Why a Middle-Aged Man Calls Himself Wuxian: The Male Fans of Mo Dao Zu Shi

An avatar in the class group

A few days ago someone new joined my old-classmates group on WeChat. His avatar was Wei Wuxian as drawn in the donghua Mo Dao Zu Shi (魔道祖师, Mó Dào Zǔ Shī), and his display name was "Wuxian." He is a man in his middle years, one of our former classmates.

Half of my curiosity came from surprise. Mo Dao Zu Shi grew out of a web novel in the danmei tradition (耽美, male–male romance fiction, written mostly by and for women). The donghua, and later the live-action The Untamed (陈情令, Chén Qíng Lìng), have generally been regarded as shows with a mainly female audience. A middle-aged man using the lead's picture, and the lead's courtesy name as his own, did not match my picture of that audience.

So I spent a few days wondering how many viewers like him there are, how they find their way in, and whether he is seeing the same story that other fans see.

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Fewer men, not no men

The numbers are patchy, and each comes with a caveat.

For the live-action The Untamed, the Chinese analytics firm Yunhe Data reported, as relayed by the outlet Jiemian in 2019, that during the broadcast the audience was 82% women and 18% men. The average viewer was 31.86 years old, and 73% were over 30. I could not find Yunhe's original report, so this is secondhand, and it describes the drama, not the donghua.

For the donghua the figures are scrappier. A fan-compiled post on Bilibili (October 2018) put the male share of Baidu search users at 38%, rising to 44%, and women at roughly 85% of the audience on Weibo. The post marks the Baidu figures as older data. Note also what the Baidu number measures: people searching for the show, not people who watched it. Separately, Jiemian's summary of Tencent Video's 2019 annual index lists Mo Dao Zu Shi among the works favored by female anime viewers, alongside Fox Spirit Matchmaker (狐妖小红娘). That summary gives no gender breakdown.

Then there is scale. A promotional article reposted by Tencent News in August 2021 claims more than 260 million views on the donghua's premiere day and more than 3.4 billion cumulative views across the series. It is a promotional piece, so read it as the studio's own figure.

Men are plainly a minority. But a minority of an audience this size is still a lot of people.

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What the donghua puts on screen

How was the donghua presented at the time? In the promotional coverage I read, the recurring words were youth, knight-errant and soulmate. A 2018 Jiemian article placed Wei Wuxian's characterization inside the wuxia tradition (武侠, Chinese martial-arts fiction): a figure unruly on the outside and chivalrous within, a type it said current viewers admire. The 2021 promotional article describes the lead in one line:

"Protagonist Wei Wuxian is a young knight-errant who loves and hates fiercely and does not fear the powerful."

That is studio-side copy, so it shows the face the studio wanted to present. Even so, the emphasis is clear: sect loyalties, grudges, the line between orthodox and heretical, clearing a wronged man's name, and two people walking side by side. The bond between the two leads, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji (蓝忘机), is played with restraint in the donghua.

I think this is probably the key. Take a viewer who does not follow web novels and has never met danmei. On his screen is a period fantasy about cultivators: a bold young man, sect politics, a man falsely accused, a later reckoning. The understated bond reads to him as close friendship, as the brotherly loyalty that runs through stories of the jianghu (江湖, the martial world). Nobody told him there is another layer, so he has no reason to go looking. Whatever makes it a different show for other fans simply never reached him.

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A few traces of such viewers exist online. In July 2019, while The Untamed was a hit, male video bloggers on Bilibili were posting about it. The title of one video, viewed about 62,000 times, read: "A Straight Guy Watches The Untamed and Can't See What's Wrong." The label is the uploader's own and I could not verify it, and it concerns the live-action drama, not the donghua.

There is the opposite case too. In June 2022 the description of another Bilibili video read: "I know a lot of people on Bilibili dislike those two, but we two guys like them and don't hide it." This person knows, and likes it anyway. There is a selection effect here, of course. People who make public videos and write public descriptions are the ones who already know. Those who don't know won't announce that they don't.

So the understatement works as a door as well as a wall. Viewers who don't know can keep watching, and viewers who do know are not made to take a position.

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What kind of hero Wei Wuxian is

Not being scared off explains why a man doesn't leave. It doesn't explain why he stays. I think the reason lies in Wei Wuxian himself.

His arc is one of the oldest shapes in wuxia. He starts as a carefree, high-spirited young disciple. He becomes the Yiling Patriarch (夷陵老祖), a figure people fear and hate. To protect Wen Qing (温情), Wen Ning (温宁) and other survivors of the hunted Wen clan, he stands against the whole cultivation world. He dies in the Nightless City (不夜天), carrying a heavy load of blame. Thirteen years later he returns through a forbidden ritual, taking over the body of a man named Mo Xuanyu (莫玄羽), and the old case is reopened.

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His position is easy to grasp. His opponent is the entire orthodox world, his friends are few, and everything he does is watched and misread.

At its core this is the knight misunderstood by the righteous: unconventional, loyal, willing to stand up for the weak, and expelled from the world he belongs to as the price. Readers of wuxia know the type. Linghu Chong in Jin Yong's The Smiling, Proud Wanderer (笑傲江湖) is another unconventional, loyal man, cast out by his own sect and misjudged by the orthodox camp. I am drawing only that general comparison, not claiming a close parallel in the details.

A 2019 critical assessment by the scholar Hu Qing (胡晴) of the novel and the live-action series is quoted in a 2025 China Writers Network article on Russian readers of Chinese literature. I have not seen Hu's original text. As quoted there:

"Rooted in traditional Chinese Confucian and Daoist culture, it embodies the chivalric spirit; its ensemble of characters is full-blooded and produces a strong 'empathy effect,' which is why it resonates with today's readers."

Chivalry doesn't depend on the reader's gender. Wei Wuxian's heroic side can pull in male viewers without any background knowledge. You don't need to know what danmei is to understand why a young man would draw his blade for the weak, why he would take the abuse rather than give in, or why people still remember him after he is gone.

Seen this way, a middle-aged man who takes the name "Wuxian" is probably identifying with the knight, not with a love story.

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An older line: Pili glove puppetry

At this point I remembered something from many years ago. A friend of mine was devoted to Taiwanese glove puppetry (布袋戏, budaixi), a hand-puppet theater that tells martial-arts serials. Pili (霹雳布袋戏) is one long-running series in that tradition. He often told me about the characters and their grudges: soulmates, loyalty, and people who stand between the orthodox and the heretical. When I later watched Mo Dao Zu Shi, I noticed the flavor was similar. That is only my own association. There is no lineage between them, and Mo Dao Zu Shi is not an adaptation of any puppet show.

What is on the record is that this kind of story has long had male audiences. The anthropologist Teri Silvio (司黛蕊) wrote in October 2018, on the Taiwanese site Guavanthropology:

"Since the 1970s, audiences for traditional glove puppetry have been mostly male, and more rural than urban."

The kind of male-to-male loyalty that carries emotional weight in these stories shows up in Pili too. The official Pili website describes one character, Yi Ye Shu (一页书), like this:

"He entered the world after the death of Ling Xin Yi Fo, and came to understand Su Huan Zhen's character and aims; when Su Huan Zhen is under pressure, he stands behind him to support him."

The official text speaks of support and shared purpose, a bond of soulmates, and nothing beyond that. When Su Huan Zhen (素还真) is in trouble, someone stands at his back. It is a very old skeleton for a story.

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The same article adds a split. In 2005 Silvio ran a questionnaire at video rental shops in Taipei and Kaohsiung, and 60% of those renting Pili videos were men. But when she attended Pili fan events, what she saw was different:

"But when I took part in Pili fan events, I found that almost 80% of the participants were women, with an average age of 24."

So the same type of story draws both men and women, each taking something different from it. Some come for the chivalry and some for the bond between soulmates. "Who is the audience for this kind of work?" never had a single answer.

Back to "Wuxian"

Wuxian is Wei Ying's courtesy name (字, the adult name given in traditional Chinese practice). It now sits in the avatar and display name of a middle-aged man in a group of old classmates.

Does he know the other meaning the work has for many fans? I can't say, but my guess is that he does not. What he likes is probably a man who stands up for the weak, who died carrying the blame and came back. He likes a "Wuxian" who would not bow his head, would not betray himself, and would not abandon his friends. When someone chooses a fictional character's name for himself, there is something plain in it: he wants to be near that kind of person.