Genres
Danmei
A Chinese genre of literature and fictional media featuring romantic relationships between men; China's homegrown branch of boys' love.
Danmei is a genre of Chinese literature and other fictional media that features homoerotic relationships between male characters. The name literally means "addicted to beauty" and is a reborrowing of the Japanese tanbi, the word behind boys' love: BL began in Japanese manga in the early 1970s and reached mainland China in the early 1990s, and the first Chinese story published online appeared around 1998. Works are mostly web fiction, consumed mainly by women, and the genre crosses media constantly: audio dramas, manhua, donghua animation and live-action dramas such as The Untamed, Guardian and Word of Honour. Scholars describe it as potentially one of the few created-in-China cultural products to gain a foothold in overseas markets.
Its legal position in China is precarious and subject to periodic crackdowns, which pushes much of the web serial economy around it offshore. The shelf composes freely with Chinese genre machinery: The Untamed is the live-action version of a cultivation novel.