Chapter 118: Two Halves of Public Opinion

Chapter 118: Chapter 118: Two Halves of Public Opinion

Within a single afternoon after the release announcement was dropped, public opinion on the Interstellar Connection network split into two unprecedentedly fierce waves of controversy.

The majority of netizens who had not yet seen the film, having only skimmed the tagline "Love between a human and the Insectoid race" along with the setting "A male insectoid who fears death flees his clan’s reproductive duty", expressed bewilderment; many extreme nationalists and AI film directors whose box-office revenues had been crushed by Benjamin last time even seized the opportunity to hire paid trolls, setting up dedicated threads calling for a widespread boycott of the film.

They berated screenwriter Elijah Hall as "a pampered rich kid with too much food and nothing to do, writing a script with warped values", criticized Benjamin Martinez for "disregarding the moral boundaries of humanity just to fish for sensational views", and even tagged the official account of the Arts Committee to demand why it had licensed such a freakish film.

However, an overwhelmingly contradictory phenomenon bordering on comedy took place at eight o’clock sharp that evening when the online ticketing portal officially opened for sales.

Their mouths cursed the bizarre theme and clamored loudly for a boycott across every forum, yet the hands of hundreds of millions of netizens clicked to book tickets faster than the speed of light!

One hundred thousand opening screenings across the entire Galaxy sold out without a single empty seat left in just eight minutes, breaking even the ticket-sales record of the previous film! The ticketing server system of the Interstellar Cinema Chain even jammed for fifteen whole minutes because the volume of simultaneous traffic was too massive.

[Huh? Where did all those people who were just screaming on the forums about boycotting and refusing to watch go?! How is it that I logged in a mere three minutes late and even the two-in-the-morning screening slot all the way out in a frontier star system was robbed clean by you lot?!]

[Ahem... I only bought a ticket to go into the theater to see just how terrible and trashy this human-loves-bug script is, so I can have material to write an accurate scathing review!]

[Cut the crap, person above! You are going in to admire the looks of the Hall family’s third young master in his Insectoid King styling! I can see your account booked a front-row VIP ticket with the spider-silk tactile sensation mode turned on!]

On the evening of September 25th, the very first screenings of [Kiss of the Black Widow] officially lit up at 5D VR theaters across the entire Galaxy.

Inside the lifelike virtual reality space of the 5D theaters, viewers felt as though they were setting foot in person upon the barren wasteland of Cygnus, feeling every freezing drop of forest rain on Sirius and smelling the acrid gunpowder smoke on the space-ruin battlefield.

Two hours and fifteen minutes passed.

When the final scene on the space-ruin battlefield drew to a close—where Insectoid King Sylas, bombarded for annihilation by the very fleet of the human General (the one who had betrayed Marcus and pushed him to his death at the start of the film), smiled amidst the rain of blood, drawing out the last golden-yellow thread of life-silk inside his body to weave an indestructible cocoon wrapping around the frantically screaming Marcus while he himself turned to ash dissolving into the galaxy—thousands of screening rooms across the entire Galaxy sank into muffled sobbing.

Not a single person remembered the talk of boycotting from before they entered the theater! Many male viewers who had walked into the theater carrying notebooks intending to jot down script flaws to write critical posts had red eyes and noses by the time the theater lights came up, sitting dazedly in their seats unable to stand up.

One hour after the first screening ended, the Interstellar Connection network once again split into two halves of public opinion waging an all-out war day and night.

Yet this time, it was no longer split into "liking the film" or "hating the film" camps like before the release, because 99% of the people walking out of the theaters had been completely conquered by Benjamin’s authentic filming techniques and the peak acting of Elijah alongside the cast!

The fierce division into two opposing camps online at this moment revolved entirely around... the fate and actions of the characters inside the film!

The first camp, taking up half the posts on the hot search rankings under the hashtag #DownWithDespicableHumanity_GiveSylasBackToMe#:

[Boohoo, I have cried until both my eyes are swollen! Whichever one of you said before watching that this film whitewashes the insectoid race, step out here right now! Throughout the entire film from start to finish, Sylas never killed a single innocent person; he was just a little spider afraid of being eaten by his own kind who hid out on a desolate planet growing flowers to get by day to day!]

[That human General is the true cold-blooded demon! To vie for Legion power, he framed his subordinate Marcus; then once he learned Sylas possessed precious life-silk capable of making indestructible armor, he used Marcus as bait to surround and capture Sylas, ultimately firing artillery to kill them both when he could not capture Sylas alive! Sylas’s line right before vanishing: "It turns out the venom of our Insectoid race kills only one person, whereas the greed of you humans can devour your own kind whole" gave me goosebumps all over my body!]

[I blame the male lead Marcus too! Even though I know he did not intentionally leak the coordinates to that General, if he had not stubbornly stepped into Sylas’s world, had not forced his love onto Sylas, that lonely Insectoid King would never have drained his life-silk dry to save him! Marcus does not deserve Sylas’s love!]

Immediately, the second camp under the hashtag #ProtectMajorGeneralMarcus_LoveIsNotAtFault# jumped in to rebut no less fiercely:

[If you curse that villainous General I agree with both hands, but why are you cursing Marcus too?! From beginning to end, Marcus was trapped by that General, who planted a hidden tracking chip inside his ribs during an earlier surgery without him knowing at all! The moment he realized he had unwittingly led the army to Sylas’s location, he personally took a dagger to slice his own chest open alive, digging the bloody chip out without anesthetic while bleeding so heavily he nearly died right there!]

[That is right! Furthermore, it was precisely thanks to Marcus appearing that Sylas learned what warmth was, learned what it felt like to be loved and cherished by someone regardless of his being a monster! Without that happy period of time beside Marcus in that primeval forest, even if Sylas had lived another few hundred years inside that freezing stone cave, he would have been nothing more than a soulless husk waiting to die!]

[In the final scene when the silk cocoon opened, Marcus’s hair had turned snow-white overnight as he clutched the remaining scrap of Sylas’s black silk robe before piloting a Mecha alone to charge into the General’s headquarters for mutual destruction to avenge his lover... I am a one-meter-ninety-tall Alpha, yet after watching that scene I bawled like a child right in the theater! The two of them are equally pitiful; the ones who deserve to be chopped into a hundred pieces are those scum borrowing the name of justice!]

[Aaah! I do not care about you two camps arguing over who is right and who is wrong, I just want to ask what on earth Elijah Hall ate to act so divinely?! That look in his eyes when he gazed at Marcus through the golden-yellow silk cocoon before dissolving into fireflies of light... It was so beautiful and heartbreaking that I swear I will never forget it for the rest of my life!]

The grand battle of character psychological analysis between the two camps of viewers pushed the discussion heat of [Kiss of the Black Widow] to a record high in the cinematic history of the Lumina Galaxy. Many viewers, wanting to find more details to prove their camp’s arguments, bought tickets to go into the theaters to rewatch it a third, a fourth time, causing the volume of tourists pouring onto planet Sirius to take check-in photos at the primeval forest waterfall setting from the film to skyrocket twofold!

At the villa on planet Sirius, Elijah was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, holding baby Sane, just over four months old, who was sitting sucking his thumb in Elijah’s lap, while gleefully reading the comments of the two viewer camps arguing online.

"Ha ha, Liam, look at this! Just the other day those film critics were berating me for writing anti-human trash, yet today those exact same old men have posted five-thousand-word analytical essays arguing with each other over whether Marcus deserves Sylas or not!"

Liam, who was sitting opposite him calculating the accounts in preparation for depositing more energy to upgrade the Trading Hall to level 4, with Noah beside him quietly peeling an apple and cutting it into small pieces to feed to his lips, raised his head with a smile upon hearing that:

"Congratulations to the great screenwriter and future Best Actor, Elijah Hall. The first-week box-office revenue of this film has already surpassed the previous one by forty percent; you might as well prepare yourself mentally to step up to the podium at the end of this year to accept the Interstellar Film Award."