“Biting Bullets”: Social Media and Razor Tongue

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Hello. My name is Troy Hanfei Tian, and this is my pitch for “Biting Bullets,” my tentatively-named adaptation of Razor Tongue, an original independent webseries by Rain Valdez. The primary technology I choose to feature in my adaptation is social media, specifically short-form content platforms like TikTok or XiaoHongShu, livestreaming and influencer culture, and live audience interaction, especially that by way of danmaku or danmu (known in English as bullet comments).

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So, what is Razor Tongue? Described and marketed as a “no-bullshit webseries,” it was created by and stars Rain Valdez, a Filipina American transgender woman and migrant to LA from Guam. The series follows Belle, also a Filipina trans woman, who both perpetuates and is eventually negatively impacted in her personal life by callout or cancel culture. In her romantic, professional, and personal life, Belle is depicted as saying the things that most people, especially women, queer people, and members of other marginalised groups, tend to swallow due to fear and social perceptions. Her criticisms of microaggressions regarding her race and gender, and “bad behaviour from men” in general, are never framed as factually incorrect, with such “callouts” having become increasingly popular among queer, POC, and other left-leaning online spaces in recent years. However, Belle’s “razor tongue” comes back to bite her in the season finale, when her past cynical and inflammatory remarks about her community and especially her love interest (a White man) are levied against her on a live public broadcast, complicating their relationships with presently unknown consequences.

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It is using these themes of public commentary and opinion, and especially during the scene of a live broadcast, that I choose to leverage the livestreaming and social media format. My adaptation of the webseries Razor Tongue by Rain Valdez will incorporate livestreaming and multilingual audience interaction from social media, allowing crowds to experience through active participation the polarising yet collective vitriol that fuels “cancel culture” along social, cultural, and community lines, as well as its consequences, in real time. I would particularly like to actualise the Internet aspect of the series’ messaging regarding callout/cancel culture through this specific social media format. While watching the series, I found it quite reminiscent of the vertical/short dramas that have recently become popular (produced in both Western and Asian nations) on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. As the series is already relatively short-form, I think it suits itself well to an adaptation onto platforms which prompt short attention spans, AI-generated slop, low-context and accusatory assertions about individuals and groups, and inflammatory discourse surrounding contemporary issues like queer rights and racial/identity politics.

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My vision is adapted from a format I have seen particularly on Chinese and Japanese social media, featuring a BiliBili/NicoNico-esque user interface, with so-called “bullet comments” (danmu or danmaku) flashing constantly across a large screen. Belle, although performing live alongside her cast probably on a physical stage in a typical performance hall, will mostly interact with her audience via this user interface, taking the place of a livestreamer for the majority of the performance. Blast Theory, a UK-based interdisciplinary artists’ group, provides an example of where audience participation has already been used as a part of performance art. I think that bringing this to digital influencer culture, where Belle’s individual issues surrounding race, migration, gender, and sexuality can be brought to the forefront, can deepen the audience’s understanding of how perpetuating callout culture on the modern Internet is a networked and collective act. I personally see this as a natural creative evolution of the equally-political but somewhat less participatory nature of callouts when the series was first released in 2019. By “breaking the 4th wall,” so to speak, audiences will be able to parasocially view her love and dating life, make quick-witted comments and view others’ opinions (within reason), and use their “razor tongues” wherever they may see fit, all within the in-universe purview of the characters onstage (or onscreen).

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As stated, Belle will take the place of a post-COVID era livestreamer talking directly to fans (the live audience) from a large screen, who may actively submit these bullet comments throughout the performance (of course with keyword filters and other restrictions). The chat will be strictly moderated for bigotry and harassment. Some comments will also be staged by producers to prompt planned story beats while still framing plot as driven by social media interaction. Also, in some sense, both arbitrarily strict chat moderation and staged, planted, or AI bot comments are also all reflective of real-life social media. It remains to be seen, though, whether the fact that there are staged comments will be disclosed to or even noticed by audience members. In any case, many comments will also be staged to be multilingual and multicultural; a lead actress cast as Belle will ideally both be a trans woman and speak Filipino, Tagalog, or other Philippine languages to feature her razor-tongued responses to remarks across nations. This portrays how audience and fan engagement fuel callout culture and personal melodrama between public figures, particularly when fandom and representation are polarised across lines of cultural identity. Just as our user interface itself is inherently migratory and multicultural, so too are the comments fanning Belle’s flaming personality. Thus, although the main storyline of the original webseries is assuredly preserved, Belle can now riff off the anti-nuance mob tendencies of modern social media audiences, especially those rooted in differing political views or cultural pride and values. The story is now satirically meta, potentially being minorly altered by any jokes or bits the audience may introduce, as well as generally by Belle’s role now being to show the audience the harms of polarised and inflammatory callout culture by their own hand, rather than just hers.

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I would also be remiss not to mention the creative influences of drag culture on my idea. While the performances and creative expressions of drag queens are virtually unlimited, stand-up comedy, especially that which is interactive with the audience, is a cornerstone of drag artistry. Transgender women in particular have very often been well-represented within the drag community, as it is foundationally and inherently gender non-conforming. Although Belle does not explicitly take the role of a comedian in my adaptation, as a trans woman of colour from the Global South, she represents a pillar of a community to queer and drag culture, both historically and into the present day. In particular, I find it important to again mention the importance of casting a lead actress who not only represents the demographics of intersectional marginalisation portrayed in the story, but who can also be funny and camp, and riff off of the audience’s presumably biting comments in service of the broader narrative. While it is not necessarily required that the actress cast for Belle be exactly like Rain Valdez in background, appearance, linguistic fluency, or any other individual trait, I think that the story is truest to someone who is able to speak from a perspective of awareness regarding queer culture, queer issues, and navigating a world biased against oneself and one’s community, i.e. someone like a drag queen.

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With this, however, comes the discussion to be had around Rain Valdez’s explicit artistic choice to not focus essentially at all on the transness of Belle or other characters in the story, with Belle herself only specifically coming out as trans in the season finale. I don’t seek to detract credence from the idea that trans representation can and sometimes should be humanising and focused on the kaleidoscope of trans life, rather than specifically on the act or consequences of their transition. I do also believe in the idea of humanising representation, and I would want to respect Rain Valdez’s original vision by mostly preserving the narrative integrity surrounding Belle’s story and personality, as well as not necessarily casting based on some sort of “DEI quota.” At the same time, however, I also believe that especially in a polarised political climate whereby female, queer, and POC humanity are used as electoral talking points, the pervasiveness of intersectional marginalisation within lived experience is also not to be understated. There may not necessarily be a single right way to address Belle’s transness, since every real-life trans person’s experience, whether centred around transition or not, is presumably representation by definition. Additionally, her race and womanhood being made explicit do actively enhance her ability to depict a true-to-life individual yet intersectional narrative. In a story as lively and dynamic as I envision “Biting Bullets” to be, I would hope that our understandings of representation regarding gender, queerness, and race evolve beyond such dichotomies, just as the depiction of callout culture evolves from an individual to a collective activity. In accordance with this, Razor Tongue itself proudly cast over 80% woman-, queer-, and POC-identified people overall, and I would hope my adaptation could achieve a similar diversity of perspectives involved throughout the production process. Actors will be cast with intentional diversity in race, gender, and LGBTQ+ identification, although they must all, like Belle, be able to react appropriately and wittily to audience comments, with the ultimate aim of promoting productive accountability and good-faith social action rather than “cancellation” for the sake of moral punishment.

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So, what will audiences see? Well, as stated, audiences will interact with Belle as if they are interacting with the social media influencers of quotidian real life, through a screen that shows their live bullet comments. By placing Belle in a relationship with a presumably cisgender, heterosexual, native-born White American man, Austin, the original webseries already explores power dynamics in a relationship between a marginalised woman and a non-marginalised man, both in how Belle’s agency can subvert these dynamics as well as how their implications still persist in the context of society. This is particularly salient in the final episode, which is staged as a live radio show. The interviewer, Ariel, initially invites Belle on specifically due to her sharp wits and strong personality, but interrogates her, uses her own quotations against her, and eventually has Belle realise the truth: that she was invited to call out Austin, to the detriment of a relationship she was genuinely pursuing. The dialogue during the radio show in the original webseries is faster-paced and quite sharp in its precise wording; however, in my adaptation, select viewers and producer plants may still be invited to participate in the show with comments beyond the source material. I also envision that the screen may be finally lifted in this segment, as it can instead be presumed that viewers are “watching the stream” with the actors literally live in front of their eyes and given an in-universe reason to be reading comments. Although these comments will presumably no longer be bullets flashing across the screen, by still being staged as (as well as hopefully genuinely) multilingual and multicultural, we see technology enabling (for better or worse) racialised and migratory perspectives to surface and nuance the power dynamics between Belle, Austin, their audience, and even Ariel as a Black woman but also an exploitative social media personality. Belle especially, as the most sympathetic character, is forced to go from razor-tongued to “biting the bullets” of the hurtful things she and her audience have said and done, even if they were encouraged by a supportive crowd in the name of a good cause. In other words, audiences enhance their understandings of the interactions between these frameworks by actively contributing within them, and allowing the actors to respond in kind.

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Thus, audiences are initially introduced to a fun comedy satirising present-day social media through a queer and campy lens, and ultimately left grappling with their complicity in a rupture in a story in which they have grown to be increasingly invested. The original Razor Tongue already utilised social media, for example in its very distribution as a “no-bullshit webseries,” to reflect the newfound accessibility in a new technological era of using our voices and seeing people in our communities use theirs. However, I want to in turn emphasise the idea that behind every face and story on the Internet is a real person, and words and actions said and taken on the Internet do indeed have real consequences. The audience is privileged enough to see it happen live, in a curated setting where the right comments are heard and the exact right actions are taken to spearhead a sympathetic, tragic, and yet ultimately safely fictional narrative. However, it usually doesn’t happen this way in real life; real-life people are complicated, sometimes even more complicated than Belle is as an already-flawed character representation, and real-life Internet users (which we presumably all are) do not have the privilege of a fictional cushion to shield our actions from consequences. We are only shielded by some degree of anonymity from personal responsibility over those consequences. Although calling out microaggressions and “cancelling” harmful people isn’t inherently a bad thing, and is often necessary to protect vulnerable people and populations from continued oppression, audiences should ultimately be left with the empirically-gained understanding that an open Internet also means open consequences on real human beings. Just as Belle learns this lesson in Razor Tongue, so too can we invite the audience of “Biting Bullets” to learn the same lesson for themselves.

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To conclude, my adaptation “Biting Bullets,” a livestreamed rendition of the webseries Razor Tongue by Rain Valdez, seeks to give audience members a uniquely participatory empirical understanding of the justifiable political morals and parasocial environments which shape and encourage callout or cancel culture, as well as the harmful effects they have on the people they may claim to be protecting, especially where intersectionality along racial, gendered, sexual, and cultural lines is concerned. I hope that UCLA, in all its diversity and its very strong lineage of historical and active organising in the Asian American political condition, can recognise the dynamic message and medium this adaptation enables for people and communities seldom represented in theatre. I envision most of all that the adaptability, lived experiences, and deep humanity of the proudly trans, Filipina, migrant Belle will be felt by each and every bullet commenter. Perhaps she, her cast, her crew, and her audience will be able to change her ending for the better.