Chinese GL

A couple of days ago, my random trawlings through the internet threw up this academic article which was recently published in the journal Continuum: 'The Production of Girls' Love Narrative in Couple of Mirrors (2021) Through Transmedia Storytelling in Contemporary China' by Wenqian Zhang and Peng Qiao. It's available open access via the journal's website here.

The abstract for the article is as follows:

There has been a relative dearth of scholarly discussions surrounding the production of girls’ love (GL) narratives in mainland China since the 2010s. This article offers an illustrative case study of a successful GL multimedia storyworld, Couple of Mirrors (CM), which unfolds across a webtoon, a novel, and a web series. First, this article scrutinizes the multilevel state regulation on queer content creation in different media formats. Second, we draw on Henry Jenkins’ canonical conceptualisation of “transmedia storytelling” to delineate the ways that the production of CM differs from the mainstream BL transmedia stories. Through a textual and paratextual analysis of official producers’ and fans’ participation, we argue that CM’s transmedia storytelling creates explicit GL elements through negotiation between market preferences, heteropatriarchal ideologies, and governmental censorship. In doing so, we show that CM represents a successful non-heteronormative cultural commodity within the mainland Chinese media market.

The authors look at the Couple of Mirrors drama and two of its adaptations, the novelisation and the manhua. The audio drama adaptation was released after they had submitted the article for publication, so that's not discussed. They situate this within the framework of transmedia storytelling and (what I found vastly more interesting) in the context of the various content regulation regimes governing different forms of media in China, which allow for different levels of explicitness and thus call for different strategies for presenting and engaging with the material.

I have serious doubts about the definition of 'baihe' they are using in the article (which is not at all congruent with my experiences of the 'baihe' category across various webnovel platforms), am more than ready for the field to refer to someone else other than Henry Jenkins on transmedia storytelling, have some doubts as to the authors' deep knowledge of the texts (for instance, they don't seem to be aware that the manhua went through an additional round of censorship some time after it finished serialising, nor when discussing the differences between the (more explicit) manhua and the drama and novelisation, do they mention the fact that the characters ACTUALLY FUCK, which seems to me to be a rather important detail), continue to be irritated at the focus on how fans interact with the texts rather than the actual texts themselves, and am somewhat unclear as to why they have made no comparisons to other read-as-GL full-length dramas (like The Message) or more explicit mini-dramas. Still, it's the first academic article to focus on Chinese GL that I'm aware of, and the discussion of the different content regulation regimes and their affordances does add clarity to my understanding, and potentially the fandom's collective understanding, of how these things work.

Fanjiao, the baihe audio content specialist platform, has announced that they will soon be releasing an audio drama (potentially a multi-season one) based on the live action drama Couple of Mirrors. Here is the Fanjiao page for the audio drama (you will need to install the Fanjiao app to interact with it).

The audio drama will star Bai Xinzan as Xu Youyi and Xiu Zi as Yan Wei (this post has a few more details about both of them). Fanjiao has also posted their release schedule leading up to the airing of the first episode:

• 27 December: Teaser #1
• 29 December: Theme song
• 31 December: Teaser #2
• 2 January: Interview with lead VAs
• 4 January: First episode

This is the third adaptation that the drama has had (the others being the novelisation and the manhua adaptation), and mainland baihe fans seem to be of the view that the medium leaves more room for explicit romantic/sexual scenes than even the manhua (which does have sex scenes, but presented in a non-graphic way with panels showing hastily-shed clothing and very faint silhouettes behind gauzy curtains and so on). I would deeply love to read a close textual comparison of the drama, the novel, the manhua and the audio drama, if anyone can be bribed/goaded into writing one (I will happily aid this cause by scanning and sending the entirety of the novel, which as far as I'm aware is only available in print format).