Why Does Almost Anything Become a Hit Now, So Long as You Attach 'Sang' to It? | QDaily Anthropology

Sang has become the punk of a new era, spreading among the young. Its subtext: life is hard enough already — can't I just say something true?

Broad daylight. Two high-school boys sit on the stone steps by a river, talking.

"There's a test tomorrow. What a pain."

"It's only May and it's already this hot."

"Isn't this fry too long? Are potatoes really that big?" "Sure they are."

This is a scene from the 2016 Japanese film Seto and Utsumi — or you could say it is every scene, because the film does one thing from beginning to end: Seto and Utsumi (the title literally means a narrow strait; in the film the two words are the surnames of the two boys) sit by the river through all four seasons and talk.

In the old idea of the youth film, the heroes brim with good cheer and finish by achieving something great. Seto and Utsumi uses two completely ordinary boys to argue for a different philosophy: why does youth have to mean running and sweating? Why can't you fritter it away by a river? They gripe about school, sneak looks at girls, watch strangers go by, complain about their parents. That is how they enjoy being young.

The way Seto and Utsumi slump on those steps looks a lot like the "Ge You slouch," the meme that swept China. Over the past year, Ji Chunsheng — the deadbeat young Beijinger from the sitcom I Love My Family, more than 20 years old now — was suddenly dug up again and put to work expressing a certain "nothing left to live for" mood.

They are not alone. You have probably noticed that more and more films, shows, reaction images and jokes with the same air are circulating online. On the surface they carry the markers of negative feeling — listlessness, gloom, freakishness — which is to say they stand on the opposite side from being upbeat. Yet these once "negative" figures have never been more welcome.

Along with them, a single Chinese character that captures the whole mood — sang, the character for mourning and dejection — has caught on among young people.

This anxious generation sees sang as the true face of life

Like fu, the borrowed word behind Chinese boys-love fandom, sang first took hold among young Chinese through the pull of Japanese pop culture. Around 2005 a term appeared in Japanese: sang nü, "sang woman." Close in meaning to himono onna, the "dried-fish woman," it meant a woman with no appeal — literally, "a woman men don't want." Sang nan, "sang man," did the same job for men.

Plenty of anime and manga are built on the sang nü theme. The 2011 manga No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular!, drawn by the two-person team Nico Tanigawa, follows a socially crippled heroine, Kuroki Tomoko. School torments her, and the harder she tries to be popular, the bigger a joke she becomes.

What sang sketches first is a loser: things go badly, nothing is fun, nothing can be done. But set against heroes wearing the protagonist's halo, this kind of character may sit far closer to how most people actually live.

After the 1990s, with severe economic crises running through the developed world, young people's odds of success shrank. Some Japanese of what is called the "yutori" generation, raised under relaxed schooling, wanted nothing more than a steady life free of pressure — and still ran into a reality where neither career nor home life went well.

Tatsushi Omori, who directed Seto and Utsumi, once described the Setos and Utsumis of the world this way: "Most of these people amount to nothing in society; they spend their days doing nothing. Their lives look colorful and full, but it is all meaningless. Behind their smiles hides endless loneliness."

One social fact such figures reflect, Omori said, is "the weakening of Japan's patriarchal society" — "even if you are a thoroughly good man, in this real society you still count for nothing."

The other standard-bearer of sang is the horse-headed, human-bodied lead of the American animated series BoJack Horseman, taken to represent a second type of contemporary unhappiness: the hollow middle class.

In his early fifties, BoJack lives a wild, rich, empty life. He knows there is not much time left to waste, and still denies it with drink and women. He packs the hole inside him with greedy ambition and falls into disappointment again and again. "Here we go again ... why do I think this stuff is going to make me happy?"

The show's creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, told The New York Times that his inspiration came from the anxiety he felt when he was young — "clueless, and full of himself."

In the United States, Generation Y (born after the late 1970s, also called millennials or the internet generation) is seen as a cohort that cares more about individual worth and is more diverse. It is also more badly lost.

Tim Urban, founder of the popular-psychology site Wait But Why, wrote in "Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy" that anxiety is one of the generation's common traits. There is a formula for happiness: happiness equals reality minus expectations. For Generation Y the answer is usually negative. They watched the previous generation build prosperity, so they grow up carrying outsized expectations and ambitions, then fall into confusion when reality pushes back.

BoJack's lodger, Todd, is a textbook millennial failure. He moved into BoJack's hulking, odd house on the hill five years ago and passes his days doing nothing beyond eating breakfast cereal and smoking weed. The voice actor Aaron Paul has said Todd may be "the first asexual character on television"; his loyalty to BoJack is always repaid with heartbreaking indifference.

In China, the viewers in front of the screen feel that anxiety in their own bodies. A Social Mentality Report released last December by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences shows that young people are not doing well. In big cities they carry the pressure of work and money; back in small cities they cannot manage the tangle of personal ties. As China's growth slows, that pressure will only build.

Young viewers like these no longer buy crude success-studies pep talk. They want emotional material with more in it.

In a savagely competitive entertainment industry, sang is the avant-garde

BoJack was born in the peak era of American television.

At the 2015 Television Critics Association gathering in Los Angeles, FX president John Landgraf first used the phrase "Peak TV" to describe how the fast-rising number of shows was nearly hitting the ceiling of what the market could absorb.

American television has had three widely acknowledged golden ages: the years after World War II, the 1980s, and 2000 to now. Over the past decade or so, as streaming platforms grew and international distribution networks opened up, the business kept expanding. Every year a huge number of new shows of every kind get made.

By FX's count, the United States had about 192 original scripted shows in 2006. By 2015 the number was 421, and in 2016 it was 455 — a 137% rise in a decade. Next year it could well pass 500.

The direct result of the peak era is that no middling show succeeds easily anymore. Fighting over picky viewers, production companies compete savagely; they can no longer hold attention with the old formulas, and have to spend more on finding what is next.

Mr. Robot won USA Network an Emmy last year. For a decade USA got respectable ratings out of "blue-sky programming" — formulaic detective series and feel-good comedies that always show a cloudless world — but to win back young viewers who kept drifting off, it had to change. Mr. Robot is about hacking and the isolating effects of digital life, subjects burning hot right now, and it is far darker than the blue-sky fare.

"For a long time we wanted to make a lot of money in the cable business, and we did," said Bonnie Hammer, the USA executive who greenlit the show. "We accepted that we were not going to win a lot of awards. Now we are in a completely different business. Competition today is not only about cable operations; good content has become one of the main things we compete on."

As production companies work to shed the formulaic, what used to be niche is being taken seriously. Over the past few years a run of unconventional characters have done dazzlingly well: the depressed horse-man; the transgender inmate in Orange Is the New Black; the unlucky Pakistani-American student in The Night Of; the café owner in Fleabag, holding herself together in the wreckage and pretending not to care; Kate, the daughter in This Is Us who can never lose the weight.

Other crowded corners of pop culture work the same way. Even inside the sang category, Japanese dramas keep turning up something new.

Date: What Is Love, Anyway?, which took Best Drama at the 2015 Television Drama Academy Awards, pairs a rigid woman civil servant who cannot accept society's idea of love with an otaku living in his two-dimensional world. They get together through an arranged matchmaking date.

We Married as a Job!, a ratings hit in 2016, is about an older virgin and a woman with a graduate degree and no job who, to dodge their own problems, enter a marriage of employment.

In the world's most advanced animation industry, the hot-blooded boy hero no longer rules alone either. In his place stand Saiki Kusuo, tortured by his own psychic powers; Madoka, the small girl who crushes you rather than heals you; Kizumonogatari. Makoto Shinkai, who had an enormous hit last year, is at his best with what you might call small but certain despair — the ache between a teenage boy and girl.

For producers, sang and "demonic charm" are equally handy settings. Both deliver freshness and something to talk about.

On social networks, sang works like the punk of a new era

Online, feeling travels not only through whole films and whole texts but through fragments — screenshots, a few lines.

You may never have watched a full episode of BoJack. But if a screenshot of it has ever crossed your WeChat Moments, the subtitled lines alone are enough to give you its essence and start you talking about it with like-minded friends.

Animated images that hit the sang nerve often catch fire overnight: the "Ge You slouch," Pepe the Frog, "(:з」∠)." Once a hot topic appears, the big marketing accounts on Weibo and WeChat pile in with copies. Shortly after the Ge You slouch took off, every other kind of slouch showed up.

On the same platforms, some of the people who voiced a sang attitude early picked up followings.

"Zeng Liangjun" describes herself as "born in 1990, architecture student." From 2011 she posted on Douban, Weibo, Xiniu Gushi, WeChat official accounts and elsewhere, writing anti-success-studies picture-and-text jokes.

Her lines got around: "Someone who stays home watching TV, drinking soda and eating snacks contributes nothing to society, but does no harm either!" "Whenever I have a mountain of homework, the world suddenly fills with fun."

It is worth saying that many young people like the Ge You slouch and Zeng Liangjun because "I really don't want to study / work" is a genuine daily complaint of theirs, a voice unlike the one schooling gives them. That other voice has a fixed form, which another user, @Xuanjie, captured: "To sum this diary up the way an elder would: if you have this much spare time to write it and stick a bunch of silly pictures on it, you should have finished your homework long ago."

In every era, youth culture is the loudest and most restless part of the crowd. For the young, information that is anti-traditional, strong in feeling and pitched high gets noticed first, then amplified and spread. In a sense, today's bullet-comment video sites and WeChat groups do what the bars and clubs that gathered young people in the 1960s and '70s once did.

In an earlier piece on punk culture we noted that, under the influence of middle-class consumer culture, young people no longer prize the expression of anger. Next to the hippies and rock kids of the past, today's youth culture, sang included, looks much gentler. But the internet has also cleared away the barriers that used to keep subcultures at the margins. They can get what they need fast, and spread what they believe in.

Making sang is just like making positive energy

I Feel My Body Has Been Hollowed Out 《感觉身体被掏空》 is the second original novelty hit for the Shanghai Rainbow Chamber Singers, after Zhang Shichao, Where on Earth Did You Put My House Keys 《张士超你到底把我家钥匙放在哪里了》 earlier this year. It sings the ordinary scene of working late in the city: "There's a boss / called David / who turns up at six in the evening with the eyes of a German shepherd / carrying a pot of steaming coffee / heh heh heh / shall we have a meeting?"

Jin Chengzhi, who heads the choir and writes and conducts its music, told QDaily that the song came out of the complaints of "overtime dogs" on WeChat Moments.

Asked whether the song counts as spreading negative energy, he says the answer is the opposite: the most important thing about it is still positive energy. "The head of a film company told me the other day that city life is too heavy and we need a sense of humor. I think that nowadays even people's venting is full of venom — aargh! Personally I don't think it needs to go that far. Our lives are real; you can't actually go at people with an axe, that does nothing. But if the music leaves you in tears, that is a kind of comfort. The audience lets its feelings out, and our social function is served."

Look back over everything that has made sang popular and you find that people are only looking for a like-minded outlet. What they want in the end is comfort, and the will to fix their problems.

In the virtual world, the sullen and unhappy are in fact full of charm and goodwill. Seto and Utsumi treasure their once-in-a-lifetime time together. BoJack is nothing more than a bastard who wants to be loved. Zeng Liangjun writes posts about not wanting to try, and has published three books.

Back in real life, though, failure is still helpless and unwelcome. People embrace it, and would rather keep it in the virtual world.

Life is as hard as it ever was. Healing stories, Mary Sue fantasies, sang — all of them are just ways of urging people on.

Cover image and in-text images from Douban Movie.