Fans' Practice And Meaning Production In The Creation Of Virtual Idol

Iqiyi,Tencent,byte bounce and other Internet giants have deployed virtual idol business in recent years.Lehua entertainment,a well-known domestic artist brokerage company,has also begun to invest in the blue ocean of virtual artists.Virtual idols have great development potential in the current youth culture industry market,and have evolved into a youth popular culture phenomenon.A-soul is a fictional idol organization jointly operated by Lehua entertainment and byte beat in december2020.In just one year of development,it has climbed to the top of the virtual idol circle of station B and is called "the light of national V" by its fans.A-soul is a high-quality virtual idol women’s group that conforms to the development of the times and the market trend.It combines the advantages of two types of virtual idols,the virtual singer and the virtual anchor,and can more purely and permanently meet the emotional demands of fans.With the rapid development of the Internet and the prosperity of social economy,the consumption concept of generation Z has become more open,inclined to emotional consumption,and willing to pay for their own interests.Generation Z,most of whom are only children,often feel lonely and emotionally deficient.They are eager to repose their emotions through perfect idols.Influenced by Japan’s secondary culture,they have special feelings for virtual cartoon characters,and have a strong aesthetic pursuit for "cute" and "high-value".The birth of virtual idols meets the demands of generation Z for perfect idols,so they have also become the main group of virtual idol consumers.The network platforms represented by station B,Baidu tieba and Douban provide a platform for behavior practice and meaning production for virtual idol fans.From the perspective of fan culture,this paper takes the popular virtual idol group a-soul as an example to analyze the practice of virtual idol fans and their meaning production.Through participatory observation,in-depth interviews and other methods,this paper analyzes the internal ecology of the circle of virtual idol fans.This paper analyzes the practical behavior of virtual Idol fans from the three dimensions of consumption,organization and power,and interprets the meaning production behind it.The study found that fans expressed their love for virtual idols through daily performances and entertainment carnivals,alleviated various pressures from the real world,and resisted authority in a game like way,forming their unique subculture style.In addition,the birth of virtual idols has promoted a kind of emotional consumption.It eases the loneliness in the hearts of fans,allows them to vent their feelings that they have no place to put,and stimulates a powerful productivity of "generating power for love".In the process of consuming for idols,virtual idols’ fans have gained a sense of commitment,happiness and satisfaction.In essence,virtual idols are symbolic symbols of cultural circles.Under the production and interaction of symbols,the identity of fans continues to strengthen.They are eager to establish a decentralized cyberutopia and realize the equality and freedom of discourse power.The unique cultural atmosphere of virtual idols’ fans makes a new turn in the development of fan culture.The birth of virtual idols has enriched young people’s discourse expression and discourse practice,but we still need to strengthen guidance to prevent the problems brought by them,such as the weakening of the boundary between virtual and real,the impact of media technology on human subjectivity,excessive entertainment and commercialization eroding cultural value and so on.