Transmedia Migration of Squid Game, from Netflix to Bilibili, by Chinese Fan Communities: A Digital Ethnographic Study

Abstract

Although fan cultures highlighting active audience engagement is prevalent in East Asia, the process and impact of such engagement have not been thoroughly explored in the literature. This study adopted a digital ethnographic approach to examine the fan-driven migration of the Korean television series Squid Game from Netflix to the Chinese online space, focusing on its spread on Bilibili. Despite the lack of access to Netflix, and thereby to the televised Squid Game series, under the country’s censorship policies, Chinese fans reutilized and repurposed elements from the series obtained from various social media and other platforms and released a significant number of fan-made videos on Bilibili. In doing so, they created new meanings and connections and facilitate the international cross-cultural spread of audiovisual artifacts. This study includes time as a factor to study audience engagement and uses the metaphor of ripples in a pool to describe the changing focus of altered audience engagement over time. Social media platforms are described as ecosystem life cycles that decompose and reuse uploaded audiovisual materials.

Keywords

• audience engagement
• Chinese fandom culture
• participatory culture
• Squid Game
• Netflix
• Bilibili