believe that the end of Go is abstraction.

• There are roots for the growth and gathering of abstract culture on Bilibili. In terms of user portraits, Bilibili has a large group of Generation Z, with a large proportion of male users. This type of young people has a strong sense of "anti-value narrative" and is good at deconstructing everything with an entertaining attitude. In terms of content, "stalk culture", one of the representatives of abstract culture, has always occupied a place on Bilibili. For example, Ma Baoguo's "Squirrel Shaking" and "Young People Have No Martial Ethics" were once very popular as ghost animal materials.

But is abstraction the password for traffic? Kas thinks this is not entirely true. After all, "whole-life" has its limits. Abstract live broadcasts alone cannot create a long-lasting live broadcast room. In fact, Zhan Ying, who is famous for her abstract live broadcasts, does not understand the meaning of "abstract". Many live broadcast effects are mostly due to her natural reactions and are unintentional. The boundary between abstract and non-abstract is actually in the hands of the audience. Fans who vote for Zhan Ying are not entirely out of "fun". More people are moved by Zhan Ying's persistence as an ordinary chess player - she will work hard to create Go content, confess her desire for the championship, and the innocence and cuteness revealed in the live broadcast are difficult to replicate. The true nature attracted the audience to stop and empathize. A less elitist Hupu goddess seems to be more in line with the values ​​of today's young people.

4. User Reviews

After becoming popular, Zhanying not only sticks to its core business of Go, but also gradually builds the "Zhanying Universe", including well-known players such as Ke Jie, Lian Xiao, Fan Weijing, and Zhou Ruiyang. After Zhanying won the championship, the eight-time champion Gu Li also sent his congratulations as soon as possible.

Searching for relevant keywords on Bilibili, there are many popular secondary creative contents such as "Ke Jie x Zhan Ying, the Go version of "Pride and Prejudice", "Zhan Ying×Yu Lijun, abstract genius VS Go sweetheart", and "Bullying a Ke Jie". From the crowd portrait, Zhan Ying's fans are young and have strong secondary creative abilities. This value is fed back to Go content and also drives Go to break out of the circle. Let's go back to the Goddess Contest. It may be difficult for Hupu to have a second Zhan Ying, and it may be difficult for Zhan Ying to have a second champion, but all parties at the center of the incident are going all out - Hupu is obviously happy to join in the fun. On the trophy given to Zhan Ying, the three red words "Eight Crown King" are very eye-catching, and a box of braised pork rice is also included with the trophy.

In this Internet spectacle created by hundreds of thousands of people, Zhan Ying won the goddess championship, the Hupu platform gained traffic, Go players got the opportunity to break out of the circle, abstract lovers gained happiness, and the only one who might be hurt was the Hupu brother who stuck to the "classic goddess image".

Author: Zhou Huan

Source: WeChat public account: "CaasData" (ID: caasdata6)