Chinese GL

(This isn't strictly about baihe but I'm posting this here anyway since I'll be using a couple of examples from baihe media.)

Let's say you're writing something inspired by or based on a c-novel. And you've come to the exciting part, which is choosing names for your characters. And you find yourself stuck.

Well, not to worry! We have a several-millennia-long tradition of poetry to assist us. All you have to do is this.

Take a line from a Book of Odes poem, or a Tang poem, or really any poem. Then pick out the name-like elements and smoosh them together. Voilà, you've got yourself a name.

Thus, from the Book of Odes the line 蒹葭苍苍, 白露为霜 (pinyin: jianjia cangcang, bailu wei shuang) (Legge's translation: 'The reeds and rushes are deeply green / And the white dew is turned into hoarfrost) gives us Bai Jianjia, which is suitable for either a refined young lady or a courtesan of the high-class, scholarly sort. Also from the Book of Odes, the line 昔我往矣，杨柳依依 (pinyin: xi wo wang yi, yangliu yiyi) (Legge's translation: At first, when we set out / The willows were fresh and green) gives us Liu Yiyi, also a good courtesan or high-class maidservant name (IMO the Book of Odes link might just about make it learned enough to be a young gentlewoman's name, but I don't usually like repeated-syllable names for upper-class or scholarly women, unless it's a nickname).

This trick is pretty commonly used in popular media. The drama version of The Message has a character named (or rather, re-named) He Jianzhu (何剪烛). This is clearly taken from the line 何当共剪西窗烛 (pinyin: he dang gong jian xichuang zhu) from Li Shangyin's poem 'Sending a Letter North on a Rainy Night'(夜雨寄北). The love interest from The Beauty's Blade is called Yu Shengyan (玉生烟), and so is a secondary character from the danmei novel Thousand Autumns, courtesy of the line 蓝田日暖玉生烟 (pinyin: lantian ri nuan yu sheng yan) from another Li Shangyin poem, 'The Brocade Zither' (錦瑟).

'But, douqi,' I hear you cry, 'what if I don't know any Chinese poetry or enough Chinese to know what are appropriate name elements to pick out of verses?'

Ah. Then I'm afraid this post will be of no help at all. Sorry.

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.

An initial version of this review was originally posted on my personal journal. I thought I might as well clean it up and cross-post it here.

( Major spoilers for Reading the Remnants )

I read the Chinese original of this novel on Changpei. There are currently two partial English fan translations of the novel available, at least the later of which appears to be ongoing. These can be found here and here.