To the entertainment industry, The Untamed’s success is irrefutable proof of concept for the viability of adapting intellectual property from boys’ love web novels to the small screen. Boys’ love, also called danmei or BL, is a subculture genre of fictional media defined by the presence of romantic male–male relationships.

Live-action adaptations of danmei literature (dangaiju) usually begin as an original work of online fiction hosted on the online literature website Jinjiang Literature City. Authors of popular works are approached to sell adaptation licenses, with first adaptations usually released as radio dramas, mobile games or donghua (animated comics). Based on the success of these multimedia adaptations, one of China’s leading streaming platforms — the most prominent being Tencent, Youku and iQiyi — will consider purchasing the rights to adapt the story into a platform exclusive television drama.

Boys’ love drama adaptations must navigate both the platform’s commercial interests and the political demands of the National Radio and Television Administration’s (NRTA) regulatory processes. During this process of adaptation and negotiation, explicit sexual or romantic elements are modified or eliminated, transforming depictions of homosexual desire into ‘bromantic’ homosociality.

Attempts at adapting boys’ love web novels into live action dramas had mixed success until the short lived web series Addicted (Shangyin) achieved broad popularity in 2016. But it was pulled from air with four episodes remaining when the romantic and sexual relationship between the two male leads became obvious. It was a revelation when The Untamed not only made it to air but was praised by the state-owned newspaper People’s Daily. Broadcaster Hu Xin lauded the show’s ‘confident’ depiction of traditional Chinese culture. The review dwelt on the chivalry and selflessness of the moral universe depicted in The Untamed, without mentioning that the main characters express their sense of justice and chivalry primarily through their devotion to one another.

The dissonance involved in praising the ‘traditional cultural values’ portrayed in The Untamed without mentioning the show’s central male–male romance marks the conflict at the heart of the danmei novel’s increasing prominence in mainland China’s pop culture. There is a paradoxical acknowledgment of the power of the boys’ love genre and its derivative products on the one hand, and the maintenance of plausible deniability about the genre’s non-heteronormative origins on the other.

Yet boys’ love narratives will likely become more prominent over the next few years. In 2020, over 60 danmei novels from Jinjiang Literature City were purchased for live action adaptation. There are at least a dozen high profile boys’ love dramas in various stages of production.

Boys’ love drama adaptations freely appropriate elements from other genres, including ahistorical time travel, supernatural phenomena, alternative universes and mythical fantasy, to avoid direct references to the history or the contemporary society of China. Yet boys’ love and its adaptations are still under constant risk of removal and even criminal prosecution, as the genre’s frequent allusion to homosexuality puts it at odds with the central government’s conservative standards for film and television.

Television dramas adapted from the boys’ love genre should not be understood through the binary of political control and the desire for dissent. The creation and dissemination of boys’ love drama adaptations is a complex process that triangulates boys’ love fans, social networking platforms and mainstream production studios in overlapping economies of labour.

Boys’ love fans are not passive recipients of cultural products, but ‘prosumers’ who collapse the boundary between the consumer and the producer through the datafication of their fandom. Boys’ love fan communities manufacture extraordinary visibility of boys’ love narratives on China’s leading social media platforms, especially Weibo. This fan labour is built into the production of value in the economy of popular entertainment culture in China.

Fan labour can be organised through official and unofficial fan communities and includes a diverse range of behaviours, some of which involve financial transactions and some of which do not. Examples include repeat viewings of a boys’ love drama to boost the show’s total view count and purchasing multiple streaming platform subscription accounts. Production studios recognise the capacity of fan labour in manufacturing the visibility of the dramas, and intentionally mobilise the fan community in their marketing strategies by providing materials for fan consumption or encouraging fan art.

Fans are often assumed to be young urban women and their labour is dismissed as mindless spamming. But the affective labour that female fans perform to promote their favourite shows makes the intellectual property visible and legible across linguistic and geographic boundaries, transforming the boys’ love fandom into a transnational phenomenon.

In January, rumours spread that the NRTA would soon remove The Untamed from streaming platforms. The Untamed once again became a trending topic on Weibo as fans scrambled to warn one another and download the show. But the rumours were never substantiated.

It remains to be seen if The Untamed will be taken offline and censored, as boys’ love series Guardian was in 2018. And in the absence of any transparency around the NRTA’s review process, it is hard to say whether it will enforce even more restrictions around the depiction of male–male relationships in response to the raft of boys’ love drama adaptations currently in production.

Angie Baecker is a Lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

Yucong Hao is a PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan.

An extended version of this article appears in the most recent edition of East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘Reinventing global trade’, Vol. 13, No 2.