1. Introduction
[1.1] The Untamed (Chen Qing Ling), a fifty-episode Chinese live-action web drama, began streaming in June 2019 to widespread popularity across China and the broader pan-Asian region. When it also became available on Netflix in October 2019, it quickly attracted fans in Western slash communities—those invested in romantic and sexual relationships between same-gender characters—who found the portrayal of the two male leads' relationship resonant with familiar slash conventions. As the show's global popularity grew, its online English-language fandom became what Lori Morimoto and Bertha Chin (2017) describe as a transcultural contact zone, where differing cultural expectations around queer representation come into contact and often clash. These expectations were informed not just by broadly Western or Asian or national cultures, but by fan cultures as well.
[1.2] When Anglophone slash fans turned from the show to its source material, The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (Mo Dao Zu Shi), a Chinese danmei web novel, tensions intensified. Where the drama is shaped by media regulations around the representation of homosexuality, the danmei novel—part of a genre of male/male romance written primarily by and for women in China—features generically conventional explicit sex, fixed sexual roles, and romance plots driven by miscommunication. For some slash fans, these unfamiliar conventions were not only surprising but also deeply unsettling. Online platforms such as Twitter (now X), Tumblr, and Reddit saw heated debates over the novel's portrayal of queerness, with critics condemning it as fetishistic, homophobic, or morally problematic. These critiques often extended beyond the text to target the author, the genre, and its fans, revealing a deeper discomfort with non-Western queer representation. I argue that this disorientation and backlash can be understood as a form of genre shock.
[1.3] I propose the term "genre shock" to describe the ways that viewers, audiences, and fans can react negatively when the genre they expect is not the genre they encounter—a phenomenon that becomes even more complex when these genre expectations cross cultural boundaries. Through the online English-language fandom of The Untamed, I demonstrate how the live-action show primed slash fans to expect they were operating within an intimatopic slash genre; thus, when they encountered the source text's differing genre, many reacted with shock, horror, and even disgust. In this case study, genre shock evolved into fans decrying the original as bad queer representation and uplifting the adaptation—which, censored due to Chinese government prohibitions on representations of homosexuality and pornography, contains no overt queer characters or relationships—as good queer representation. Calling an overtly queer novel disgusting and homophobic and celebrating an adaptation that deliberately removes overt queerness as so-called pure romance not only contributes to intrafandom conflicts but also activates racist frameworks of power. Nor did these judgements remain attached to the text—they quickly spread to those who enjoy reading and writing these genres. Such judgements may arise from the shock of finding oneself in a different genre than one expects; however, they draw on and play into long-established racial, ethnic, and cultural power structures in the process. The transcultural nature of this case study reveals how genre shock can turn into moral policing that, under the guise of progressive politics, ultimately reinforces Western norms and values.
[1.4] The concept of genre shock gives us vocabulary to identify these misrecognitions separate from the value judgements that are subsequently often made. In doing so, however, I do not want to offer excuses for the often-vicious reactions that arise from these clashes. Instead, my hope is that by learning to identify genre shock as the root of these clashes, fans and fan studies scholars alike can begin the work of detangling genre unfamiliarity from moral value judgements. Doing so can be a step toward the promise of transcultural understanding and connection offered by fandom in today's global media landscape.
[1.5] Throughout the article, I use terms such as "Anglophone slash fans" and "Western slash fandom" as shorthand to refer to the community under discussion in this case study. In using these terms, I do not mean to imply that any individual fan is themself Western, American, or British. Instead, I refer to the way that online English-language fan communities are normatively structured along Western, particularly American, ideological and fandom norms (Morimoto and Chin 2017; Pande 2018; Bussoletti 2023). My aim is not to describe specific fans involved but to draw attention to the ways that differences in communal interpretive conventions, though they may be obscured in the flattened spaces of online transcultural fandom (Morimoto and Chin 2017), can affect fan communities.
[1.6] I begin by offering a definition of genre shock before turning to the article's case study, online English-language fandom of The Untamed. After identifying three relevant genres—intimatopic slash, danmei, and dangai (or danmei adaptations)—I examine how these different genres can be found in The Untamed and its source novel, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, and demonstrate how fans accustomed to Western slash traditions experienced genre shock when encountering the novel. Finally, I analyze fan discourse to show how expressions of genre shock become entwined with fandom purity culture and racist discourses, ultimately working to silence non-Western and non-hegemonic voices within transcultural fandom.
2. Defining genre shock
[2.1] After the final season of Game of Thrones aired on HBO, Kristin J. Warner (2019) argued in the Los Angeles Review of Books that many viewers disliked the ending because they fundamentally misunderstood its genre. Game of Thrones is popularly understood as a quality television drama; Warner, however, argued that Game of Thrones is better understood as a soap opera. Soap operas excel at presenting characters on different sides of familial, social, and political conflicts, and encouraging viewers to identify with as many of them as possible. In doing so, soap operas reveal that "one person's success will come at the expense of another's joy." Soap opera fans know that endings are never satisfactory and have developed strategies for navigating contradictory identifications and storytelling desires. Had Game of Thrones viewers who thought they were watching quality prime time fantasy drama understood the show's soap opera structure, they may have been able to borrow these strategies to, as Warner said, "circumvent [their felt] helplessness and actually locate new pleasures." Without using the term, Warner described how some Game of Thrones fans experienced what I call genre shock.
[2.2] Genre shock draws from the common concept of culture shock, which Adrian Furnham (2019) defines as "a sudden, unexpected, and surprising set of mainly negative emotions and cognitions associated with encountering a new environment" (1839). Crucially, the experience involves "a negative affective, behavioural and cognitive reaction to a new stimulus which is unexpected." Similarly, genre shock describes the emotional disturbance and negative response that arises when faced with an unexpected genre. A viewer expecting a rom-com may experience genre shock when zombies appear to wreak carnage; a player expecting agency in a video game may experience genre shock when they are unable to affect a key plot point. Following Jason Mittell's (2001) cultural approach to genre, I use the word "genre" here broadly to describe a set of formal and interpretive elements that are shared by creators and audiences. Genre shock occurs when audiences expect one genre—one set of conventions, tropes, character archetypes, plot structures, aesthetic devices, editing techniques, and so forth—but encounter something different.
[2.3] Genre shock is often expressed in ways that denigrate the unexpected or unfamiliar genre. Warner (2019), for example, describes emotional responses on social media that lamented Game of Throne's bad writing, decried out-of-character actions, and expressed feelings of being deceived and betrayed. The text itself became inherently wrong. This transference, common to genre shock, often occurs in ways that denigrate the genre connected to Otherness. With Game of Thrones, the disparaged elements were those associated with the low-culture, feminized form of the soap opera. In the case study to follow, the Chinese/Asian form is seen as not just inferior but actively harmful. Genre shock often devalues minority and othered genres and expressions, ultimately serving to uphold the rightness and universality of Western norms and values. It is thus particularly prevalent, and particularly pernicious, in transcultural spaces.
[2.4] When an individual experiences culture shock, the unfamiliar culture is not necessarily lesser in any way—it is simply difference that causes disorientation and discomfort. In the same way, genre shock should not necessarily involve hierarchies and value judgements. Yet, as the following example discusses, it is often expressed in ultimately harmful ways, including devaluation and social media harassment of individuals. It is vital to disentangle the state of disorientation that comes from encountering an unfamiliar and/or unexpected genre from the way this disorientation and distress tend to be expressed. Providing differentiating vocabulary offers fans and fan studies scholars greater reflexivity in these experiences, ultimately encouraging the exploration of unfamiliar genres with curiosity rather than knee-jerk expressions of dislike and disgust.
3. Intimatopic slash as genre
[3.1] In his foundational text on fandom, Jenkins (1992) describes fandom as an interpretive community. While it would be impractically broad to suggest that fandom comprises one distinct, singular interpretive community, there are modes of interpretation common to fan communities that can be productively approached as genres. Transformative fan works have been theorized as notably collaborative. Fan fiction, for example, is characterized as a collaborative process between writers, editors (often known as beta readers in fic communities), readers, and commentors, and Turk and Johnson's (2012) "ecology of [fan] vidding" charts how fan interpretive conventions evolve collaboratively over cycles of discussion around the media text and the production, circulation, and discussion of fan works. Fan reading, then, is just as collaborative a process as fan production. Through discussion of a film or an episode of television with other fans, through reading fan fiction and watching fan vids, fans learn not only what specific textual moments become touchpoints for a specific fandom but in aggregate what kinds of moments are ripe for specific kinds of interpretations across fan communities—in essence, a broader sense of fan interpretive conventions, which can be usefully considered a genre.
[3.2] One well-known genre, or category of interpretive conventions, is slash. Fanlore, a user-edited wiki focused on media fandom, describes slash as "a fandom term used to refer to a type of fanwork in which two or more characters of the same gender are placed in a sexual or romantic situation or relationship with each other" (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Slash). As this definition reveals, slash is often colloquially thought of in terms of output or production (e.g., slash fic, slash vids), but slash is equally a reading strategy. The verb "to slash" implies a specific interpretive practice of reading character archetypes and relationships—one so pervasive that the metaphor of watching with slash goggles on (in other words, reading any character relationship as homoerotic despite a lack of textual support) is often deployed pejoratively (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Slash_Goggles). Julie Levin Russo (2017), on the other hand, reclaims slash goggles as a "queer mode of viewing" that "unveil[s] [the text's] homoerotic subtext" (¶ 1.2). Through this metaphor, we can understand slash as a particular mode of viewing, a specific orientation toward a text, that rewards the investment of intensified meaning into certain types of interactions between male characters. Through fan communities' collaborative processes of reading and writing, these conventions, including "both the scripted actions of [the] characters" as well as "the nuances of the actors' performances (ways they look at each other, ways the actors move in relation to each other)" (Jenkins 1992), become infused with specific interpretations. Any text that contains these narrative and performance elements thus becomes available to be read through slash goggles as containing queer subtext.
[3.3] As a grassroots term, the specific definition of slash can be somewhat contested. Fans disagree, for example, on whether the term refers to male pairings or to any same-gender pairings (e.g., femslash is often used to designate female/female pairings), whether slash must involve characters from an existing source text or whether original fiction can be considered slash, or whether with increasing queer representation slash can include relationships actualized within the media text itself as well as non-canonical pairings. Different modes or subgenres also exist under the banner of slash. While writers sometimes categorize fan fiction with genres typical to media industries, such as romance, mystery, and fantasy, more often fan fiction writers use fandom-specific categories such as slash, het (heterosexual pairings), or gen (no romance or pairings), and tropes and conventions such as AU/alternate universe, fluff, hurt/comfort, first time, and PWP/porn without plot to categorize genres of fan fiction.
[3.4] While fans do not widely use her language themselves, Elizabeth Woledge (2006) identifies two main structures within slash fan fiction. One follows the conventions and narrative structures of conventional romance novels. In this world of what Woledge calls romantopia, the point of the story is to overcome differences and misunderstandings between the romantic couple. Sex and intimacy are separate, and plot is driven by (often sexual) misunderstandings that arise through a lack of intimacy. The other, which Woledge terms intimatopia, foregrounds and values male homosocial intimacy. In this narrative structure, intimacy comes first. Sex can further express and enhance emotional intimacy, but is not necessary to engender it, as in typical romance narratives, "sex is central only when it can be used as an extension of…intimacy" (107). Some of the most foundational and enduring slash pairings in Western Anglophone fandom have arisen from source texts that are already set in homosocial environments, such as detective and military narratives (Lei 2023). Analyzing slash fan fiction in two fandoms, Julia Goldmann (2022) identified more than three-quarters of her corpus as intimatopic. I cite this not to imply that all slash fan works are intimatopic, or even that this is a representative proportion, but to demonstrate that intimatopic structures are established, prevalent, and recognizable in the slash fandom and to slash fans. I thus categorize intimatopic slash as a specific genre, one that is very familiar to and within slash fandom.
4. Danmei as genre
[4.1] Outside of Western, specifically Anglo–North American, English-speaking media fandom, there are other fan interpretive traditions that resemble slash. In English, the term Boys' Love (BL) is most commonly used to discuss genres of male/male romance across Asia, but there are regional variations—for example, yaoi and shonen-ai in Japan, Y series in Thailand, and danmei in China. There are obvious similarities between slash and BL broadly: Both depict male/male romantic and sexual relationships, and both are generally seen as aimed at female audiences. However, there are also differences, as the two traditions seem to have arisen in parallel, not one from the other. Prominently, while slash arose as a fan tradition involving characters from preexisting source texts and thus rarely describes original fiction, BL is much more likely to be original stories. Further, as I will discuss in relation to danmei specifically, the structures, tropes, and conventions that are common to BL are different from those of slash.
[4.2] The Chinese danmei genre has evolved from the introduction of pirated Japanese BL manga into China in the early 1990s (Yang and Xu 2017). Japanese BL manga arose from a tradition of shōjo, or female-targeted, manga in the 1970s, and as with slash fandom, women continue to be (at least imagined as) the dominant producers and audience of BL in both Japan and China (McLelland and Welker 2015; Nagaike 2015; Zhao et al. 2017). Though danmei has evolved into its own distinct genre with massive online communities and prolific production, the tropes and structures inherited from Japanese BL works are much less prevalent in recent Western genres. Since the early days of fan studies, slash has been theorized by both fans and academics as egalitarian, transcending the gendered power dynamics of heterosexual relationships in various ways (Lamb and Veith 1986; Penley 1992; Jenkins 1992; Salmon and Symons 2003). BL, and danmei specifically, on the other hand, tend to adhere to strict hierarchical relationship and sexual roles. In the "dyad of seme (gong in Chinese, literally, the attacker, similar to the top in self-defined gay relationships with labeled positions) and uke (shou, literally, the receiver/bottom)" common to BL and danmei narratives, "the assignment of the roles is usually fixed and nonreversible" (Yang and Xu 2017, 10).
[4.3] Along with this aggressive/passive dichotomy comes relationship dynamics that may be uncomfortable or off-putting to those used to conceptualizing slash as egalitarian. In a 2005 survey, for example, Dru Pagliassotti (2008) found that scenes of sexual violence and nonconsensual sex were more common in BL, and more accepted by readers of BL than by Western slash fans. Gay activists and academics have pointed to these depictions as homophobic and damaging to gay communities (Ishida 2015; Baudinette 2017). Others see danmei's unequal power dynamics as political sites for the negotiation of power structures, and find that these debates open space between gay men and female danmei fans, resulting in grassroots queer and feminist transformation (Xu and Yang 2013; Yang and Xu 2015). In the cultural, political, and regulatory environment of the People's Republic of China, danmei are questionably legal. Often siloed in specific online literature forums and websites, the danmei community is slightly sheltered from, but still vulnerable to, state prejudice under charges of pornography and homosexual representation (Yang and Xu 2016; Ge 2025).
[4.4] Further, danmei plots often have structural similarities to romantopia, or the world of conventional romance novels from publishers such as Harlequin and Mills & Boon. Plot and tension in these stories are often structured around fundamental misunderstandings by both parties—what the hero might consider a manifestation of love the heroine might find brutal treatment. Only by the end of the story do the two characters come to understand each other enough that what was once seen as brutal can be reinterpreted as love (Woledge 2006). This is opposed to the intimatopic structure, where intimacy is always already present, and love and sex serve to deepen that intimacy. While feminist scholars since Janice Radway (1983) and Tania Modleski (1982) have demonstrated that romantopic narratives can provide adaptive social functions as well as pleasure to their readers, such narratives and power dynamics are now seen as less socially acceptable in the Anglophone fandom sphere, especially by slash fans who are invested in egalitarian queer representation.
5. Dangai as genre
[5.1] In the mid to late 2010s, Chinese production companies turned to danmei for content, producing a string of dangai (or danmei adaptations for television). Following Jun Lei (2023), I identify dangai as a specific genre that is "related to but differentiated from" danmei. The changes required to bring danmei stories to television are not cosmetic but structural, and can have significant impact on their meaning, message, and interpretation, especially within transcultural contexts. While danmei communities are always under threat for violating the restrictions on representations of homosexuality and pornography, dangai, as live-action productions for commercial television (or web series), are even more stringently monitored for such depictions. One of the first dangai, Addicted (2016), retained enough overt homosexuality that it was removed from streaming partway through its airing. Subsequent dangai have employed a number of adaptation strategies in order to avoid the same fate: Some transmuted one of the main (male) characters to a female character or increased focus on a secondary heterosexual storyline in order to dilute attention on the primary homosocial relationship. Guardian, a popular 2018 web series that also recast its main homosexual love story as a brotherly bond, was removed from streaming for three months in 2018, only to reappear with some scenes missing, which fans speculate is an indication that the production's portrayal skirted too close to romance (Wang 2019; Ng and Li 2020). These adaptations deliberately employ allusion to their source material and aesthetic/formal strategies that code the male main characters' relationships, while maintaining a kind of plausible deniability as relates to censorship. In doing so, they tap into an aesthetic language that is familiar and evocative to Western slash viewers.
[5.2] The international popularity of dangai, including The Untamed, have brought heightened state scrutiny to danmei communities and dangai productions. Since late 2021, as Tingting Hu et al. (2024) explain, the "bromance-as-masquerade strategy" no longer passes muster, and the state's suspicion of non-normative masculinities has led to a decline in dangai that openly adapt danmei.
6. Genre shifts between The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation and The Untamed
[6.1] The Untamed (2019) is a live-action adaptation of the original Chinese web novel The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (Mo Dao Zu Shi) by pseudonymous author Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. The web novel is set in a xianxia (Chinese historical fantasy) world, where cultivators develop supernatural powers and strength through lifelong qigong-inspired training. It opens with the death of Wei Wuxian, an initially promising young cultivator who has turned evil and is reviled by the cultivation world. Thirteen years later, Wei Wuxian, secretly resurrected into someone else's body, awakens, and quickly becomes embroiled in solving a murder mystery with world-changing implications. It is a complicated and at times ambiguous narrative dealing with grand themes of morality, justice and injustice, mob mentality, personal and societal accountability, class, generational trauma, and family, all alongside the romance between protagonist Wei Wuxian and his rival-turned-partner-turned-lover Lan Wangji.
[6.2] While The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation hinges as much on Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji's romantic missteps and miscommunications as it does on the twists and turns of the broader political murder mystery, the live-action adaptation must remove any explicit romance, not to mention sex, between the two male protagonists due to the restrictions on homosexual representations in media. Instead, the series codes the relationship between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji as a profoundly intense homosocial bond. In doing so, however, the drama shifts from a more danmei-typical, romantopic trope-driven narrative to an intimatopic structure that foregrounds their male homosocial intimacy.
[6.3] One narrative event demonstrates how the genre shifts between the novel as danmei and the drama as intimatopic slash. In an episode from their youth, Wei Wuxian brags about his archery skills, and is made to spend a subsequent hunting competition blindfolded (Mo Xiang Tong Xiu 2021). In the novel, Wei Wuxian wanders a forest blindfolded. A mysterious person pushes him up against a tree, and as he is forcefully kissed, he wonders who this girl kissing him is (2021). Soon after, he finds Lan Wangji angrily destroying trees, clearly—to the reader familiar with such tropes, if not to Wei Wuxian—frustrated at the lack of self-control that led him to kiss the oblivious Wei Wuxian. In the drama, Wei Wuxian removes his blindfold, so there is no mistaken identity, and when he encounters Lan Wangji wandering the forest, they have an emotional heart-to-heart. During the conversation, which is filled with lingering shots of intense eye contact, Lan Wangji defines their relationship with a term (zhiji) that is translated by Netflix as lifelong confidante and soulmate by other streaming services—a specific term that not only taps into a long historical Chinese tradition of male bonds that encompasses and transcends romantic love (Hunxi-Guilai 2020) but also invokes the kind of intimate oneness that characterizes intimatopic fiction. Unlike the drama, which uses this scene to emphasize the knowing connection between the pair, the novel follows romantopic tropes where the scene is one in a series of misunderstandings that cause conflict and draw them apart.
[6.4] Structurally, the plot changes made in the adaptation process shift their relationship away from one based around romantic conflicts and misunderstandings. While both open in medias res with Wei Wuxian's death and subsequent resurrection, the novel is structured in present-day (post-resurrection) action regularly interspersed with flashback chapters, while the drama soon interrupts the present-day action with a single, extended thirty-one-episode flashback, only returning to the narrative's present in the thirty-third episode. The novel's structure aligns perfectly with the typical romantopic structure and tropes of conflicts generated by misunderstandings (which are then explicated to the reader through flashbacks). In contrast, by the series' return to the present day, there are no secrets hiding in the past between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji. Further, while in the novel Wei Wuxian is unaware that Lan Wangji knows his identity post-resurrection, there is no such question in the drama. The need to hide Wei Wuxian's identity from everyone else—he is still, to the outside world, a reviled outlaw—serves to bring the two characters closer together while isolating the pair from even the relatively homosocial backdrop of the cultivation world. Such a close, private relationship intensifies their intimate bond of two, a hallmark of intimatopic narratives (Woledge 2006), while further differentiating from the miscommunications and sexual misunderstandings that generate the romantopia-typical plot. While they might be aware that censorship has wrought a degree of elision from the narrative, viewers familiar with slash and unfamiliar with danmei would have no reason not to expect the source novel to conform to the same intimatopic structures.
7. Genre shock and purity culture in The Untamed fandom
[7.1] As the analysis above demonstrates, the adaptation process produced a coded, intimatopic portrayal in The Untamed that was highly familiar to English-language slash fans. Fans who were accustomed to, and expected, a similarly intimatopic style of queer narrative in the source text experienced genre shock when encountering danmei tropes and romantopic structure. Being disoriented by such an encounter could lead to increased intercultural exchange and understanding, but in practice this disorientation and shock is often expressed through rejection of the unfamiliar genre. In the transcultural context of The Untamed's Anglophone slash fandom, the danmei genre—along with its writers and readers—becomes the bad object. In praising the queer representation of The Untamed and condemning that of The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, these fans reveal the ways that genre shock becomes entwined with more damaging discourses such as fandom purity culture, which seeks to control representations of identity, including queerness, within hegemonic moral bounds (Springman 2024) by policing so-called good and bad representation. Ultimately, genre shock and purity culture provoke conflict and risk the silencing of non-Western voices in the contact zone of transcultural fandom.
[7.2] The examples of fan discourse that follow were mainly found in the context of such online conflicts, arguments, and harassment. Between 2020 and 2023, as posts, conversations, and links crossed my various social media feeds and I followed these leads down social media rabbit holes, I gathered more than three hundred posts, threads, and conversations from publicly accessible social media, such as Tumblr, Twitter (now X), and Reddit, and fans' personal websites. This sample is not representative, and I do not make any claims about the proportions of fans that hold such views. However, these views do circulate within the broad slash fandom networks that I am myself a part of. I often first encountered these views through other fans' attempts to challenge these understandings of danmei and dangai culture. In order to avoid drawing attention to specific instances of these conversations, potentially reigniting conflicts and perpetuating further harm to fans, I have chosen not to cite usernames and links. Instead, I offer terms and phrases in common enough circulation that specific posts cannot be identified, and ethically fabricate longer quotes to reproduce the essential meaning and style while remaining unsearchable (Markham 2012).
[7.3] When praising The Untamed, many fans invoke the intimatopic nature of the drama while celebrating the lack of explicit sex and even romance. Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji's relationship in the show is described as pure, intimate, delicate, subtle, restrained, and emotionally intense, explicitly connecting the value of the intimatopic elements of The Untamed to the censorship that required removal of both romance and sex. One fan enthused that "sex and kissing are replaced with a super deep emotional connection," for example, and other fans considered the (non-physical) moments of intimacy in the drama to be more satisfying than a kiss or even a confession of love. Often citing the writing advice to show rather than tell, these fans assert that the need to allude to romance subtextually resulted not just in better storytelling but in better queer representation. One fan claimed that "it would have been easier to have them kiss, but this relationship is more powerful," while others felt that even a kiss scene would have ruined the portrayal of the relationship. Thus, beyond appreciating the way that the show conveys intimacy and closeness between the main characters despite censorship, some fans were "actually grateful for the censorship," while another quipped, "at some point we gotta thank censorship for this." As Abby Springman (2024) similarly argues, Anglophone fans' discussion of censorship is thus framed as if it made the show "gayer" than the novel. In one sense, these fans are not wrong to consider censorship productive in a Foucauldian manner (Leung 2024). However, this slippage—from appreciating The Untamed's queer representation despite its censorship to because of its censorship—reveals the messy entanglement between discourses of fandom purity culture and racism. Thus, the shocking encounter with queer representation in the danmei genre, specifically around unmet expectations of intimatopia, twists into support of a regime that limits and eliminates any queer representation at all.
8. Racialized impurity and bad queer representation
[8.1] Upholding the de-queered and de-sexed depiction in The Untamed also reinforces longstanding Western, particularly American, stereotypes of East Asian and Asian American masculinity. Scholars argue that Asian men are often emasculated and asexual, or hypersexualized in deviant ways (Fung 1991; Chan 2001). The fan discourse around purity and intimacy in The Untamed paradoxically affirms both poles of this binary: The emotionally restrained, desexualized relationship is celebrated as pure, while the novel's more explicit, kinky content is condemned as improperly hypersexual. If The Untamed is pure because censorship removed romance and sex, then the romance and sex in the source text must be impure. Criticisms levied against the novel, the genre, its author, and its fans range from accusations of homophobia to perpetuating homophobic stereotypes, fetishization, and unhealthy and abusive relationship dynamics. Many of the romantopic misunderstandings and mysteries that drive the novel are interpreted as bad writing as well as bad queer representation. This interpretation is perhaps influenced by translation choices in an early, fan-translated version (Ng 2024), but such discourse has the same effect regardless. Inflammatory language—rapey, twisted, creepy, disgusting, immoral, ignorant, and garbage—is applied not just to the novel but also to the author and its fans. These are not neutral expressions of preference for a different genre; they are moral and ethical judgements that rebound onto the novel's author, readers, and genre. Springman (2024) argues that fandom purity culture's roots in American Evangelical Christian culture results in a "fear of contagion" where bad or problematic fictional content could infect those who interact with it. Bad queer representation, then, must be controlled and eliminated. Genre shock is channelled into covert xenophobia and racism, designating a merely unfamiliar genre of queer representation as dangerous and wrong.
[8.2] The tropes of queer representation in The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, and danmei as a whole, are seen as impure or bad representation because they do not align with Western conceptions of good—often homonormative—queerness. Even where Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji conform to homonormative standards, such as in their implied adoption of a son, forming a reproductive family unit, for these fans the characters' inappropriate queerness makes them unfit for parenthood. This view, however, centers Western conceptions of queerness and diminishes other queer modes of being. Joseph Massad (2002) argues that Western discourses of gayness take Western categories of non-heterosexual identities for granted even in other cultural contexts, and applying these identities and categories in non-Western contexts often erases, delegitimizes, and "represses same-sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into its [Western] sexual epistemology" (363). When fans call the novel fetishistic, homophobic, and not good representation, it only reproduces Western norms and understandings of non-heteronormative sexualities, identities, and desires as universal and correct. It denies the queer world-making potential of this text not just for those within its intended audience, China's danmei community, but for all readers across Asia and the rest of the world (Shaikh 2023; Acosta and Lu 2024; Yang and Garg 2024).
[8.3] These critiques and accusations extend beyond the text itself, causing harm to creators and fans as well. Springman (2024) shows how fandom purity culture often borrows from movements concerned with diversifying representation, such as the #OwnVoices movement, to claim that any engagement with a topic must be legitimized through one's own identity. For this reason, fans who object to fetishization and homophobia within the novel often do so with the self-disclosure that they are themselves queer (and thus qualified to identify homophobia and queer fetishization as well as police its representation and consumption). This conflation of identity with representation also runs the other direction. In this logic, if the web novel and danmei are homophobic and fetishistic, then its writer and fans must be as well. In online spaces such as X, Tumblr, and Reddit, misogynistic terms like the Japanese fujoshi and Mandarin funü (rotten women) are used to denigrate fans of the novel and author Mo Xiang Tang Xu herself. In their own linguistic contexts, these terms have been reclaimed by female fans of BL as markers of sophisticated engagement with media. Within Anglophone fandom, however, these terms are often uncritically deployed to accuse these fans of homophobia (Aburime 2024). While the impetus behind fandom purity culture and morality policing may arise from a desire to make online fandom a safe space for participants, the conflation of depiction and consumption with endorsement can lead to high-profile conflicts and harassment campaigns (Drouin 2021). These dynamics demonstrate how purity culture, under the guise of progressive politics, can reproduce racialized hierarchies and silence non-Western queer voices, even when the object of fandom is a queer, non-Western text.
9. Conclusion
[9.1] The case of The Untamed fandom is particularly interesting because the source text was judged in English-language spaces to be too queer. Judgements on queer representation in transcultural fandom more often concerns fan anger around a perceived lack of queerness. In this vein, Lori Morimoto (2019) examines fan reactions to a 2016 Japanese anime Yuri!!! on Ice, about a Japanese figure skater Yuri and his Russian coach, later (implied) husband, Victor. Like The Untamed, Yuri!!! on Ice was praised in Western fan circles for the quality of its queer representation, yet its queerness is at times deliberately ambiguous. In episode 7, for example, Victor and Yuri share what appears to be a kiss. As Victor's arm obscures the bottom half of their faces, however, whether it is in fact a kiss or simply a hug is left open to the viewers' interpretation. As Morimoto (2019) shows, this ambiguity appeared more acceptable to fans who were familiar and comfortable with Japanese generic traditions and fan cultures. Fans from a Western slash milieux, on the other hand, reacted with feelings of betrayal and accusations of queerbaiting after the narrative (and paratextually the author) refused to define Yuri and Victor's relationship. Eve Ng (2017) notes that judgements of queerbaiting are determined by cultural contexts and expectations; Western fans' reactions here may be informed by homonationalism whereby, despite the nation's lack of gender and sexual equality, fans come to associate the feminist-queer values of Japan's plentiful exports of yaoi and BL media with the nation itself (Williams 2015). Accordingly, they may expect good queer representation from a Japanese anime and react strongly to the perceived breach of trust when Yuri!!! on Ice instead relies on ambiguity and subtext. Subverted genre expectations are key in this instance too. Although Yuri!!! on Ice received opprobrium for lack, rather than excess, of queerness, the effect is still to disparage a non-Western representation of queerness. Genre shock is not dangerous on its own, but for the way that it is often implicated in the perpetuation of hegemonic hierarchies.
[9.2] In proposing genre shock as a concept, I do not suggest that there is something wrong with taking pleasure in reading queerly. As Andrea Wood (2013) argues in relation to Japanese BL anime, censored or coded depictions can be "erotically charged for the viewer and appeal to a wider array of fantasies" specifically because of their ambiguity, and the fact that slash fans have engaged in this reading practice for so many decades proves the practice's affective appeal. However, the way that some English-language fans extend moral judgement on the validity of more explicit forms of queer practices and representations reveals the uneven power logics inherent in transcultural contact zones. Within transcultural fandoms, fans must learn to disconnect moral judgements from unfamiliarity with interpretive conventions. When we can recognize and expect genre differences, transcultural fandoms can begin to live up to their potential as spaces of cross-cultural connection rather than as places where epistemic violence simply becomes reiterated.