[ SECRET POST #5646 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5646 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 25 secrets from Secret Submission Post #808.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

07. https://i.imgur.com/mco9ibX.png

[(Anonymous)]

I wouldn't really call it fake. Do the videos have very high production value and romanticise life in rural China? Probably. Does she get support from official propaganda channels for what she does? It's not unlikely. But I don't think she is an actress and I largely believe her backstory. A lot of the skills she displays look too much like being born from years of practised routine. That's not something an actress with no background in rural living could fake.

She is likely very wealthy by now (even without any ... sponsoring money, she is a hugely successful influencer) and can afford to pay for a professional team but she still does the work in front of the camera herself. She also afaik never claimed to give a realistic look into farming life of the common rural person so...

[(Anonymous)]

+1 They're staged and planned and produced...but she's still doing it.

And hell, even if it is entirely fake shots and camera tricks, I wouldn't care. They're still nice videos that make me happy.

[(Anonymous)]

She has old as fuck videos where you notice she had a tripod to make the shots and had to repeat the movement over and over. There's even a video where she promote her lamb food and you can see she's using an iMac to edit the videos. So while the videos now do look too perfect, she still says that everything she does in her grandma's farm is something she learned from her grandpa and that takes lots of experience to fake it (break bamboo, plant rice, etc).

[(Anonymous)]

Ayrt
Yes, exactly. I also love her old "how to" noodle video where she actually mentions how long it took her to shoot because between setting up the camera and making sure the angles and focus were correct, the dough kept drying up too much to work with.

I also think it's weird that she gets so much scrutiny for allegedly being "fake" and and actress just because her production value went way up over time. Like... that would be a sign that she did start out small and only developed into more professional videos after getting successful.

And I don't get the criticism that her videos are romanticising farming and rural living. A) she never claimed her videos are a realistic depiction of the daily life of a rural farm worker and b) a lot of what we see her doing still looks like hard work, no matter how pretty it looks. Imo, only people who never had to stoke a fire every time they cook and never planted anything would disagree.

[(Anonymous)]

She doesn't have to claim her videos are realistic for some people to misunderstand them as such. And honestly, it doesn't really matter; farming simulator games, for example, are very explicitly fake, and they still get criticized for romanticizing farming and small-town life. Because they do, and so do her videos. Like her video about wool is pretty mountains and quick shots of old-fashioned crafting and conspicuously placed cute baby sheep. It's not about the difficult work of raising animals or the enormous amount of time it takes to make all your clothes from scratch any more than Harvest Moon is going to have you experience total crop failure due to weather or make it hard for your character to fit into town as the newcomer.

And I don't think it's a bad thing to have these fantasies about living in the country and doing pretty crafts and raising your own food! It's normal to wish you had a different, ideal life, and people romanticize city living, too. But you can see why people who do have to live on farming margins, deal with the many hard and dirty jobs that get left out of pastoral fantasies, and have experienced the downsides of living in a small town might get miffed about seeing them over and over.

[(Anonymous)]

I only watched a few of her videos (they're very pretty, but there was one that made me uncomfortable for reasons I can't remember now), but I was surprised so many people in the comments seemed to think she truly was living the Ghibli life. Like, this beautiful Chinese woman just happens to be making extremely high-production videos all by her lonesome of her real life in her well-preserved Arcadian village where she humbly trades goods with her neighbors, does crafts in traditional dresses and often loose hair, and embodies filial piety by taking months to make her grandmother silk pajamas by hand? It's a fantasy - a very well-done fantasy that takes a lot of work, it's clear there's real effort going into her videos, but of course it's not actually how she lives off-camera. The government is promoting her as a cultural ambassador because her videos make countryside living look amazing.

[(Anonymous)]

i'm pretty sure the Chinese government wants everyone to believe that the way this woman lives in her videos is how all farmers and poor people are living in the country and that they're all happy workers who don't need democracy.

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, probably, but the actual content of her videos is no more political than your average Western instagrammer. Her videos are inoffensive to the Chinese government, but hardly tailor-made.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't understand why people think she's doing all of this alone when her crew keeps appearing in the videos...
That said, thework she does in the videos is real. It's just that she is wealthy enough (and supported by official channels) that she can concentrate on just the content of her videos and very likely leave the upkeep of her dreamy homestead to a team.

[(Anonymous)]

They are very nice videos. I'd love to see more channels like hers of equal production quality from across the globe.

[(Anonymous)]

I haven’t seen this Chinese woman’s videos, but they sound similar to Country Life Vlog, which is a family in Azerbaijan making food and doing agriculture in a gorgeous rural setting.

[(Anonymous)]

This sounds lovely and I want to watch it now )the Azerbaijan channel too, an anon shared above.

I didn't grow up in a rural setting at all, so this kind of thing is a fantasy. When I did spend a summer in the country/farm...lol I still loved it. There was no cute dress wearing while I was picking weeds and changing the water for the chickens (corralling them back into their pen either)...and there's nothing cute about carcasses either. Anyway. Still would love to live in the country with my own vegetables and fruits trees, chickens and bees. Maybe some sheep or a goat. The food was delicious.

[(Anonymous)]

Sure, it's highly produced and glosses over a lot of the other realities of rural life (my least favorite childhood chores were weeding corn and helping load/stack wood). But it's clear that the life she is glamorizing is her own, and that it comes from a place of love of her family's traditional lifestyle. I mean, even if the scale of things is exaggerated to look good for film, she still clearly loves her family and is doing something that will allow her to take care of them and preserve their way of life in an age of urbanization.

And yeah, it's clearly being elevated because it fits in with that government's propaganda. But I'll take glamorized videos of a woman showcasing a bunch of rural skills in the natural beauty of her hometown over the newest summer blockbuster of "these war crimes and civil rights violations are good, actually, directed by Michael Bay".

[(Anonymous)]

Lmao, yeah, exactly.

[(Anonymous)]

LOL Its so soothing!!! True or not, her videos are so nice. I agree that if I were hella rich I'd probably end up emulating something similar.

[(Anonymous)]

Why worry about Internet content you enjoy being "fake"? All content creators manufacture authenticity for the audience to some extent, even the vloggers who just sit and talk at the camera. Content is "produced". It doesn't arise into existence.

[(Anonymous)]

imagine if people could talk about chinese content creators without immediately accusing them of being government plants. there's tons of rural living channels romanticizing that kind of life in all kinds of countries, that is because people are into it

[(Anonymous)]

She is getting promoted as a cultural ambassador by the government (likely to get young people to return to rural communities). That doesn't mean she's fake, and it doesn't mean she shares all of the government's positions but it does mean the government is involved to a certain extent.

[(Anonymous)]

+1

She's not a plant, but it is true that she is being promoted by the CCP.

[(Anonymous)]

IIRC Swedish YouTuber/Instagrammer Jonna Jinton was recently awarded directly by the monarchy for her cultural contributions, but I've never seen anyone talk about her content the way they talk about Li Ziqi's.

[(Anonymous)]

Because China bad.

But more sincerely, unless you yourself are living there, I find that it's more useful to be cognizant of and wary about propaganda from your own government, as some of it might actually affect your life. No matter how terrible it all is, you as a foreigner living in another country will never have any measurable impact on what the Chinese government does to its people.

[(Anonymous)]

The difference might be that Sweden has a very, very different type of government and Jonna Jinton wouldn't suddenly "disappear" should she promote the "wrong" type of cultural heritage.

[(Anonymous)]

yes, but it is only in china we call it propaganda. if we heard that in, say, japan the government promoted someone who shares content about traditional ways of preparing food or dyeing clothes we wouldn't feel it was necessary to mention it when discussing their channel, because like, duh, countries want to preserve and promote their culture.

like im not saying the ccp is above propaganda, it's just that anything portraying china in a positive light gets labeled propaganda and that's really a bit fucked

[dantesspirit]

Just going by the photo and the text, a garden like that is *a lot* of work.

So she very likely has *a lot* of help to get it looking that way, as well as whatever work she herself does and what you see is the result of that hard work, behind the scenes, so to speak.

Does that mean it's all fake or staged? No, not really. It just means you don't see what it takes to get to this point.