Love and Producer is a popular Otome game with four main male characters who have brought cherished romance and intimacy to a massive amount of female players in China. However, a group of local producers made a comedy sketch with unlicensed content from the game and causing controversy.
The sketch named The Boyfriend Is Coming was aired on iQiyi as part of Super Sketch Show Season 2. It tells the story of a company CEO's mother urging her daughter to get married quickly. The daughter was depicted as sweet, but in a silly way where she was indifferent to everything but playing games.
When her mother advised her not to indulge in the game, the young woman said abruptly: "I am not addicted to the game, it is the game characters who are addicted to me."
Screenshots of The Boyfriend is Coming, a comedy sketch alluding to the following to Love and Producer
Then, the daughter introduced her four favorite boyfriends in the game to her mother one by one. And they jumped out from one side of the stage.
The audience quickly noticed that the first boyfriend was called Hu Zeyan, which obviously resembles Li Zeyan in Love and Producer, a young and promising company president.
It would not have caused as much backlash if the boyfriends and their relationships with the woman were depicted in a gentle and loving way. However, the boyfriends all behaved in a frivolous and exaggerated manner.
President Hu Zeyan said in a loud voice, "I just want to be king in your world" and "I am insatiable, I only want all of you".
A game poster of Love and Producer
The other three boyfriends are a mysterious police officer, a sickly yet talented scientist, and a cheerful entertainment star. All four boyfriends are coherent to the four male characters in Love and Producer.
Another serious problem with this sketch is that fans found it didn’t have a content license from Love and Producer. But the copyright infringement was so obvious that when the male protagonists appeared, the background music was the same as that in the game.
Previously, there was a famous line in the game’s community: "The stars have been picked and you should hold them tight,” and “My superpower is to like you so much". However, the sketch producers just copied the whole lines without modification and totally ruined the atmosphere.
Many fans of Love and Producer felt angry and offended, leaving tons of comments on Weibo and messaging the producers for apologies.
They said the portrayal in the comedy is full of prejudice and stereotypes due to a lack of knowledge of the game and the fan base. Going on to say that the sketch is not humorous, either and that the whole comedy is just frivolous.
The production team remained silent at first. But on October 8th, the producers officially issued an apology statement, saying that due to the lax creative process and a lack of copyright checks, The Boyfriend Is Coming caused deep harm to the players of Love and Producer. They promised that they would remove the videos related to this work.
Love and Producer’s Weibo account reposted the apology announcement by Super Sketch Show
Love and Producer responded by reposting the apology and stating that the game characters carry the hope of its developers and that people’s love for the game should never be misinterpreted.
There was more back and forth to this outcry. But fans pointed out that the essence of such a problem was that the creators were not being professional, and there was insufficient research done on the subject matter.
Comedy depicting similar phenomena has done well in the past. The program’s first season had a sketch called “Servicemen for Idols”, satirizing the chaos related to the frenzy for celebrities. But this time, obviously, The Boyfriend Is Coming is an unsatisfactory work that failed to meet people’s expectations.