1. Introduction
[1.1] In contemporary China's digital subcultural ecology, the French Revolution—that historical node once termed the "founding event of modernity" (Fehér 1990, 3)—is undergoing a morphological transformation. It is no longer merely an examination point in high school history textbooks requiring memorization of the limitations of the bourgeois revolution but instead is deconstructed into consumable affective works through fan culture terminology such as CP (coupling), AU (alternate universe), chanliang (产粮, a metaphor for creative content production), and Ke (嗑, intense emotional investment), which denotes not passive viewing but an intensive form of affective labor and energetic investment where fans project desire onto a particular pairing. On the Chinese platform LOFTER—an analogue to Tumblr—the "Friends of the ABC" youth society from Hugo's Les Misérables ([1862] 1987)—a text commonly appropriated in Chinese fan circles as a narrative stand-in or conduit for exploring the themes and ethos of the French Revolution—has become a focal point for derivative creations, and this temporal displacement is not historical confusion but the fan community's affective archaeology: LOFTER creators' tags reveal they knowingly situate the ABC Society in 1832 yet deliberately comment using phrases like "the spirit of the French Revolution lives forever" and "Jacobin idealism." For them, revolution is not a chronicle event but a transferable affective structure—the 1789 guillotine and the 1832 barricades share the same narrative grammar of youth as politics. On the international archive AO3, the revolutionary friendship between Robespierre and Saint-Just is repeatedly written as danmei (耽美, a Chinese genre of homoerotic fiction) narratives.
[1.2] In this study, I examine French Revolution–themed fan works created by Chinese youth on LOFTER, with selected works from AO3 serving as cross-cultural points of reference. This grafting of online subculture may appear as a contemporary symptom of "amusing ourselves to death" (Postman 1985), yet it conceals a profound ideological operation mechanism, where youth subjects are quietly producing themselves.
[1.3] Robespierre was the leader of the Jacobin faction during the French Revolution, celebrated for his incorruptible lifestyle as the Incorruptible. During the Reign of Terror he orchestrated from 1793–1794, approximately 17,000 individuals were executed. The Law of 22 Prairial stripped defendants of their basic legal rights, reducing death penalty verdicts to the decision of a single judge, causing the number of executions to surge fivefold in the final month. The Thermidorian Reaction marked the end of the Terror, sending Robespierre to the guillotine he himself had brought to its apex.
[1.4] This fractured historical evaluation constitutes the core of its contemporary appeal. As a female graduate student, I study the Reign of Terror in academic circles, yet in fan fiction circles, I harbor a deep affection for Robespierre—the primary perpetrator of the Terror—and his pure virtue as constructed in fan fiction narratives. Although fully aware of the historical violence, I cannot resist the absolute moral posture he manifests in these fictional portrayals. This schismatic experience mirrors precisely what China's renowned sociologist Fei Xiaotong (1994) described as the "dual individual"—the externally manifest "He" adheres to academic circle norms, critiquing the violent logic of the French Revolution's Terror, while the internally concealed "I" defends Robespierre's purity and solitude in the deep night before his Thermidorian fall as depicted in fan works. The method of critical autoethnography provides the possibility for dissecting this contradiction.
[1.5] The core question of this study is: Why, in a postrevolutionary era, would a young woman fall in love with revolutionary terror itself and experience political passion through Ke-ing revolutionary CPs? This phenomenon cannot be simplistically described as historical nihilism—an ideological accusation in the Chinese context specifically targeting discourses challenging official historical narratives—but should instead be regarded as a micropolitical operation of affect.
2. The predicament of contemporary Chinese youth and the appeal of safe radicality
[2.1] The phenomenon among the youth group referenced in this study must be understood within China's social context. In 2023, Chinese higher education graduates (excluding self-study examinations) reached approximately 17.7 million (Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China 2024), while socioeconomic development simultaneously decelerated, with relative solidification of class positions and weakened mobility, creating a massive group of highly educated yet low-income youth. They can neither relinquish the cultural capital endowed by education nor obtain corresponding social positions. Simultaneously, channels for youth participation in public political life are limited, and any organized political action faces stringent review and regulation.
[2.2] This state of delayed adulthood starkly contrasts with youth political participation during the French Revolution. During the Revolution, Saint-Just, at age 26, had already become a core member of the Committee of Public Safety, participating in national affairs, whereas contemporary Chinese youth in their mid-twenties completing graduate studies are still regarded as immature employment reserves for industrial sectors.
[2.3] Against this backdrop, French Revolution historical fan fiction offers a historical time capsule where youth can directly grasp history without enduring hierarchical seniority. This safe radicality—experiencing extreme political engagement at the symbolic level without bearing real risks—has become a typical form of affective self-exploitation under neoliberal governmentality.The romanticization of revolutionary figures functions as an ideological suturing, a process where subjects stitch together the individualizing logic of neoliberal discourse (emphasizing personal choice) with the collective political passion of the revolutionary era (providing a definitive moral framework), forming a contradictory political subjectivity.
3. Field archaeology and reflection
[3.1] The romanticization of the Reign of Terror in fan fiction serves as a mirror for personal academic constraints. At 2 a.m. one day in 2023, I was reading a historical fan fiction text on AO3. The author depicted Robespierre trembling alone after signing the Law of 22 Prairial—not trembling from the ecstasy of supreme power, but he "saw the necessity of terror yet felt his own self dissolving." I knew this was romanticization and beautification of history—the law led to the execution of over 1,000 individuals, including numerous innocents. Yet I remained moved by Robespierre's purity and solitude because, in that moment, I thought of my own thesis proposal.
[3.2] My advisor commented on my proposal: "The topic is too broad, not feasible. Be more realistic." But what is reality, if not accepting the academic circle's rules of the game and becoming a qualified student? Robespierre's incorruptibility was a refusal of such compromise. My emotional investment in him was, in truth, mourning my own inability to refuse. This affective investment confirms Fromm's (1941) diagnosis: When freedom becomes a burden, subjects retreat into the safe distance of historical symbols, using controllable traumatic experiences (such as reading nue wen [虐文, angst fiction]) to evade the uncertainties of real politics. Robespierre became for me an ideological sublime object (Žižek 1989)—a historical specter emptied of concrete political content, retaining only the hollow shell of radicality. Each act of indulgence constitutes a symbolic consumption of Other violence to fill one's own scarcity and powerlessness in political participation.
[3.3] The narrative then turns to danmei as "weapons of the weak" (Scott 1985, 29). We must acknowledge that the danmei narratives in the fan circle indeed function as weapons of the weak for women, effectively carving out a space for female subject desire within male-centered revolutionary narratives. This concept draws on James C. Scott's (1985) analysis of everyday forms of peasant resistance, adapted here to describe how female fans use covert cultural practices to assert agency. For instance, the danmei-eroticization of the revolutionary friendship between Robespierre and Saint-Just deconstructs traditional revolutionary history's male alliance and reveals its latent affective and corporeal dimensions. This practice literally enacts Butler's (1988) theory of gender performativity—by rewriting male bodies, female authors declare their mastery over the symbolic system.
[3.4] But we must acknowledge that this narrative weapon is fragile. My fieldwork reveals that danmei fan fiction creation must strictly adhere to intracircle rules—such as prohibiting OOC (out of character, referring to deviations from established character traits), mandatory CP tagging—HE (happy ending) or BE (bitter ending) designations, and so on. While these rules appear to maintain creative quality, they in fact reproduce atomized individualism—each creative group becomes an isolated text producer, thereby losing the possibility of collective political action.
[3.5] Interestingly, my own danmei narrative obsession occurs within a desexualized framework—I explicitly prefer qingshui (清水, clean water fiction), a mode of desexualized affective investment worthy of analysis. Qingshui refers to fan fiction works that deliberately avoid explicit sexual description. Unlike the Western gen tag emphasizing no romance, qingshui in the Chinese context is replete with spiritual eroticism and tension, avoiding physical sexual depictions to preserve a sense of affective purity. This creative mode serves as a strategy to pass platform content censorship and reflects a specific Chinese fan community's veneration of spiritual love. Fraser (1995) notes that contemporary feminism faces a rupture between politics of recognition and politics of redistribution—individual identities gain recognition without challenging structural exploitation. My clean water preference is precisely a microcosm of this rupture—it represents both a deep rejection of the sexualized market (refusing to reduce affective relations to sexual transactions) and a strategy of cultural capital accumulation for maintaining moral purity, positioning pure love fans above carnal fans within an intracircle hierarchy. Yet it never escapes the reproductive mechanism of gendered labor division—women are responsible for affective labor and moral purification, while men (even posthumous ones) provide political passion.
[3.6] The appeal of Robespierrist virtue in fan fiction lies precisely in its political subjectivity requiring no mediation—no compromise needed, virtue itself is political action. This radicalism is seductive for Chinese youth in a state of delayed adulthood—we have our adolescence prolonged by the education system yet are suddenly demanded to be realistic upon entering society. The French Revolution's Reign of Terror provides a historical time capsule where youth can directly grasp history without enduring hierarchical seniority.
[3.7] These historical narratives of youthful revolutionaries provide me, suspended in delayed adulthood, with an alternative life script. Being in my twenties means existing in a suspended state: higher education cultivates my critical thinking and innovative capacity yet provides no corresponding channels for political participation. While the job market demands young people accumulate more experience, the fan fiction circle offers the illusion of direct action. This illusion's safety lies in its operation within the quan di zi meng (圈地自萌, staying in one's own circle) rules of digital platforms—any transgression risks triggering the gua ren (挂人, hanging people) mechanism, a distinctly Chinese fan community practice of public criticism involving the exposure of a violator's real ID or personal information. This rapidly moralizes political passion into circle rules issues and thus avoids real social conflict.
[3.8] Žižek (1989) notes that ideology operates through the logic: They know what they are doing, but they are still doing it. I am aware that romanticized narratives of the Reign of Terror are simplifications, yet I remain immersed in this narrative mode because it provides an alternative life script. Here, the subject's melancholia, rather than mourning, is more appropriate—because mourning implies letting go of the lost object, whereas melancholia internalizes it as part of the self. My indulgence in Robespierrist virtue essentially internalizes my own structurally political repression as a virtue compulsion.
4. Multiple theoretical dialogues
[4.1] Marx (1975) criticized Hegel for treating real contradictions—material conflicts between labor and capital, concrete social antagonisms—as a copy of the Spirit, subordinating concrete material conditions to abstract philosophical categories. I adapt this critique to analyze how French Revolution fan fiction operates as a copy of a copy that obscures the real contradictions of contemporary Chinese youth. Here, the real contradictions are the structural predicaments facing my generation: the prolongation of adolescence through educational credentialism, the foreclosure of political participation channels, and so on. The Spirit is the revolutionary fervor of 1789—radical political agency, collective action, and the immediate grasp of history. The fan fiction becomes a copy of the Spirit: It reproduces the affective intensity of revolution while evacuating its concrete political content. The original—the French Revolution as a material historical event—is already inaccessible, layered over by textbook narratives, Hugo's literary sublimation, and previous fan interpretations. Thus, when fans return to 1789 through their creations, they are not engaging with the Revolution's materiality but with a spectral copy; this copy allows them to experience safe radicality without confronting their own impotence in the face of the real contradictions of neoliberal China.
[4.2] Foucault (1972, 3–4) already pointed out that "history is a complex product of multiple powers and knowledges." Participants in the fan fiction circle face not a purely objective historical event but an event-text wrapped in multiple layers of narrative. When scholars use the politically correct discourse of officialdom to critique the so-called erroneous tendencies of fan fiction creation, they are using one powerful discourse to suppress a weaker one. And the wisdom of critical autoethnography lies in recognizing that the self is simultaneously a cultural vessel and that the critical posture of academic elites is itself a product of specific social structures—they wield symbolic power derived from official discourse, while fan communities provide hidden resistance to this power. The truly critical posture is not to adjudicate right and wrong between the two but to reveal how these positions are socially produced.
[4.3] However, this fan resistance risks co-optation by digital platform capital. LOFTER's chanliang mechanism is essentially the commodification of affective labor: each fan fiction work's recommendations are converted into platform traffic capital. Creators become free affective laborers under the discourse of generating content for love, representing a new form of alienated labor: youth alienated from their own affects. Ke-ing revolution becomes a mechanism of self-exploitation—as subjects consume revolutionary symbols, they simultaneously fill platform databases and exhaust their desire for real political participation. Fan culture studies must respond to this challenge: When subcultural resistance itself becomes a source of platform capital profit, how can new forms of revolution be constructed?
[4.4] Psychoanalysis offers a deep diagnosis of the Ke mechanism. Fromm (1941) observed that modern individuals, due to the loneliness brought by freedom, seek authoritative or destructive relief. In postmodern society, neoliberal governmentality individualizes all risk—you are unemployed because you didn't work hard enough. This forced individual freedom drives subjects to seek escape mechanisms for psychological relief. Ke-ing revolutionary CPs is precisely the digital version of this psychology—when real political participation is fraught with risk, subjects retreat to the safe distance of historical symbols to obtain controllable traumatic experiences and thereby experience determined passion.
[4.5] Žižek's (1989) theory of the ideological sublime object provides a more precise analysis. Robespierre in the fan fiction fan community functions as a lost sublime object whose political radicality is retained only at the imaginary level, while all actual political content (social contradictions) is sanitized. Each act of Ke-ing repeats this process—subjects experience revolutionary passion in the imaginary precisely to avoid political action in the real.
[4.6] This deep logic is particularly evident in tragic narrative texts. By repeatedly reading scenes of Robespierre's execution after the Thermidorian Reaction, individuals obtain controllable traumatic experiences. This is not simple emotional masochism, but rather through symbolic repetition of trauma, the subject's sense of powerlessness before structural social violence is transformed into individualized psychological drama, thereby avoiding confrontation with their own impotence in real political life. Viewed thus, the author's jouissant fixation on the terrifying absolutism of Robespierrian virtue signals not a rebellion against structural oppression but its melancholic internalization—transforming external political domination into an obsessional moral superego.
[4.7] Feminism reveals both the liberation and the trap of danmei. Butler's gender performativity theory (1988) encounters challenges in the fan fiction creation domain. Strictly speaking, historical fan fiction creation lacks an original text; fans can only excavate and research through historical events themselves, and all ren she (人设, character personalities) represent competing constructions of historical interpretation discourse by different communities. Therefore, the OOC warning in essence constitutes a rule of the interpretive discourse community established within fan communities to maintain discursive boundaries. These rules appear to protect creative freedom but actually discipline female subjects' desires through micropolitical operations—"No OOC" means accepting a mainstream interpretation (typically the pure Robespierre in fan works) and prohibiting deviation from character.
[4.8] Fraser's (1995) critique of the limitations of "politics of recognition" is applicable here—while danmei-eroticized narratives in historical RPF (real person fiction) grant recognition to female subject desire, they fail to challenge the mechanisms of gendered labor division and exploitation that necessitate this desire's hidden form. More dangerously, digital platform capital precisely quantifies this subjective desire: LOFTER's CP ranking system transforms women's affective labor into tradable digital assets. When the "historical RPF" tag garners tens of thousands of clicks on online platforms, this is not merely a youth subcultural phenomenon but part of the digital economy's value reproduction chain. Here, tradable digital assets are virtual gifts and tipping systems where fans can purchase digital tokens to support authors, convertible to real monetary value through platform mechanisms.
5. Methodological reflection
[5.1] The honesty of autoethnography requires exposing the researcher's own split. When I simultaneously participate in the historical RPF circle and reflect on it as an academic researcher, am I not betraying the trust of fellow fans in some sense? Moreover, academic ethical requirements demand anonymization of research subjects, yet the fan fiction circle's gua ren culture relies on real-name exposure to maintain community order. This ethical conflict exposes that academic and fan circles belong to different symbolic orders—the former pursues universal knowledge, the latter protects cultural secret languages.
[5.2] A greater contradiction lies in the split between affect and reason. While browsing historical RPF works, my rationality repeatedly warned me, "This historical RPF is a beautification," yet my affect still drove me to "One-Click Threefold"—like, recommend, tip. If autoethnography is honest, it must present these irreconcilable splits rather than effecting false integration. I ultimately realized that the limitations of methodology are precisely the limitations of the researcher—in the age of digital capital, we all become dual individuals in some sense, exhausting the potential for political liberation through alienated affective labor.
[5.3] The concept of the acafan requires reevaluation two decades later. Jenkins's (2006) concept of the acafan (academic-fan) originally described scholars who are also fans, but postcolonial scholars note that when Western scholars study non-Western fan cultures, they often treat the latter as data mines, constituting a form of violence. Yet even as a native researcher, the flow of academic capital remains unequal, constituting a certain colonial violence—my publications, academic promotions, and so on, are built upon freely extracting historical RPF creators' products of affective labor, forming an internal colonization of fans by scholars.
[5.4] I wish to emphasize that true youth subcultural critique does not adjudicate individual right or wrong but reveals how these ideologies and subjectivities are produced. When researchers critique the fan fiction creation for tendencies toward historical nihilism, they must simultaneously critique their own academic nihilism—the academic violence of abstracting lived experiences into research data through theoretical discourse. As Jenkins recently reflected in his concept of participatory culture (Jenkins and Jie 2024), researchers should not merely be observers but participants, poaching critical theory back into the community to achieve bidirectional knowledge flow.
6. Conclusion
[6.1] Through critical autoethnography and dialogue with multiple critical theories, this study reveals the deep logic underlying youth Ke-ing of French Revolution historical fan fiction culture. My own virtue obsession proves this practice is not merely an external object of observation but an internal condition of existence—a triple response to gendered violence, generational predicament, and the nothingness of political participation.
[6.2] The way forward lies not in reconciliation but in maintaining this very contradiction. Just as Marx did not reconcile matter and consciousness but opened new paths through praxis, integrating them organically, perhaps the production of youthful political subjectivity requires simultaneously affirming the contradiction and torn sentiment: "I love Robespierre" and "I critique Robespierre." The value of critical autoethnography lies in making this contradiction visible, thereby transforming individual melancholia into collective diagnosis.
[6.3] My final action could be publishing a fan fiction piece on AO3 titled "A Female Graduate Student's Self-Critique," writing in romantic language a dialogue between myself and Robespierre where he directly interrogates me: "Do you love me, or the moral exemption you imagine?" This is not academic play but completing a critical circuit through the fan fiction circle's own logic—if poaching is fans' weapon, then critical theory must also be poached back.
[6.4] In the digital capitalist age, in this postrevolutionary era, perhaps revolution is no longer possible, but the gesture of Ke-ing itself can be revolutionized. This sounds like a clichéd fan fiction ending, but the honesty of autoethnography permits me to retain this cliché—because clichés are precisely the crystallization of collective desires. Just as Robespierre on 9 Thermidor could not shoot himself (legend says his jaw was fractured, preventing him from pulling the trigger), I too cannot complete self-annihilation between academic discipline and fan pleasure. This inability to annihilate may be the final dignity of subjects under neoliberal discourse—we no longer believe in grand narratives, yet we refuse complete surrender; we know fantasy is fantasy, yet we insist on fantasy because beyond it, there is nothing.