Did that title seem shocking, like it was made to grab your attention? Well, yes—it was about something that had just happened!
Back when we sold better than traditional literature and made more money than they did, traditional writers jumped out to say that what we wrote was trash. Now that our works had been adapted into TV dramas and crushed those screenwriters in the ratings, those screenwriters started striking back too. Well, we had stolen their rice bowls, after all. It was inevitable.
According to this screenwriter whose name I had heard for the first time, the ideas in online literature were all trash. Every month, when his company gathered screenwriters for meetings, they had high-quality stories.
Fine then. So I looked up this unknown screenwriter, Wang Hailin. What a high-quality story—Let's Go Watch Meteor Shower!
What lofty quality. What lofty creativity.
People who made TV dramas as shitty as that did not reflect on their own screenwriting abilities; they only knew how to open fire on us.
Naturally, there was an element of hyping himself up. A fourth-rate screenwriter whose name nobody had known suddenly began attracting attention. I had originally been too lazy to bother with him. Who knew how many fourth-rate screenwriters like him there were in the entertainment industry? Who cared about him?
But one sentence of his pissed me off. It would have been one thing if he said online literature was trash—traditional literary circles had always said that. I had seen plenty of people like that, who did not know how to improve themselves and only knew how to curse others. But he said that readers of online literature were all idiots. That, I could not tolerate.
In our line of work, to put it bluntly, readers were the ones who fed us.