Catching Chen Qing Ling

By Yue (Cathy) Wang and Maria K. Alberto

Introduction: The Single-log Bridge

“Who cares about the crowded, broad avenue? I’ll stick to my single-log bridge till it’s dark.” This translation of a line uttered by protagonist Wei Wuxian in episode 29 of Chén Qíng Lìng (abbreviation CQL, English translation The Untamed), was quickly adopted as a touchpoint for this highly popular Chinese drama and the growing networks of texts and conversations that surround it. When Wei Wuxian proclaims this, he is explaining to fellow cultivator Lan Wangji that he will not return to their society’s conventional mores when that would also mean relinquishing his protection of several war survivors. Instead, the drama’s hero announces, he will remain in a dangerous location and practice a forbidden strain of cultivation magic if this is what it takes to live up to his values of protecting the defenseless. The “crowded, broad avenue” may offer a stable, familiar, and well-traveled route where the metaphorical traveler could reasonably expect safety and shelter along his way; conversely, the single-log bridge may lack a secure foundation, is traveled much less often, and might lead places where most people do not go. With this metaphorical statement, then, Wei Wuxian both makes a fateful decision and also acknowledges the precarity that attends it, all with his characteristic blitheness.

These lines about the single-log bridge are striking, evocative, and occur in some form across all adaptations of pseudonymous author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s 2015–2016 webnovel Mo Dao Zu Shi (abbreviation MDZS, English translation The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation), which The Untamed is based upon. These lines also encapsulate much of what drew viewers on a global scale to this show. Much like its webnovel predecessor, The Untamed offers a complex, multi-vocalized story about holding true to one’s beliefs despite societal pressures, individual challenges, and clashes between differing moral systems and expectations. As the audience, we follow a large cast of compelling characters through flashbacks to their days as classmates and to a war that decimated whole factions of society; we then return to the narrative present, where survivors of that war and the next generation attempt to extricate the truth of what happened during the tumultuous past. Drawing from genres of Chinese fantasy literature including danmei (idealized relationships between men), wuxia (martial arts world), and xianxia (immortality cultivation), The Untamed is set in a fantastical version of ancient China, and most of its protagonists are cultivators, who have cultivated their qi (vital energy or life force) to activate superhuman abilities such as increased strength, improved senses, and enhanced fighting skills.

From its initial release in summer 2019, when episodes aired on Tencent Video from June 27 through August 20, The Untamed resonated with audiences across the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and soon, on the global stage beyond. National and global news networks charted its meteoric rise, with Sina calling The Untamed the biggest hit of the year, Tencent reporting it as their highest-earning media product, and PR Newswire documenting astonishingly high rankings on entertainment and social media platforms worldwide.¹ Since then, the massive popularity of The Untamed has been attributed to various factors. Within China sources such as The People’s Daily, an official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), have upheld The Untamed for its positive portrayal of Chinese culture, arts, and traditional values. Wardrobe and costuming design are commonly mentioned for their beauty, intricacy, and evocation of traditional Chinese clothing,² evidencing what Amanda Sikarskie calls heritage storytelling, or “a usage of the past that is purposeful and commerce driven.”³ The drama’s soundtrack and music are also mentioned frequently, with critics praising how the score complements the plot, most main characters have evocative theme songs, and specific musical devices and instruments serve important narrative functions.⁴ The narrative and script of The Untamed are also regular points of discussion,⁵ as are the actors who perform this script and embody these characters.⁶ (Less frequently mentioned in many academic or trade contexts is fans’ “shipping” of Untamed actors, particularly Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo,⁷ but this practice of imagining and depicting actors in a sexual or romantic relationship is also critical to understanding the drama’s success and ramifications. See discussion of maifu later in this introduction and of the 227 Incident in chapters by Huynh & Levine, Chen & Troy, later in this volume.)

The drama’s various strengths were also buoyed by a combination of strategic and highly successful promotion and distribution strategies, which in turn drove widespread, highly-visible fan engagement. Producer Xinpai Media utilized concerted promotion efforts, and Tencent released episodes earlier for paying VIP viewers, garnering millions of new subscribers. After initial release to Chinese audiences, The Untamed was also made available on networks across Asia,⁸ on streaming platforms globally,⁹ and in a truncated, 20-episode special edition described as “specially made [for] overseas fans” as it focused more on the relationship between protagonists Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji.¹⁰ Extensive social media discussion by fans accompanied each new release, and together these factors spread awareness of The Untamed to new audiences worldwide. Early coverage in Euro-American contexts often describes The Untamed as a surprising hit whose characters and queer subtext compelled viewers unfamiliar with Chinese media,¹¹ thus breaking down cultural barriers.¹² Then once the entire drama was available, fans’ interest in The Untamed was maintained longer through paratexts such as “fan-meetings,” concerts performed by cast members (both in person and live-broadcast), photoshoots of the actors in venues such as Harper’s Bazaar China, an official merchandise line available on Taobao, and two spin-off films with new stories about secondary characters, The Living Dead (2019) and Fatal Journey (2020).

No one factor among the many named here—adaptation, production, promotion, distribution, reception, transformation—can be isolated from the rest as a definitive explanation for the success of The Untamed. However, the fact that this drama was—and remains—a multifaceted success is undeniable. In the “Research Report on China’s Internet Audiovisual Development” for 2019 and Q1 of 2020, The Untamed ranked highest on an official popularity index rating of 631 drama webseries,¹³ and as Jun Lei also documents, it topped domestic charts in China for 18 consecutive months.¹⁴ In 2022 as we were working on this collection, it also hit ten billion streaming views worldwide.¹⁵, ¹⁶ Consequently, some scholars from mainland China turn to a combination of cultural transmission and global market logics for an answer, such as considering how The Untamed successfully minimizes “cultural discount,” or the cultural specificities that make a film attractive to domestic markets but may simultaneously repel foreign markets unfamiliar with the social systems, values, concerns, and/or styles it depicts.¹⁷ Approaching similar questions of cross-cultural consumption from another perspective, The Untamed also joins the ranks of phenomena such as the Korean Wave, or Hallyu, and Cool Japan, in which popular culture and media texts from the pan-Asia region, broadly conceived, are circulated on a global scale.¹⁸ As Lei maintains, by adapting a danmei webnovel The Untamed has helped “bring a niche genre to a mainstream audience and other fandoms who had no prior knowledge of it,” and in the sheer popularity and visibility that resulted, this drama can also provide an important starting point for understanding and studying the continuing rise of BL-adapted dramas.¹⁹ Relatedly, Eve Ng and Xiaomeng Li locate The Untamed as a prominent early example of what they term “brand homonationalism,” explaining that as official sources in China praise the show’s “depictions of traditional Chinese culture while downplaying or obscuring the texts’ origins in homoerotic novels,” this commentary seeks “to recruit dangai series towards advancing Chinese cultural power while containing the texts’ queer transgressiveness.”²⁰

In this collection, then, we see our project as also striking out across something of a single-log bridge. For one thing, we are acutely aware of setting out into terrain less covered, as this is the first full-length scholarly work on The Untamed, and it also joins only a handful of other books in English on related topics such as queer Chinese television and the genre of danmei, broadly construed as fiction about idealized male/male relationships authored and published largely by Chinese women writers in subcultural online communities.²¹ Dangai, or live-action dramas adapted from danmei, still lack this full-length scholarship. So for another—and related—item, we are also highly cognizant that there will be limitations to our route in this collection. While we have sought to consider both The Untamed as well as important contexts such as the initial webnovel MDZS, various modes of translation, and global fan communities, from a variety of approaches and perspectives, these are still only a fraction of the conversations that could be had regarding such a prominent and influential text. Thus, as we draw together these strands and many more, our principal hope here is that this work can create one such metaphorical bridge toward greater clarity on the tremendous phenomenon that is The Untamed: as an adaptation of a danmei webnovel, as well as a cultural text, a fan-object, and an unanticipatedly global media phenomenon.

Watching The Untamed

The Untamed is a live-action drama webseries that originally aired on Tencent Video in summer 2019, and was then made available on platforms across Asia and worldwide later that year. Over the course of 50 episodes, The Untamed tells the story of Wei Wuxian (played by Xiao Zhan/Sean Xiao), a cultivator who became legendary during an inter-sect war for his skill in a controversial form of cultivation. The story opens with Wei Wuxian’s death, before jumping ahead more than a decade to his soul being summoned into the body of a young cultivator who wants Wei Wuxian to deal with his enemies. Audiences then follow along as Wei Wuxian first tries to avoid—and then gets pulled back into—the lives of friends, family, and enemies from his previous life. Extensive flashbacks to his younger years slowly provide context to his death and also his relationships, particularly with Lan Wangji (played by Wang Yibo), a fellow cultivator who has regarded him highly since they were disciples in training together, unbeknownst to Wei Wuxian. In the narrative present, the two unravel a political intrigue and murder case that leads them to uncover hidden truths about Wei Wuxian’s death and other tragedies from their past, as well as achieve reconciliation of sorts with Wei Wuxian’s surviving family members.

This story is adapted from the danmei webnovel Mo Dao Zu Shi (MDZS) by pseudonymous Chinese author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, where in addition to the plot points outlined above, these two protagonists also develop a sexual and romantic relationship. In the drama though, that relationship has been altered instead to what is variously described as soulmates, a deep brotherhood, or a “bromance” that is still deep and intimate, but also less explicitly sexual and romantic than the initial relationship depicted by the webnovel. For audiences already familiar with other Chinese live-action dramas adapted from BL novels, such as Shang Yin [Addicted] (2016), Jue Dui Zhengfeng [Beloved Enemy] (2017), and Zhen Hun [Guardian] (2018), this tactic would be familiar: producers try to draw in audiences who already enjoy danmei/BL content, but without drawing the attention of censors and thus risking production being stopped or the show being removed from platforms. As Yue (Cathy) Wang has shown elsewhere, attempts to balance these differing goals may lead the story being altered significantly, but still, glimpses of the original relationships and events related to them are often visible for audiences familiar with the original text.²²

The sociopolitical and legal landscapes surrounding these BL-adapted dramas is complex, spanning the full century of technological, historical, and political developments in a self-modernizing, increasingly neoliberalized China that Jamie J. Zhao traces in “Queer/ing the Contours of TV China.”²³ Likewise, changes in this landscape often occur rapidly, leaving industry and fans scrambling to keep up, while media forms like web series may be more intermittently effected by regulations geared primarily toward television or internet content, since they draw from both without being fully one or the other. Still, pertinent exigencies abound. For instance, in 2017, the national industry organization China Netcasting Services Association (CNSA)—whose members include state-controlled assets as well as key platforms like Tencent, iQIYI, Bilibili, and more—released its “General Rules For Reviewing Netcasting Content.” In addition to encouraging content that promotes “core socialist values,” patriotism, and officially-approved viewpoints on Chinese national history,²⁴ the “General Rules” also discourage a broad range of topics that purportedly oppose these values, including depictions of the supernatural, overt violence, and “abnormal sexual relationships and sexual behaviors” including “homosexuality, sexual perversion, sexual assault, sexual abuse, and sexual violence.”²⁵ While these regulations are easily interpreted in regards to danmei adaptations, more recent legislation targets danmei specifically, as when in January 2022 Beijing Municipal Radio and Television Bureau announced a prohibition on danmei-adapted television dramas.²⁶ Far-reaching pronouncements such as these demarcate bans against media expressions of unconventional gender, sexuality, and desire that subvert or counter dominant hegemonies. The Chinese publishing industry also faces control and regulation by the party-state, much like those other forms of media production. In each of these cases, because of its “dual association with homosexuality and pornography,”²⁷ danmei remains particularly vulnerable.

In watching and discussing The Untamed, then, it can be easy for audiences beyond its original contexts in the People’s Republic of China—or even, more specifically, beyond danmei communities in or originating in China—to fall into what Koichi Iwabuchi has termed “a disregard for the complicated processes of people’s media culture consumption,” wherein celebration of a text’s circulation beyond its country of origin all too often “disengages us from crucial questions about the cross-border circulation and consumption of media culture under uneven processes of globalization.”²⁸ Taking Cool Japan as his starting point, Iwabuchi questions whether non-Japanese audiences consuming these pop culture texts gain any deeper understanding of Japanese culture and society, whether such works entrench stereotypes of Japan, and how existing power relations are thus reiterated.²⁹ Responding to Iwabuchi and other scholars studying pop culture texts originating in East Asia, Bertha Chin and Lori Morimoto push a step further, arguing for an understanding of such fans, fandoms, and fannish practice as “transcultural,” rather than international or transnational. Here Chin and Morimoto maintain that close, contextualizing attention to sociopolitical and globalizing forces should be supplemented equally by “our informed understanding of fan behaviours, motivations, and processes of meaning-making as driven by affective pleasures and investments,” which acknowledges how popular culture texts from the pan-Asia region are positioned at “the complex intersection of affective investment and national subjectivity.”³⁰

Watching The Untamed and other danmei adaptations whose nuances not only stem from specific cultural contexts, but also are actively shaped by deliberately opaque regulatory practices and exigencies, reiterates the need for similar cognizance. To the importance of specific socio-cultural contexts, awareness of globalizing flows, and an informed understanding of cross-cultural affective pleasures recommended by scholars such as Iwabuchi, Chin, and Morimoto, we would also add the need for greater recognition of textual indicators. That is, we re-emphasize the key importance and critical role of culturally-informed signifiers of established genres, deliberate genre hybridity, and queerness that has been concealed, expurgated, or transmuted into veiled gestures and images.

Genres & Genre Hybridity

The webnovel Mo Dao Zu Shi, which The Untamed is based upon, is a genre hybrid that blends together elements from various forms of Chinese fantasy literature, including danmei, wuxia, and xianxia. This genre hybridity is visible in several aspects of the webnovel, and thus in The Untamed as well. Characters’ worldviews and the broader setting are reminiscent of jianghu (lit. “lakes and rivers”), or an ahistorical world—typically a variation on ancient China—inhabited by sects and clans of martial art practitioners, wandering heroes, exaggerated villains, and ordinary people: this term has been popularized by extensive use in wuxia, or the martial arts genre.³¹ Likewise, the webnovel’s cultivator protagonists and cultivation society are drawn from staples of xianxia, the immortality-cultivation genre, which embellishes martial arts with fantasy elements from Chinese myth and Daoism, most notably that characters can develop a “golden core” and attain superhuman abilities.³² And finally, though this is far more evident in Mo Dao Zu Shi than in The Untamed, protagonists Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are both idealized, beautiful men who develop a strong connection with one another, following the traditions of danmei, a genre focused on homoerotic relationships between men.³³

To better set the stage for contributor chapters, this section offers brief overviews of the genres of danmei, wuxia, and xianxia, as well as some of the complications that stem from contemporary drives toward adapting and/or commercializing them.