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Bromance as a Masquerade: Adaptation and Reception of Chinese Danmei Fantasy
Abstract
The article discusses danmei (or boys love, BL), a fiction genre which occupies a special place in Chinese pop culture. Despite the fact that these entertainment stories are characterized by a love line between male characters, the authors and consumers of Chinese BL are primarily heterosexual women. Danmei has become popular not only in China itself, but also in many other countries, which adds relevance to the study of its reception by the Russian audience. First of all, this applies to web series television adaptations of network BL novels available to the world audience. The research focuses on a number of issues related to the production, adaptation, and consumption of danmei media content. What are the features of the genre and how does it differ from non-Chinese versions of BL? What makes danmei so attractive for women and how is the Chinese BL community structured? What strategies does the Chinese web series industry use to adapt primary sources and how do BL fans and a wider audience perceive these adaptations? The article shows the contradictions inherent in the danmei subculture: on the one hand, its proximity to the feminist and queer movements, on the other—its support for heteropatriarchal values. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the representative strategy of bromance used by Chinese producers in the TV adaptations of danmei novels under party-state censorship. In particular, I analyze the popular TV series S.C.I. Mystery (2018), Guardian (2018), The Untamed (2019), and Word of Honor (2021). Apart from de-erotizing the interactions of between the protagonists, these adaptations significantly modify the genre, plot, setting, and characters. At the same time, producers of the shows take into account the expectations of the multimillion army of danmei fans, leaving them certain opportunities for queer reading. In Russia, danmei by the web novelist Mo Xiang Tong Xiu are the most popular, as well as the fantasy web series The Untamed based on her novel Mo Dao Zu Shi. This case study of the multi-part online drama The Untamed reveal the three patterns of reception of the series by the Russian audience: bromantic, romantic and “fluid.” In conclusion, the challenges of conceptualizing danmei as a genre, subculture, and entertainment industry have been articulated.
... Zhou et al., 2018). Nim (2022) points out that readers access all categories and navigate according to personal needs and expectations hard to meet in reality. ...
... Similarly, Xiaochen completed his self-identification through reading BL fiction too, but with a deliberate intention to explore his "pubertal curiosity" for male-male sex. Although Chinese BL fiction tends to be more obscure in sexual depictions than Japanese Yaoi erotica, pornographic content remains a salient feature especially in hardcore fiction (Nim, 2022). These erotic depictions not only compensated Xiaochen with sexual pleasure as analyzed earlier, but they also functioned as an initial source of sex education. ...
Boys' Love (BL), known as Danmei (耽美) in China, is a popular female-oriented male-male intimacy genre celebrated by today's Chinese younger generation. From 2000 to 2020, BL fiction rapidly developed, becoming a major expression of male homosexuality and homoerotism in China. This research detects the dynamics between BL fiction's utopianised space and gay readers—a community simultaneously being the major subject of BL representation and the minority of BL fans. Conducting semi-structured interviews with three Chinese BL gay readers from high school, college, and workplace, this research delineates a representative picture of Chinese gay readers' intentions, experiences, and opinions of involving a utopianised BL world. Using Ruth Levitas' utopian thinking framework, this research investigates how the utopianised representations of idealised homosexual romance, arousing homoerotic behaviours, and the normalised gay everydayness in Chinese BL fiction from 2000 to 2020 can impact gay readers' engagement with practical lives. The study argues that Chinese BL gay readers' active involvement and strategic interactions enable them to contingently engage with their lived reality, demonstrating their subjective role as active audiences with agency. This result adds to contemporary BL studies and provides an enriched utopian thinking framework, calling for subsequent minority research to value individuals and individuality.
... In such cases, works may originate from robust fan participation and word-of-mouth promotions, permeating everywhere, creating awareness and sparking public discourse despite restrictive legislation. These books, when dramatized into TV dramatizations, in turn, easily attract many young audiences and give adolescents an even bigger repertoire of stories about romance that further stir their interest and imagination about romantic relationships [2]. This cultural trend is particularly prominent among young women, who tend to develop a more open and inclusive attitude toward romance [3]. ...
In recent years, with an increasing awareness of mental health issues among Chinese adolescents, teenage dating has gradually become a focal point of discussion among society, educational systems, and parents. Within the unique cultural context of China, adolescent dating intersects with educational values, family attitudes, and social morality. Traditional Chinese society generally maintains a conservative stance on adolescent romantic relationships, viewing them as potential distractions from academic performance and future development. However, as globalization progresses and adolescents sense of personal identity strengthens, an increasing number of teenagers are exploring emotional autonomy, making teenage dating an undeniable social phenomenon. This paper systematically examines the varied perspectives of Chinese society, schools, and parents on teenage dating through literature analysis. It investigates how these attitudes impact adolescents' emotional development and academic performance. Findings reveal that, although parents and schools predominantly hold negative views toward teenage dating, citing concerns about academic distraction, psychological pressure, and potential health risks, adolescents' emotional needs and the influence of social culture have grown more pronounced in recent years, leading to the normalization of teenage dating. Moreover, the lack of systematic emotional education in schools has exacerbated adolescents confusion about romantic relationships, resulting in a need for more effective guidance. This paper proposes that schools and families improve communication, provide balanced emotional education, and harmonize emotional guidance with academic development to support adolescents' healthy growth and mental well-being
... The sensational '227 incident' (Wang and Ge, 2023: 356) and the ban of dangai (Huang, 2022) were considered to be caused by fans of the main actors of two famous dangai television series, The Untamed (陈情令) and Word of Honour (山河令). Remarkably, although these issues are not closely linked to danmei and queer culture per se, the state has been able to take the opportunity to compress the creative environment for danmei, as demonstrated by the difficulty in publishing physical books of danmei (Yang and Xu, 2017), the stringent censorship of online content 7 / 12 involving elements of danmei and dangai (Wang, 2020), and the downplaying of queer elements by dangai (Nim, 2022), among other things. ...
Danmei (耽美), which is also called ‘boy’s love’ (abbreviated as BL), refers to fantasy textual stories depicting
gay male romantic relationships (McLelland and Aoyama, 2015). The rapid proliferation of this popular
culture has triggered scholars to reflect on the ‘queer culture’ in which it is represented. This article aims to
explore the intrinsic connection between Chinese danmei culture and Chinese queer culture in digital media.
By adopting the research method of media archaeology and culture materialism, I will map the development
of danmei culture in mainland China into three periods: repression period (1994-2003) when the state
authority compelled danmei and queer culture to find shelter in virtual cyberspace; permeation period (2003-
2016) when queer culture reshaped danmei culture, and the former two generate multiple forms of expression
on the internet; and circulation period (2016-2021) when digital media industrialised danmei culture. Then, a
cultural framework, ‘queer-danmei-media’ will be proposed, in reference to the interaction of ‘affect-bodyworld’ described by Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth, and Lisa Blackman, to reinforce the social and
political functions of danmei and transfer it from generalised pop culture towards the cultural representation
and campaign position of queerness and feminism.
... To survive regulations and continue their profit from queer content, the Chinese media industry produces dan'gai content, encouraging fans' participation in reading queerness from opacity (Ng & Li, 2020;Zheng, 2024). Therefore, queer opacity in Chinese TV/web series is conceptualized as a masquerade where male-male romance is depicted under the guise of homosocial bromance (Hu & Wang, 2021;Nim, 2022). When employing opacity tactics to produce adapted dramas, Chinese producers often highlight traditional Chinese values and cultural elements while downplaying any queer components within the original novels, shaping opacity as a Chinese queer feature intertwined with homonormativity, homonationalism, and homocapitalism (Ng & Li, 2023;Ye, 2022). ...
Drawing on Stanley Fish’s concept of interpretive communities, this article explores the various transcultural interpretations of queer opacity, a Chinese variant of queerness within dan’gai web series. This study reveals that while viewers employ a shared interpretive strategy of queer reading to identify queer opacity, the effect of queer interpretation is contingent upon the queer interpretive subcommunities’ familiarity with Chinese culture. Moreover, different cultures possess sub-strategies of queer reading: visibility reading is often practiced in the global northwest to initiate visibility politics in society, while opacity reading is used in the global southeast in an unconfrontational manner within fictional worlds. By examining a layered interpretive phenomenon that involves transcultural reaction videos towards the Chinese dan’gai web series The Untamed (TU), alongside the danmu from Chinese viewers on these videos, this study contributes to scholarship on transcultural queerness through the lenses of queer opacity and transcultural reader reception.
The male-male romance web series The Untamed reached a height of media interest in the summer of 2019 in China. Numerous Chinese young women were obsessed with the drama centred on the relationship between the two male protagonists, and many fan followers identified themselves as ‘ The Untamed Girls’. Through online observation of young female fans of the male-male romance web series, this study articulates how they were self-organised as a counterpublic and utilised strategic ways to negotiate with the party-state censorship. Drawing upon the conceptualisation of ‘ambivalence’, the study analyses a dual ambivalence in their collective actions. It is argued that The Untamed Girls’ participation as a popular feminist project is, however constantly intertwined with an assumption of heteronormativity and an internalised misogyny, where these seemingly empowered women are simultaneously reaffirming a heterosexual regulation of sexual desires and devaluing women when they celebrate the male-male romance embodied in such a drama series.
Danmei, aka Boys Love, is a salient transgressive genre of Chinese Internet literature. Since entering China’s niche market in 1990s, the danmei subculture, predominantly in the form of original fictional creation, has established an enormous fanbase and demonstrated significance via thought-provoking works and social functions. Nonetheless, the danmei genre is not an innovation in the digital age, in that its bipartite dichotomy between seme ‘top’ and uke ‘bottom’ roles bears similarities to the dyad in caizi-jiaren ‘scholar-beauty’ anecdotes featuring masculine and feminine ideals in literary representations of heterosexual love and courtship, which can be attested in the 17th century and earlier extant accounts. Furthermore, the feminisation of danmei characters is analogous to an androgynous ideal in late-imperial narratives concerning heterosexual relationships during late Ming and early Qing dynasties, and the depiction of semes being masculine while ukes being feminine is consistent with the orthodox, indigenous Chinese masculinity which is comprised of wen ‘cultural attainment’ epitomising feminine traits and wu ‘martial valour’ epitomising masculine traits. In terms of modern literature, danmei is parallel to the (online) genre yanqing ‘romance’ that is frequently characterised by ‘Mary Sue’ and cliché-ridden narration.
Masculinity in contemporary China can be embodied by myriads of works featuring male-male same-sex intimacy and eroticism, which fall into a genre dubbed as danmei ‘addicted to beauty; indulgence in beauty’, aka Boys Love (BL). As a marginalised yet increasingly visible subculture, danmei writing has attracted legions of female producers/consumers, who are (self-)referred to as ‘rotten girls’. The female-oriented fiction is overwhelmingly marked by a conspicuous dichotomy differentiating seme (top) from uke (bottom) roles, and a prodigious amount of narratives concern feminisation of uke characters, motivated by the prevailing ‘soft masculinity’. Nonetheless, readers also delight in a subcategory of danmei featured by shaonü gong ‘maiden/adolescent-girl seme’ manifesting epicene demeanour and conducting sajiao which denotes playing cute/winsome/petulant or performing pettishness/coquettish. The sajiao acts of semes indicate authorial personae and the ‘cuteness’ youth culture, especially the ‘paradoxical cuteness’ integrating masculinity and femininity as well as cross-dressing and cross-gender performance. Furthermore, seme characterisation entailing enfeebled virility enables female readers to challenge heteropatriarchal and heteronormative zeitgeist, and it mitigates women’s dread and anxiety concerning sexual violence, exploitation, and oppression in real-world contexts.
This article examines how the adaptation process and fan engagement are constituted in the Mainland China media landscape by focusing on the phenomenally popular online drama Guardian (镇魂 2018). Through an in-depth analysis of this series, the article explores the contestation and negotiation between the "top-down expurgation" from the drama's production team during its adaptation process and the "bottom-up subversion" from the fans of this series during its reception and consumption. If the intentional expurgation signifies a strategy of survival confronting the restrictions imposed by censors, then the fans' creative activities work as a kind of resistance to the (post)socialist ideology in China, where homosexuality has been considered a violation of patriarchal heterosexual family, where supernatural narratives have been viewed as backward superstitions, and socially wronged lower-class members are seen as a threat to social stability. The adaptation of Guardian from novel to drama and its reception becomes a battlefield of strategic compliance and resistance, where economic demand and political power, modern liberal attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and equality and traditional values concerning harmony, conformity, and authority contest and negotiate.
Originating in Japan, “boys love” (BL) manga and fiction that focus on romantic or homoerotic male-male relationships are considered by most of their writers, readers, and scholars to be primarily by women and for women and are purposely differentiated from gay fiction and manga by both commentators and practitioners. However, BL's increasing interweaving with homosexuality and sexual minorities in China requires scholars to reread and redefine BL practice in its Chinese context. This article discusses some of the recent transformations of the BL genre in China, examines the significant role female practitioners have played in indigenizing BL, and ultimately points to the trend of consciously writing and reading BL through a homosexual lens. By reflexively constructing “gayness” in BL works, these practices have also created a peer-led educational space on nonnormative sexuality and gender identity. The author also examines how BL “poaches” official and mainstream cultures, resulting in their considering BL the primary fictional vehicle of homosexuality. She therefore suggests that the trend of conflating BL with homosexuality and the deliberate homosexualization of BL in both texts and real life have ultimately extended the cultural identity of BL, as well as its political meaning, and in practice have created a porous culture that welcomes gender diversity and helps increase the visibility of the gay community, revealing a significant social and cultural shift that cannot be ignored or reversed.
This chapter explores the ways in which critical issues of representational appropriation are belittled by way of both apologetic gesture and shielding. This chapter's analysis is twofold: while critiquing the separation between fantasy and reality—“they do not represent gay men in reality”—it aims to critically reflect upon this perspective in order to better understand the elements intrinsic to the genre. The fraught relationship between gay men and Boys Love (BL) creators goes back to a 1992 article by gay critic Satō Masaki, who argued that BL represented misappropriated gay romance. Gay men also observed that the protagonists deny or repudiate homosexuality since it is important for the female readership that these characters experience an exclusive attraction to each other. Despite engaging romance, these characters reject homosexuality and are often troubled by feelings of guilt or repulsion, as if same-sex love were a bad thing.
This chapter discusses the problems that emerge from the proliferation of different terms referring to genres of male-male romance writing in Japan. Drawing from the insights of Boys Love (BL) light novel writers and manga artists, it argues that a failure to distinguish between genres can not only lead to confusion on multiple levels, but also impede the development of research that uses the genres as variables to explain a distinct social phenomenon associated with each. The chapter also presents their perceptions on the other subgenres of BL. In discussing the categories shōnen'ai, tanbi, JUNE, yaoi, and BL, the interviewees stressed both chronological and narrative content difference between these terms. For instance, they associate the traditional term shōnen'ai with the pioneering manga by the Fabulous Forty-Niners, while tanbi (aesthetic) literature for them is most associated with themes explored by “aesthetic” authors such as Thomas Mann and Oscar Wilde in Europe.
Today it is not surprising that there should be degree and other courses in media, film, television and cultural studies. Yet behind these developments lies an ongoing history of conflicts over what can legitimately be called ‘culture’. The setting up within the educational system of courses on media and cultural studies marks the recognition that it is not just Fine Art or Literature that constitute the ‘cultural’ in society. Left-wing intellectuals and Marxist ideas have played an important role in achieving this change in attitude. The contributions coming from these have not only entailed a positive assessment of the possibilities of the television age, but have also developed a radical politics. The campaign to broaden definitions of culture to include ‘ways of life’ has often been linked to struggles for a more democratic and egalitarian society. From this point of view, the problem has not been to make Culture more accessible to the people (in the manner of Mathew Arnold or Lord Reith), but to redefine ‘culture’ in order to valorise and explain areas of experience and meaning previously discounted within educational, broadcasting and other institutions (Williams, 1971, pp. 9–15; Mulhern, 1980). As will be shown, this led to important debates on the meaning of the term ‘popular culture’.
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