Chinese Fanfic

Since​ Trump’s re-election, worrying rumours have been circulating on Chinese social media: ‘AO3 might be in trouble. Trump wants to shut it down.’ AO3 (Archive of Our Own) is the world’s most popular website inspired by and dedicated to fanfiction – in China we’ve adopted the Japanese term doujin to refer to fan culture – and people from many countries have contributed stories imagining Trump in almost every possible scenario. The most popular, of course, are death or sex fantasies; there is an especially rich seam of erotic strong man pairings: #Trump/Putin, #Trump/Musk, #Trump/JesusChrist. #Trump/Shrek was popular in 2016 because of his ‘drain the swamp’ slogan and Shrek being a swamp monster.

Doujin is closely associated with ACGN culture: the linked worlds of anime, comics, video games and young adult novels. As ACGN has grown increasingly popular in China over the last decade, so has doujin. Fans of popular manga or novels create new plots for the characters and publish them on websites (doujinshi) read by fellow enthusiasts. One of the most popular genres, typically written by women for women, is Boys’ Love (BL), in which male characters are paired up (or ‘shipped’). They don’t have to be ACGN characters to be given the BL treatment: fantasy series are popular sources of inspiration (Harry Potter shipped with Draco Malfoy, for instance) and sometimes the protagonists are taken from real life (see #Trump).

BL arrived in China with the rise of the web-novel in the mid-2000s and now dominates the romance market. A generation of schoolgirls are growing up reading BL, just as we read Chiung Yao in the 1980s. Chiung Yao was quite productive by pre-internet standards – she published more than sixty novels – but most web authors have to put out a thousand words a day to keep their readers hooked. The platforms that host them pay as little as 20-30 RMB (two or three pounds) per thousand characters and take up to half the tips writers receive from appreciative readers. One famous author admitted to receiving less than 5000 RMB for a novel of 300,000 words. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the web-novel market in China was worth 40 billion RMB in 2023 and has 24 million writers, 36 million works and more than half a billion readers. Only a handful of those writers have a traditional book contract or – even better – a TV/movie/radio drama adaptation of their work. Most write for themselves and their community; author-reader interactions are often intimate. A writer might share a bit of their daily life when they get to the end of a chapter (‘I’ll be busy with chores tomorrow, so I might be late with updates’) and sometimes they ask readers how they would like the story to go. If a reader is an especially good tipper, a writer might create subplots catering to their taste. The production model and fierce competition means that the most popular web-novels are reliably addictive reading.

In 2019 the BL novel The Founder of Diabolism was made into a TV series, making stars of its lead actors, Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo. In the adaptation, however, homosexual love is turned into brotherhood. A gay friend of mine complained that you need a magnifying glass to find the romance; viewers who didn’t know the original novel had no clue. Xiao and Wang’s armies of fans split into two camps and fought on social media. This brought AO3 to the attention of the authorities, who blocked it on the mainland (it’s still accessible only via VPN). Homosexuality is a grey area in mainland China. It isn’t officially forbidden, but it mustn’t be flaunted.

But BL isn’t really about homosexuality (and few gay men read it). It’s an escape for women. Young women can’t get it right: they’re too strong or too bitchy, too weak or needy. They can’t appear overly independent, but they mustn’t be like their grandmothers either. Traditional romance writing has the same constraints. BL writers have found an imperfect solution: with two men as protagonists, everything is possible and no reader feels offended. Disturbing behaviour or scenarios – torture, violence, rape – are common, and every fetish and taboo has its own cult following.

Tags allow you to navigate BL culture. #BE (bad ending) is a turn-off for many. But difficulties are welcomed if they help to bring about a sweeter ending (a #HE is much preferred). Many Chinese BL readers have a #VirginComplex (due to society’s low tolerance for cheating and affairs) and expect the male leads to partner for life. #ABO (alpha, beta, omega) allows for male pregnancy – an alpha male/female can impregnate an omega male – and many writers like to see the omega male in a role traditionally assigned to women (a popular Trump subgenre has him as an omega male impregnated by alpha males). Readers who want just romance without the dangers of pregnancy or childbirth know to avoid #ABO scenarios.

Tags also describe the setting, which can range from mythical realms to contemporary college campuses. Female authors use traditionally male-dominated genres such as martial arts, doomsday, hardcore sci-fi, gangster and even eSports. Social issues such as class, generational conflict, wealth disparity, discrimination against minorities and nepotism are touched on. Funny works are praised: one web-novel, Mr Dior, pokes fun at every popular BL sub-genre (CEO, sugar daddy, warlord, mafia godfather, merman prince etc). There are no ugly or short men in this universe. The protagonists of Shui Qian Cheng, author of a series of BL melodramas, have an average height of 188 cm: fans call them the ‘188 League’. One of the few male authors, Fei Tian Ye Xiang, is famously prolific (he wrote a novel of more than 400,000 characters in 66 days) and known for the quality of his storytelling. As a supposed gay man, he might have an advantage when writing the bedroom scenes.

Japanese BL is explicit but Chinese writers face strict regulations and censorship. Big web-novel sites such as Jinjiang are very cautious about sexual material, so BL writers usually provide a ‘pure’ version for Chinese websites and share the ‘fan service’ on foreign sites such as AO3. Fans rate the graphic scenes by vehicle metaphor: buggy, bicycle, motorcycle, car, racing car, airplane, rocket. Former ‘rocket’ level writers who have tamed their writing to avoid being charged with spreading obscene material are known as ‘wheelchairs’. Last summer a young female writer was sentenced to ten years for her graphic writings on the web-novel site Haitang, which is registered in Taiwan (outside mainland regulations). The author of The Founder of Diabolism, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, was sentenced to three years for self-publishing and distributing a minor erotic work.

There is a funny video clip imagining a young BL writer who has just passed the civil service exam seeking advice from a female lawyer:

Writer: Can I continue writing sexy BL stories while working for the government?
Lawyer: No, you cannot.
Writer: Perhaps I could post them on foreign websites so my colleagues here won’t notice?
Lawyer: You had better not test it.
Writer: Under a pseudonym maybe?
Lawyer: Highly inadvisable.
Writer (now almost begging): Is there really no way? The couple I ship are so obscure and only a handful of girls like to read about them …
Lawyer: If you really, really want to do it, wait until you are seventy years old.

Police on the mainland don’t arrest people over seventy for minor offences. That’s why senior citizens are able to gather in public parks and exchange political rumours or discuss global and domestic issues. If they were younger, they would be arrested for illegal assembly and endangering public safety.

Young men are not entirely happy about the rise of BL. The art director of the video game Black Myth: Wukong said on social media last year that he wanted to make a ‘masculine game for ballsy men’ and dismissed BL creators for their bad taste. His views have been echoed by male gamers, who complain that too many popular games feature handsome, homosexually inclined characters. Perhaps they should be grateful for the way BL authors depict them, as other writers are not so kind. The comedian Yang Li’s ‘ordinary yet confident men’ sketch wounded many male egos recently, as did Shao Yihui’s film Her Story, in which the female leads struggle with family, work and relationships while the men are losers or puppy types who like to show off their credentials by reciting the Japanese feminist Chizuko Ueno at the dinner table. Most of the audience when I saw it were women, and the men who were there didn’t know whether to laugh at lines such as ‘being born a man is the original sin’ and ‘men are also the victims of patriarchy.’ It was one of the highest grossing films in China last year.