Danmei is Chinese fiction about romance between men, written mostly by women for women readers. The characters 耽美 mean 'indulging in beauty'. It circulates on web-novel sites such as Jinjiang Literature City and sits in a legal grey zone on the mainland, which is why screen adaptations usually recast the romance as deep friendship or 'brotherhood'. The genre has an international readership and a Japanese publisher has begun translating it. The Untamed, Guardian and Word of Honor all started as danmei novels.
Dramas
Where it comes up
Written in the Margins: the women who quietly built China's drama boom
Somewhere behind so much of the costume drama and fantasy romance you've fallen for is a woman writing under a pseudonym, for free or for pennies, in a genre that has never gotten to operate in the open. This is the part of the story the credits never mention.
Word of Honor: A Wuxia Road Story About a Man Who Left His Organization With Three Years to Live
A guide to the 2021 Youku wuxia series Word of Honor: a secret-organization chief who leaves at a deadly price, the Ghost Valley lord he meets on the road, and how a Priest novel's jianghu became the first two-male-lead drama of 2021.
Guardian: The Small-Budget Urban Fantasy That Gave Its Two Leads a Mass Following
A guide to the 2018 Youku web drama Guardian: a detective and a professor handling cases between the human world and an underground one, how the adaptation handled its source novel, and how two actors gained a large following on a small budget.