AI dramas fall into formula: from "No Heartburn" to "Sauce-Braised Duck," core memes multiply through volume

**Key Points**

**1. Core memes multiply through volume and become viral hits**

"Not Heartburn" centers on an honest merchant holding the line and a villain whose price cut backfires, then keeps spawning variations with different dishes, settings, and characters. Related Hongguo viewership is about 40 million, and "The Honest Chicken Cutlet at the School Gate" will get a second season; the earlier "Sauce-Braised Duck" meme reached 5 billion views.

**2. Anti-formula twists and brand bandwagoning amplify spread**

Netizens flip the honest merchant into a dishonest one, and anti-formula clips such as "ate it and got heartburn" have more than 200,000 likes; brands use "Not Heartburn" to prove their own honesty, with creators, brands, and netizens together driving traffic higher.

**3. Formulaic content keeps probing the same thrill points**

Subjects such as doomsday shelters, 1980s food-stall vending, Miao girls studying abroad and catching ghosts, and gender-swapped Taiwanese idol drama all replicate the same thrill; "The Ghost Catcher of Ruicao Academy" has nearly 1.78 million likes at its peak, and the first episode of the gender-swapped Taiwanese idol drama has more than 550,000 likes.

**4. Homogenization makes heat decline, while core memes and micro-innovations are worth more**

Not every bandwagon "rules" subject takes off: "Good Chicken Needs Slow Stewing" has only 14.72 million views and 4,559 saves; "Pretty Malice" sees declining views in later episodes. AI short dramas now iterate on a monthly or even weekly basis, and what breaks out is not a specific drama, IP, or person. 2026-10-26 07:37 AI dramas, formulaic Cixi Commune quick read

This article is from the WeChat public account: Cixi Commune, author: Cixi Commune Editorial Department

Even if you don't know where "Not Heartburn" comes from or how this meme went viral, you have probably heard this story while scrolling short videos (or passively inhaling secondhand short videos): a small merchant refuses to cut prices in order to maintain quality, when another competitor attracts customers with lower prices, so everyone rushes to the cheaper merchant and mocks the protagonist small merchant as greedy and money-obsessed. But the protagonist small merchant holds the line and does not cut corners, until everyone realizes cheap goods are not good, and the merchant regains its reputation, with the whole thing summed up as: the rules are established, the road will get wider and wider, and only then can you avoid heartburn.

The stories are similar, but the forms of expression are ever-changing. Well, perhaps what is ever-changing is only the food: beef noodles, chicken cutlets, steamed buns, wontons, barbecue, boxed meals, rice noodles, malatang...

The related AI dramas all have Hongguo viewership of around 40 million, and "The Honest Chicken Cutlet at the School Gate" is even about to get a second season. You could say one meme gives birth to all things, and the Not Heartburn story instantly fills internet platforms, pushed to different veteran food lovers; everyone, within different types of food algorithms, watches similar stories without ever getting tired of them.

In fact, "Not Heartburn" is only the hottest of many AI drama memes. Beneath the calm surface, the public has already quietly been surrounded by the viral spread of AI dramas, but this time, besides brands jumping on the bandwagon to gain traffic, more and more audiences have gladly accepted it.

Remember the sauce-braised duck meme that was popular at the beginning of the year?

Against a traditional Hong Kong-style costume setting, an AI meme called "Saving a Fox in the Snowy Mountains" unfolded. The story begins with "Have you ever saved a fox in the snowy mountains?" Just when everyone thought this was an ordinary repayment-of-kindness plot, the style suddenly shifted: the woman pulled out a gun and aimed it at the male lead, saying hatefully, "I am that sauce-braised duck." The stereotypical repayment plot immediately turned into the opposite revenge plot.

The familiar Hong Kong style, anti-stereotypical plot, abstract humor, plus room for innovation, drew more and more creators into this meme-making carnival, transforming into the snowy mountain "next to the sauce-braised duck you saved," the mud that was stepped on... In addition, there were rebirth versions, not-saved versions, unsaved versions, weapon-enhanced versions... Various versions surfaced. What was originally a plot created to sell sauce-braised duck thus became an internet AI meme and reached 5 billion views.

This fully shows that even for niche content, when more people join in creating it, it has a chance to become a "meme."

Similar to the "sauce-braised duck meme," the "Not Heartburn meme" also follows this "volume" route. After the first Not Heartburn plot was created, similar Not Heartburn plots sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain.

But creators understand the logic of spread well. With similar story cores, they turn simple innovations into new stories and continue to meet market demand. Besides the different dishes mentioned above, the settings also differ: some are street vendors, some run community businesses, some focus on rural banquet scenes, and others focus on roommate relationships.

These stories all attract the public with different backgrounds. Behind the seemingly abstract surface, they tell the same core: hold the line, establish the rules, and create the thrill of turning a villain's methods against the villain. In the end, this type of subject creates a "large volume, guaranteed satisfaction" effect: malatang audiences have seen this story, and young people who care about roommate relationships are also very likely to scroll to it. Thus the "Not Heartburn meme" was born.

The subsequent spread pattern is already familiar. After "Not Heartburn" left Hongguo, it also met with "sauce-braised duck meme"-style fission on internet platforms.

The protagonist changes from an honest merchant to a dishonest one, and this reversal gives the plot a kind of helpless comedy. "Ate it without heartburn" becomes "ate it and got heartburn"; "Afraid, but I'm more afraid of breaking the rules" becomes "Afraid, but I'm more afraid of not making money"; lines such as "If you can't make money, you've really lost out," "I'd rather break the rules than earn a little more," and "Then I'll sell it cheap to college students" are so brutal that netizens exclaim: Hongguo has turned into black fruit, what kind of brutal truth is this. Even though the Not Heartburn meme has already become everyone's catchphrase, such anti-formula AI clips still got more than 200,000 likes.

In different layers of the algorithm, many AI memes are trending on the internet in this way. Take "doomsday shelter," for example: the plot often opens with urgent BGM, and when facing impending dangers such as storms, flash floods, zombies, and bandits, the protagonists hide in a homemade shelter and survive the disaster. Outside the shelter is full of danger, but inside, the people live a comfortable little life with plenty of food and clothing, birdsong and fragrant flowers, and a full sense of security.

Another example is the topic of "1980s food stalls," where AI clips appear almost uniformly: because of a child's momentary mischief, the stall-owning parents accidentally invent a new food, which then becomes famous across the whole street. Braised snacks, stinky tofu, malatang, hot and sour noodles, luosifen, pork skin aspic, sour soup dumplings, Xinjiang stir-fried rice noodles, and other foods are all born in the form of an "accident."

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Content products usually cannot escape homogenization. Once a type of plot becomes popular, similar plots appear in batches across the content market, but in the face of algorithms, homogenized content finds it hard to sustain traffic. Formulaic AI dramas have their own technique: repeatedly testing the audience's pleasure points in different forms.

And this "cultural phenomenon" is currently continuing in the form of "Miaojiang girls." The Ghost-Catching Master of Ruicao Academy tells the story of a Miaojiang girl studying in South Korea and "catching ghosts." It has currently updated to 13 episodes, with a highest like count of nearly 1.78 million. Similar to AI study-abroad dramas, on different bloggers' homepages, Miaojiang girls, Miaojiang saintesses, and Miaojiang priestesses are busy studying abroad in various countries and "catching ghosts."

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Of course, works like Little Red Lantern Hanging Low have also been born, and netizens commented: At this moment, I finally understood this movie.

In the future, will core creative memes be more valuable?

When food that "doesn't cause heartburn" spreads to hundreds of varieties overnight, it is hard to define it as content creation anymore. Perhaps a more appropriate name is content reproduction.

Yes, content reproduces like thin noodles: as long as you take one bite, you can never finish eating. Friends who often eat Fujian thin noodles know that thin noodles are a very filling food; they can reproduce in the bowl and also reproduce in your stomach. And AI short dramas, as the thin noodles of the content world (temporarily named by Hedgehog Commune), face the same problem: viewers easily get full.

Searching for keywords such as "rules" and "no heartburn" on Hongguo shows that not all rule-setting plots gain high popularity. For example, Good Chicken Needs Slow Stewing has only 14.72 million popularity and only 4,559 favorites, in contrast to other works of the same type with more than 10,000 favorites.

On the Douyin platform, Korean-drama-style AI dramas are no longer a rare species. When every genre performs similar plots, the freshness brought by micro-innovation cannot sustain viewers for long. For example, the first episode of Beautiful Malice has nearly 5 million likes, but the view counts of the following episodes are declining; the later-appearing The Ghost-Catching Master of Ruicao Academy can no longer create the same order of magnitude of views as Beautiful Malice.

AI dramas without heartburn have proven that they have the ability to break out of their niche, except that what breaks out is not a specific drama, a specific IP, or a specific person. And this AI drama ecosystem of content reproduction also has two sides: the harsh way to put it is barbarism, and the nice way to put it is open source.

Is the barbaric ecosystem sustainable? We cannot predict. The only thing we can be sure of is that the creativity to build core memes and the micro-innovation ability based on hot memes will become the two most important skill points at this stage.

After all, with memes comes volume, and with volume comes visibility. Visibility may last long or short, and creative people each rely on their own abilities. AI Venture Capital Daily Channel: Frontier Technology. This content comes from the internet, original link; the views only represent the author and do not represent Huxiu's position. If there are copyright issues, please contact hezuo@huxiu.com, and we will verify and handle them promptly. Everyone who is changing and wants to change the world is in the Huxiu APP[ ]