Poetic Prosumption and Disruptive Creativity: Social Media Uploaders and Influencers as the New Bandits, Pirates, and Guerrilla Winners

This chapter looks at fandom practices on Bilibili, a video-sharing social media site mediating anime, comics, games, and novels (ACGN). It uses an ethnographic approach to problematise the Western conceptualisations of creativity by looking at the ‘Shanzhai’ and cultural adaptation phenomenon of Chinese online vernacular cultures. It also shows how Chinese urban youth poach and transcode media texts through parody, piracy, and their own agentic ‘prosumption’. The chapter describes poetic and tactical prosumption that shapes Chinese youth’s negotiated identities and nurtures new socialites in the making. It aims to initiate a constructive conversation between Western and Eastern literature in a Chinese context and to understand the knowledge, attitude, and behavioural changes within networked communities on social media platforms.