2 posts tagged with "offline event"

“Compared with cost-effectiveness or practicality, young people care more about pleasing themselves in collaboration events to satisfy their spiritual needs.”

In the past two years, “collaboration” events have become a favorite of many ACG fans.

From milk tea and coffee for eating and drinking, to digital stationery for studying, to clothing, shoes, and bags for wearing, to transportation cards for travel… Collaborations cover every aspect of ACG fans' daily life, from high-end digital products costing thousands to free electronic merch. Their variety is increasingly rich, presenting a dazzling array of options. The companies participating in collaborations have also expanded beyond traditional ACG and food/retail industries, with the cross-circle effect growing stronger.

Collaboration events have also become more normalized, extending from holidays, anniversaries, and character birthdays to everyday collaborations. Young people are surrounded by collaborations almost 365 days a year. It is reported that in 2025 alone, there were over ten thousand collaboration events, averaging dozens per day.

From the demand side, young ACG fans are increasingly inclined to participate in offline collaboration events when going out with friends. They are willing to spend time, energy, and money to create beautiful memories with friends or with the characters they love.

During these events, many young people share their collaboration strategies or experiences on social platforms, giving them unique meaning: perhaps a milestone commemoration of years of following a series, a reward for hard work in study or career, or aesthetic satisfaction from customizing collaboration souvenirs…

What exactly are young people seeking when they chase collaborations? When the “collaboration craze” becomes a widespread cultural phenomenon, can we catch a glimpse of the spiritual world of young ACG fans?

01 Why Are Young People So Fond of Collaboration Events?​

Many may not understand: why are today's young people so keen on chasing collaborations?

The simplest reason is: Because they love 2D characters, they want to “own” them in the real world!

Apart from creating and watching works, the easiest way to connect with virtual anime characters is to get their merchandise. Compared to ordinary merch, collaborations have unique appeal.

As the saying goes: Everything can be collaborated. In today's era of abundant material life, everyday items not only serve their functional purposes but can also become props for users to express their individuality.

When familiar IPs and characters appear in practical forms around you, stepping out of the cold screen into daily life, the sense of companionship is greatly enhanced, allowing fans to experience novelty and satisfaction.

Collaborative products usually combine practicality and spiritual value, satisfying both basic consumption and IP consumption in one go. For example, when faced with a mouse, given the choice between an ordinary, slightly cheaper mouse with no special attributes and a uniquely designed collaboration mouse featuring a favorite character, and possibly a limited edition, most ACG fans will choose the latter as long as the price premium is not excessive.

Some collaborations are not physical objects but transform an entire space into scenes from the anime. Compared to passively receiving audio-visual information, offline experiences offer multidimensional, immersive two-way interaction. When fans walk in, they feel like they have broken the dimensional wall and entered the world of their favorite character.

Alternatively, some scenes in the work are themselves based on the cultural elements of a real place, or even have explicit design prototypes. Fans travel thousands of miles, crossing the gap between dimensions, to finally check in at the actual location, sharing the same space with their beloved character, finding intersections with their favorite character in reality, and feeling the traces of their life.

This new form of tourism is called “sacred site pilgrimage” (anime pilgrimage). It provides both the joy of pure travel and the feeling of spiritually closing the distance to the beloved character.

This form of tourism has long existed in Japan, such as Ghibli Park in Nagoya, the hometown of the author of Natsume's Book of Friends (Hitoyoshi), and the Tokyo locations of Makoto Shinkai's famous film Your Name.. Some new anime even partner with scenic spots to promote tourism right from the start of broadcasting.

As more domestic anime with strong local characteristics become popular and with the planning and collaboration of enterprises, domestic “sacred site pilgrimage” tourism is also developing rapidly. For example, Longhu Mountain Scenic Area has collaborated with two major domestic IPs, Under One Person and Sword Coming, attracting many viewers to visit.

Gift economy is also an important part of collaborations. As the saying goes, “Each generation has its own eggs to collect.” The various peripheral gifts of ACG collaborations are the eggs this generation wants. Collaboration paper bags, fridge magnets, badges—paired with milk tea, snacks, trendy toys that young people are already accustomed to buying—since they are buying anyway, it's better to have a collaboration gift than none. “Why not take it?”

Usually, collaboration events are time-limited; once the window closes, it's gone.

This sense of urgency gives collaboration products an extra function compared to regular merch: They carry a memory, recording the irreproducible and unique connection made with the loved work at this time and place.

Offline collaboration events not only provide a space for audiences to interact with anime works but also become physical spaces for communication and interaction among like-minded fans.

Contemporary young people are increasingly trapped in atomization—loneliness, lack of communication, social anxiety. Many turn online for connection, but screen-based interaction cannot fully replace face-to-face communication.

Pop-up events, markets, sacred site pilgrimages, and other offline collaboration events provide lonely young people with an opportunity to connect with others, to gain a sense of belonging in group activities, and to satisfy social needs.

This is not simply about willingly spending money—not all collaborations require real cash; some only need check-ins, content creation, or sweepstakes to participate.

Its greater charm lies in the fact that enthusiasts can actively “approach” the virtual world they love, projecting and releasing their passion, anchoring a point in their lives.

In this process, young ACG fans invest (energy/time/social interaction/money) and receive souvenirs or returns of certain value, gaining positive spiritual feedback. Compared to cost-effectiveness or practicality, young people care more about pleasing themselves in collaboration events to satisfy their spiritual needs.

02 Are Collaboration Events Already Evolving to the Next Level?​

According to incomplete statistics, in the past summer alone, there were over 300 IP pop-up events nationwide, showing continuous growth.

From a temporal perspective, summer is the peak period for collaborations, while other months also maintain active collaboration activity. Collaborations have shifted from occasional commercial events to gradually integrating into people's daily lives.

In terms of form, collaborations cover online + offline, digital + physical. From character skins to input methods, from limited pop-ups to theme concerts, ACG collaborations exhibit diversity in categories and gradient differences in scale.

Rich events expand the forms of ACG IP implementation. Multiple industries and chains are connected, and more and more non-traditional ACG enterprises are participating, playing important roles in transforming abstract cultural symbols into concrete, tangible cultural products or activities.

For example, Painting World of Bad People (Hua Jiang Hu Zhi Bu Liang Ren), an original domestic anime IP that has been around for twelve years, has accumulated a loyal fanbase. In recent years, its rights holder began exploring large-scale offline collaboration events, successfully holding a ten-year anniversary concert in Luoyang, a themed check-in event at Wuhan Polar Ocean Resort, and recently planning a themed street with Xingzhou Ancient City, making traditional cultural tourism a new form of IP expression.

The Huabei × Sword Coming collaboration is particularly innovative—its self-produced variety show Sword Coming: Intangible Heritage Sword Forging invited eight anime viewers to go to Longquan, Lishui, Zhejiang—the real-world prototype of the “Pearl Cave Heaven” in the anime—to experience real sword forging.

“Sword” is an important motif in the anime, Longquan sword forging is a thousand-year-old Chinese intangible cultural heritage, and variety shows are a media format beloved by contemporary youth. This collaboration not only brings content from the anime into reality but also responds to young people's inquiries about their own cultural roots and identity.

Regarding IP sources, the anime IPs initiating collaborations show a wide distribution across both time and geography. In terms of time, older anime like Hikaru no Go, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, The Legend of Nezha remain enduringly popular, while newer series like Delicious in Dungeon, Link Click have risen. Audiences differ yet overlap.

Geographically, besides classic Japanese anime IPs, domestic anime collaborations have seen significant growth. For example, the rights holder of the original anime The Legend of Hei (Luo Xiao Hei Zhan Ji), Hanmu Chunhua, according to public data, still achieved a net profit of over 4 million yuan in the first half of 2026 without any sequel airing, proving its stable profitability.

In August, the Under One Person anime ten-year anniversary “Yiren Festival” drove a substantial increase in mall revenue, with nearly 70,000 visitors on the first day—double the usual—and achieving millions in peripheral sales in the first weekend.

Shanghai Film Animation Yuan (Shangying Yuan), which holds IPs such as Havoc in Heaven, Calabash Brothers, and Lang Lang Shan Xiao Yao Guai, also shows strong momentum, with its first-half profit doubling year-on-year to the 30 million level.

With the development of the domestic animation industry, domestic animation has gradually built a stable young audience. Compared to imported products, domestic animation, born on local soil, better aligns with the spiritual needs of Chinese youth. The distress of being misunderstood or unseen, confusion about the future, and the thirst for answers are all projected onto the anime they watch daily.

Young viewers hope the protagonist will become their “mouthpiece,” seeking resonance from the protagonist, and with a similar mindset, fulfilling ideals that are hard to achieve in reality.

At the same time, the fun memes in domestic anime that only make sense in a Chinese cultural context, and the plots that are both close to reality and slightly above it, can help relieve some of the bitterness in young people's lives. Collaboration designs are no exception. Collaboration merchandise drawn from local culture better understands the psychological demands of Chinese youth—seeking good luck, seeking sudden wealth, hoping for CP sugar, and wishing for blind box pulls of their favorite character.

Guided by the pragmatic spirit of “Left eye twitch is fortune; right eye twitch is superstition,” ACG fans approach collaboration merch with the attitude of “Sincerity works wonders.” This youthful mentality and youthful collaboration design resonate perfectly, giving rise to many interesting collaboration events and products today.

The broad prospects of collaboration events have also attracted some businesses to blindly enter the market, mass-producing similar collaborations that only achieve superficial buzz, with actual per-event revenue declining rather than increasing, drawing criticism from fans and being detrimental to sustainable IP operation.

Meeting spiritual needs should not be equated with consumption. Only planners who truly understand young people's spiritual needs and deeply comprehend the core of the IP can produce excellent collaboration events that extend the charm of the original work into the real world. Taking Huabei × Sword Coming × Longhu Mountain's “gold sticker free entry pilgrimage” as an example, a successful collaboration should delve into the cultural core of the anime IP, find the connection point that resonates spiritually with young people, and ultimately realize a triple-win event for the IP side, the audience side, and the enterprise side.

Its greatest significance lies not in the direct revenue it generates, but in providing a reference sample for domestic anime collaborations, showing that there are many more possibilities for collaboration events.

Currently, the “collaboration craze” is still in full swing, and the development of domestic animation IP is still in an exploratory phase. We look forward to more diverse collaborations and hope that collaborations become high-quality and mature.

Who didn't daydream in childhood that the Tridagger could really climb walls, that the Cyclone Magnum could really tornado, and that the Beat Magnum could really pull a big〇 out of its bumper and absolutely wreck other cars' paint jobs?

This long-dead mini-4WD dream was, this year, inexplicably brought back to life by a single uploader.

Mini-4WD cars have gone completely viral this year.

Yet what made them famous wasn't some internet celebrity influencer, but a landscape designer who "snuck in some personal agenda."

He is an uploader on Bilibili, going by the name “Ordinary Guy Talks Design”. The videos he used to post were all explanations of various infrastructure or functional building design projects — subway green spaces, horticultural expo landscapes, park rock cutting...

But none of those were his proudest work. His true “masterpiece” was an “easter egg” he secretly buried into a park project in Beijing back in 2022.

To bring this “easter egg” to life, he sweet-talked and bamboozled the client and the site supervisor, all just to sneak that fiery childhood memory into the drawings and ultimately turn it into reality.

In fact, at the very beginning, he had no such idea.

The client asked for a park landscape with a “Chinese classical style” theme, and he had been diligently fulfilling that requirement... until one day, when he saw the drainage channel of the rain garden and suddenly it reminded him of the mini-4WD tracks of his childhood:

The fiery passion of childhood memories surged up in an instant. That inspiration and nostalgia made him want to build a mini-4WD track into the project.

He thought about it day and night, tossing and turning, until he finally decided to leave a little trick in the design drawings — on what was originally a vast, empty lawn, he added a symbolic decorative landscape and named it “Ruyi” (the jade scepter).

On the design drawings, this “Ruyi” drew no attention. In reality, however, it transformed into two bona fide mini-4WD tracks.

He was dead serious about the tracks. The two tracks were divided into single-lane and double-lane versions; and to prevent the double-lane track from having unequal lengths due to curvature variations, he specifically modified the starting points to be one long and one short, following the equal-distance principle, to ensure the total length was the same.

Even the width and side-wall heights strictly followed the official mini-4WD dimensions, and the material used was sturdy steel plate.

And so was born the most special “easter egg” of Beijing's Wenyu River Park:

Secretly cooking up two mini-4WD tracks was no easy feat. Big projects like this are all decided by aging executives who don't understand these novel gadgets — almost every step along the way could have been killed.

Why the client let the designer mess around, nobody knows — even the designer himself said “there was some luck involved.” Many netizens speculated that the client actually knew all along, but they also wanted to play mini-4WD after work, so they tacitly allowed it.

In any case, once this mini-4WD track officially went into operation, it quickly attracted China's first batch of new-energy vehicle owners — except they weren't driving Teslas or NIOs; they were middle-aged toy fans clutching mini-4WD cars, calling themselves “mini-4WD dads.”

Countless mini-4WD-loving toy fans were willing to drive for hours just to experience that fiery feeling from the childhood anime — the sight of a boy running side by side with his mini-4WD car.

Time flew by. Through four cycles of snow and thaw, the “Ruyi Track” of Wenyu River Park still stands safely on the lawn, and it even went through one track upgrade, being cherished like a treasure by staff and toy fans alike.

Today, this place has become the Jerusalem of Chinese mini-4WD fans; countless dads are even more eager than their kids, crying and begging to take them there for a visit.

Because it got so popular, a mature service ecosystem spontaneously formed around it.

When you play mini-4WD outside, your car inevitably wears down from friction and collisions. So here, one-stop repair services are provided: chassis parts, motor repair, roller and nose-cone optimization... Even if your car is smashed to pieces, you can buy a new one on the spot as a substitute.

Hardly any kids here are playing on phones — what's a phone compared to the thrill of mini-4WD? I truly envy today's mini-4WD kids: ten-thousand-RPM motors, new-energy batteries, full aluminum alloy chassis, stainless steel frames... backed by the solid logistics of their mini-4WD dads, plus Mom's encouragement and wallet power — they have all the gear they could want, and all the little ones have to do is bring their dad's dream onto the track.

The everyday stories on the Ruyi Track, spread through social media, have in recent years made netizens all over the country green with envy.

This year, more and more parks have begun leveraging online exposure — through “online calls for customization ideas,” “weekend themed competitions,” and the like — attempting to upgrade mini-4WD from a toy into a social vehicle. Some parks have even built their own mini-4WD tracks, such as the 17mu campground in Wuhan and the Jiabei Country Park in Shanghai.

These parks built mini-4WD tracks not just to ride the hype — many details took players' suggestions into account, and each has developed its own operational character.

Some cities have also begun responding to suggestions to “add mini-4WD tracks to city parks,” actively promoting this new type of outdoor activity.

Why did mini-4WD in parks become so popular? There are many reasons.

For one, this is childhood nostalgia for the post-80s and post-90s generations. When many people were kids, they had to save up three months of pocket money just to buy an Auldey mini-4WD car, yet never got a chance to run on a real track — at best they could only scurry around the streets, ending up battered and bruised. The arrival of park tracks not only solved the venue problem, but also gave the “big kids” who can finally afford to pay for their hobby a chance to make up for a childhood regret.

For another, as a parent-child activity, mini-4WD really doesn't cost much to get into. Compared with camping trips that easily run into four digits, a few dozen to a couple hundred yuan gets you hours of exhilarating fun in the park — incredible value for money. Plus, mini-4WD as a toy has a low barrier to entry but a high ceiling — easy to pick up, yet worth deep study and continued investment, with a remarkably high replay value.

Of course, the most important point is that building a mini-4WD track is also a good deal for the park. The construction cost isn't high, but the publicity effect and tourism value it can bring to the park and even the whole city is considerable. The operators' cost-effectiveness is just as strong.

However, even the best model needs a starting point. Come to think of it, without that initial wave of genuine market buzz to prove the concept, almost no one would have thought of adding such a facility to a park.

And the starting point of it all came purely from love — the purely accidental plant of one designer, and a two-way courtship between a park and its players. It was a chance occurrence, yet it awakened the revival and transformation of a whole era's culture.

Park mini-4WD shelters hurried urbanites under a patch of green shade, allowing everyone to temporarily get away from the clutter of worldly affairs and work, and briefly return to childhood.

We're always wondering what way of living is more valuable, more meaningful — but a lot of things are actually quite simple. Playing mini-4WD in the park, in itself, says more than any statistics could about a society's spiritual world growing ever richer.

At the end of the day, allowing everything to happen is the most sophisticated way to live.