Huayu 2021: Isn’t he in the technology field?

Chapter 103 The Casting Controversy Begins, Mai Mai's Curiosity

The next day was the weekend.

While many people were still sleeping in, at 10:03 a.m., Weibo entertainment blogger "Insider Scout" suddenly dropped a bombshell.

"Tencent Pictures is offering leading roles in A-level projects as an olive branch to strengthen cooperation with its strategic partners."

The accompanying image is a blurry WeChat chat record that mentions the CEO of a certain technology company will be joining as the male lead in a new drama co-produced by Daylight Entertainment and Tencent Video.

The comments section quickly deciphered that this project was "The Beginning," and the tech upstart mentioned in the chat logs was speculated to be Jiang Qing.

Upon hearing the news, fans of the original work immediately flooded the super topic and began writing crazy literature.

"Xiao Heyun is a game architect, not a tech genius!"

From the perspective of fans of the original novel, Jiang Qing's acting career is just a hobby, and he is unlikely to play the role well. How can they sit still?
At 10:35, the hashtag "#BeginningActingChangeIssues" suddenly appeared on Weibo's trending topics list.

An anonymous forum post is circulating wildly in various gossip groups, titled: "On the eve of the start of filming for Daylight Entertainment's new drama, the male lead Bai Jingting has been replaced by Jiang Qing, a rising star in the tech industry who has recently gained a lot of attention."

At 10:40, the top ten trending topics on Weibo were instantly dominated by "Tencent's strong promotion will inevitably backfire" and "Academia invading the entertainment industry".

Some netizens created a parody video by combining the scene of Jiang Qing tightening a wrench in "Sihai" with Tencent's investment portfolio this year. The video, titled "Wrench Prying Up the Entertainment Industry," garnered over a million views in ten minutes.

At 11:15, Bai Jingting's fans posted a nine-grid comparison image.

On the left is Bai Jingting's handwritten formula for deducing the movement path in the locked room in "Who's the Murderer," and on the right is a photo of Jiang Qing giving a speech at the International Artificial Intelligence Summit, captioned "Has the dimensional barrier between actors and scientists been broken?"

The topic "Border Crossing" quickly rose to the seventeenth spot on the trending searches, with the top comment being a sharp and critical critique.

"Should we cast Einstein as Sheldon next time?"

The comment section of Daylight Entertainment's official Weibo account was instantly flooded with comments from Bai Jingting's fans.

The top three most popular comments were "Give me back my innocent character," "Capital's excessive promotion deserves a divine retribution," and "Can't we just let AI geniuses focus on scientific research?"

Fans basically knew that Bai Jingting had landed the male lead role in "The Beginning," and all that was left was an official announcement. But then, something unexpected happened just before the announcement, which was bound to cause a stir.
However, Jiang Qing's super topic has a completely different style.

After the initial shock, the fans were quickly filled with joy and spread the news everywhere, creating a lively and exciting scene.

"I woke up to a wonderful surprise! Jiang Shen is going to put on a play?!"

"The rumors are so detailed and believable, they must be true!"

"Although it feels a bit like he's not doing his job properly, it's such a waste that Jiang Shen's face isn't used for acting!"

"Let's wait and see, and wait for an official announcement before making any decisions."

"I wonder how good Jiang Shen's acting is. Logically speaking, a genius should be good at everything, right? And I felt that his cameo role as Xiu Ta Ge in that leaked scene was pretty good."

"Who cares? It's a boon for fans anyway, so let's just look forward to it!"

"I see Bai Jingting's fans are really excited. Shouldn't we fight back?"

"After all, the news hasn't been confirmed yet, should we wait a little longer?"

"Wait my ass! I took a look, and the insults were too awful. I'm going to charge at them!"

"Wait for my sisters, we're going together!"

……

Soon, many hot-tempered fans began to fight back.

At 12:15, Bai Jingting's anti-blacklisting website posted 58 accounts that were abusing Jiang Qing. Clicking on them revealed that they were all newly registered users with photos of Jiang Qing as "Brother Xiuta" from the drama.

The two fan groups engaged in a back-and-forth battle over the topic of "Jingting Mountain has collapsed." Jiang Qing's fans mocked Bai Jingting's fans as "unpopular people playing the victim," while Bai Jingting's fans retaliated by calling Jiang Qing's fans "capital sycophants." The live chat was refreshed with nearly 300 mutually insulting comments every minute.

At 1 p.m., behind-the-scenes footage of Jiang Qing's cameo appearance in "Si Hai" was suddenly unearthed.

In the video, director Han Han holds a walkie-talkie and smiles wryly: "President Jiang insisted on doing it himself, and the insurance company almost tore up the contract."

This video, which was previously ridiculed, is now filled with sneers in the comments section.

"It's just a hobby for rich people. If they fail, they can always go back to being a boss. Besides, it's just a cameo role."

"I can't relate to rich people!"

"Acting requires realism, right? And people actually praise that? Ha..."

Amidst the commotion, at 2 PM, the official Weibo accounts of the TV series "The Beginning," Daylight Entertainment, and Tencent Video simultaneously updated their posts, attracting a large number of netizens to quickly watch.

#TheBeginningOfTheTVSeries# Looking forward to Xiao Heyun, welcome newcomer actress Jiang Qing

@JiangQing: #OfficialAnnouncementOfFilmingStart#
A crane soars into the clear sky, parting the clouds.

drop--

Passenger Xiao Heyun has boarded the bus!

#TheBeginningofTVSeries#
The official Weibo account of the TV series "The Beginning" has officially announced that Jiang Qing will be the male lead!
"A bus mystery: how to escape from the jaws of death? An endless loop, the truth finally emerges. Looking forward to newcomer actor @JiangQing, looking forward to Xiao Heyun!"

"Looking forward to Jiang Qing! Looking forward to Xiao Yunhe!"

"Looking forward to Jiang Shen! Looking forward to Xiao Yunhe!"

"Looking forward to Dr. Jiang! Looking forward to Xiao Yunhe!"

……

Once the announcement was made, Jiang Qing's massive fan base could no longer hold back and quickly swarmed out to take over the comment section and control the narrative, displaying a level of intensity comparable to that of a top-tier male actor.

At this moment, with Jiang Qing's fans fully mobilized, Bai Jingting's fans were no match for them and were quickly overwhelmed and disappeared without a trace.

With this, the casting controversy has finally come to an end.

Elsewhere, the arguments continue.

Sharp questions have appeared on Zhihu's trending list.

Is having tech company founders play programmers a modern-day version of the Emperor's New Clothes?

A highly-rated answer posted a photo of Jiang Qing giving a speech at an international summit: "He doesn't even wear a plaid shirt; he's dressed in a suit and tie like he's going to acquire a game company."

Opponents immediately dug up a screenshot from the third chapter of the original novel, in which Xiao Heyun "unbuttoned two shirt buttons" while deriving a formula in a loop, which was strikingly similar to Jiang Qing's look at a product launch event.

A screenshot of a riddle posted on WeChat Moments by an executive of a film and television company reads: "Should casting now be based on financial strength or role suitability?"

The accompanying image is a screenshot of the line "Earn money standing up" from the movie "Let the Bullets Fly," and the image spread throughout various film crew groups within just a few tens of minutes.

Under the top-ranked question on Zhihu's hot list, an anonymous user asked: "[The Beginning] is positioned as a sci-fi infinite flow story. Is Jiang Qing a truly deserving choice for the best male lead?" The comments were divided into two camps.

Science and engineering students cheered, "Finally, we don't have to watch pseudo-scientific plots anymore," while film and television professionals lamented, "The capital-driven cult of personality has begun."

On Zhihu's trending topic "How to evaluate a tech genius playing a high-IQ role", a PhD student from MIT posted Jiang Qing's paper on "the neural mechanism of time perception" and concluded that "at least he won't pronounce quantum mechanics lines as alchemy". This conclusion received nearly 6,000 likes in two hours.

Opponents responded by sharing screenshots of comments from the movie "The Theory of Everything": "Even Hawking himself couldn't play himself; professional matters should be left to professionals."

The "Breaking the Dimensional Barrier" challenge has taken over the trending list on Douyin.

In the most-liked video, a boy pushed up his glasses and asked shyly, "Is the threshold for becoming a fan now having published an SCI paper?"

The top-ranked video on Douyin's trending list was taken from a candid subway perspective.

The programmer-looking guy held the novel "The Beginning" in his hand, comparing it with a screenshot of Jiang Qing's TED talk on his phone, and muttered to himself: "If Xiao Heyun looked like this, Li Shiqing would be willing to loop it twenty times."

The video garnered nearly 50,000 comments, with some joking that "the ceiling of intellectual homosexuality has come to life," while others mocked that "this is a hopeless case of late-stage admiration for the strong."

The third spot on the trending list was also quite eye-catching, with two film students having a heated debate inside the café.

"He doesn't need acting skills at all."

A girl wearing black-rimmed glasses is tapping on a tablet.

“The moment he stands there, he is Xiao Heyun himself.”

The boy opposite me pulled out his drama school textbooks.

"Performance is creation, not reproduction! This kind of casting is like asking Mo Yan to personally play the donkey in 'Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out'!"

A content creator on Bilibili's film and television section produced a comparison video.

In a submission titled "When 2D Characters Get Real Voice Actors," the face of Xiao Heyun, synthesized by AI, was replaced with a photo of Jiang Qing, instantly triggering a barrage of comments like "Dimensional fusion complete."

When the camera cuts to the original description of "pale from staying up all night coding," the scene precisely freezes on a photo of Jiang Qing working at her desk in the lab during her university years. Amidst the screen full of jokes about "the director using his supernatural powers to cast the role," a few comments like "this is too unfair" are mixed in.

At 4 PM, a prominent figure in the tech industry published a lengthy article titled "Beware of the Entertainment Trap for Tech Elites."

The article compares the casting of this "beginning" to "Einstein making a cameo appearance in a Chaplin film," accusing capital of creating "rationalism worship."

Because it was written by someone working in the tech industry, the long post immediately sparked heated discussions among netizens.

"I don't think there's anything wrong with crossing over into other fields. After all, every industry is doing it these days. Speaking of which, Guo Fan, who directed 'The Wandering Earth,' was a law student, and Jiaozi, the director of 'Ne Zha,' was originally a medical student. Looking at it this way, aren't the three major universities a bit awkward?"

"Just wait and see. It's not that tech geniuses can act well, nor that capital can necessarily produce good actors. I'm specifically calling out a certain Tian."

"I really think it's a waste of Jiang Shen's talent to cross over into acting. It's too disgraceful for such a brilliant AI genius to become an actor."

"We ordinary people probably can't understand the thought process of a genius. Maybe they're just playing around with it on a whim."

"Whether it's talent or money, there have been too many examples to prove that a small success depends on promotion, while a big success depends on fate. There are many people in the entertainment industry with wealthier backgrounds than this Dr. Jiang, but I haven't seen many of them become famous."

"I'm quite looking forward to seeing how Dr. Jiang will portray the character. I'll definitely watch the show no matter what."

"Ha... having money means you can do whatever you want, you can just snatch a role that someone else has already been cast in."

"Fans of the person upstairs, don't be so sour. Don't make a fuss about things that haven't been officially announced. It's just making us look foolish."

"I'd like to see what kind of joke he'll pull off..."

Soon, the comments section went off-topic again, turning into a battleground between fans.

Meanwhile, at four o'clock in the afternoon, at the Central Academy of Drama.

"The top scorer in the Anhui Province college entrance examination rejected Tsinghua University and Peking University, and joined the Cognitive Lab at the University of Science and Technology of China as soon as he enrolled. He has published in almost all top scientific journals..."

On the track of the new campus of the Central Academy of Drama, Zhao Jinmai was looking at Jiang Qing's information on her phone. The more she looked, the more her expression changed. Her eyes twitched from time to time, and she felt her steps become heavier.

"This is a true academic genius!"

She couldn't help but sigh.

The girl has a striking, bold face with thick eyebrows, big eyes, and a high nose bridge. However, her droopy eyes and upturned corners of her mouth add to her sweetness. Dressed in a black tracksuit with a high ponytail and a few wisps of hair falling over her forehead, she exudes youthful energy at first glance.

Ever since she learned this morning that Jiang Qing had replaced Bai Jingting as the male lead in "The Beginning," she had been in a daze until just now when she remembered to learn more about the male lead she was about to work with.

Although I knew something about this "Jiang Shen" before, I only clicked on the trending topics out of curiosity and glanced at them, since we weren't in the same circle.

All I remember is that he was a very capable person, and quite handsome.

Hmm... something like that.

I didn't think much of it when I heard he had a cameo in the movie "The Four Seas" a few days ago. After all, it's not unusual for successful people to make cameo appearances in movies and TV shows.

But now he's suddenly become the male lead she'll be acting with, so she definitely needs to get to know him better to avoid an awkward meeting.

You wouldn't believe it until you look closely; it's absolutely outrageous!
She even wondered if this person was a carbon-based life form.

Moreover, Dr. Jiang seems to have revealed his culinary skills and athletic talent when he participated in variety shows, and his singing voice, which he happened to show in the latest episode, also seems quite good.

No... I'm still undecided about her singing voice.

After all, his teammates... well, it's hard to say.

"The pressure is immense!"

After checking, the girl breathed a sigh of relief.

After wandering aimlessly along the track for a while, Zhao Jinmai suddenly remembered something.

This Dr. Jiang seems to have an ambiguous relationship with Zhou Ye from the Beijing Film Academy, and his relationship with Chen Duling is also questionable. Apparently, he even visited her on set yesterday...

Although there are many rumors and speculations in the entertainment industry, and it's not easy to make hasty judgments, she still intends to be careful and pay attention to the appropriate boundaries when interacting with others in the future.

However, I am inexplicably looking forward to meeting Dr. Jiang.

Zhao Jinmai decided to watch the latest episodes of Peach Blossom Village tonight so she'd have something to talk about next time they met.

You can also learn about his personality along the way.

Thinking of this, she immediately turned around and headed back towards the dormitory.

Meanwhile, Jiang Qing had already arrived in Hengdian.

(End of this chapter)