Heterosexual relations, where they appear, are doomed, nasty or perfunctory.īL might have remained under the radar, except for an accidental collision between the enormous fan base of the actor Xiao Zhan and the much more niche BL fan fiction universe.
If Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan aren’t your cup of tea, there are other couples to choose from. The Untamed is thoroughly addictive, creating a world filled with gorgeous sets and costumes where women are largely absent, and nearly all the characters can be read as gay men. Unlike the book, there’s no scope for the protagonists to kiss, get married or break a bathtub, but there are lingering glances, rabbits bumping noses for no particular reason (rabbit is slang for a gay man), and even a brief glimpse of a gay graphic novel.
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The TV series, which had to navigate the Chinese censorship regime, stays on the side of what Hong Kong University academic Angie Baecker describes as “plausible deniability”. The original book (available in translation) is unmistakably spicy. Both actors are unfeasibly beautiful.Īctors from The Untamed including Xiao Zhan (third from right) and Wang Yibo (fourth from right) perform onstage during The Untamed National Style Concert in November 2019 in Nanjing, China (VCG via Getty Images) Produced by Tencent and screening on Netflix, it stars Xiao Zhan as the mischievous Wei Wuxian and Wang Yibo as the rather stiff Lan Zhan. The show most responsible for bringing BL into the mainstream is The Untamed, a fantasy epic adapted from the most popular BL novel in China, The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation ( Mo Dao Zu Shi, 魔道祖师). Boys’ love is largely written by women, for women, and has little connection to gay fiction and even less with the often-grim reality of gay life in China. While the writing feels thoroughly queer, there’s a twist. Known as danmei (耽美 – indulging beauty) in Chinese, the tradition has strong roots in Korea and Japan.
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While a decade ago this genre was bubbling away in the quietest corners of the Chinese internet, a series of hit online and TV dramas mean BL is now big business.īoys’ love isn’t new, dating back to 1960s fan fiction that saw Captain Kirk and Doctor Spock finally acting on the sexual tension between the characters portrayed by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. Yet just a year later, Chinese TV hit on the secret sauce: take out the women, set it in a fantasy world, and ramp up the sexual tension between the boys.īoys’ love, or BL, is the new black, and Chinese audiences and readers can’t get enough of it. A drama about class divisions set in present-day China – where class divisions aren’t up for discussion – was never going to work. Following the tensions between a poor girl and four rich boys, the mainland version was unwatchable. A 2018 Chinese remake of the Taiwanese show Meteor Garden is a good example.
For years, Chinese television dramas were the poor cousins of Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese soap operas.
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