Recently, while browsing Bilibili, I accidentally discovered an old Hong Kong film I had never seen before, called "Love Across Time and Space." Released in 1998, the title suggests a time-travel pure romance, but it is actually an extremely outrageous parody film collecting elements of fantasy, time travel, gangs, gunfights, crime, and nonsense. It's wildly cut. It can seriously spread rumors about Liu Bei and Zhang Fei having homosexual tendencies, while also giving you a wave of loyal Guan Yu. The overall creation has the flavor of Stephen Chow's "A Chinese Odyssey" series, crashing into my comfort zone like a semi-trailer, making me curious why I hadn't seen it before. "Just Another Pandora's Box" is simply a poor imitation of this film.
Throwing grenades in the Three Kingdoms period, asking if you're dead yet.
It makes one lament that although we often mock the internet as a cesspool, when it comes to its core job of information retrieval, vast databases and网民 memory banks do help uncover hidden gems. In fact, with the overwhelming number of movies, series, and animations available today, the trend towards shorter and faster social media is indeed accelerating information discovery and dissemination. Through short videos, people often discover interesting works they've never seen before. From this perspective, it's good—although you simultaneously have to endure the bombardment of "Da Zhuang Xiao Mei" style 5-minute recap edits.
At the same time, dissemination on video platforms can easily give neglected older works a second spring due to various factors. Just like "Let the Bullets Fly," which we often say deserves UNESCO heritage status, Jiang Wen probably didn't know back then that he would create so many "internet bibles."
Recently, there was a similar example on TikTok, where an anime work titled "Raikou of Dragons" was dug out from historical archives by many Western otaku, becoming one of the core topics of discussion among anime enthusiasts within just a few days.
According to reports, "Raikou of Dragons" is an anime adapted from the work of Japanese manga artist Haruka Hinata, produced by Studio Kosei. It first aired in May 2003 and was remade in June 2020. The story is set in a fantasy medieval background where the world was once ruled by dragons. However, as fortunes change, after the dragons were overthrown, human forces began to discriminate against and oppress dragon kinds. The protagonist, Sumiko Kuronami, is a half-dragon girl who has experienced many hardships due to her dragon bloodline. Therefore, she has been searching for the treasure "Other Eye" to allow her to become a pure human.
During her journey, she encountered Raikou and others, joining the dragon-hunting team led by Raikou and meeting companions like Mizuki Kuroshi and Ayano Kuronami.
Mizuki Kuroshi
Overall, "Raikou of Dragons" tells a more mature-style fantasy adventure story. The disasters brought by dragons made racial conflict the sharpest contradiction in this world. Many members of the protagonist group have dragon bloodlines, leading to different childhood traumas. These issues inevitably cause the character relationships and plot to slide towards a "dark, deep, and cruel" direction.
The main antagonist in the story, Gwenllian Scarrow, hunts dragons generation after generation because her ancestors were eaten by them.
The more mature storyline development led to much discussion among viewers regarding the plot of "Raikou of Dragons," such as the relationship between Sumiko and Mizuki in the protagonist group. These discussions, reviews, and video clips flooded TikTok during this period, with many netizens creating extensive fan works. Some called it the greatest anime they had ever seen and recommended it to different netizens as a more mature version of "Delicious in Dungeon" or "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End."
At this point, things basically follow a normal internet development story—a popular work appears every now and then, whether new or old, following this process.
But strangely, although the settings of the protagonist group, the story background, and plot developments were described convincingly by these netizens, you cannot find the complete full episodes of this anime on the internet, only scattered fragments with vastly different styles.
But no one knows what happened in episode seven.
And astute readers should have noticed something wrong from the images I posted—the characters in the protagonist group do not look like they come from the same art style at all.
As the anime "Raikou of Dragons" gradually became a hit on TikTok, many Western netizens genuinely began to desire watching it. Unable to find it, they turned to social media for help, asking where they could watch "Raikou of Dragons"—because no matter how they searched, they could only find content related to "Raikou" from the "Pokémon" series.
Ultimately, the closest he got to a truthful answer was—
"Sorry."
In fact, "Raikou of Dragons," the work that recently went viral on TikTok, is a completely fictional non-existent entity from start to finish.
It originated from a "netizen co-creation plan" proposed by a TikTok user named ianburp in a video posted on July 16, 2025. The initial purpose of this plan was that ianburp felt there were too many "fake otaku" online—people who hadn't watched much anime but liked to show off during normal discussions. Thus, he decided to fabricate a fake anime work and develop it into a community hotspot to use as bait for trolling.
Within just a few days, ianburp's concept received widespread response—it seems that hating tone-deaf "fake otaku" is a universally shared sentiment. In the initial plan, ianburp only provided the title "Raikou of Dragons" and the protagonist's name, Sumiko Kuronami, without many settings. However, in subsequent developments, numerous netizens truly fleshed out the various details of this fictional work bit by bit.
They added background stories, increased numerous story details, chose team adventure themes common in Japanese anime, and carefully designed unique personalities for each member of the protagonist group.
Incidentally, during this process, they inevitably incorporated many currently popular elements, such as setting the protagonist Sumiko as bisexual and the key character Mizuki as transgender. Whether these LGBT elements, which netizens currently "love to see," further promoted the work's spread is unknown, but they did add a few flaws to this fictional old anime.
Interestingly, recent internet discussions about AI tools have increasingly entered the realm of practical application, with many netizens becoming quite familiar with these tools. This seems to be gradually unveiling the curtain on the next era of the internet. If there are corresponding textbooks on internet development history in the future, the prevalence of "Raikou of Dragons" on TikTok will undoubtedly serve as a major "application problem" under the AI topic.
Thanks to the maturity and prevalence of current AI tools, "Raikou of Dragons," which originally had only scattered images and text descriptions, gradually acquired many actual visuals: promotional videos for the first season, opening sequences, character concept art, and fan creations derived from character settings. Some netizens even treated these "fictional creations" as a stage to showcase their skills.
The character modeling looks a bit familiar.
Among these forged videos, a significant one involved netizens discovering the voice of Hololive EN virtual streamer Koseki Bijou in one of the fake PVs. This further propagated "Raikou of Dragons" with the title "Biboo's (the streamer's nickname) first anime voice acting role." Some audiences became convinced of "Raikou of Dragons" because of this video—although Biboo explicitly stated in her livestream that it was just a prank.
This person has over 800,000 followers on YouTube and is quite influential.
Numerous netizen creations and complex dissemination behaviors have made the existence of "Raikou of Dragons" increasingly credible. This bait, originally used for trolling, has begun to smell increasingly real.
Promotions suggest Season 2 is almost out.
As its influence expanded, "Raikou of Dragons" gradually became a famous "urban legend" on the foreign internet recently—you can see many discussions about it, even some actual visuals, and hear about famous people participating, but you just can't see the anime itself.
Even more absurdly, as everyone's setting constructions became more complete, with realistic details spreading across the internet, some netizens had the bright idea to create a Fandom WIKI page for "Raikou of Dragons," integrating creative information from all angles.
Basically, except for the lack of an actual anime, the "Raikou of Dragons" IP has become convincing enough to pass as real thanks to the collective efforts of netizens—their level of dedication is such that one might suspect they could produce the actual anime if centrally coordinated.
However, as more and more people fell for the trick, the story surrounding this IP has largely reached its end.
Netizens still obsessed with this carnival would dismiss skeptics with excuses like, "This anime is banned in most countries and regions, please use a VPN." Seeing these replies, I almost thought I was browsing a Chinese community.
But such excuses have basically failed to fool internet-savvy users for the past decade. It lacks the entertainment value compared to another group who simply say, "Damn it, why did you have to expose it?"
It seems that since the internet began connecting people, these collectively created false stories have always been an enduring "team-building activity." If everyone clearly declares at the beginning that it's a fictional story setting, it later becomes the "SCP Foundation"; if everyone determines to put on a act, we can also see the "1999 Earth Defense War."
However, judging from user preferences, Western netizens seem more enthusiastic about this project—the internet operational techniques related to "Raikou of Dragons" have appeared more than once in their internet development history.
In August 2020, Tumblr, which had been declining due to moving away from NSFW content, rarely became the starting point of an internet sensation sweeping the entire web. A user named zootycoon posted a photo of a boot tag, saying that the shoes he bought had no brand name, only the name of a non-existent Martin Scorsese film.
Another user replied under his post: "This idiot hasn't watched Goncharov."
Thus becoming the source of all evil.
In 2022, "Goncharov," which had gradually become an internet urban legend, received AI support: a Tumblr user uploaded several movie posters and stills. The cast on the posters was exceptionally luxurious, with Robert De Niro playing Goncharov. This unintentional act completely ignited the movement to forge a non-existent film.
After the post received tens of thousands of reposts and likes, more and more information about "Goncharov" began to emerge on Tumblr, including stills, plot interpretations, and even animated GIFs.
The increasingly fervent fan activities led to the formation of a viewing fan club for "Goncharov." They hailed the film as "the greatest mafia movie in history," spontaneously creating posters, video content, and theme songs, while fabricating plot details to spread outward.
In the later stages of this movement, fans of "Goncharov" gradually extended the work's influence to other social media platforms, garnering increasingly widespread attention for this fictional 1973 mafia film.
The event even took a dramatic turn when related content reached the story's protagonist, Martin Scorsese. His daughter, Francesca Scorsese, replied to netizen comments on TikTok and shared screenshots of text messages with her father—in which Martin Scorsese humorously admitted that "Goncharov" was a film he had made years ago.
This sudden "official certification" made "Goncharov" one of the most legendary tales in recent netizen movements.
This legendary tale inspired many netizens to attempt to replicate similar viral events.
In 2023, a TikTok user named emilyjeffri attempted to forge an 80s horror film called "Zepotha." Her method was similarly to propose a collaborative creation plan for netizens, asking them to comment, "Oh my god, you look exactly like XXX from Zepotha," thereby making "Zepotha" a trending topic.
Using the same tactics as "Goncharov," the spread of "Zepotha" followed a similar trajectory. Their similarities were so high that many netizens dubbed it a "poor imitation of Goncharov."
And facts prove that imitation is an unavoidable part of internet pranks: two years later, an animated version of "Goncharov" appeared on TikTok once again. However, compared to before, this latest netizen prank campaign had a more "righteous" goal—
Trolling.
The reason why many veteran Western otaku are so enthusiastic about this movement is likely largely due to their inability to suppress the "elitist gene" flowing in their blood.
Of course, it could also be the "troll gene."
Speaking of which, I recently had an idea about "liking a mischievous neighbor housewife Rathalos," and I wonder if anyone is interested.
