Boys’ love fan communities manufacture extraordinary visibility of boys’ love narratives on China’s leading social media platforms, especially Weibo. The creation and dissemination of boys’ love drama adaptations is a complex process that triangulates boys’ love fans, social networking platforms and mainstream production studios in overlapping economies of labour.īoys’ love fans are not passive recipients of cultural products, but ‘prosumers’ who collapse the boundary between the consumer and the producer through the datafication of their fandom. Television dramas adapted from the boys’ love genre should not be understood through the binary of political control and the desire for dissent. Yet boys’ love and its adaptations are still under constant risk of removal and even criminal prosecution, as the genre’s frequent allusion to homosexuality puts it at odds with the central government’s conservative standards for film and television. There are at least a dozen high profile boys’ love dramas in various stages of production.īoys’ love drama adaptations freely appropriate elements from other genres, including ahistorical time travel, supernatural phenomena, alternative universes and mythical fantasy, to avoid direct references to the history or the contemporary society of China. In 2020, over 60 danmei novels from Jinjiang Literature City were purchased for live action adaptation. Yet boys’ love narratives will likely become more prominent over the next few years. There is a paradoxical acknowledgment of the power of the boys’ love genre and its derivative products on the one hand, and the maintenance of plausible deniability about the genre’s non-heteronormative origins on the other.
The dissonance involved in praising the ‘traditional cultural values’ portrayed in The Untamed without mentioning the show’s central male–male romance marks the conflict at the heart of the danmei novel’s increasing prominence in mainland China’s pop culture. The review dwelt on the chivalry and selflessness of the moral universe depicted in The Untamed, without mentioning that the main characters express their sense of justice and chivalry primarily through their devotion to one another. Broadcaster Hu Xin lauded the show’s ‘confident’ depiction of traditional Chinese culture. It was a revelation when The Untamed not only made it to air but was praised by the state-owned newspaper People’s Daily. But it was pulled from air with four episodes remaining when the romantic and sexual relationship between the two male leads became obvious.
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During this process of adaptation and negotiation, explicit sexual or romantic elements are modified or eliminated, transforming depictions of homosexual desire into ‘bromantic’ homosociality.Īttempts at adapting boys’ love web novels into live action dramas had mixed success until the short lived web series Addicted ( Shangyin) achieved broad popularity in 2016. Based on the success of these multimedia adaptations, one of China’s leading streaming platforms - the most prominent being Tencent, Youku and iQiyi - will consider purchasing the rights to adapt the story into a platform exclusive television drama.īoys’ love drama adaptations must navigate both the platform’s commercial interests and the political demands of the National Radio and Television Administration’s (NRTA) regulatory processes. Authors of popular works are approached to sell adaptation licenses, with first adaptations usually released as radio dramas, mobile games or donghua (animated comics). Live-action adaptations of danmei literature ( dangaiju) usually begin as an original work of online fiction hosted on the online literature website Jinjiang Literature City. Boys’ love, also called danmei or BL, is a subculture genre of fictional media defined by the presence of romantic male–male relationships. To the entertainment industry, The Untamed’s success is irrefutable proof of concept for the viability of adapting intellectual property from boys’ love web novels to the small screen. During its final month of broadcast, it racked up 200 million views per day and over 70 million yuan in viewing fees on its streaming platform Tencent. Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the PacificĪuthors: Angie Baecker, HKU and Yucong Hao, University of Michiganīy any metric, the Chinese television drama The Untamed was a smashing success - but especially by those measuring the show’s ability to drive data and engagement.
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