On August 8th, under the weight of Shanghai’s summer heat, a shipyard-turned-park became what its visitors called, a “Ita-island.”(derived from ACGN fandom term “Ita-bag”). Xiaohongshu – known to most as a lifestyle and beauty platform – staged REDLAND, its first large-scale offline anime-and-gaming expo, on Shanghai’s Fuxing Island.
Instead of following the predictable convention-hall formula, REDLAND’s 80,000 square meters unfolded like a real-world RPG map. The island was divided into three themed zones: Timeshift Port, home to game giants MiHoYo, Tencent, and NetEase; Rebirth Trial Ground, featuring the shooting game Game for Peace, survival title Sultan’s Game, and various indie projects; and Idle Forest, dedicated to ancient Chinese-style MMORPGs and fan community booths. Visitors moved along a fixed yet story-driven route, equipped with starter kits, role cards, and badge quests.
Each booth leaned on the source game’s own mechanics: Genshin Impact’s archery trials, Sultan’s Game’s gacha-and-task combo, JX Online 3’s historical gardens reconstructed within a real park. Layered on top was a unified worldbuilding – quest boards, NPCs, resupply stations – knitting dozens of IPs into a single, coherent island narrative.
For Xiaohongshu, REDLAND wasn’t just cosplay photo-ops and merch tables. According to Xiaohongshu, the platform has seen anime content grow 175% and gaming posts up 168% in the past year, becoming its third- and fourth-largest categories. Its July rebrand, from “Your Life Guide” to “Your Life Interest Community”, set the stage for REDLAND as a live stress test of whether an online interest graph could manifest as a physical, immersive space.
The audience here isn’t the traditional ACG consumer, but what Xiaohongshu frames as the “2.5D” crowd – fans who embed IPs into daily life, from costumed café visits to game character birthday celebrating events. For this group, REDLAND offered more than a place to browse. In an internal interview, a lead creator from Xiaohongshu’s community marketing team said they wanted to create a “ita space” for the anime and gaming crowd. “People often feel that non-mainstream, non–‘normie’ users have their own spiritual world and personal space. So we thought – why not build a real-world space, an island, just for them? That’s how the concept of the ‘Pain Island’ came about.”
Over the past year, Xiaohongshu has been actively expanding into the gaming vertical. Starting in 2024, the platform launched the #I’mMakingGamesOnXiaohongshu campaign for independent game developers. The initiative brought 1,351 game creators from China and abroad onto the platform and incubated 38 creators with over 100,000 followers to engage with the community. In July 2024, Xiaohongshu made its debut at ChinaJoy, one of the largest gaming expos in the country.
Another departure from typical conventions was its ticketing model. Only a small portion of REDLAND tickets were sold, while the vast majority were given away for free through a quiz on the Xiaohongshu platform. “For our very first REDLAND, selling tickets wasn’t the point. We’d rather hand them out through a fun in-app quiz so more people come, play around, and interact. We had a total of 70,000 tickets this time, and roughly 70 to 80 percent were given away for free inside the app, with only about 20 percent actually sold.” One of the event’s creators explained.
Execution wasn’t flawless: the heat strained both visitors and cosplayers, some interactions felt missing the point, and the role system’s purpose sometimes was unclear. But as an attempt to break the stagnation of China’s offline ACG events, which are often trapped in the photo-op plus merch loop, REDLAND was a bold social experiment.
