Some Photoshop-savvy “netizens” have been making their own interpretations of the CCTV fire imagery, layering on monster and alien attacks, cartoonish personifications of the buildings, the tracing of mysterious symbols in the smoke-clouds…

It seems only natural to want to “metabolize” such an epic-scale disaster by shrinking it to the level of the cute, or distancing it via the lenses of narrative and myth. Maybe such a catastrophe provokes the need to take more “authorship” than normal over one’s city (as demonstrated here, in a very light-hearted manner). Obviously since there was very little loss of life, it doesn’t feel like a “human tragedy” — more a tragedy of inanimate objects and systems. We know so little about the secret life and emotions of glass and steel. Does the urban fabric of Beijing itself feel the “burn”?

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