One post tagged with "BilibiliWorld"

Authors / Soda & Hashichai

Edited by <The Reliable Editorial Desk>

How long has it been since you last stood in a public place and loudly, freely declared of the anime, manga, or game you love: "This is just so good"?

I know that in today's climate of "hard opposition" online, openly praising the work you love in front of others has become harder and harder. Sometimes, the moment you say something good about A, people assume you're disrespecting B, C, and D.

Gradually, many people have chosen to stay silent. They still love — they just love cautiously, afraid to speak up. At some point, expressing your passion started requiring a defense strategy first. But this summer, a lot of people tucked that "passion" in their hearts and brought it along with them to Shanghai.

From July 10 to 12, at the National Exhibition and Convention Center, Bilibili World 2026 gathered everyone's love for ACGN in one place.

Day one of BW opened under a typhoon warning, yet I was carrying another, stranger kind of wariness.

That wariness is a lingering side effect of browsing online communities. I'm sure many people are like me — used to the endless noise in comment sections, used to checking someone's "faction" before judging their take, used to running a statement through our heads several times before saying it: "If I say this, will I get screenshotted? If I say that, will I get called out?"

That habit became muscle memory, and I carried it into the BW venue. In front of every booth, I would instinctively do a quick "recon pass" — checking which exhibitors were neighboring which, worried someone might start a fight, on guard against potential "hostility."

But then, I saw this scene on the exhibition floor.

A Genshin Impact Sandrone coser walking side by side with a Wuthering Waves Aimisi coser. Out of respect for their privacy, I didn't take a photo, but you can picture the scene.

The two of them might well be friends in real life. They walked naturally, shoulder to shoulder, their outfits occasionally brushing against each other, each carrying free fan merch in hand to hand out to strangers who came up to interact. When passersby saw them, nobody was shocked, nobody compared whose character was more respectable, whose "won." They simply walked along, like any pair of good friends enjoying a fun convention together.

Of course, we all know that if this scene appeared in a video on the internet — especially with the names of those two games side by side — a comment war of several hundred floors would hardly be unusual.

I stood in place watching them for a long time, until they disappeared from view. In that moment I almost wanted to laugh — laughing at the wariness I'd carried in, which in a setting like this seemed entirely unnecessary.

We take certain sharp voices online far too seriously, and in doing so we forget the genuinely normal ways people get along with each other in real life.

"We need more BWs." That was the first thing I thought once I snapped out of it.

This was also the question I kept turning over during my three days at BW. Why are BW attendees so peaceful, friendly, and enthusiastically engaged? At BW, passion has truly found a way to prove itself.

On internet social media, love for ACG requires debate, requires winning. But at BW, your passion doesn't have to win — it just has to be there.

Another thing that moved me was a male player who, at first glance, seemed to "come with bad intentions." He queued for nearly two hours at the Virtual And You booth, barely spoke to anyone, and after the demo started, he kept jotting something down on his phone intermittently.

So after he finished the Virtual And You demo, as I watched him carefully tuck the merch into his bag and photograph the messages players had left on the interactive wall, I thought he was finally about to go live. After all, he was carrying freebies picked up from booths of all different games, his bags so stuffed they were about to burst — all "trophies" from his earnest participation in the interactions.

Then he opened his phone and suddenly, excitedly, told his friends and family: "Our VTuber community is just the best!"

And it wasn't just the VTuber community. At the Arknights: Endfield booth, countless people held up their phones, greeting the Chen Qianyu coser, hoping she would look at their camera. The Chen Qianyu coser kept playing along, greeting the audience in the most faithful recreation she could manage. Everyone on stage and off didn't know each other, yet in that moment they felt like old friends, expressing "I see you" and "I like you" in the most anime way possible.

Demoing games, buying merch, stamp collecting, cosplay, taking photos, grabbing freebies — online, these things are so routine they can even come off a bit "fandom-brained" or "cringe otaku." But here, they took the shape that passion needs: you show up, you come close, we connect — and that's enough.

At the Neverness to Everness booth, there really was a crimson itasha Porsche Spyder billed as "the world's first pain-wrapped" car. Azur Promilia set up an utterly girlish carousel. Goddess of Victory: NIKKE brought a Dorothy + Cinderella double-doro display. Honor of Kings: World had its flatbread bag, Imo its "no-emo" gag, Girls' Frontline 2: Exilium its tomato bag... The publishers crossed dimensions, carrying in-game memes into reality.

After all, when publishers play with memes online, there's too much to consider. But at BW, everyone simply hoped the publishers would spend real money to surround the venue with even more memes.

Passion has no borders and no hierarchy — that was my new realization at this year's BW. This BW had noticeably more international visitors, and nobody found it strange at all.

I used to think "internationalization" was just a publicity tactic for many conventions — how many overseas guests you invite, how many countries' tickets you sell, ultimately just numbers in a press release. But at BW, internationalism grew naturally. When the momentum of spreading passion is strong enough, language and nationality stop being barriers.

On the second morning of the convention, I happened upon a few visitors from Korea who, after getting out of a taxi, stood bewildered by the entrance signage. Quickly, a passing Chinese attendee, in slightly halting English, asked what kind of tickets they had, then helped contact a volunteer, and together they guided the international guests using the simplest numbers and gestures. Everyone spoke different native tongues, yet they smiled like old friends.

Not speaking Chinese is no problem — whenever someone runs into trouble, people will eagerly gesture and help. What's more, here, the love of the 2D world became a universal language.

This year's BW was also remarkably inclusive toward publishers.

As one of the large-scale conventions that more and more publishers prioritize every year, many spent heavily at BW — some specially-built booths cost seven figures to construct, for example Neverness to Everness spent a six-figure sum on the Porsche itasha alone.

You don't need to burn budget on massive decorative sets; spending on details can catch players' attention just as well: an interactive mini-game like the "Tajiduo whack-a-mole" that makes players chuckle knowingly, or the Endfield frog staring players down on-site, or the publisher inviting the coser their players know best and handing out game merch that players understand at a glance.

Going big and flashy has its prestige, but heartfelt small-and-beautiful touches get recognized by players too. On the BW floor, publishers could bolder-play their memes and greet players with open interaction, while players arrived ready to hunt for more easter eggs and clever touches. This is the most comfortable relationship between publishers and players, connected through their works — and it's how it should be.

When night fell, after BW came BML.

This year's BML may have been the most "explosive" one ever. Honkai: Star Rail, Azur Lane, Zenless Zone Zero, Wuthering Waves, Arknights, Arknights: Endfield, Genshin Impact (sorted alphabetically)... the music of these games was placed on the same stage, presented to the audience in the form of a concert.

No need to explain how these names relate to each other online — put any two or three of them side by side and players will argue for three days and three nights. But on the night of BML, as the melodies of these games rang out one after another, some people cried, some sang along, some waved glow sticks and cheered for every song whether or not it belonged to their beloved game — and nobody argued.

I even saw some solo-stan fans who at first only waved their glow sticks for their own favorite game, but as the show hit its stride, they couldn't help cheering wholeheartedly for every single track, even joining the other players in shouting "!(Game name) is amazing!"

When this parallel-universe moment came to its end, everyone together gave the bold and meticulous organizers that heartfelt cry: "Bilibili, cheers!"

It reminded me of the original purpose of BW and BML: to gather the good things of ACGN in one place — not so fans could fight over who's better, but so more people could see, hear, and feel them.

When everyone gathers together and good content gets seen by more people — that is the relationship these games were always meant to have.

As the show let out, I received a text message from the organizers: "We hope the audience can carry this memory forward." I sincerely hope the hope of the BML command center comes true.

On the way out, the staff waved and thanked everyone as they said goodbye. Some walked slowly, heads down, flipping through their photo albums, smiling to themselves at one particular shot, then scrolling on. Some carried comically huge bags, bulging with the treasures traded for over a full day — proof that they had been there. The bags were almost absurdly large, but the people carrying them wore satisfied faces.

I shuffled out with the crowd, and thinking back on the whole day, the withdrawal symptoms hit earlier and harder.

Perhaps back online, outside BML's offline spacetime, the people who like to argue will keep arguing. But at least for those two days of BML, the passions that usually stay silent got to be expressed openly and proudly.

They stood before the games they love. No debates, no defenses — just love.

Many people say that by its ninth year, BW has evolved toward something more commercial and more seasoned. Others say it increasingly resembles that once-most-famous game convention in the country.

No one can hold back the passage of time, and no one can stop the mainstreaming of the 2D world.

As a veteran otaku, it's hard not to feel nostalgic for the old convention stories. The withdrawal feeling after my first convention as a teenager, the FFF Inquisition, the free graffiti walls, begging for photos on Tieba, free-roam days — those unique memories of an older generation of otaku are mine too. After attending all three days, exhausted, I sat in a coffee shop in the Silverbiz district, chatting with fellow media colleagues about which event to rush to next, while gazing out at the radiant, energetic crowd passing by — and was carried back to the excitement and nervousness of my first convention seventeen years ago.

The typhoon's aftermath still hung over Shanghai. A gust of wind blew past, and I was pulled back into the present.

Every generation has its own marks of the 2D world. Perhaps veteran convention-goers looking at BW2026 will feel that the proportions behind the three letters A-C-G are no longer balanced, that the things they once loved are no longer so common today. The tide is impossible to hold back — but at least in this moment, we can still gather together. Leave the complicated questions to the organizers at Bilibili. As "Let the Wind Tell You" sings:

"If you cling to the years and can't bear to move on, I'll quietly record this poem; if you tire of gravity and long to fly, I'll send the winds of the whole world your way."

As long as this love can carry on, many people, like me, will sincerely hope there can be more BW and more BML — a little more, and then a little more still.