Chinese GL

My brain being too fried for anything heavily words-based this week, I thought I would put together a collection of baihe audio drama art by the artist Nongmin Shanquan (农民山泉), whose distinctive and instantly recognisable art style sets her work apart from what the cookie-cutter prettiness that dominates much of the genre.

( pictures under the cut )

Check out the artist's Weibo here for sketches, fan art, private commissions, and general updates.

Note: The artist's handle is almost certainly a riff on Nongfu Spring (农夫山泉, pinyin: nongfun shanquan), China's most popular bottled water brand. If I had ten pence for each time someone associated with Chinese GL decided to name herself after a well-known domestic beverage brand, I would have twenty pence, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it's happened twice (the other namer-of-self-after-popular-beverage-brand being, of course, the actress/cosplayer formerly known as Wang Laoji, star of an absurd number of GL mini-dramas, who these days is officially credited as Wang Xuexi (王学习) and known to her fans as Jiji (吉吉)).

I'm painfully aware that (1) this comm really needs a resource post on baihe audio dramas and (2) I really don't know enough about audio dramas to be the person to write it. If anyone wants to write such a post, please please please go ahead and do it! You'll have my eternal gratitude.

Fortuitously though, Fanjiao — the specialist platform for baihe audio content, itself a spin-off from the lesbian dating app The L (formerly Rela) — celebrated its fifth anniversary a few weeks ago, with a long video featuring 49 baihe voice actresses, so I've decided to shamelessly glom on to it and provide an introduction of sorts to audio dramas via sketching out the profiles of each VA featured and listing their major works. The list is set out below in more or less alphabetical order based on pinyin. The focus will be mostly on the Fanjiao-hosted dramas which each VA has participated in, but I will provide details of their voice work on other platforms and media where I'm aware of them.



The original video can be viewed on the Fanjiao Weibo account here. For ease of embedding, I've re-uploaded it to my YouTube account. There are currently no English subtitles because I, er, already have a very large backlog of things to translate, but if anyone is interested in trying their hand at subtitling it, you're very welcome to do so, and I'm happy to provide support!

( VAs A to F )

( VAs G to P )

( VAs Q to X )

( VAs Y to Z )

I previously made an excessively long Twitter thread on this topic with less textual detail but with voice clips and images, which you can read here.