when my creative world was blown wide open by Netflix’s algorithm directing me to The Untamed.
Unfamiliar? Ah, so was I. Those long ago days of innocence.
The Untamed is a TV series (50 glorious episodes) from mainland China, which is about two young cultivators in love. So simple. So perfect. So beautiful. Their love is never shown through anything beyond longing looks, the occasional touch of a wrist, and willingness to sacrifice anything and everything for one another despite constant misunderstandings and evil plots.
This absolutely, absolutely doesn’t do it justice. It’s just the nuts and bolts.
I don’t binge watch. I bingewatched this. 50 episodes in subtitles, because I knew no Chinese whatsoever. And then I bingewatched it again. And then I discovered that it was based on a novel, and then I went looking for the novel, and fell down a rabbit hole of danmei/BL literature, xianxia, and Chinese webnovels in fan translations. I am still in this rabbit hole. It’s so completely wonderful and I love it here. Come on down! (It’s also awesome that it’s a rabbit hole because rabbits are a symbol of male homosexuality in Chinese mythology. Rabbits are all over The Untamed.)
What did I love? In future blogs I’ll share about some of my favorite authors and stories, but as I read voraciously through literally dozens of webnovels there were several things which excited me as an author and lover of fantasy.
First was the obvious, unrepentant, and glorious queerness of the genre. The genre called danmei (“admiring beauty”) or BL (“boy’s love”) in the Chinese webnovel context are usually written by and for women, writing under pseudonyms. The stories are not only about gay love, but also are flouting censorship to write love stories that are both deeply desirous and embodied AND self-sacrificing, loving, mutually caring. Pretty much every significant character in many books is gay without explanation or apology, with occasional heterosexual women cheering on the love from the sidelines. While there are definitely examples of unhealthy relationships and appalling communication skills among BL novel couples! — overall this deeply loving commitment between two people of the same gender that overcomes all obstacles is what I’ve discovered and adore in the genre. There’s a playfulness around gender and sexuality that I (and the extremely loyal fan base in China and internationally) appreciate and enjoy deeply.
In terms of narrative structure, the webnovels move extraordinarily fast. Because they are designed to be read as serials and the authors need to hook readers week after week for the chapters, it doesn’t lag much despite the occasional bit of filler. Every 2000-5000 words, something significant happens that moves the story along.
And often these stories are very long compared to English-language published works. As someone who loves long-form I was thrilled to find works that run to three quarters of a million or even a million words in translation, with multiple story arcs intertwined, often through different timelines and character relationships.
And then there’s the fantasy. The Untamed (and the other novels of its author, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu or MXTX) fall into the Chinese fantasy genre of xianxia or ascension, wildly popular in TV shows both for danmei and heterosexual romance. In xianxia, individuals develop spiritual powers through cultivation, a commitment to meditation and long martial-arts training inspired by Taoist legends; these individuals can cultivate to the point of becoming immortals, deities and members of heavenly courts (high xianxia) or can live on earth and simply be very powerful people having earthly adventures with their spiritual powers (low xianxia). Chinese fantasy genres also include xuanhuan, stories inspired by mythological creatures which overlap with xianxia.
I was deeply struck by the narrative differences between these novels and much English-language fantasy, which usually has the heroes going on the “hero’s journey” or fighting against the great evil that threatens the world. In the novels I’ve been falling in love with, while there might be great evils, it’s not assumed that the protagonist’s purpose in life is to battle it and make the world safe again, because of course the world has never been safe. Suffering and evil are part of the structure of life on earth, and the work of the protagonist is to protect those they love as best they can in a complex world where bad things happen and suffering comes to everyone. Villains are rarely completely evil or hateful; they, too, are caught in a complex world. In this way especially, I found the narrative structure of danmei and xianxia to be deeply truthful and meaningful.
One final thing that I love and admire in this genre: the creative risks taken by the authors, not only in writing materials that might be subject to censorship, but in the way in which a webnovel is published, putting material out that might not be revised tightly, open to the fans who would comment and critique chapter by chapter. I can’t imagine that kind of risk-taking, given the polishing and revision that are more common for novelists in my own United States milieu. And yet there’s something so beautiful and admirable about it. The authors sometimes respond to their fans, or write comments to them, which are preserved in the fan translations I’ve read. The author has something she would like to say, and the author will say it: about the things the fans are saying, where they are in the novel, what they want to do with it, what their process is.
One of these comments, from MXTX, described her writing process: wandering at night, listening to music, working out the vision she had had of a single scene which inspired this immense tapestry of a webnovel, and no doubt writing chapter after chapter, night after night. I realized that I also had a vision of a single scene, and a single phrase, and inspired by MXTX, I started wandering the streets at night, and writing.