Who Was Screaming at Bilibili's 12,000-Person Anime Meetup Last Weekend?

Maybe everyone — otherwise they wouldn't have been there. It was all for love.

At around midnight on July 22, Chinico boarded a slow train from Bengbu, in Anhui province, to Shanghai. The trip takes six hours one way. He had paid 140 yuan for a round-trip ticket — most of the budget he had set aside for the journey — to get to BML (Bilibili Macro Link), the event Bilibili was staging in Shanghai. He had won his two tickets, face value 780 yuan each, in a Bilibili video contest. He couldn't afford a hotel, so he planned to catch the 11 p.m. train home the same night the event ended.

He had just finished his final year of high school, and this was the first time he had ever left his hometown.

On the morning of July 23, Liao Jinhan and his father took a high-speed train from Hangzhou to Shanghai. Liao, a first-year high school student studying in the United States, had been a Bilibili user for five years. His father knew he ran an uploader account in Bilibili's gaming section and neither opposed it nor encouraged it, but he did pay for the whole BML trip. Delays along the way cost Liao his booked train, and he didn't reach the Expo grounds until just after 1 p.m.

Zhang Le was a Shanghai native, also in his first year of high school. He got his start as an uploader on Youku, streaming himself playing games. He wasn't very good at it: under one video, the same viewer left the comment "I can't take it, how can you play this badly" five separate times. That didn't bother him much. He kept posting on Bilibili anyway, and roped in friends and family to watch. His own family had planned a road trip for July 23, but Zhang Le told them at the last minute that he had a 780-yuan "concert ticket" and had already arranged to meet someone. His parents agreed.

The ticket was Chinico's. The two had known each other for only a few weeks and had never met face to face; they planned to meet in person for the first time before BML began. "When Chinico got the ticket he wanted to sell it to me cheap, and I told him he might as well just give it to me" — Chinico had won the tickets partly because Zhang Le's friends and family turned out to support him.

On July 23, 2016, 12,000 people converged on the Mercedes-Benz Arena at Shanghai's Expo grounds for the offline gathering called BML. Counting everyone who had bought outdoor-area tickets only, the crowd was over 20,000. It wasn't really the "concert" Zhang Le had described to his parents. Its core was an exchange between Bilibili's uploaders and their fans, with popular guests flown in from Japan to perform live and outdoor attractions like gaming events. Everything revolved around the two-dimensional world — fan slang for anime, comics and games, or ACG — that the audience loved.

This was the fourth year Bilibili had held BML, by now the site's best-known offline event. Four years earlier, on October 5, the BML performances had fit into a small venue that held 800 people. The show has since grown into a large-scale production, and the slogan changed to match: "Waiting for you where it all began." Ted, a fan who hasn't missed a single edition, ranked all four. He put 2014 first, with about 2,000 people: "The atmosphere was great. The two years after that, the venue got bigger and there were more people, but there was also a lot of inexplicable awkwardness."

The uploaders that fans know so well online were of course one big reason to come. But plenty of people, like Chinico, Liao Jinhan and Zhang Le, were also there to meet internet friends in the flesh. The three of them had met in Zhang Le's QQ group. This was their first real-life meeting, their first BML, and their first ACG gathering on this scale.

This year's BML was a bigger hit than many expected. Official-channel tickets for the show sold out in under two hours, and the most expensive 1,280-yuan floor seats were gone in four minutes. Just past 10 a.m., before the first outdoor livestream had even started, the BML line already ran 500 meters, from the venue beside the Huangpu River to the road in front of the Mercedes-Benz Arena. Some fans who squeezed in early joined new lines to buy merchandise; others made straight for the gaming zone to wait for uploaders' live streams. In 40-degree Celsius heat, many more had no choice but to duck into the shopping mall attached to the arena, and Starbucks became the best refuge — the store wasn't large, and there was barely room left to stand. On every floor of the mall you saw fans in cosplay outfits, Lolita dresses and T-shirts printed with ACG idols.

In earlier years, promotion went no further than the site's homepage. This was the first time Bilibili advertised BML in the subway. "We got some exposure in the subway, but we didn't do it because we had any real promotional or marketing need," said Chen Rui, Bilibili's chairman. "The bigger goal was to let the users who support Bilibili feel that the things they love are slowly getting stronger." He added: "With Bilibili, and with BML, I think the people who really spread the word are ordinary users."

It was just after 1 p.m. before Chinico, Liao Jinhan and Zhang Le finally got through the line and inside. The gaming zone was still the busiest place. Fans sat cross-legged on the floor of the livestream area, holding fans and phones, waiting for the gaming-section uploaders to stream Gang Beasts brawls, while fans who couldn't be there filled the screen with bullet comments of their own: "Please mind bullet-comment etiquette," "Remember to take your trash with you."

Liao Jinhan's biggest wish for the trip came true before the show even started: he spotted Xiaoyao Sanren in the outdoor gaming zone. Xiaoyao Sanren is a popular uploader in Bilibili's gaming section, known for his commentary on the punishingly difficult I Wanna series, and at the time he had more than 600,000 followers on the site. Liao loved his humor and his skill at the games, and had even joined his fan group. But seeing him was one thing: "It still wasn't close enough."

The BML performances ran over two days this year, the first built around the uploaders and the second around the Japanese guests. This was also the first year BML set up outdoor activities — a main stage, a gaming stage, a central livestream room, a merchandise area, an autograph area and a food court — and those zones brought in more event revenue. Chen Rui also told QDaily that every previous edition had lost money, and that this was the first BML to turn a profit.

The main sponsors switched from last year's Meizu to Xiaomi, Japan Airlines and Pizza Hut. At last year's BML, the hosts read the sponsors' names out again and again between segments as a form of advertising. On the Zhihu thread "How would you rate Bilibili Macro Link 2015?", several users said the hard sell had gone too far. A user called Hanfeng wrote: "Too many ads. They read those sponsors' names out at least three or four times over the whole show." Having noticed the problem, this year the organizers held the Xiaomi spot until the show was nearly over, and tucked the Japan Airlines pitch into the support bag handed to every member of the audience.

Along with Bilibili's popular uploaders, this year's BML featured the Japanese girl idol group Momoiro Clover Z; Choi Seong-guk, the Korean actor Chinese meme culture knows as "Curator Kim"; Ayumi Miyazaki, who sang "BRAVE HEART," the insert song from Digimon; and Dai Quan, who performed "Wukong." Every one of them was a figure Bilibili's fans knew intimately.

"Compared with watching a livestream at home, I'd much rather be there. If you've never been to one, there's no way to understand the feeling. It's completely different — being there beats a livestream by a mile. It's a different world," Ted said. Over four years of college, he went to dozens of ACG live shows.

At 5 p.m., with the show about to start, the audience filed in to the sound of scalpers asking, "Need a ticket?"

Nearly all 12,000 open seats were taken, and from the floor to every section of the stands the audience held up glow sticks in red, green, purple and silver. While everyone waited for the first song, the livestream screens on either side of the stage were already filling with the bullet comment "bilibili - ( ゜- ゜)つロ Cheers~"

A guzheng sounded, and the gathering officially began. The audience waved their glow sticks along with the fast intro — organized cheering of the kind fans call "yingyuan," more fervent this year than ever. The opening number, sung by five uploaders from the cover section, was "Nine Nine Eighty-One," a Chinese Vocaloid "legendary track" originally sung by the virtual idol Yuezheng Ling. A Chinese Vocaloid legendary track means a Chinese-language Vocaloid song posted to an ACG video site that has passed a million plays.

Dressed head to toe in black, Shixuezhi'an sang the show's first line in his slightly low voice. The rousing ACG anthem lifted the whole hall. He is a modestly well-known uploader in Bilibili's cover section, with close to 30,000 followers at the time, and posts mostly covers of popular anime songs. Fans call him "Little An."

"When you sing live, you have to pick songs that work live. As long as I pick songs that suit me, I think I can do a good job," Shixuezhi'an said. He had been posting to Bilibili since 2013 and had 24 uploads by then; the most-watched was his cover of the Slam Dunk theme song, at 208,000 plays. For someone this talkative, he wasn't prolific: "When you sing online there's a lot you're not happy with. You can nudge it, touch it up, treat it as a piece of work rather than just a song. For me personally, if there's a spot I don't like, I'll pick at the details. But live, the atmosphere counts for more."

He had performed at last year's BML tour stop in Xi'an, and the more formal BML stage had him keyed up. "Live feels more professional to me — the equipment, the whole process of adjusting the sound, going up, walking the stage. An anime convention can be an event for the sake of an event, but BML is genuinely building something like a real stage and giving everyone a chance to show what they can do. That's why I've wanted this stage for four years. It pulls harder than other conventions."

Host GoHank had worn his trademark floral shorts at the first three BMLs; this time he put on a black suit. The audience seemed to know every uploader who walked out. "Next up is the uploader in Bilibili's gaming section with, by common consent, the most female fans, and the biggest appetite for brutally hard games…" The host was barely through his first hint before nearly the whole hall knew who it was, and the fans below started screaming "Xiaoyao Sanren!" Even so, what these uploaders mostly did once they had the microphone was introduce themselves and say "thanks for your support."

Ted wasn't especially fond of that format, least of all when several uploaders performed a song or a dance together. "In its first year BML was billed as an event for offline exchange between uploaders and their audience. After a few editions, I don't think that has come through. Instead of talking with the uploaders, it feels more like getting a look at them — they come up, say hello and go back down." He preferred the second day: "People come up and sing. Not a word of filler."

The loudest cheers and the best reviews went to revivals of old favorites. Linggan Band played a new version of "My Stage," the theme song of the classic Chinese animated series 《我为歌狂》 (Crazy About Singing), and nostalgic fans flooded the screen with "I'm getting a little teary" and "8888888" (bullet-comment shorthand for applause). When Ayumi Miyazaki's voice rose into the Digimon theme, the audience sang along and the screen filled at once with the long line that carried all their nostalgia: "Mugendai na yume no ato no / nani mo nai yo no naka ja" (roughly: after an endlessly expanding dream, crossing a cold, indifferent world).

Ayumi Miyazaki's set was Liao Jinhan's favorite. "That was seriously fantastic," he said. "I'd heard his songs on Bilibili before. There was a small glitch at the start of the live performance, which was a bit of a shame." What floored Chinico was the hologram performance by the virtual idol Luo Tianyi, which he called "the second half's bombshell."

In the end Liao Jinhan traded his own 980-yuan ticket for one of Chinico's 780-yuan seats. "I wanted to sit with Zhang Le. It's boring on your own," Liao explained, which Chinico immediately turned into a joke about the two of them being a "CP," a shipped couple: "If you two really have to 'be together,' I can swap too."

The three of them, meeting for the first time, talked happily — probably because in ordinary life they have so few people to talk to like this. "Even at future BMLs or other offline events, it's hard to get a chance to meet the people you've been chatting with online all along."

Of the three, Liao Jinhan takes his videos the most seriously, and his get the most views; one reached 15,000. The other two spend "half an hour, an hour" making a couple of cuts. Liao does post-production and rendering, which can take several hours depending on the machine. On a friend's recommendation he started making boys'-love-flavored gaming videos, and built up a small following of fujoshi viewers.

Liao Jinhan had planned to livestream his whole BML outdoor-area day for his fans, and had even packed a GoPro head-mounted camera, but the heat killed the idea. Since he had brought it, he practiced on Zhang Le instead. Twenty minutes before the final call to go inside, Zhang Le ordered a plate of fried rice, laughing that at the school cafeteria he can finish a meal in three minutes.

With the camera on him Zhang Le ate a little self-consciously while Liao Jinhan narrated: "His movements have slowed down now." That clearly wasn't much of a hook, nothing like the uploaders in the gaming zone. "How can he talk that much and react that fast!" Liao marveled. He doesn't think he is good at talking either; recording videos, he often runs out of things to say and falls back on filler like "and then" and "this thing." But asked whether he would keep making videos, Liao was the first of the three to answer without hesitating: "I think I will."

By a little after 10 p.m., BML had reached its last song. Uploaders came out draped in BML's special support towels, and the audience traded glow sticks for the flashlights on their phones. As the closing number, "Bilibili Cheers - ( ゜- ゜)つロ," started up, the bullet comments filled with "bilibili - ( ゜- ゜)つロ Cheers~" and the whole hall swayed with pinpricks of light.

At the end everyone shouted together: "Bilibili, cheers!" Zhang Le was moved. "The atmosphere was fantastic. It felt like our side was shouting 'bi' and the other side was shouting 'li.' It really had something." And: "This isn't the internet, it isn't the virtual world, but it really felt like all of us were on Bilibili together, in real life."

Streamers of gold confetti poured down over the stage, the hall screamed one more time, and the host delivered his closing line: "See you again next year!" Liao Jinhan was all fired up: "Actually, this BML gave me a new goal. Sooner or later I'm going to get on the BML stage myself." Afterward he recorded what he felt on Weibo in seven Chinese characters: no regrets, this life, for joining Bilibili.

The hall emptied slowly into a Shanghai midsummer night still above 30 degrees Celsius. A Bilibili user with the handle "Garfield With No Pants" hurried back to his hotel clutching a long pillow shaped like Bilibili's little-TV mascot, bought at the venue: "It feels pretty strange carrying this down the street." Liao Jinhan went back to the hotel his father had booked; Zhang Le's parents came by car to collect him; and Chinico ran for the subway to catch his 11 p.m. train. To his delight, he spotted a fellow BML fan on the train back to Bengbu, recognizable at a glance by the white support bag handed out at the venue.

"Whether I come back next year depends on the money," Chinico said. He may not be lucky enough to land free tickets again. He said nothing about whether his parents would back him: they think making videos on Bilibili is a waste of time, and have no idea what BML is. Still, after this first trip, talking to the "three-dimensional world" may come a little easier to Chinico.

(At the interview subject's request, we are not using Chinico's real name.)