🌀A WORLD OF STORIES

In the last Culture Wire, we briefly talked about book merch—logoed T-shirts and caps that signal niche literary interests, letting readers wear the story. This week, we found something that goes even further.

The Boyfriend Book Box reframes each $497 subscription as a ‘gift’ from the male lead in a dark romance, filled with items designed to bring the character to life. More than 20,000 people are already on the waitlist.

Fans don’t just want to consume stories; they increasingly want to inhabit them. In China, romance narratives are moving off the page and into real life. In a fast-growing offshoot of the murder-mystery roleplay format jubensha, players spend hours acting out tragic love stories alongside paid ‘love companions’. The wider industry now spans roughly 168,000 companies, with 72,000 founded in 2025 alone—up 16% year-on-year.

And remember Love and Deepspace? New updates allow characters to call players by name, creating a more personal experience. Some players are even extending character relationships into ChatGPT and DeepSeek. At the far end of the storytelling spectrum, character.ai users are building companions from scratch.

OUR TAKE

To frame this cultural shift as pure escapism misses the point.

Fictional worlds don’t just entertain—they’re where people go to feel understood, explore connection, and experience emotions everyday life doesn’t always deliver. Some Love and Deepspace players say the game fulfills emotional needs they didn’t even realize were unmet.

Back to books. In Indonesia, where the Reading Interest Index jumped from 66.77 to 72.44 in a single year, BookTok is helping revive reading and turn it into a social identity marker. More than half of readers (62.5%) now discover books through social media.

As reading becomes social, spaces are evolving. Jakarta’s Gramedia Jalma bookstore is designed as a third space blending bookstore, coworking space, and café. Singapore’s National Library Board just launched Chapters, a collectible card game that turns 30 years of library history into a playable narrative.

We’ve previously explored how people are pushing back on frictionless consumption in search of meaning. Narrative is what ties it all together. BookTok, bookstore third spaces, and AI companions may look different, but they point to the same shift: in an uncertain world, people want stories they can enter, extend, and shape—not just watch or read.

Referencing literary culture is easy. Building a narrative people want to step into is harder but far more valuable for brands in the long-term.

In China, Mixue turned sales receipts into serialized fiction, sparking a viral craze. Alipay Alipay partnered with novelist Liu Zhenyun to create a Convenience Store Literature Corner, where everyday people co-create stories. Dr. Seuss reframed reading itself as travel with a faux travel agency where every ‘booking’ leads to a book.

The opportunity for brands is clear: move beyond storytelling, and build worlds people can participate in. Because if anything is clear from BookTok to AI companions, it’s that the demand for stories people can live inside is only accelerating. 

For those of you born before 1997, ‘fax, no printer‘ is Gen Z speak for ‘undeniable facts I agree with’

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