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SOCIETY & CULTURE

Danmei, a genre of
Chinese erotic fiction,
goes global
Society & Culture
Centered around romantic and sexual relationships between men,
"danmei" is wildly popular in China. It's been a hit abroad, too, with three
books recently receiving an authorized English translation — and all three
making it to the New York Times's bestsellers list.

Jin Zhao Published February 24, 2022

Illustration for SupChina by Derek Zheng

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One afternoon in August, Lee Mandelo, a writer and critic, was hit by what
he described as an “avalanche of messages and Twitter alerts” on his phone.

“Generally, you can get the sense sometimes when some big piece of news
or announcement hits because it reveals who in your community is also a
fan of this thing,” he told me as he revisited the excitement among his
online and real-life friends, authors, and those in the mainstream
publishing world of science fiction and fantasy.
“This thing” was danmei fiction, in particular three fantasy novels by one of
the most popular authors of the genre, Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù 墨香铜臭,
known by her fans as MXTX. The big news was the books’ acquisition by
Seven Seas Entertainment, a leading independent publisher of manga and
light novels in North America; these novels — Heaven Official’s Blessing (
天官赐福 tiān guān cì fú), Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (魔道祖师
módào zǔshī), and The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System (人渣反派之自救
行动 rén zhā fǎnpài zhī zìjiù xíngdòng) — were going to get an authorized
English-language release.

When the first volumes came out in December, English-speaking fans,

many of whom had read the novels’ fan translations online and/or watched
their animated or live-action TV adaptations, raved about getting their pre-
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ordered copies of the licensed translation in the mail. “I waited from August
and now it’s mine,” a reader wrote in their review of Heaven Official’s
Blessing on Amazon. The subject line: “New bible just dropped.”

At the turn of the new year, the titles — all three of them — were on the New
York Times’s Paperback Trade Fiction Bestsellers list.

This thing was indeed a big deal.

Inspired by Japanese yaoi, translated as “boys’ love” (BL), danmei is a

genre of fiction produced in China that centers around male-male romantic
and sexual relationships. It started as a niche genre in the 1990s. In recent
years, with the growth of online literature publishing, now a 25 billion yuan
($4 billion) business with around 460 million readers in China, danmei has
inspired an explosion of adaptations into graphic novels, animation, live-
action dramas, and audio dramas, and made its way into mainstream
culture despite China’s ever-tightening state censorship.

And now it’s making its way beyond China’s borders.

“The New York Times list is…curated, and queer books are often curated off
the New York Times list,” said Mandelo, who picked the three novels for his
Queering SFF reading series and wrote glowing reviews for two of them on
Tor.com. “Seeing that no one did that curating off, that all three of the
books made the list, felt pretty significant in terms of really valuing what
queer audiences want to read, and the fact that we do care about these
texts, and that transnational texts like this in translation also have that
ability to be consumed popularly and be enjoyed by audiences in the
Anglophone world.”

The first print run for the series totaled half a million copies, according to
Seven Seas. Four- and five-star ratings piled up on Amazon and its
affiliated Goodreads. At the time of this writing, the first volume of Heaven
Official’s Blessing is on the editors’ pick list on Amazon for Best Science
Fiction and Fantasy.

It would probably be overly ambitious to think that a danmei novel will

become a Three-Body Problem kind of phenomenon, but danmei fiction
and media just may be one of the few examples of contemporary Chinese
culture to achieve a significant following abroad.

Danmei, a new indulgence for “boys’ love”

fans

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For Anglophone audiences, danmei (literally meaning “obsession with

beauty” in Chinese) is a relatively new addition to queer popular content
such as slash, a genre of fanfiction featuring male-male romance that
initially grew out of fandom for Star Trek: The Original Series in the late
1970s, Japan’s yaoi imports from the 1980s and other yaoi-influenced
transnational BL media, and LGBTQ romance.

Before Seven Seas’s translations, there were already many vibrant

transnational fan communities for danmei fiction and media. A couple of
very niche independent publishers, Peach Flowers and Via Lactea, have
published licensed English translations of some lesser-known titles, but
most danmei translations were online, done by fans without official
licensing from the authors or their Chinese publishers. Readers can find
translations on websites like Exiled Rebels and Chrysanthemum Garden, or
by using portal websites like Novel Updates, which archives and provides
links to translations by individuals or groups. Some translators also post
their translations as “Carrds” — a type of one-page website — on social
media. Danmei fanfiction also has proliferated on websites such as Archive
of Our Own. In true subculture manner, almost all the online content is
non-commercial.

When Seven Seas recognized the transnational nature of danmei fandom, it

sought out fan translators Suika and Faelicy to translate titles based on
their prior translations. The demand in the international market has also
been noted by Jinjiang Wenxuecheng (JJWXC), the most dominant literary
website in China that publishes danmei webnovels, where MXTX, along
with big-name authors such as Priest (Faraway Wanderers) and Meng Xi
Shi (Thousand Autumns), is a contracted author. In January,
JJWXC announced that it will launch an international site to publish
crowd-sourced licensed translations — in English only for the beta version
— of selected novels from its website. This move sent panic to danmei fan
translators, many of whom are afraid that their translations might be
stolen. Many translators have locked their content for now. For
international danmei fans, how much this will affect their ability to access
danmei content online is yet unknown.

Anglophone readers will be

familiar with many of the tropes
in danmei, such as found family,
sibling relationships, enemies
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turning into friends into lovers,

and long separations.
In the past few years, adaptations of danmei novels, most notably Chinese
dramas The Untamed (2019) and Word of Honor (2020), and the animated
series Heaven Official’s Blessing (2020), have streamed on Netflix, and
shows such as The Guardian and Thousand Autumns have been posted on
YouTube. To many Anglophone fans, these adaptations were their gateways
to danmei fiction.

This was how Cecilia, a thirtysomething American fan of Grandmaster of

Demonic Cultivation, got into it. She started by binge-watching The
Untamed on Netflix when the pandemic started, all 50 episodes. Wanting
more, she managed to find an uncensored copy of the novel in traditional
Chinese from Taiwan. Now she not only does her own translations of
danmei, but also writes and publishes fanfiction online.

“I like the romance,” Cecilia said, “but I think what makes Grandmaster of
Demonic Cultivation in particular really fascinating is that it has
everything. It has the political drama, and it has the romance, it has the
family part, which I find really interesting, like the sibling and parent-child
dynamics. I do think that’s part of the reason why it became so popular,
because a lot of people could find things outside the main relationship that
they could relate to.”

What Cecilia described is quite common in popular danmei novels, which

often spreads across multiple storylines with an expansive cast of
characters. This is due, in part, to their origins as webnovels serialized on
literature websites, where authors are financially incentivized, like Charles
Dickens back in the day, to write longer stories with a long arc featuring
complex, interwoven storylines, and many twists and turns to keep readers
paying for new chapters.

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation has 113 main chapters and another

14 “extra” chapters featuring side stories, released after the main story is
finished. The whole thing spans across the protagonist’s two lifetimes. The
longest of the three new translations by MXTX, Heaven Official’s Blessing,
has 244 main chapters and eight extra chapters.

This form of danmei fiction gives ample room for developing stories that
might not fit in a tight structure, which, to some readers, gives danmei a
unique appeal. The sprawling narrative harkens back to some of the most
well-known classics in Chinese fiction, such as Journey to the West (西游记

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xīyóu jì), Outlaws of the Marsh (水浒 shuǐhǔ), or Romance of the Three
Kingdoms (三国演义 sānguó yǎnyì), many of which were based on the
scripts, known as huàběn 话本, of serialized oral storytelling performances
that were popular in the Song dynasty in the 10th century.

“I like that it’s not the three-act structure. It’s more whatever goes,” said
Nicky, a 26-year old Latinx American reader. “In danmei, I’m getting the
full story of almost every single person, the backstory and their life that I
don’t know I’ll get in American novels. Even the extras and the
miscellaneous information. I’m like, this so great.”

Lost and found in translation

Danmei stories often cut across genres and themes. Some of the most
popular borrow from wǔxiá 武侠 and xiānxiá 仙侠, and draw heavily on
China’s history and Buddhist, Daoist, or other Chinese cosmological
mythologies. These may be some of the most difficult to translate across
cultures with unfamiliar histories and philosophies, different tropes and
conventions.

Encouragingly, danmei may have attracted a different generation of readers

who grew up reading fantasies and who are willing to make a little effort to
overcome the uncertainty and vertigo when entering an unfamiliar world.
All three novels that Seven Seas picked to translate fall into the genre
of xianxia fantasy, set in some fantastical version of ancient China, with
characters — each often having two or three names — traversing multiple
lifetimes and physical bodies. It sounds daunting, but readers do not seem
to mind.

“It’s a fantasy,” Cecilia said about Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation.

“To me, it’s not that different from reading Lord of the Rings or The Wheel
of Time or something, where they make up their own language. In these
novels, they’re not even that made up. They’re actual terminologies. The
Chinese tropes are more established. In theory, it should be easier than
learning elfish or something.”

Danmei, a genre that centers on

intimate personal relationships
and sexual fantasy, seems at

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odds with what is generally

associated with China.
Perhaps underneath the differences, danmei has more in common with
English genre fiction than it seems. There are many tropes familiar to
Anglophone readers in these new English danmei titles, said Cecilia, such
as found family — which especially strikes a chord with LGBTQ audiences
— sibling relationships, enemies turning into friends into lovers, and long
separations. “People really enjoy them,” she said.

The difficulty posed by these culturally unfamiliar texts can also be, in critic
Lee Mandelo’s words, “a fun kind of difficulty.” “All genres have that barrier
of entry, no matter what,” he said. “I think there can be a real pleasure in
coming to a genre and place you didn’t know before and taking a moment
to figure out what are the tropes of this space, what are the histories of it,
where is this coming from.”

Counterintuitively, it is subtle cultural differences in contemporary contexts

that may pose a bigger barrier to appreciating danmei fiction for
Anglophone audiences.

“I suspect we’ll see maybe more translations of more contemporary drama.

We do tend to love a story about a mobster or a police officer, that sort of
thing,” said Mandelo, who mentioned a novel he had in mind, Silent
Reading by Priest, a crossover of a crime thriller and a romance between a
cop and an antihero type of genius. “I also do wonder how much the North
American audience will follow along a contemporary setting that’s less
familiar to them, whereas I feel we’re trained to read across cultures into
fantastical settings or science fiction.”

Queer eroticism, censorship, and making it to

the mainstream
In addition to fantasy, many Anglophone danmei fans come from the
established yaoi and yaoi-inspired boys’ love (BL) media fanbase, who are
drawn to queer romance in spite of — or often in addition to — the cultural
unfamiliarity.

In China and other Asian countries, BL has a reputation for being produced
by straight women for straight women. Some have attributed this, in part,
to women’s status in these cultures where strong heteropatriarchal
traditions discourage women from expressing and enjoying sexual desires.

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BL is a “perfect fantasy” for women in East Asia who are expected to be

“ignorant of sex and sexuality,” wrote Dr. Jungmin Kwon, professor of
digital culture and film studies at Portland University, in which they
“become acquainted with men and the male body” and “flesh out their ideal
men, who do not exist in the real world.”

BL’s appeal to straight women also goes beyond Asia. Romantic sexual
relationships between men featured in BL “kind of in a way take gender out
of it because there you have two people who are relating, romantically
engaged and sexually engaged, so the kind of cultural power differences
that play out between men and women in these situations just doesn’t
exist,” said psychologist professor Anna Madill of the University of Leeds,
who enjoys BL herself. “I find that very attractive and I think a lot of
women equally find that attractive.”

Yet research seems to suggest that Western audiences of danmei content

are more queer than those in China. Since 2014, Madill and her colleague
Yao Zhao have been collecting and analyzing data of BL fans through online
surveys in English and Chinese, and found that while Chinese danmei fans
are more likely to be straight women, the community engaging with queer
and BL fiction in the Anglophone world has a broader range of sexual
and/or gender identification.

Mandelo, who is a member of the queer community and a Ph.D. candidate

in gender studies at the University of Kentucky, also questioned the idea
that danmei is consumed mostly by straight women. “There’s a sort of
flattening that occurs,” he said. “People say just ‘straight women.’ A, even if
it was, that’s fine, but B, it doesn’t seem accurate to any observed field of BL
fandom or danmei fandom that I see. I think there’s a great deal, almost
entirely queer audience. There’s a very interesting mix of genders.”

He cited a study done in Hungary on yaoi consumption where 58% of the

participants who had consumed yaoi materials within a year were men.
“Which makes sense when you think about it,” he said. “I have encountered
a lot of transmen, transmasculine people, cis men also, who are fans. One of
my academic advisers is a cis gay man who’s also a big fan of BL culture and
writes about it.”

Danmei has revived, after nearly a

century of suppression, the
writing of eroticism, especially
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same-sex eroticism, that was

integral in China’s classics.
Despite the differences in the audiences across cultures, queer eroticism is
the one defining element in the genre that attracts its core fans, no matter if
they speak Chinese or English.

“The avid fans, those people who engage with BL a lot, who really like it, are
more engaged with the sexual content,” said Madill, whose research
suggests that with some subtle differences, Chinese and Anglophone BL
fans share very similar tastes in eroticism. “Some of it is just really kinky
pornography, but there’s usually a sense that these are people who are
enjoying a sexual relationship.”

There is a wide range of eroticism in danmei, from love stories that stop at
the bedroom door to straight-up pornography. But while enjoyed by its core
fans, the depiction of queer sex might also stand in the way of danmei
making its way to the mainstream market.

In China, where all cultural products are subject to state censorship, the
genre is a double offender, for its presentation of same-sex romance and for
its erotic content. Screen adaptations are not allowed to portray the main
male characters in a same-sex romantic relationship. The rules are not as
strict for audio drama adaptations, which is a relatively new market and
generally caters to a less mainstream audience, but that space is tightening
up as well.

In webnovels, erotic scenes and, increasingly, non-erotic scenes that

suggest romantic intimacy between two men have to be cut out or edited
when they are published in print. Even original webnovels are not spared
from more recent, stricter regulations. JJWXC has been invited to “talks”
with the regulating authorities numerous times in the past few years. The
platform was also temporarily suspended a few times and had to take down
or lock content — including two of MXTX’s three novels published in
English, Heaven Official’s Blessing and The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving
System — that was considered in violation of the publishing rules.

In the Anglophone world, although there is no state censorship, it is still

common for queer erotic scenes to be edited out in visual productions to
appeal to a more mainstream audience.

“The queer audience really, really wants and enjoys joyful erotic content,”
said Mandelo. Critics, on the other hand, are a lot less willing to engage

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with these works. “I do wonder how much of it is the sort of unwillingness

to talk openly about queer sexuality and texts that have sexual content
that’s joyous, that’s fun, that’s horny. There’s a shyness, critically, about it,
but I think audiences really want it.”

Danmei fiction may encounter a bigger challenge getting in the doors of big
publishers like Tor Books, the publisher of The Three-Body Problem in
North America. “There is still less of a readership for queer content in a lot
of ways, particularly if it has sex in it,” Mandelo said. “I think people are
willing to read maybe a queer romance as long as its straight audience
doesn’t have to engage with the fact that it is queer on the page.”

How “Chinese” is danmei?

In an essay on Tor.com, Chinese science fiction writer Xia Jia wrote that
“the Chinese science fiction of the era dating from the 1990s to the present
can be read as a national allegory in the age of globalization.” The recent
interest from the outside world in Chinese science fiction perfectly mirrors
the growing fascination and anxiety about the ancient country, which is
quickly becoming a powerful economic and technological engine, and, in
the imaginations of many, a global rival.

Danmei, on the other hand, a genre that centers on intimate personal

relationships and sexual fantasy, seems at odds with what is generally
associated with China. Joyful queer sexuality is not an aspect of China that
is usually thought to be relevant to the rest of the world, especially during
these times besieged by anxieties about geopolitical competition,
environmental and health crises, and a future that is increasingly uncertain
despite or perhaps because of technological advancement.

If science fiction gives readers a sense of participating in history, with its

predictions of the future and metaphors for the present, as science fiction
writer Kim Stanley Robinson has said, danmei does not pretend to achieve
that, even though a generation of Chinese writers, many of them young
women, find the freedom to express their views on history, politics, and
culture within danmei.

Despite the influences from Japanese yaoi and Anglophone genre fiction,
danmei is undeniably and intimately Chinese, tracing its DNA back to
traditional Chinese literature. It has revived, after nearly a century of
suppression, the writing of eroticism, especially same-sex eroticism, that
was integral in classics like The Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦 hóng
lóu mèng), Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (聊斋志异 liáo zhāi zhì yì),
and The Plum in the Golden Vase (金瓶梅 jīn píng méi), and continued the

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aesthetics for male beauty celebrated in classical poems as old as those

in The Book of Songs (诗经 shījīng), dating back to the 11th century BC.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to the genre making it big in the Anglophone
world is the mainstream culture’s unwillingness to engage the Chinese on
an intimate, personal level, and the culture on its own terms, as it still views
China as an “other.”

But that does not mean the genre won’t grow. Danmei is still a very young
genre, with about 30 years of history. Some of the most popular works were
written by authors in their 20s. MXTX is only 36, and
completed Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation at 29; Priest is 34 and
completed Faraway Wanderers at 22; Tang Jiu Qing is 25 and
completed Qiang Jin Jiu at 21. With time, more quality works will be
produced and translated into English.

More quality media adaptations accessible to transnational audiences will

continue to help popularize the genre. The animated show Heaven
Official’s Blessing on Netflix, for instance, has drawn in a new, younger
audience with a much more flexible attitude toward gender identities and
sexuality. “A writer friend of mine, a couple of them, actually, who had
older teenage children, got the first book to their kids who are also queer
older teens,” Mandelo said.

Cecilia’s partner, an American film and TV aficionado with no background

related to China except for Cecilia’s Chinese-Taiwanese American family,
watched The Untamed and the animated Grandmaster of Demonic
Cultivation with her. “Coming from a white perspective, he was able to get
into it, even with the subtitles being funky,” she said. “We read part of the
English translation together.”

Jin Zhao writes about culture and politics in the U.S. and in China
for English- and Chinese-speaking audiences. Her writing has appeared
in The Nation, Alternet.org, and various publications in China. A former
radio host with the English Service of China Radio International (CRI)
based in Beijing, she earned her Master’s in Communication and Ph.D. in
English from Georgia State University. Read more

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