Fisheye Placebo Wiki

Fisheye Placebo is a web comic created and illustrated by Wenqing Yan, also known by the alias Yuumei.

Artist Description[]

Living under an authoritarian regime is not fun. Extensive censorship meant no Facebook, no Youtube, and no porn.
Fortunately for Vance, being a hacker makes scaling the Great Firewall a walk in the park. With the free web at his fingertips, Vance should be happy but he’s not. Maybe there’s something missing in his life that porn just cannot replace.
Maybe it’s a girlfriend.
So it’s not weird at all to hack into the university to assign himself a hot female roommate, right? That’s just taking fate into your own hands, or something along those lines, right?
Too bad fate had other plans in mind and Vance is dragged into a crazy conspiracy to overthrow the government by his most-definitely-not-female roommate.
College is meant to be exciting, but not this exciting. Between failed dates, failed grades, and maybe not quite failed hacks, Vance will slowly come to question the morality of his actions and the true price of freedom.
Is this what democracy looks like?[1]

History[]

Artwork related to the series started appearing on Wenqing's DeviantArt on March 23, 2011 and the first strip, "Intro", appeared two years later, on March 23, 2013.[2] Strips continued to come out on a regular basis until around May 2014 (after Chapter 1 (Part 2)) as Wenqing's time was taken up to work on and release Axent Wear cat ear headphones.[3] To further complicate matters, she suffered from permanent hand damage from drawing too much[4] causing her to go on hiatus for over two years. Rather than give up on the story though, Wenqing used that time to hire other artists to help build up 3D backgrounds she could then paint over, saving time and pain to her hand and started to release again in March 2018.[5]

About the Name[]

As for the title, I won't give away the metaphorical meaning since that's for you to find out when you read the story. However, the technical term for "Fisheye" refers to a type of lens used in photography to produce a wide angle view that also results in a rounded distortion of the image that gives of the same result as a 5 point perspective drawing. "Placebo" refers to the medical term of a fake medicine that's used to trick the patient into thinking they are getting better, and the psychological effects of that false belief might actually make the patient heal. Hence the quote "Through the distorted lens I found a cure."

References[]