By Anivia Deng
The internet has always been the playground of many cultures. One is the ACG community (Animation, Comics, and Games), which emerged as digital entertainment developed. Members of the ACG community are different in the sense that they choose to use avatars to represent themselves. These avatars functioned like masks, representing a completely different side of their users' lives. I was a part of this community, where members believe that their reality and avatars are separate entities in separate dimensions of space.
I eventually chose to opt out after seeing how the community grew more popular and changed from a creative and respectful place to a chaotic and hateful one. The ACG community has gained incredible popularity in China over the past ten years and has changed from a small, niche culture to a part of the popular culture. Many middle and high schoolers flooded into the community space and quickly stirred up the atmosphere of the community with their creativity and immature teenage minds. Professionals, good or bad, also saw a chance to profit from this growing culture and join the chaos. To maintain ACG community order, members began to lift up the masks of those engaged in problematic behavior. Among those who were condemned was a man behind an avatar named Kaede. After he had shown problematic sexual tendencies, community members found out about his pedophilic reality.
Kaede is an avatar of a Chinese artist, and despite controversy, we still don’t know his real name. After completing his postgraduate studies in Japan, he decided to make a living as an artist and share his art on social media. Trained as a traditional painter, Kaede often borrowed techniques and compositions from paintings in the neo-romantic period. Kaede’s subjects often have childlike manga features, but when the viewer’s eyes fall upon the characters, they must suppress their eagerness to put their hand to the painting to feel the meat and bones. Smooth, silky, and shining garments appear on these characters, with decorations and breathtaking details. It is like their clothing can only be sewn by divine hands. In addition, Kaede is good at colors: vivid and intense colors fly in and out of his compositions, mincing the light of a heavenly palace and creating a dynamic and joyous feast of light and shadows.
Working in a Chinese context, Kaede understood what his audience liked to see and frequently used elements from modern interpretations of Christianity and Chinese traditional culture in his paintings. Kaede was also a man of incredible productivity. He could produce works at great speed that attracted the attention of his art-craving followers. Among these followers, there was me. At the time, I did not find this work to be problematic. However, as he got more visibility on social media through collaboration with Japanese Vocaloid Hatsune Miku and artist Yoshiki Okamura, some of the more knowledgeable followers felt uncomfortable looking at his work. Having a full understanding of how controversial his art could be, Kaede decided to hide behind his female avatar and repeatedly declared his non-sexual but artistic interest in teenagers’ bodies.
As this group of followers raised questions, I also grew suspicious of Kaede’s sexual attractions. The followers first questioned Kaede’s actual gender. Followers found his arms and hands displaying male characteristics during live streams, and when questioned about the gender of his avatar, they would often be blacklisted. Later, It turned out that Kaede, a cis man, was using a female avatar to distract his followers from his problematic sexual attraction to children and teenagers. For Kaede, somehow, being female makes pedophilia okay.
I was annoyed that Kaede used a stereotypical image of how he sees women to distract his fans, but what made me angrier was Kaede's exposed past. As I read about Kaede’s roommate during Kaede’s undergraduate years in China, I started to wonder how this man survived social judgment in the first place. Kaede’s roommate alleged that Kaede had been pedophilic since the beginning and publicly announced his problematic sexual attraction to his entire dorm. Yet, teachers or school officials never took this seriously.
Kaede was aware of his degrading reputation and released a disclaimer, saying he has only developed peaceful sexual relationships with females older than 20. Kaede also said he never claimed himself to be a female artist. Ultimately, he stopped posting for a year and a half. And every time Kaede is mentioned somewhere, he is labeled a pedophile.
Kaede is certainly experiencing backlash, but he has not been canceled. His artistic talent is still widely recognized within the ACG community. His Twitter account was shut down, but all his posts on other social media accounts remain visible. Recently, Kaede began posting from Germany and secretly announced his return after his exposure in 2023. No matter how he tries to move on from this, Kaede will forever be left in "eternal cringe."
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