Get Excited About: Cdramas, Xianxia and Chinese Media
When was the last time you discovered an entirely new-to-you world of art and culture?
We all have that TV show that got us through lockdown — at least, I hope you did. I wouldn’t have made it without my dog and the online community I found that got utterly deranged about xianxia disaster hotties.
What’s certain is that since spring 2020, I’ve watched very little TV in English. This is new for me. I was never a weeb or a kpop girlie; I’m not into anime or manga, and I’ve still never seen a Godzilla movie. (I know! Don’t worry, Chicago has me covered.) I did, however, have that one friend who’d inhale trashy TV with me. We’d been wending our way through The Vampire Diaries, but as the pandemic dragged on, she suggested something different; something with subtitles: The Untamed.
“It’s Hamlet plus Game of Thrones in gay ancient fantasy China,” another friend told me.
I couldn’t not check it out.
I’ve since consumed a lot of these stories, some modern dramas of various genres but mostly xianxia, a subgenre of wuxia, which has a long and awesome literary history in China and beyond. The very briefest summation goes something like this: In the antique martial arts world, known as the jianghu, various sects can cultivate their internal energy to interact with reality. Sometimes this explores high-fantasy gods and ascended immortals; sometimes this means earthly squabbles with amazing fight choreography. I am very much an outsider, a newbie and a guest in these spaces, so please don’t take me as an authority. I just really, really enjoy what these stories have opened up for me — and I’d love to encourage others to give them a try.
Some things to know about Chinese fantasy TV going in
Set your expectations. Until recently, American TV was all about 22-episode seasons, which might or might not get renewed each year. Korean dramas are still more like this, with your average kdrama running about 16 hour-long episodes covering one story. Chinese dramas laugh in the face of a set season length. The Untamed is 50 episodes, Ashes of Love and Immortal Samsara are 60, The Romance of Tiger and Rose is 23, Word of Honor is 37 (depending on whether your streaming services includes that crucial epilogue). The good news is you don’t have to worry about the show being canceled before it finishes airing — the whole story has been filmed, and the episodes are a digestible 40 minutes or so. The bad news is that you don’t return to beloved characters and worlds with new material, at least not officially.
That’s probably not the actor’s real voice. This is fascinating, actually! There are lots of reasons why a character’s dialogue is dubbed in post-production, ranging from nonstandard Chinese dialects to chaotic filming conditions to simply preferring an actor’s look to their sound. Here’s a 2017 interview with a leading voice actor for an inside perspective.
The budget and production value might throw you at first. In Anglophone media, we’ve largely lost mid- and low-budget TV. I think this is a function of cowardly executives who only fund a project if they think it’ll become Succession or Stranger Things. Matt Damon famously spoke about how losing physical media puts outsized pressure on any film to bring in mega box office returns. Cdramas, for better and for worse, make a lot of story happen with a lot of ingenuity. I just finished one show in which human-animal spiritual hybrids are transformed with pretty much just school-play greasepaint (I loved it). Some dramas represent massive armies with a handful of unenthused extras, but we’re meant to understand that this is a force of thousands. The CGI may or may not be worse than the practical effects. And yet: we buy in.
Corollary: We have to mention the wigs. The men especially are often subject to baffling hair costuming. Yes, the sideburns are also hair that is tied up with the rest of the cascade of flowing locks. Yes, the forehead is sometimes a suggestion rather than a feature. Some actors are beloved of the wig gods; others have more supplicating to do. Just go with it. Pointing this out is like pointing out a painting is made of paint.
Wang Haoxuan (Xue Yang in The Untamed) is beloved of the wig gods. He looks amazing in every period drama he's in.
Those cool locations are real, though. If you thought the Hollywood backlots of yore were a big deal, get ready for Hengdian World Studios. It’s the largest film studio in Asia, and it claims to offer backdrops for 5,000 years of history. You want palaces, manor houses, villages, military border forts, 19th and early 20th-century cities, natural settings, any of the above? It’s probably shot in Hengdian. One of the truest delights of watching lots of cdramas is spotting locations you know from other shows. Hengdian and similar are also why actors dub their dialogue in post-production — with so many dramas filming with so much equipment in adjoining spaces, it’s hardly worth it for most to capture their own sound live.
Yes, you can see the censorship. The Untamed is very famously a queer love story; the novel it’s based on, called The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, features explicit gay sex and lots of pining. For a brief moment, despite existing strictures, the Chinese film industry realized danmei webnovels were a cash cow waiting to happen. A flurry of adaptations became a launchpad for some actors into a kind of stardom that makes Swifties look tame. These shows maintain the emotional intensity of the love story but had to compromise on depicting queerness, so most of the signposts of attraction were subsumed into literary signifiers like admiring the moon together. Today, dramas that were filmed during this rush to capitalize on BL (boys’ love), like Eternal Faith and Immortality, languish in development purgatory. The leads of some of the biggest hits have been rocked by outlandish-sounding scandals, with Word of Honor’s Zhang Zhehan effectively blacklisted from acting in Mainland China and The Untamed’s Xiao Zhan only just recovering his stature after a string of wholesome roles which deprive us of the roguish, anarchic charm that made his turn as Wei Wuxian so iconic.
We honor the art by seeing the big picture. I don’t believe in punishing creativity because of a creator’s shitty government. Besides, getting interested in these shows has opened me up to incredible people and communities. Being curious about, say, vocabulary or kinship terms has led me to ask questions and get to know so much more about an entire world and its diasporas. There’s also the joy of being a total beginner. Cdramas have immersed me in an entirely new-to-me language of tropes, references, jokes, histories, philosophies and accepted norms. Without traveling, my experience of stories has been totally reframed. Learning about what I’d taken for granted also allows me to ask better questions about those political things I care about.
Most of all, these shows speak for themselves. They’re not all masterpieces — I have watched some terrible shows because I love a particular actor or concept! There are cynical cash grabs and insipid scripts and aggravating choices, as in any media landscape. But I also think there’s a certain fearlessness about cdramas. They will take the silliest concept you can smash together and just run with it. They care about chemistry and emotions so much! There is a joyous community theater feeling about some of my favorite low-budget shows, wherein the viewer can’t help but get caught up in the joy of the characters and dynamics. You can tell when everyone is having fun. And when the production value matches a show’s ambition, some of the most incredible storytelling I’ve ever seen can follow.
If you’re sold, start here.
Below are a few of my xianxia favorites. Some are available on Netflix, but many more live on Viki, which has a Roku app. There are several Chinese-language streaming services available with English support, but the only other one I pay for is iQIYI, which, just a heads up, has the jankiest interface I’ve ever used on a smart TV. The reward for the annoyance is high, though, as iQIYI produces some killer big-name dramas.
The Untamed
The first words we hear in Episode 1 are Great news! Wei Wuxian is dead!
Wei Wuxian may be the ultimate villain of a terrible inter-sect war, but not everything is what we’re told it is. When, years after his death, our protagonist suddenly wakes up in another man’s body, he has to figure out both why he’s been resurrected and how to hide his identity from his rival-turned-soulmate, Lan Wangji.
Watching The Untamed can be disorienting the first time, but stick with it — after two episodes in medias res, we begin a long flashback which makes that weird beginning amazing and heartbreaking. The plot is part murder mystery, part family drama, part trauma narrative and all deep-seated love story. The ensemble is flawless, the characters will win you over many times over and the world-building will light you up with questions and possibilities. It’s on Netflix, though fans have feelings about their subtitles (those available on Viki are considered much more reliable, and they often supply cultural context too).
This trailer looks exciting yet dreary, but I can’t say enough how much this show is also hilarious, charming, heartfelt, nasty, shocking and generous.
Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity
If a long series sounds like too much for a first bite, give this 2020 film on Netflix a try. The masterfully surreal yet precise cinematography, the rich mix of humans and demons, the odd-couple leads and the expert pacing make Dream of Eternity a more-than-worthy Mandarin-language entry in a storied Japanese franchise.
The frame story is simple: four cultivators come to the capital to suppress a demonic serpent that’s trapped beneath the city. One of them hates all demons; another is the son of a fox spirit. These two come to rely on each other more than they could have imagined — which is some real boilerplate, but this film earns it. You’ll appreciate Mark Chao and Deng Lun’s fabulous chemistry, as well as the artistry of every bit of material culture, from the costumes to the weapons to the lush and intimate settings.
Best of all, cdramas actually know how to light scenes set in the dark. You’ll be able to see all of it — a lost practice elsewhere!
Ms. Cupid in Love
How do you find new shows to watch? It’s so simple: go to MyDramaList and explore what else your favorite cast has done. That’s how I found Ms. Cupid in Love, a straightforward treat of a romantic comedy starring Cao Yuchen (the “peacock” Jin Zixuan in The Untamed) and Tian Xiwei. He’s an immortal war god who accidentally destroys the heavenly matchmaking matrix; she’s the mortal kingdom’s No. 1 matchmaker, facing a world which no longer wants to get married (see previous). We’ve got memory loss, fake dating, a competitive fashion show, a little kidnapping, a little mythic questing and a gaggle of great supporting characters.
There’s a thriving genre of lighthearted period pieces that poke fun of modernity, like The Legendary Life of Queen Lau, My Heroic Husband, Oh! My Emperor and the reverse-transmigration meta-morsel Mr. Bad. I love these because they’re so open-hearted. They’re not overly concerned with lore — they’re here to have a good time and to scratch an itch, both for the makers and the viewers.
The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty
This one is cheating, but only a little. There’s no magic in Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, except (rimshot!) the incredible cast. How can you not love this premise, though? Tang Fan is a low-level civil servant who only wants to slack off and eat out. Sui Zhou is a traumatized former soldier with a mission to keep the imperial city safe. Both are roped into a larger scheme by the ruthless but charming palace eunuch Wang Zhi. Expect food porn, found families, cross-dressing, high stakes and magnificent fight scenes with all the hallmarks of executive producer Jackie Chan’s kinetic and slyly funny style. The opening credits are also one hell of a banger.
For all of Sleuth’s marvelous charms, it’s also a window into certain kinds of -isms within China. Major supporting characters and subplots belong to nomadic steppe peoples such as the Oirats and the Jurchens; the characters are beyond great, but they’re very much written by outsiders. Orientalism does exist within China, as we also see in shows like Love Between Fairy and Devil, in which the monstrous male lead heads a tribe of Turkic-shaded immortals. All these roles work hard to humanize the terrifying other and rebuke the protagonists’ prejudices, but it would be a disservice to turn off your analytical brain just because you’re reading subtitles. I’m not qualified to lead this conversation, but it is one of those things that cdramas can open you up to — more questions, more ways of thinking about the world.
My Journey to You
This is my most recent obsession. It’s truly one of the greatest shows in any language I’ve ever seen.
Imagine Marvel’s Red Room, the hypercompetent Soviet spies who gave us Black Widow, versus the Starks of Winterfell and you’ve got My Journey to You. The Wufeng assassins have overrun almost all of the martial arts world — save for the Gong family, a powerful and paranoid sect perched on an impregnable fort in an isolated valley. The only way to destroy them is to send Wufeng moles as candidates for the upcoming bride selection.
One is Yun Weishan, a heart-weary but brilliant killer who longs for freedom. There may be more Wufeng assasins among the brides, but she doesn’t know who and neither do we. Her mission becomes even more complicated when the head of the family and the future leader of the sect are murdered in one fell swoop, leaving just one unlikely heir to the dynasty: the second-youngest son, Gong Ziyu, a useless disaster of a man.
If you loved Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity, you’re ready for My Journey to You. It’s by the same writer-director, and giving Guo Jingming 24 hours to play in pays off in spades. The sensory experience of the show is sublime, a feast of shivering gingko leaves, exquisite embroidered robes, shining ornamentation and rich wood interiors. Each episode culminates in some truly breathtaking revelation or cliffhanger, effortlessly executed. Almost every character, especially those in the embattled Gong household, is either rancid or insane, from the teen incel poisonmaster to the hidebound council of elders to the exquisitely funny and lovelorn eldest daughter who stays up nights to invent horrific weapons. They’re fascinating and even sympathetic, with desires and dependencies that both move and horrify.
I’ve shared a scene above to give a sense of the show itself, but you should really watch the trailer too, for the sweep of it.
There’s more where that came from!
Thanks for reading my first post! I’ll be writing personal essays and enthusiastic explainers about twice a week going forward. Look for my intro to Korean fantasy TV soon. Let me know if you’ve got any thoughts or recommendations — I’d love to hear from you! ✶