Spring Thoughts Under Moonlight: Getting It On in Fantasy Ancient China
So many cdrama romances unfold within strict parameters, but things aren't as simple (or as rigid) as censorship versus sensuality.
Everybody has that fantasy universe they wish were real, or at least that they could take part in. Which element would you bend in Avatar: The Last Airbender? What’s your go-to DnD build? Personally, I want to know my daemon, the animal companion that represents your soul from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (also known as Paradise Lost for kids).
A central prop in Pullman’s universe is the alethiometer, his titular golden compass that reveals the truth through many-layered combinations of symbols, each intuited with a different meaning according to context and interpretation. I bring this all up to quote the writer, translator and editor S. Qiōuyì Lù, who proclaimed on Twitter, “Chinese is one of the most alethiometer-ass languages around.”
I’m not qualified to discourse on the linguistics of it all, but I can say a little about one kind of global language: horniness.
What we’re up against
Very few, if any, of the cdramas I’ve watched completely sidestep romance. This is a feature, not a bug. One fascinating subplot in the excellent Zhou dynasty detective thriller Luoyang follows a couple joined by arranged marriage learning to actually love each other. The near-future sci-fi series Love Crossed dangles intriguing questions about using artificial intelligence to commodify love. Every quest, reincarnation cycle, group project and murder mystery is a vehicle for the real question: Will these dummies just kiss already?
Be careful what you wish for. Thanks to a combination of social conservatism, profit motive and state expectations of media, these love stories can struggle under some deeply corny tropes. Somehow, the most beautiful people you’ve ever seen are so talented, kind, friendly, funny, compelling, rich and maladjusted that the mere suggestion of asking for what they want shakes their propriety and rattles their repression. I haven’t seen the drama below, but these clips exemplify a practice that kdrama fans have dubbed the dead fish kiss: paralyzed, blank eyes staring, utterly bloodless — and far too often, obligatory as accidental first contact.
There is something silly and fun about otherwise competent and attractive young adults fumbling into true love with a pure heart, just like it’s silly and fun to imagine actors and television professionals (not known, in my experience, for their inhibitions) winking at the audience for a living about desire. You’ll also find international fans arguing about whether this good, clean romance is better than Western fare, because it’s not sex-obsessed and demeaning the way Anglophone media can be, thus making the censorship some kind of crucible or silver lining.
Personally, that doesn’t hold a lot of water for me. While it’s fantastic to enjoy and appreciate what we have, we are being robbed of what these artists could create under different circumstances. That said, China has a long tradition — think centuries, millennia — of horny merriment. Keep thinking about that alethiometer, we’re going to enjoy the metaphor.
Baby, you can drive my car
In 2018, China empowered a new, consolidated regulatory agency to oversee film, journalism and publishing, called the National Radio and Television Administration. I tried looking up an English-language guide to NRTA expectations for TV and web dramas, but even in Chinese-language media, the rules seem more like vibes than structure. There have been reported bans on history, folk culture and magic, on lavish palace life and men with earrings or dyed hair, on Korean dramas, on queerness and genderfuckery, on time travel, on “puppy love” and over-the-top fannishness, on shows with more than 40 episodes.
Weirdly enough, these cultural crackdowns have not prevented actual human beings from feeling actual human feelings and wanting to talk about them. One incredible venue where this plays out is the world of amateur fiction — webnovels, many of them danmei (“boys’ love” or BL). Dr. Aiqing Wang of the University of Liverpool has written a super accessible and fascinating paper about circumventing censorship in self-publishing and related forums. She finds that metaphor, euphemism, Chinese-English code-switching, satire and truly impressive wordplay can both protect online communities and resist “the conservative traditional norms prescribing that women must be chaste and subservient to men.” One example:
Other scholars (and netizens too) argue that self-censorship is what drags down storytelling. In his 2022 paper “When a Subculture Goes Pop: Platforms, Mavericks and Capital in the Production of ‘Boys’ Love’ Web Series in China,” Dr. Sheng Zou of Hong Kong Baptist University examines the market incentives creators face when they finally move from the periphery to the center of culture production.
“There is an unresolved paradox for subcultures between gaining visibility/viability on the one hand and retaining integrity on the other. The former ensures the reproducibility of subcultural forms, while the latter the survival of subcultural meanings… The temptation and pressure for a subculture to enter a scalable economy of reproduction are immense. However, once it enters the economy of scale and reproduces its style in commodity forms, the subculture betrays its own basis of existence and loses its integrity.”
Selling out is another one of those universal dilemmas. Is it better to make the story, even in an altered or watered-down form, so it might open more people to the original? Is it worth it to change something important to your story to placate a censorious state and a socially conservative widest-possible audience?
Get it, girl
I started watching cdramas four years ago, sort of assuming that I’d never see anything as frisky as Supernatural, much less True Blood or Gossip Girl. Every so often, I’d catch some funny interview bloopers or a slightly more open-mouthed kiss, but I’d set my expectations and I was here for other things. I love the plots, the costumes, the tropey side quests, the melodrama! I love the slow burns, the earned friendships, the over-the-top acts of vengeance, the systems of mythology, the fight scenes, the sets and locations, the material culture of the props. I sort of took the romances for granted: yeah, I’m rooting for the couples, but we know they’ll find love. Gimme the trappings! It’s the details that makes it special!
Then along came My Journey to You. I was already hungry from the luscious cinematography, the high-stakes spy stuff and the fabulously unhinged Gong family. Then one of our resident lady assassins made her move on her mark, the brooding antagonizer Gong Shangjue.
Hang on, I thought, as they slipped nakedly into their alone and nakedly wet and aesthetic soaking bath. Hang on!!!!!!!!!
It happened again: I’d found A Familiar Stranger on a list of soul-swapping dramas (yes, I love that there are enough of them for lists!). Something something two strangers switch faces, and Face/Off was a formative text of my teenage years, so, with such short episodes, why not give it a try? This show is pandirectionally horny, with an enemies!!! frisson between the female leads and two Decidedly Proactive male leads (one bad, one very good). I can’t emphasize enough, though, how charged every scene between the two female leads is. It feels like it was done on purpose.
“Homoromantic suggestiveness in Chinese TV series is a local inflection of a global phenomenon,” writes our critic Zou, “where gay imagery and culture have been proliferated via consumerism and converted into mere style, innocuous and seductive.”
Okay. Fair. We should have more of these delights across sexualities, body types and orientations, for real and with weight. It’s not actually enough that “[m]oving beyond eros, [BL dramas] have revolved around sublimated themes, promoting officially sanctioned values such as positivity, moral uprightness, diligence and self-actualization” once they actually have investors and a budget.
Who by fire
You’ve already met my guy Zhang Linghe, the 190-cm engineering student who was scouted out of college into costume drama after costume drama. His debut roles tended toward the painfully upright — the earnest second lead who would never get the girl. Then I saw him get mean.
The Story of Kunning Palace is about a horrible empress who gets a do-over, waking up upon her death in her 18-year-old body. For all her efforts to stay out of trouble, she winds up in the weirdest hot-for-teacher scenario with the man who brought her down in her previous life, a court minister and rebel who’s unimpeachable on the outside and a certified freak on the inside. It’s magnificent.
O-oh, I thought, as they finally [redacted], after hours, months of snarling and snapping at each other. Oh, they’re [redacted]. Even in the happily-ever-after, they’re really [redacted], huh.
You know when the chemistry is scorching and the female lead is a baller and the male lead is hitting all your buttons and you have that record-scratch moment, like, I’m not a weirdo, but this is… quite real, isn’t it? So did a lot of viewers. Rumors about the fabulous Bai Lu and Zhang Linghe dating circulated for well over a year. Those rumors spurred precipitous drops in his social media follower count, as angry fans took it out on him for being “distracted” from his work.
Now the rumor is that Bai Lu’s agency forced them to break up just before the new year. The relationship would have “affected her acting career.” We only know anything from carefully controlled scraps distributed by management and wild speculation from the internet, layers upon layers of it could be anything. Self-censorship. The fantasy universe we wish were real.
Absence of evidence vs. evidence of absence
I don’t know why some cdramas get to be more hot’n’heavy than others. I don’t know the mechanism by which some productions are allowed to seize you through the screen and crack you open where you sit. But I think for people like me, who are outside both China itself and the Sinophone diaspora, it’s worth thinking about the assumptions we carry into our enjoyment of these shows.
There are lots of reasons why a disinterested party might sneer at cdrama romance: the unseriousness of girl things or queer things or sex things, the racism that can dismiss a cast out of hand as agents of desire, the presumption that “tame” stories don’t have value, the belief that you understand a work the same way its intended audience does. The idea that what you see from the outside is all there is. The embarassment of your own body and heart.
Which is silly. I dismiss all of that. We love romances because we want to be jolted. What if we were chosen? What if we could let ourselves have one dearest simple wish? We want to be understood and to be treated with true kindness. We want to build something, and we want to choose with whom. We want the best of all possible options. We want to be intrigued, delighted, infuriated, conquering, engulfed. Our fantasies are important. They’d be important if they were only fun and illusory. We owe ourselves joy. It’s great that it could come from anywhere.
Thank you. If you’ll pardon me, I have some fiery enemies-to-lovers to scream about into my pillow. ✶
Important boilerplate for the people
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