To Pokimane, pt 40

Info:

https://www.google.com/search?q=china+salty+fish+slacker+explained

https://x.com/tiff_ilosophy/status/1946519461034688627

https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2021/06/stop-trying-to-make-lying-flat-happen/

https://www.reddit.com/r/noveltranslations/comments/nj41el/anyone_know_the_meaning_of_salted_fish/

https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2021/04/china-spiritual-capitalists/

User with Douyin ID @79230039490 changed her display name from "肉肉丸" to "·摆烂小鱼", which Google translates as "Slacking off Little Fish" or "Sluggish Little Fish". The name on her second account @xiao.ru.888 went from "咪咪爱发癫" to "*鱼酱", even though she only uploaded one video in the past month.

I think it's fair to say that glasses usually make someone look less attractive. (Pey was happy when she got laser eye surgery and no longer had to wear glasses; I am just making an objective statement about appearances.) And yet she wears glasses in all of her videos, doesn't use a lot of image warping, doesn't use zooms or algorithm optimization tricks like blurring the start of the video, and leaves a lot of empty space above her head. In short, the 'slacking little fish' label seems accurate.

To be honest, the third explanatory link made me think about my motivations. It showed a male sprawled on a couch, who compared to the male leads in Chinese dramas did not look attractive. This idea is about working less, so it makes sense to try to associate working less, or slacking off, with attractive people.

The lighting her videos makes me want to work on the MMD shader that I haven't made because I'm concerned that me doing so could act as a reason for someone to delay sharing the idea. It's basically the same in all of her videos but more obvious with some outfits, like this one (another dance with same outfit). The light that illuminates her also shines through a window onto a bright floor, which isn't visible and which would look bad if it were visible. This makes surfaces that point towards the floor much brighter than in other directions.

People are more likely to change their name if they think they aren't important; maybe her name actually sounds like 'little fish'. (Apparently the character in A Dream Within A Dream is literally named 'little fish'.) And maybe she works hard in the job that earns money, but making and posting Douyin videos is her way of slacking off.

Apart from A Dream Within A Dream, other dramas have female leads with a 'slacking off' attitude. When Destiny Brings the Demon was translated on Viki by the Salted Fish Team. I think the female lead in Back From the Brink has a 'slacker' personality; also, I think I did not recognize her as the female lead in Legend of the Female General, despite watching like eight episodes of it and all of Everyone Loves Me, where she also starred. Showing how good she is as an actor to become a character with a completely different personality.

Notably, both A Dream Within A Dream and When Destiny Brings the Demon are 'transmigration' stories, featuring someone from modern times and modern work culture. (I guess the female lead in Love Game in Eastern Fantasy also sort of fits this pattern, as she 'slacks off' by thinking about or reading novels, but she doesn't really demonstrate this tendency within the story. Instead she gets her father within the story to do lots of exercise, to the point where he runs away to escape.) I can't much more about them because I haven't finished any of these three dramas, but the characters must have been written and acted with this type of personality because of viewers who identify with it.

It isn't the only personality type in dramas, for modern characters who are transmigrated into a story. Fateful Love features a female lead (who also appears in Love Game in Eastern Fantasy and A Dream Within A Dream) who is an elite military operator, far from any 'slacker' stereotype. In A Dream Within A Dream, the female lead dies many times in the first episode (and in Love Game in Eastern Fantasy, the female lead dies so many times she almost stops caring), but in the donghua How Dare You, the transmigrated female lead is very afraid of the possibility of dying (Ep04) and works hard to achieve a good outcome within the story.

Maybe I only started emailing you in December because you had said and done some controversial things. And based on events, like Greta not posting anything on Instagram since 18 Feb, I can't rule out the whole 'government conspiracy' thing, and the possibility that your actions could have been influenced by my emails to other people, that mentioned you.

So maybe you might feel guilty. "A lie is justified if one does not benefit".

—luckily, I remembered what I was going to say, after spending way too much time looking up dramas. You know how the explanation of inequality, which I hope you read, compared people to children? That was deliberate; like Sergeant Lim comparing the soldiers to drew cartoons in the daily logbook to little children who kill insects without feeling guilty. ("Naharnet is the first independent Lebanese Digital Media providing real-time news and information in English and Arabic about Lebanon, the Middle East and the World.")

This isn't to say that young people never do terrible things. In Till the End of the Moon, the main male character is bullied at a young age by other young males. In the first episode of Lost You Forever, the main male character is bullied by other young males after his parents die, until he is defended by the main female character.

I didn't spend time planning this post out. It was supposed to take just a couple minutes, link a few things and say something brief. Maybe you did know that I mentioned you in emails. Maybe I wouldn't have tried to email you if you hadn't bought yourself the ring or said that you missed when streaming was about playing games, which let me know that you hadn't recently died.

Something about how you're probably the most-followed female English-language streamer, but most people still haven't heard of you. Like in the World of Warcraft stream where you speculated that someone you knew in high school who has a cool name didn't know that you streamed. Today I encountered a Douyin video from a few months ago with 28 million likes, almost as much as Gangnam Style which has 31m likes, and I had never encountered the creator before.

Other than to mention the slacker little fishes of the world, this post is to say that I will think of you as someone who does not feel guilty. If your actions do result from feeling guilty, then I will misunderstand them and attribute your motivations to something else.

(It took three hours to write this post)