Chinese GL

Skimming through the entries for Yuletide, I was delighted to see a fic based on this Liu Yun Rui short film! The fic can be read here.

In today's Tumblr trawl, I came across a brief review (with discussion in the replies) of the Soulmate Adventure special episodes, as well as a brief review of the short film Deviance.

Fanjiao, the specialist platform for baihe audio content, celebrated its sixth anniversary a couple of weeks ago with a video featuring congratulatory messages from 49 baihe voice actresses. As I did with last year's video, here's a quick rundown of the voice actresses and their notable roles (I'll link back to the post about the fifth anniversary video for those voice actresses who were also featured in that).

I've uploaded the video to YouTube for ease of embedding; the original video can be viewed here on Weibo. Again, there are currently no English subtitles, but if anyone is interested in subtitling it, I'm happy to provide support!



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I've been following the work of indie director Zhao Yue Lydia (照月 Lydia) on Bilibili for some time, so it was pleasing to find that she's uploaded one of her GL short films (although 'short' is relative — it's nearly an hour long), The Suffering of Mount Xiqing (西晴劫, pinyin: xi qing jie), to YouTube, complete with English subtitles. This is a xuanhuan short film featuring a central relationship between the formidable guardian spirit of the titular mountain and the naive Daoist novice sent to undermine her.

Ending spoiler

The main film technically ends with the death of one main character, but there is a coda in which she reunites with the other main character post-reincarnation.

Personally, the subtitles don't seem amazing, and they're hardsubbed in a font and colour that's quite difficult to read at points, but at least they're there (and I didn't have to do them, haha). There's also a little video on Bilibili of the cast and crew at the official premiere for the film.

Somewhat randomly, I've subtitled idol girl group SNH48's Republican Era-set 'stepmother romance' promotional video (starring Liu Shuxian and Hu Xiaohui), which aired at one of their live shows last April. The original video can be seen here on Liu Shuxian's Bilibili channel.


From memory, that was the time the Pavilion of Women trend was going around on Douyin, so I guess that fitted in with the zeitgeist. I made a little compilation of the ones I saw that had queer elements, which you can see here.

I've subtitled A Demon in the House (宅中有妖, pinyin: zhai zhong you yao), a 12-minute short film starring the familiar duo of Sheng Wei and Ai Ye and directed by Liu Yun Rui. The subtitles can be viewed here via Captionfy and here via NekoCap if you have the NekoCap extension.

This short film originally aired on Kuaishou as pay-to-view content. The source video my subtitles are tagged to is hosted on the KwaiDrama YouTube channel. All the sound on their videos is wonky (including this one), because they've muted out most of the copyright-protected music. This is presumably to let them monetise it.

I've subtitled The Tribulation of the Mountain God, an 11-minute extra for Led Astray by Love, which can be viewed here (via Captionfy). This originally aired as pay-to-view content on the Kuaishou platform. The video is hosted on the YouTube channel KwaiDrama, which seems to have been scooping up YouTube licences for a whole load of mini-dramas that initially aired on the Kuaishou platform. All the sound on their videos is wonky (including this one), because they've muted out most of the copyright-protected music, presumably so that they can monetise it.

Some content notes: the characters An Qi and Ren Qiuping are coded as belonging to a non-Han minority ethnic group, and An Qi is played by a Han actress (the actor playing Ren Qiuping is probably also Han, but I haven't looked into him). There is a lack of specificity about precisely which minority ethnic group they supposedly belong to, which is problematic in the way Western productions coding a character as 'vaguely Asian' would be. It's also possible to read the film as being somewhat disparaging of minority ethnic 'superstitions', though I don't think that is a particularly strong element.

Over on tumblr, wlwcatalogue has posted a detailed write-up about various Chinese GL mini-dramas and short films. Check it out here.

Qi Xiaxia (who may have directed this video, and certainly edited it) released this very short film for the Mid-Autumn Festival this year, and I finally got round to subtitling it just in time for Christmas. It's aesthetically more realistic than most of the short films in this tradition. Half of the spoken dialogue is in the local (I believe Zhejiang?) language, so I could not have subtitled it without the aid of the Mandarin hardsubs (I'm fine on Cantonese, Hokkien and Hakka, but any Wu language always sounds like something that I can nearly understand and never actually do), so that was an interesting challenge.

For some time, the people behind the MMORPG Justice Online and the MOBA game Naraka: Bladepoint have been releasing GL-themed promotional videos. I remain unsure why, but I certainly appreciate it (even though I'm not, personally, always enamoured of contemporary Chinese videogame aesthetics especially where costuming is concerned). Recently, they've collaborated to produce the following video:



I've compiled most of their previous promotional videos here. Highlights include Justice Online's series of videos based on the twenty-four solar terms (see the first six videos here) and this video featuring two popular characters from Naraka: Bladepoint.