Sang Yu hadn't logged onto Weibo in so long that she'd forgotten which account she was on.
Since the post was already out, deleting it now would be a bit weird. Whatever, she'd leave it.
[y_03] was an account she'd opened five years ago—proof of Sang Yu forgetting her roots, a flaunt-my-wealth account created specifically to record her spending.
Back in the old days, whenever she saw rich people posting, she'd sneer at them and block them.
She never bothered reporting them, though. Reporting took too many extra steps, and it tired her out just thinking about it.
This account actually got reported all the time too, but its reputation was decent—probably because she didn't just spend money, she also donated.
Cancer research donations, disaster relief, stray animal rescue—big or small, if she saw it, she'd basically always donate.
Later on... she'd probably just gotten tired of it, and the account stopped updating.
It had been a year and a half since the last post. The newest comments under her previous Weibo post were all speculating whether she'd been arrested.
[Did she really get arrested?]
[Soul, return to us, soul, return to us... Without you, how am I supposed to write about rich people's lives in my little novels?!]
[Did some foreign country invent age-reversal technology, at the cost of a year-long sleep? Is that why you disappeared?]
As Sang Yu scrolled through the comments, she noticed the red notification dot in the bottom-right corner start twitching, the number surging.
Huh?
People were already reading her new post that fast?
Sang Yu tapped into her homepage and read through the movie review she'd written again. She knew what she'd written, but she wanted to see it once more.
[y_03]: [——
Recommending *Legend of the Golden Realm*: it successfully allows every audience member to confirm their own intelligence during the viewing process.
Have you recently felt like your brain isn't working well, your logical thinking has weakened, your appreciation of artistic works has declined?
I suggest watching *Legend of the Golden Realm* once. After watching, you'll discover it was all an illusion.
The empty theater environment, the screenwriter's braindead plot, the actors' clumsy performances will form a cocoon around you.
In that moment, you're no longer watching a movie. The theater is a laboratory.
The audience is participating in a large-scale, flexible experiment on "where is the lower limit of human intelligence," as volunteers.
I now understand why some critics write such brilliantly vicious takedowns—
When the audience's will to survive meets the creative team's death wish around the corner, language automatically grows teeth on rotten films.
In the theater, your urge to roast burns hotter than ever, and your inner roast-blogger persona takes over.
If you want to become a humor blogger, you can test the waters with *Legend of the Golden Realm* first.
I'd say you can use it as a baseline, a talent test to judge whether you have the potential to be a roast blogger.
Looking back, it turns out Little He was the one quietly holding up the audience from the shadows.
The only downside is the test voucher is a bit pricey—it depends on what your local theater charges.
...]
It was pretty well written.
Sang Yu once again gave herself a stamp of approval.
The comment section felt nothing like she expected—no resonance, only bewilderment.
[??]
[Did she sell her account?!]
[The buyer was such a fool!]
[Wait, hold on—this is actually a great anti-fake test. Would a real rich person need to sell their account?]
There were too many cases of people fleeing abroad with embezzled money, ending up broke, selling their wealth-flaunting accounts on the Chinese internet, and then leeching off the public.
Ever since [y_03] appeared, everyone had been digging into her identity.
But no one had ever uncovered much—only that her surname was Sang.
The blogger had been silent for so long that the public went from initial amazement to eventual forgetting, and she'd long since lost quite a few followers.
When people saw this account on their feed now, they needed a moment to remember who it was.
And now [y_03] was back, back for real—only to post a completely unrelated movie review. Wasn't that basically announcing the account had been sold?
Sang Yu replied: [? Sold what account? I wrote this review myself, hello.]
[Stop being stubborn. Do you have any idea how jarring this post is compared to the original owner's style? Just curious—how much did you pay for it?]
Sang Yu replied: [Zero yuan. Free acquisition.]
[What are you even playing at?]
Sang Yu gave up. She wasn't great at proving "I am me," so she let it go.
[A missing person returns?!?!]
[You actually went to see *Legend of the Golden Realm*? The Bilibili bloggers all roasted it as a massive stinker. Several screenings near me only had a handful of tickets sold.]
Sang Yu replied: [I wasn't paying attention. Only after watching it did I realize it was that bad.]
With nothing better to do, Sang Yu started chatting with the netizens.
She never used to do this.
Worried about slipping up or breaking character, she'd always stayed silent—she'd only lurk in the comment section after flaunting wealth, reading the envy in the top comments and secretly enjoying it.
She'd even opened a side account to "educate" fans about details they hadn't noticed, playing that insufferable rich-person act to the fullest.
Looking back on her past, Sang Yu felt a rare twinge of secondhand embarrassment.
This account was actually pretty big—even after followers unfollowed, with the mass of zombie followers, it still had over thirty million followers.
More and more curious people clicked into the review.
Without any of the jargon professional film bloggers used, written entirely from the heart, its light humor had people cracking up.
Everyone knew *Legend of the Golden Realm* was terrible, but only a minority would willingly eat shit.
If [y_03] hadn't braved the danger herself...
Ahem!
Although the swarming netizens were just there for the spectacle, a trending spot was practically guaranteed—and in the production company's eyes, this had to be a smear trending topic bought by a rival.
[y_03] definitely sold the account!
Paid negative reviewers are attacking!
Fans, charge!
The production company played a little trick: they only rallied the fandoms of the traffic-star leads to storm the trending topic and control the comments, leaving the veteran actors untouched.
First, because veteran actors had no fan armies; second, because traffic-star fandoms were easy to use.
—The celebrity playing "Little He" was named Huang Yunwen, a newly minted top traffic star who'd blown up to the front line two years ago thanks to a costume idol drama.
Just buy a few marketing accounts to whisper in their ears: "They're buying smear trends against him. Poor Yunwen-gege, the movie got set up by rivals!"
And the fandom would charge.
Even the rational ones in the fandom couldn't hold back the tide. In domestic entertainment, defending your idol/actor was instinct.
So [y_03]'s comment section got overrun.
But because too many people had shown up for the giveaway, even the top-traffic fandom struggled to control the comments, so the irrational fans shifted the battlefield to her private messages.
·
The next day.
Sang Yu thought her phone had crashed.
It turned out Weibo's backend was just lagging from too much data.
Her unread messages showed 990,000+—the display limit—while messages kept pouring in.
Sang Yu: "?"
Did she have that many active fans?
Oh, so she'd hit the trending list.
*Legend of the Golden Realm* was so bad that once [y_03]'s roast kicked things off and the situation blew up, countless netizens instantly joined the pile-on.
Because modern works really were awful.
Not just movies.
Films, TV dramas, animation, novels, comics, even music—all of it felt like pre-made meals churned out by AI.
Some weren't even as logical as AI.
Television was exactly the same as three years ago, unchanged—costume idol dramas ruled everything.
Close-up-only shots, PPT-style dialogue delivery, feeble fight scenes, cringe-inducing romance lines, chaotic plots.
Movies...
Misery, youth, melodrama, toilet humor, dumpling-making, happy family reunions.
At least the old scripts had acting; the new ones were even more cringe. They loved tossing in nonsensical dialect that yanked you out of the story in a second.
Animation...
Chinese animation was still stubbornly clinging to 3D.
The models got prettier, but expressions barely improved, and the plots were bad, making it feel like plastic dolls playing house.
Zero immersion.
Audiences had been eating shit all along.
Who on earth actually enjoyed incomprehensible big-director films? "Just watch a few more episodes and you'll get used to it" TV dramas, huh?!
Audiences had suffered long enough under capital, its ugly nepo babies, and their garbage scripts!
Sang Yu read several trending posts, took a spin through the comment sections, cackling with glee, and only then went to check her private messages.
The messages were a mixed bag.
The first thing Sang Yu saw was the hate.
—Maybe everyone had this flaw: at a glance, negative comments always stood out more than positive ones.
[How much did you get paid to write this hit piece? If the movie's bad, why'd you watch it? Are you a masochist? Must've felt great, huh?]
[Huang Yunwen's acting is obvious to everyone among the new generation. Are you blind?]
[Bought an account just to smear people—the company behind you must be funding you well. Throwing a giveaway, deliberately farming a trending topic, heh.]
[My gege's acting is bad? Why don't you get up there and act yourself?]
[So rich—why don't you invest and shoot a big-budget film then?]
[The plot's bad? If you're so capable, you do it. Write a script and let's see?]
Sang Yu: "?"
Huh?
She'd always thought the "you can't criticize a fridge unless you can refrigerate" thing was just a joke. People actually used this rhetoric now?
No, she couldn't do it, and she wasn't going to do it either—she wasn't part of the creative team.
The creative team worked together to produce a pile of crap—was she not allowed to say it was bad?
Those fallacious ones were actually the mild ones. The nastier comments replaced profanity with symbols, painful just to look at.
Sang Yu's inner celestial-dragon-person persona was getting hard to suppress—she wanted to find a lawyer and retaliate.
...Wait a second.
Sang Yu scrolled back up and found that "if you're so capable, you do it" line again. Suddenly she thought of... the most fitting form of "revenge."
She couldn't do it and wouldn't do it—but couldn't she find capable people to do it?
She could totally become an investor!
Bloggers all said good shows didn't sell, so bad money drove out good. But for Sang Yu... it didn't matter if the work didn't sell.
As long as she enjoyed it, that was enough.
As the sole investor, the script, the actors, the director—couldn't she pick whoever she wanted?
Since everyone bent the knee to the market, well, if the pay covered it, presumably recruiting people wouldn't be a problem.
When Sang Yu wasn't acting like a celestial dragon person, she was fairly human-shaped.
Her previous main quest had been [Be a good granddaughter / good daughter / good sister], but as time went on, she worried she couldn't keep it up.
This incident gave her inspiration, so she decided to assign herself a new main quest—*A Certain Domestic Entertainment Company Simulator*.
Step one: open a company.
Step two: start filming shows.
Step three: produce and consume it all herself.
Right.
Sang Yu opened Weibo again, this time making sure she was on the [y_03] account.
Then she posted screenshots of all that filthy language.
[y_03]: [censored screenshots] [I've got what it takes, so let me do it. I'm preparing to open an entertainment company in a few days. Paid name submissions start now.]
What a petty person.
