Big Stinky Pigs: Why Chinese Cat Owners See Their Own 'Insult-Chasing' Fandom in the Mirror
A fandom slang term for fans who publicly scorn the star they cannot stop following has found a new home: China's living rooms. Cat owners are confessing, in their thousands, that they insults their cats the way the most devoted fans insult their idols.
The confession posts follow a template. An owner comes home, opens the door, and finds the cats asleep; delight floods in; then they open their mouth, and out it pours. "They're so cute I could die — but the moment I speak, a whole string slides out, smooth as silk: two big lazy pigs, so naughty they won't even come greet me, my big stinky pigs, sleep all day, freeload, never lift a paw around the house," one owner wrote on Weibo this week, in a post liked nearly 4,000 times. The hashtag it anchored translates as: "After getting a cat, I finally understand the psychology of insult-chasing."
辱追 — literally "insult-chasing" — is fandom slang for a particular kind of fan: the one who publicly runs down the idol they are privately unable to quit, who posts the criticism and buys the merchandise, who would be offended if you agreed. The term has been kicking around Chinese fan communities for years, usually as an accusation. What made it trend this week was the act of recognition: cat owners scrolling past the diagnosis and finding themselves in it.
A follow-up essay laid out the anatomy. The cat wrecks the furniture, scratches, ignores you, sulks; then it ambles over and curls up, and "all the grievances evaporate on the spot." Wronged on one side, unable to let go on the other, the owner keeps feeding the object of the complaints — which is, the poster concluded, the exact mechanism of the fandom condition, "that push-and-pull, draining feeling, finally understood through a cat."
The cats are the term's friendliest host, but not its first outside fandom. When China's men's football team lost 2-0 to Australia in a World Cup qualifier in Hangzhou in March — before a national-record crowd of 70,588, a detail that made the loss harder to explain — fans reached for the same word: a hashtag translating as "the national team, insult-chasing" tagged the debate over why so many people watch a team this bad. That week even produced a splinter argument, as fans defended the goalkeeper against the "butter hands" charge — proof that in insult-chasing, the abuse and the defence come from the same seat.
There is an older grammar underneath it all. The folk saying 打是亲，骂是爱 — a slap is affection, a scolding is love — has long licensed carping as a form of closeness, from parents to children and back. What the hashtag documents is that grammar absorbing a modern vocabulary: pet accounts talking in the dialect of idol fandom, calling their animals pigs and freeloaders in the same breath they photograph them sleeping. Nobody in these threads is confused about which side of the relationship the devotion sits on. The insults are simply what it sounds like when the love has nowhere better to go at the end of a working day.