Shift! The Side-Character Heroine

Xue Lu was an uprising female film director, famous among television programs, and much of her early career as a youth idol well-received. She specialized in feminine emotions and reactions. Actresses would be put through a specialized training programme that was of her design.

Being her debut in the film industry, Xue Lu was certain and confident that “Beautiful April” would be an impressive film. Otherwise, she would have rejected it in the first place.

Of course, she had to choose her team of actors and actresses wisely. If they did not possess flawless acting skills, they had to at least be famous enough to advertise the film by acting in it.

It was true that online streamers had some fame to their names, but did they really have any power over Box Office profits?

If Xue Lu wanted a vase to be her female protagonist, she could pick someone from one of those famous idol groups or some popular young lady.

She had already set the lead actor’s role in stone. It had to be the talented young actor, Liu Xingxing. Growing up as a child actor and graduating from a film academy, he had acted in numerous popular webseries. Audience and film directors alike had praised him as a prodigy!

However, he never had the chance to be a film protagonist. This was a first for him, so he would give his best as protagonist Gu Yuan, a person with a complicated past and refusal to conform to society’s norms.

Liu Xingxing was energetic. No audience had never been entertained by his comedy play. However, he wanted to be more than that. He had nailed it as an indecisive young scholar in “Shall I Compare You to a Spring’s Day.”

In “Beautiful April,” he did not have to be hated by the audience anymore. The Male protagonist had liked the female protagonist right from the start. His feelings towards Goddess Chu would be far more complicated. Perhaps they were the only two in the world who shared the same thoughts in music?

A few self-proclaimed art philosophers had taken the relationship between Chu Luoxun and Lin Meiyue into in-depth analysis. Everyone was aware of how Chu Luoxun had saved Gu Yuan from hellish conditions during critical ventures. Her love for Gu Yuan was unquestionable. Even so, Chu Luoxun had been absolutely helpful to Lin Meiyue. She had tried her best to fulfill Lin Meiyue’s wishes and had even entrusted all of her masterpieces to the other woman. Was this true love?

If Chu Luoxun and Lin Meiyue’s true friendship pours out from the novel into the movie, it would be a guaranteed hit. These “art philosophers” sounded more like the promoters of Yuri. [2]

Yuri was not exactly synonymous to same-sex relationships. It was way more than sex. Chu Luoxun had pampered Lin Meiyue in so many ways, how could Lin Meiyue not feel the same towards Chu Luoxun?

Lin Meiyue probably loved Gu Yuan more than Chu Luoxun. This had slowly built up her hatred and jealousy towards Chu Luoxun. Finally, she did the despicable, becoming the most possibly hated character at the end of the story.

But how could she be blamed? Han Leng had loved Chu Luoxun more than her. He had deliberately ruined his “flawless love story” project only to make readers love Chu Luoxun. In the process, he had unintentionally turned Lin Meiyue into something very much human…

Some readers sided with Lin Meiyue because her behavior had been absolutely logical. Chu Luoxun was a perfect, flawless unicorn that only existed in fantasy.

This entire movie weighed on the actors of these three characters. All of them required sophisticated expressions to bring these characters to life.

Xue Lu had also made up her mind for the female lead. Nie Zisu was a popular member of a large group named “abc48”.[3] Instead of being called “abc48, the group was also known as “Nie Zisu and her dancers,” due to her outstanding performance. People did not even know the names of the other group members.

Nie Zisu had not intentionally brought such “fame” to herself. It was her horrible behavior that brought her to the headlines. Since then, her haters have been urging her to quit the entertainment sector.

Her in-flight antics have been caught on tape and was still a hot topic for conversation.

She had been in the first class cabin, playing with her phone, and had refused to stop as the aeroplane was about the take-off. The Air stewardess had asked her politely to switch off her phone, only to get verbally butchered by the idol, claiming that terrorists would have used phone instead of explosives if a phone was so dangerous.

That was not all. She took out three mobile phones and walked to the economic class cabin, declaring that she has officially hijacked the plane with her phones. If anyone opposed her, she would turn off the aeroplane mode on all three phones!

There was an awkward silence as those words hung in the air. Some passengers almost immediately recognized her as Nie Zisu. She’s always making a joke out of herself!

The internet went wild!

“Nie Zisu started wrestling with passenger during a flight, all because she refused to shut her phone off.”

After that, came the birth of a new hashtag, #RampageofNieZisu. Some accounts had reports of her slamming her phones into the faces of others while threatening to bomb the plane!

Threads were formed…

“She did it again! What a hilarious girl!”

“I hereby am officially switching from a fan to a hater. Pretty face, bad attitude. What a shame!”

“She is to be Goddess Chu’s actress? Please do not let her ruin the image of a goddess. I might just tolerate having her as a side-character!”

“She should be banned from any form of entertainment, period!”

“These allegations are false! My friend claims that it was caused by a fat nerd who had asked for her signature on the flight. She had refused and slapped him across the face. Only then did she go on a rampage and threaten to bomb the plane!”

“Wow, now I’m jealous. Can goddess Su slap me too, please?”

“Wild Goddess Su fans have appeared in comments!”

“To be honest, Nie Zisu is a good actress. Everything she does is a hot topic. I think that she will be a superstar in the future!”

Translation Note:

[1] Shall I Compare You to a Spring Day(Chinese: 春风十里,不如你) is a 2017 Chinese television series based on the novel Beijing, Beijing by Feng Tang. Starring Zhang Yishan and Zhou Dongyu, the series is a coming-of-age story about young love and brotherhood among a group of youths, who lived during the revolutionary times of Beijing. It premiered on Youku on 21 July 2017 and airs one episode from Monday to Friday.

[2] Yuri (百合, “lily”), also known by the wasei-eigo construction Girls’ Love (ガールズラブ gāruzu rabu), is a Japanese jargon term for content and a genre involving lesbian relationships in a manga, anime, and related Japanese media. Yuri focuses on the sexual orientation or the romantic orientation aspects of the relationship, or both, the latter of which is sometimes called shōjo-ai by Western fandom

[3] ABC48 is similar to AKB48, (pronounced A.K.B. Forty-Eight). It is a Japanese idol girl group named after the Akihabara (Akiba for short) area in Tokyo, where the group’s theatre is located. The group includes over 130 members as of December 2015, aged from their early teens to their mid-20s. AKB48’s producer, Yasushi Akimoto, wanted to form a girl group with its own theatre (unlike pop groups performing occasional concerts and seen on television) and performing daily so fans could always see them live. This “idols you can meet” concept includes teams which can rotate performances and perform simultaneously at several events and “handshake” events, where fans can meet group members. Akimoto has expanded the AKB48 concept to several sister groups in China, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan and the Philippines with upcoming groups announced for India and Vietnam.