Weekly AI Hit Observation: AI creators are creating Chinese lead roles for Japanese and South Korean TV dramas

This week's list of viral AI content clearly shows distinct segmentation of track popularity: the fantasy creative track and the emotional life track each account for 40%, while the pet-healing track takes up 20%.

Interestingly, a large number of short AI videos centered on the plot of people from Sichuan-Chongqing and Northeast China transferring to study in Japan and South Korea have emerged in the fantasy creative track. They use dialect complaints to deconstruct the common tropes of Japanese and Korean idol dramas. The representative work *Pretty Malice* topped the list with 3.362 million likes, and the similar work *Daily Life After Swapping Bodies With a Japanese Schoolgirl* broke into the top five of the list with 613,000 likes.

These AI-generated international students, although using the same Korean drama-style campus classroom and school uniform sets, break the idol drama atmosphere, leverage the inherent straightforward personality traits of people from Sichuan-Chongqing and Northeast China, and insert the complaining character setting into the idol drama plot, creating the refreshing sense of "breaking Korean drama tropes", "it turns out that dramas can be shot this way", and "Chinese people have their own Korean dramas".

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Case 1: *Pretty Malice*

Likes: 3.362M  

Release Time: 2026/8/28

Zhang Zhi'an, a Sichuan international student, suddenly arrives at Chenglv Academy, a Korean chaebol school, and is directly assigned to the bottom F class. As soon as she enters the school, she encounters classic Korean drama campus conflicts such as exclusion from classmates and class prejudice. Faced with difficulties, Zhang Zhi'an does not choose to forbear and step back, but resolves various conflicts with her natural capable aura. She meets Han Daoxun, the red-haired school bully, while working part-time. Campus conflicts gradually push the two to develop a bond, and the whole series is a continuous plot that combines sweetness and refreshing pleasure.

Many netizens have accurately found that this work integrates a large number of classic shots and campus class settings from multiple campus-themed Korean dramas such as *Pyramid Game*, *Cheongdam International High School* and *Good Competition*, which is a typical AI short drama that "uses the shell of Korean drama to make new stories".

However, the viewing experience of *Pretty Malice* is completely different from that of orthodox Korean dramas. The classic representative of Korean campus themes, *Cheongdam International High School*, is a proper dark campus drama with a depressing atmosphere. The protagonist can only forbear silently and maneuver carefully when encountering campus targeting and class suppression, behaving very restrainedly in every word and action, making the audience feel aggrieved throughout the whole process.

And *Pretty Malice* retains this attractive Korean drama shell. The exquisite and advanced Korean-style chaebol campus pictures are paired with pungent and vivid Sichuan-Chongqing dialect dialogues. The contrast between depression and free-spiritedness, between Korean style and Chinese style, is pulled to the extreme.

In the comment section, this mixed freshness of "Korean drama shell + Sichuan-Chongqing dialect core" makes the audience love this gameplay. Netizens are all recognizing the old drama memes, praising the dialect character setting, and collectively waiting for new episodes.

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Case 2: *Daily Life After Swapping Bodies With a Japanese Schoolgirl*

Likes: 613K    

Release Time: 2026/9/1

Different from *Pretty Malice*, this work takes the fantasy level-breaking route. The male protagonist Zhou Chu has a countdown appearing out of thin air on his hand. When the countdown ends, he swaps bodies with Yuli, a Japanese high school girl, and is immediately involved in a school bullying incident. He uses the objective condition of language barrier and a straightforward way of acting to resolve the crisis.

The fantasy setting in the video directly bypasses the constraints of real logic, without the need to scrutinize Japanese high school rules or international student exchange systems. All plots serve the suspense of the story, and the Northeast dialect is the core starting point for shaping the character contrast.

The female protagonist Yuli has a soft and cute face, but speaks with a down-to-earth Northeast accent. This dislocation of external image, living environment and speaking style creates a unique sense of joy, and this contrast alone can continuously capture the audience's attention.

This account also completes fan accumulation through series of episodes. Although there is no embedded advertising cooperation at present, its audience is mainly young people who love creative short dramas, and it has the conditions to undertake advertisements targeting young groups.

However, the trend of the comment section of this work is significantly different from the former. Netizens are more amazed by the creativity of the story, playing with the gender contrast jokes brought by body swapping. The audience is keen to guess the foreshadowing of the countdown and deliberate on the subsequent plot trend. Remarks urging for updates also appear frequently. Everyone's focus is on the dramatic conflict brought by the fantasy setting, and the proportion of complaints about AI-generated pictures is very low. They pay more attention to the plot trend and character contrast.

Taking the commercial status of these two accounts as a sample, we can reflect the real situation of other accounts in this track. Many similar creators will sign up for creator activities launched by platforms or AI tool providers to obtain certain exposure and incentive bonuses.

In short, the Chinese-style refreshing character setting meets the taste of the audience, the dialect makes up for the texture of AI content, and the template is simple and easy to replicate for mass creation. These three core advantages have completely made this type of theme extremely popular.

Some time ago, the viral videos in this track such as *Northeast Zihan Breaks Into Japanese High School* and *After Entering the Novel, I Conquered the Cold Top Student With My Northeast Dialect* all follow the same "refreshing drama trope": international students in a strange environment, even if they do not understand the local language, can "win over" the male lead, or immediately fight back against the bullying and isolation from local students.

After long-term content dissemination of short videos, people from Sichuan-Chongqing and Northeast China have formed a fixed impression in the hearts of the audience: people from Sichuan-Chongqing have a crisp and pungent personality, while people from Northeast China are forthright and dare to argue. These two types of character settings are perfectly suitable for the protagonist of refreshing dramas.

Putting the protagonist with such personality in a strictly hierarchical, depressing Japanese and Korean campus, who is not afraid of making trouble and dares to confront the exclusion and difficulties from others, the character and the environment inherently have conflicts, without the need for laborious plot foreshadowing, the dramatic effect comes out immediately.

Among them, dialect is the key to becoming popular. The biggest shortcoming of AI short dramas is that the dubbing and pictures are too mechanical, looking very stiff. However, Sichuan-Chongqing dialect and Northeast dialect are down-to-earth, with a natural daily life atmosphere, which can make virtual characters more vivid and real.

These two dialects have extremely high audience acceptance. Audiences across the country can understand them, and they can also trigger a large number of netizens to play memes and interact in the comment area, making the video atmosphere more lively, so it is naturally easier to be remembered by the audience.

The popularity of this type of theme is essentially that creators are looking for a stable, easy-to-replicate viral template. For the content of "international students breaking into Japanese and Korean campuses", the plot framework, character settings and emotional selling points are all ready-made, no original polishing is needed. Everyone only needs to change a character and modify a small part of the plot, then they can stably produce content and get traffic.

In the past, audiences watched Korean dramas for beautiful love stories and refreshing idol plots; later they watched Vlogs to see other people's study abroad, travel and daily life; when it comes to AI short videos, the gameplay has changed to another form: "Why can't ordinary me be the protagonist in their campus dramas?"

AI gives creators a ticket to enter foreign stories, and also gives the audience a chance to reassign the protagonist roles.

As for where the next batch of "international students" will go, it no longer matters.

After all, as long as the template exists, the next stop for international students can be Tokyo, Seoul, or even directly Hogwarts.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Xiaoyu AI Film & Television", author: Jiujiu, published with authorization from 36Kr.