What Is “Yun Behavior”? Ontology and Internal Heterogeneity

The Rags Drum 2020 annual results list this essay as qualifying in both the Eve Festival and After Festival.

0. Introduction

Over the past two or three years, Chinese online communities have increasingly used the prefix 云 (yún, literally “cloud”) in expressions such as 云观众 (yun guanzhong, “yun viewer”) and 云玩家 (yun wanjia, “yun player”). In this translation, the Chinese prefix is romanized as yun rather than translated as “cloud,” since the established English term “cloud gamer” refers to someone who plays through a cloud-gaming service. These expressions generally arise in discussions of anime, comics, and games. The “yun viewers” of an anime, for example, are usually people who have never watched it—or never watched it in full—yet offer their own opinions, views, or insights about it. Sometimes, however, the construction “yun X” does not require an explicitly stated opinion. “Yun JoJo fan,” for instance, can describe people who know next to nothing about JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure itself but eagerly repeat its memes or proclaim their love for it.

Such people and phenomena are hardly unfamiliar in other settings. They have left entertaining traces across societies and cultures. Many of our parents’ generation, for example, were “yun poets” during China’s poetry fever of the 1980s—at least, many spirited young men were when they tried to court a partner by writing verse. In the West, if the very publication of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read tells us anything, “yun readers” are certainly not rare. Among humanities graduate students around the world, some measure of “yun research” may even be the norm. Who has really finished every one of the hundreds of references listed at the end of a dissertation? These expressions plainly point to a class of behavior. Only because an agent performs the corresponding “yun behavior” do we call that person a “yun X.” If we want to analyze the concept behind such expressions and discuss the questions they raise, yun behavior itself is the better place to begin. That concept will organize the argument of this essay.

What, then, counts as yun behavior? My answer has two parts. First, most current reflection seems to stop at giving examples. A better answer would be ontological: it would explain the set of essential conditions in virtue of which yun behavior is what it is. I offer a detailed ontological analysis of those conditions and seek enough clarity to support deeper discussion. Second, it is worth asking what we seek to accomplish when we use the vocabulary of yun behavior. Starting from those pragmatic aims, I analyze the latent pattern of inference behind them and show that it is inconsistent across real situations. Beneath a unified ontological framework, the concept of yun behavior thus displays an internal heterogeneity in practice. That heterogeneity reveals a significant ambiguity in how we use “yun behavior” and related expressions.¹

I. An Ontology of “Yun Behavior”

When examining an expression popular in online communities, nothing presents it better than a visual example. In our age, memes are often the clearest markers of pragmatic value. The “yun-player triple combo” below shows how the concept is ordinarily used. Examples give us an initial grasp of a concept, but they cannot by themselves reveal the corresponding reality it represents, still less why that reality is what it is. Beginning from a range of cases, this section therefore develops a general framework: the necessary and sufficient conditions for any behavior to count as yun behavior.

The “yun-player triple combo” meme

1.1 A State of Absent Participation

Whether we speak of “yun viewers” of anime or “yun players,” the first crucial feature is the state of not having actually participated in the relevant activity. A yun viewer has not actually watched—or fully watched—the anime in question; a yun player has not actually played—or fully played—the game in question. This absence of participation need not be public. In many situations, whether a subject has really taken part in an activity is a matter of inference rather than established fact.

1.2 Quasi-commentness

Second, we do not use “yun X” for ordinary people who have not participated because they simply do not care about an anime or game. Yun behavior must therefore exhibit some personal investment by its agent: bluntly passing judgment, as in the meme above; pretending to have watched an anime and then offering an opinion; or creating ambiguity through nonverbal acts—snapping a disc, reposting something on Weibo or Twitter, displaying a purchase—while deliberately signaling approval or dislike. To varying degrees, all these acts function as commentary on a work: the work at which the yun behavior’s comment-like content is directed, and which serves as the object of the relevant activity. Not every yun behavior is literally a comment, but every instance performs at least some comment-like function. This gives us the second crucial feature: yun behavior must display at least a quasi-commentness toward the work it concerns.

1.3 The Community as Public Context

Third, the first two conditions readily yield another: a public context is necessary for the typical attribution of yun behavior.² Yun behavior differs from a secondhand opinion. It ordinarily occurs in public and requires a subject other than the agent to apply the description “yun X” to that agent; only then does the agent’s conduct become yun behavior in the full sense. Suppose I have never watched Glasslip but have heard about its reputation. One day, alone, I see its title and mutter, “This show is garbage.” No one hears me. Under those conditions, the utterance would not normally count as yun behavior; at most, it is an opinion adopted secondhand. But if I make the same statement in a QQ group where everyone else has watched Glasslip and regards it as a masterpiece, I may well be deemed a yun viewer.

There are, of course, further complications. Not just any public context can sustain the attribution. Imagine that I shout “Glasslip is garbage” in a university classroom. Everyone else in my class is a normie whose knowledge of anime begins and ends with Hayao Miyazaki. I, by contrast, know anime extremely well but am an ill-tempered, ostracized, gloomy fat otaku. My classmates might contradict me out of spite, unanimously proclaim the show a masterpiece, and accuse me of being a “yun viewer.” It is unlikely that my statement would thereby become yun behavior. This thought experiment shows that a public environment capable of supporting the attribution must include people who possess some degree of standing to apply “yun X” to an agent.

That does not mean “having watched Glasslip” is the only standing required. Actual participation in the relevant activity is, in fact, neither sufficient nor necessary for the standing to apply “yun X.” Consider an extreme case. Three people who have never watched Glasslip begin discussing it and agree that it is garbage. I join them and, unaware of their prior opinion but strongly confident in the animation studio P.A.WORKS, declare that Glasslip is excellent. The other three immediately accuse me of being a “yun viewer.” I really have not watched it, and their assessment accords with the prevailing view across major anime-review communities. My conduct is plainly yun behavior.

Now consider the roughly inverse case. I have not watched Glasslip and call it excellent. The other three have watched it and regard it as garbage. Yet I am a “veteran otaku” with more than twenty-two years of anime viewing behind me and considerable influence on several social platforms, while they are “newbies” who began watching anime only this year. The following outcome is entirely plausible: so long as I do not reveal that I have never watched Glasslip, my experience and influence keep the other three from accusing me of being a “yun viewer.” They may instead begin to doubt their own aesthetic judgment.³

A universal standard is plainly difficult to identify; the content of the relevant standing is more likely plural. I will therefore use qualified member simply to denote a subject with the requisite standing in a given context, leaving open what characteristics qualified members must possess and how to identify them. We can then describe the public context required to attribute yun behavior as a community composed of qualified members.

1.4 Violating Basic Beliefs

Fourth, we must examine the actual process of attribution. Suppose I comment on an anime in an anime-elitist forum. Even if I have not really watched it, I am unlikely to be treated as a “yun viewer” so long as what I say does not conflict with certain basic beliefs held by the community. A basic belief here is not the same as the community’s prevailing opinion of the work. In many cases, it is a belief about a fact. If I say, “Miuna Shiodome, the heroine of Glasslip, is a successfully realized character,” I am likely to be considered a yun viewer; if I say, “Glasslip is the greatest masterpiece under heaven,” I am more likely to be considered a troll. Of course, a substantial epistemological literature has shown that beliefs about facts and inferential beliefs expressing opinions are not so cleanly divided. In some cases, inferential beliefs are likewise basic, and an agent who violates them can also be deemed a “yun X.” If “yun viewers” generally accept an inferential belief $p$ , for example, the community of qualified members may treat $\neg p$ as basic, so that any act affirming $p$ counts as yun behavior. It is therefore difficult to draw a boundary around basic belief. We can only offer a functional description: basic beliefs are those whose violation leads the community to regard an agent as not having participated in the behavior’s relevant activity.

1.5 The Relevance Rule

One problem remains: how can we describe more clearly the relation between yun behavior, the activity associated with it, and the work toward which it is directed? Solving this problem will help extend the conceptual analysis of yun behavior to more general categories. The first crucial feature identified above is a state in which the agent has not participated in some activity. But what is this activity in which the agent “ought” to have participated? More precisely, for any behavior that exhibits quasi-commentness, how do we determine its relevant activity in general terms? When analyzing its comment-like character, I briefly said that the relevant activity involves the work at which the yun behavior’s comment-like content is directed. That is not precise enough for an ontological analysis. Now that the meaning of public context is clear, we can give a constructive account based on a community of qualified members. For a given behavior $x$ , a community of qualified members $C$ , an activity $A$ , and the work $W_A$ involved in that activity, $A$ is the relevant activity of $x$ if and only if the following condition obtains:

$(\mathrm{RR})$ : $x$ performs a comment-like function concerning $W_A$ , and $C$ collectively accepts participation in $A$ as a necessary condition for performing $x$ .

I call this condition the Relevance Rule ( $\mathrm{RR}$ ). It describes the activity associated, in any context, with a behavior possessing at least quasi-commentness. We can again use Glasslip to clarify the relation. Suppose I say, “Glasslip is a masterpiece.” My utterance is commentary on the work Glasslip. There also exists a forum whose community consists of seasoned, independently minded anime elitists. The community collectively accepts that actually participating in the activity “watching the anime Glasslip” is a necessary condition for saying “Glasslip is a masterpiece.” The relevant activity of my utterance is thereby fixed.

Determining the relation between behavior and activity through $\mathrm{RR}$ is not redundant. Its purpose is to cover as many contextual variations as possible. We should not assume that the relevant activity of $x$ can invariably be summarized as “watching, appreciating, or playing the work,” because an activity $A$ and the work $W_A$ involved in it do not stand in a one-to-one relation. Consider a case from January 2019. The well-known actor Chen Kun reposted a Weibo item about the theatrical film Fate/stay night [Heaven’s Feel] (HF) and recommended it. Unaware of some older stories about Chen, a netizen saw the repost and wrote on Baidu Tieba: “Is this guy just shilling? Is he a yun viewer?” Many replies would likely rebut the attribution by citing Chen’s Weibo recommendation of Fate/Zero (FZ) several years earlier. Reposting and recommending HF has a comment-like function concerning the HF film, yet in this case the relevant activity need not be “watching HF.” The earlier act of “recommending FZ” can be sufficient. Such examples are common in reality. When the comment-like conduct of a public figure enters a niche culture, the relation between behavior and activity becomes looser and more casual, making us correspondingly more cautious about applying the “yun X” label to that figure.

In a more specialized, hardcore fan context, by contrast, a behavior’s relevant activity may be stricter and more complex, especially when the work belongs to a series. On a dedicated Tieba or forum, commenting on the 2006 anime adaptation of Fate/stay night may require not only watching that anime but playing the original game, and perhaps knowing other works in the same franchise. Within highly specialized communities, a merely superficial acquaintance with a work may itself invite the charge of being a “yun viewer.” RR therefore uses a form of group construction to describe the relation between behavior and activity across different contexts.⁴

1.6 Conclusion

The preceding analysis sketches the outline of yun behavior and allows the following ontological account. For any agent $P$ and any behavior $P(x)$ performed by that agent, $P(x)$ counts as yun behavior if and only if:

$(1)$ $P(x)$ occurs within a community $C$ composed of qualified members;

$(2)$ $P(x)$ displays at least quasi-commentness toward a work $W_A$ ;

$(3)$ within community $C$ there exists some version of $\mathrm{RR}$ that, on the basis of condition $(2)$ , determines the relevant activity $A$ of $P(x)$ ;

$(4)$ $P$ has not participated in the relevant activity $A$ of $P(x)$ ; and

$(5)$ $P(x)$ violates a basic belief $J$ collectively accepted by community $C$ .

These conditions do more than draw a practical boundary between “yun viewers” and others. Like most social objects shaped through speech acts, yun behavior and its derivative concepts are identified in practice through changing pragmatic conventions. The conditions offered here are better understood as the metaphysical ground of yun behavior: they ask what its metaphysical essence is in the most general sense. As we can see, that essence is not nearly so self-evident as the opening meme suggests. Ontological analysis must cover as many cases as possible, which is why this somewhat complicated set of conditions is needed.

II. Heterogeneity in Pragmatic Aims

Another way to answer “What is yun behavior?” is to ask what speakers seek to achieve with such vocabulary. When someone is called a “yun X,” what is the speaker really claiming? The intuitive answer is disparagement, since expressions such as “yun viewer,” “yun player,” and “yun fan” are all pejorative. But what is the object of that disparagement?

In the overwhelming majority of cases, calling someone a “yun X” targets not a particular subject as such, but that subject’s behavior. Within a community of seasoned anime fans, it is my speech act—“Miuna Shiodome, the heroine of Glasslip, is a successfully realized character”—rather than me as some “bottom-tier anime pleb,” that gets me labeled a “yun viewer.” Anyone else who says much the same thing is likely to receive the same label. The pragmatic aim of attributing yun behavior is therefore clear: at least within a given context, it demands that certain acts performed by a subject deemed a “yun X” be treated as unreasonable. Since every yun behavior possesses at least some quasi-commentness, we can be more precise: treating certain conduct as yun behavior serves to revoke its legitimacy as commentary.

Some derivative uses of “yun X” also comment indirectly on the work itself. We sometimes encounter statements such as “Only yun players like this game” or “Most people who talk about this game all day are yun players.” Their substantive function is not to describe a state of affairs—the speaker usually does not care whether the description is accurate—but to express a negative judgment of the work involved. A yun player is someone who has performed yun behavior concerning a game, and yun behavior lacks legitimacy as commentary; therefore a yun player’s liking for a game is itself illegitimate. If a game is one that “only yun players like,” the statement implies, at least logically, that there exists no legitimate commentary expressing love for it. The game must consequently be “garbage,” unworthy of affection for any qualified commenter. Whether speakers directly classify conduct as yun behavior or use “yun X” to evaluate a work indirectly, their pragmatic aim is metacommentarial: as commentary, yun behavior should be treated as unreasonable, even beneath consideration.

Behind this pragmatic aim lies a highly intuitive pattern of inference. I call it the inference from firsthand experience to qualification for commenting, or E2C. It agrees to a considerable extent with common sense: an evaluation must be grounded in actual experience of the thing evaluated. “No investigation, no right to speak”; “What books impart remains shallow in the end; to understand this matter fully, one must act.” E2C also has obvious connections with traditional themes in epistemology. At minimum, it implies that experience is indispensable to the acquisition and justification of knowledge. This essay need not settle those vexing philosophical disputes, but within the ontological analysis above, E2C plainly turns on whether condition (4) is satisfied. Yun behavior should be stripped of legitimacy as commentary because its agent did not actually participate in the relevant activity—did not really experience the work being discussed. Conversely, E2C can operate as a diagnostic tool. Participation in the relevant activity does not guarantee that a comment-like act is legitimate, but absent participation is enough to revoke its legitimacy altogether.

In many actual attributions of yun behavior, however, E2C does not operate consistently as a diagnostic tool. The very presence of condition (5) in the ontological framework above implies the possibility of counterexamples. It permits a case in which an agent has never watched the anime or played the game, yet the agent’s comment-like act is not treated as yun behavior because it agrees with certain basic beliefs taken for granted by the community. In other words, if the comment-like content expressed by an act is commonplace enough, its legitimacy as commentary will not be revoked, whether or not the agent participated in the relevant activity.

The “copypasta” phenomenon in Chinese online communities illustrates this situation well. Whenever a work becomes a topic of discussion, early comment-like formulations are repeated en masse across subsequent threads, whether the assessment is positive or negative. Recent positive examples often concern Nintendo’s first-party games. From The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to the then-popular Animal Crossing: New Horizons, discussion of every Nintendo title that breaks into the mainstream attracts a tide of bandwagon praise, much of it from people who have never played the game—marketing accounts chasing trends are an especially obvious case. Several years earlier, the spread of hostility after the closed-beta controversy surrounding Girls’ Frontline offered a negative example. Many people who never experienced that beta cited it as grounds for condemning the game, while a wildly disproportionate number even claimed to be “veterans of the third beta.” Both cases share one feature: within the context where their comment-like content is expressed, people who never participated in the relevant activity are still very unlikely to be treated as engaging in yun behavior. If, on March 25, 2020, I wrote “Anyone who doesn’t buy Animal Crossing is out of the group” beneath a video about the game, or told someone on Tieba in August 2016 that “the MICA Team third-beta fiasco disgusted me,” my behavior would be so ordinary and unremarkable, so perfectly unopposed to the community’s basic beliefs, that it would not count as yun behavior.

How should we understand these counterexamples to E2C? If we are unwilling to abandon E2C wholesale—and we should not lightly discard common sense—they reveal the internal heterogeneity of the concept of yun behavior. That heterogeneity arises because, in applying expressions such as “yun X,” we tacitly commit ourselves to two versions of E2C with different strengths. Strong E2C treats firsthand experience as a necessary condition of legitimate commentary: only after a subject has actually watched the anime or played the game can the subject’s conduct be legitimate commentary, or the subject be qualified to make it. This is the version challenged by our counterexamples, and what the inferential pattern demands in principle.

A weaker version is also common in practice. Weak E2C admits that “firsthand experience” is transmissible. An agent may invoke another subject’s experience—even experience relayed through several intermediaries—as the necessary ground of legitimate commentary. So long as the other subject is known to have participated in the relevant activity, the agent performing the comment-like act automatically acquires the qualification to comment legitimately. This transmission plainly requires further restrictions. The person whose experience is invoked must have some degree of reliability within the relevant community, and not every kind of comment-like content can satisfy the necessary condition for legitimacy through transmitted experience. The decisive restriction is the one indicated by condition (5): when an agent has not participated in the relevant activity, transmissible experience can support only ordinary and unremarkable comment-like content. Any content that exceeds the community’s basic beliefs may prompt further demands for accountability. If the agent cannot show actual participation in the relevant activity, the conduct will naturally be treated as yun behavior. This “comment-like content must be commonplace” restriction also explains why weak E2C does not conflict with the original ontological framework. The content permitted by weak E2C fails condition (5); even when it satisfies condition (4), the conduct is not yun behavior.

The strong and weak versions of E2C introduce an unavoidable heterogeneity into the concept. When we call some conduct yun behavior, what exactly are we saying? Under strong E2C, we are inclined to say that its agent did not actually participate in the relevant activity, so the conduct is illegitimate as commentary. Under weak E2C, we are more inclined to say that (i) the agent has not cited a reliable experience, (ii) the cited experience cannot support the corresponding comment-like content, or (iii) the comment-like content violates the community’s basic beliefs while the agent cannot establish actual participation in the relevant activity. Corresponding to the strength of E2C, I will call the former strong yun behavior and the latter weak yun behavior. They are plainly not equivalent. The concept of yun behavior frequently manifests this heterogeneity in actual use.

Finally, consider a possible objection. It might hold that weak yun behavior is an invention: merely a deceptive practice enabled by negligence. If we always asked the agent behind every comment-like act whether they had participated in the relevant activity, only strong yun behavior could remain. The objection imagines a situation possible only in principle. Even if I left the comment “Anyone who doesn’t buy Animal Crossing is out of the group” below an Animal Crossing video on March 25, a conscientious inspector would examine every trace of conduct across my entire life and then label me a “yun player” on discovering that I had never actually played it.

This objection overlooks the crucial feature of yun behavior as a social kind: its social construction. To say that only one form of yun behavior would exist under ideal conditions is like saying that under ideal conditions money would not function as a universal equivalent. In a tiny setting with complete information and very few kinds of goods, money truly would not be needed as a universal equivalent. Social kinds such as yun behavior and their instances are, of course, “invented”; the source of that invention is the social reality in which they exist. The fact that people routinely neglect to verify participation is itself part of that reality. The entire point of investigating a social kind is to examine the traits it exhibits across real situations. The reality of yun behavior is that, in many contexts, we quite commonly attribute its weak form to other people.

III. Conclusion: Toward the Possibilities and Limits of Yun Behavior

The internal heterogeneity of yun behavior does not signal an ontological contradiction. It poses an epistemological challenge to a metacommentarial position. In Chinese online communities today, labels such as “yun viewer” and “yun player” are almost automatically considered pejorative, and the corresponding yun behavior is dismissed just as automatically. Its internal heterogeneity demands greater precision. If “yun viewer” simply means “someone who has not watched the anime but holds forth about it,” then most people have been a “yun X” at some point in their lives. If yun behavior means “commentary offered without having watched the anime,” then in practice we reject it far less consistently than we imagine. We not only accept yun behavior; we even use it as the premise for further inferences.

The crucial point is to recognize the difference between the two versions when we habitually condemn yun behavior. Weak yun behavior may indeed deserve rejection across the board. To condemn strong yun behavior without distinction, however, is to ignore its possibilities as commentary. Humanity has accumulated an ocean of anime, comics, and games over the past several decades; what any one person can experience is only the tip of an iceberg. Yet in some situations, that does not prevent us from commenting beyond our own experience. Although I have played neither Muv-Luv Alternative nor NEKOPARA Vol. 1, their Bangumi ratings give me reasonable grounds for believing that the former is the better visual novel. This possibility is not boundless. In discussing the transmission of experience, I offered several rough, unanalyzed restrictions; they do not yet establish the limits of yun behavior as commentary. Doing so would require additional theoretical resources, including all manner of “vexing” philosophical debates over knowledge by acquaintance, group agency, and epistemic externalism. Those resources may help us attain a kind of clarity that improves commentary itself.

Supplementary Notes

Clarification of concepts. Yun behavior is this essay’s central concept. Strictly speaking, “yun behavior” denotes a class of behaviors. We can therefore say only that some act by a person is yun behavior, or that the act belongs to the type “yun behavior.” In the main text, however, I use formulations such as “attributing yun behavior to an agent.” More precisely, I should say “attributing the property of yun-behavior-ness to an agent’s behavior.” I avoided emphasizing the distinction for ease of exposition, but a stricter analysis must distinguish yun behavior from yun-behavior-ness.

“Yun X” is a general term for concrete uses such as “yun player” and “yun viewer.” For the purposes of the argument, the usage of “yun X” in the main text reflects the following definition: any agent $S$ is a yun X if and only if $S$ performs a behavior $x$ and $x$ is yun behavior; alternatively, any agent $S$ is a yun X if and only if $S$ performs a behavior $x$ and $x$ possesses yun-behavior-ness. The two definitions are equivalent within this essay, but they are not interchangeable in every setting. The former seems to involve a greater degree of social construction, while the latter emphasizes that the property of yun-behavior-ness constitutes the metaphysical ground of the fact that “ $x$ is yun behavior.”
More recently, “yun X” has also become a harmless means of self-mockery. Many people, for example, candidly say they “yun-cleared” a game after watching someone else finish it. Such self-deprecating usage ordinarily contains no comment-like opinion and is therefore unrelated to the yun behavior discussed here. To respect actual pragmatic convention, I emphasized the “typical attribution” of yun behavior in this section, indicating that the essay does not address this atypical self-mocking usage.
For any comment-like behavior $x$ , there exist some potentially relevant activities $a_1$ , $a_2$ , $a_3$ , …, $a_n$ . These potentially relevant activities meet the following condition: for any activity $a_x$ , if there is a possible context in which $a_x$ is a relevant activity, then $a_x$ is potentially relevant.

Let $S$ be the set containing all potentially relevant activities as elements. Then $S = \{a_1, a_2, a_3, \dots, a_n\}$ . Let $A_1$ be the set of activities relevant to $x$ in context $C_1$ , and $A_2$ the set of activities relevant to $x$ in context $C_2$ . If $A_1$ and $A_2$ differ with respect to context, then $A_1 \subsetneq S$ and $A_2 \subsetneq S$ , but $A_1 \neq A_2$ .