The work aims to discuss the influencing factors of digital natives on the emotional perception of character design with traditional cultural background and contemporary aesthetic meaning, and explore the aesthetic attitude, cultural identity and value trend characteristics of the young generation. A model about user emotional perception of Dunhuang new cultural and creative character design was built by capturing texts and data related to character design in online reviews, with a qualitative analysis tool called Nvivo 12 Plus according to the method of the grounded theory. Software ROST CM6 was employed to further analyze users' emotional tendency and high-frequency emotional perception factors. It was concluded that three categories of aesthetic and appearance value, scenes with a sense of substitution, and historical narration were the core factors that influenced users' emotional perception of characters. Then, a model about the factors influencing emotional perception of Dunhuang new cultural and creative characters based on subjects, scenes and contents was built. The study shows that grasping the polarized aesthetic characteristics of the times, shaping digitally-enabled immersive embodied perception of scenes, and achieving the emotional resonance with the historical narration with cultural identity have a significant influence on improving the emotional perception of new digital cultural and creative character design.