<em>Tielian</em> in Mixed Realism: Real Person Fan Fiction and Collective Memory in Contemporary Chinese Fandom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates the question of authenticity in Chinese real-person fan fiction (RPF), a fan-fiction subgenre centered on real-world celebrities. Through the lens of tielian (“getting close to the face”) and mixed realism, the study examines how Chinese RPF authors craft recognizable representations of celebrity characters that resonate with fan readers. Focusing on the RPF work Light Rail Does Not Reach the Eighteenth Floor on the fostering idol, the case illustrates how real-world events are transformed into compelling depictions of the past that weave fragments of realities into a coherent narrative. In this context, tielian serves both as a measure of authenticity and as a means of expanding readers’ consumption of celebrities’ media-generated realities. Since collective memory plays a crucial role in the fostering-idol fandom, subjective interpretations often contest each other in the agreement of tielian. This tension highlights the dynamic negotiation of authenticity within RPF communities. By framing tielian as a form of processual and affective truth making, the article positions RPF as a site of literary innovation that reconfigures realism, authorship, and authenticity in participatory digital culture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".