Over the last few years, despite the strict censorship of the state government, boys’ love drama has been surging in Chinese media in an implicit or explicit way. Compared with modern queer drama, boys’ love stories find fertile soil in the genre of Xianxia drama, which features ancient settings and the cultivation of immortality. To figure out the reason behind the popularity of boys’ love narratives, especially in Xianxia drama, this research observes one of the most successful dramas The Untamed (陈情令, 2019) adapted from the popular webnovel Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. The author starts with the audience’s review in a Chinese scoring platform Douban to avoid intentional selection of the audience’s feedback and subjective interpretation. This paper argues that boys’ love narratives are justified by being incorporated into the broader national aesthetic norms propagated by the government.

Authors:
Yue Chen, Yonsei University, South Korea

About the Presenter(s)
Yue Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature, Yonsei University. Her research interests include digital rhetoric, discourse analysis, and East Asia films.

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