Confidence and Introspection: A Cultural Discourse Analysis of Fantasy Themes in the Comments Section of 'Black Myth: Wukong' on Weibo

Abstract

The explosive popularity of the topic ‘Black Myth: Wukong’ masks a deep-level discourse game and confrontation between contemporary Chinese players' cultural confidence and high demands, mirroring the self-cultural identity and its evolution of Chinese players as China's soft power rises from standing up to becoming stronger. Taking the comment texts on the Weibo topic of ‘Black Myth: Wukong’ as the research object, and using text mining technology, this study explores the emotional attitudes, cognition, and concerns of Chinese players towards the ‘Black Myth: Wukong’ topic based on cultural discourse research theory and fantasy theme analysis. It summarizes the deep-seated reasons behind the cultural confidence and introspection of Chinese players in the wake of the ‘Black Myth: Wukong’ craze. The study finds that the overall sentiment of Chinese players towards ‘Black Myth: Wukong’ is strongly positive, with a small number of comments showing a negative tendency. The rhetoric in the comment section forms four fantasy types: cultural export supporters, quality-oriented neutrals, game critics, and cultural depth pridesters, which together weave two major rhetorical perspectives: ‘Supporters of Chinese Culture Going Global’ and ‘Critics of Chinese Cultural Products.’ The differences between these two rhetorical perspectives and their communities reflect the ‘cultural confidence’ and ‘cultural nihilism’ of contemporary Chinese players, constructing ‘legitimate identity recognition’ and ‘resistant identity recognition’ respectively. Although these two have generally achieved a balance, there is still a need to be vigilant against the potential risks brought by ‘cultural nihilism.’