disgracetoscholars | In the Weeds: Same-Sex Subtext in Mainstream Media (Part One)

Hi guys, welcome to A Disgrace To Scholar’s first In the Weeds feature post, this time focusing on the topic of queer subtext in East Asian popular media. I'm going to go a bit broader than our usual remit in the sense that I'll be talking about anime and video games as well as dramas— there will be spoilers for some of the examples I’m discussing, but I'll make sure to give warnings in advance when I'm about to talk about a particular fandom in detail (they are also tagged on the post, for the curious).

This topic is going to be covered in two posts. Part one is going to be looking at the concept of “queerbaiting” and why it is inappropriate to apply that term to these kinds of relationships in East Asian media. Part two, which will be posted next week after our discussion on episode 3 of Guardian, is going to take a more in-depth look at what the signs of an implied same sex relationship actually look like.

So, without further ado: welcome to my TED talk!

So what am I discussing, and why?

This feature is specifically examining quasi-canon subtextual/implied same-sex relationships in popular East Asian media, particularly in relation to (1) the reasons why creators often leave it to the audience to read between the lines rather than outright confirm, and (2) the signs that imply that kind of authorial intent.

There are a number of things I may touch on, but will not be discussing in detail, including pure fanservice and “no homo” tropes (except to the extent that it’s relevant to help draw this distinction), or about the actual BL genre, both of which are more than extensive enough topics to fuel their own discussions. (Anyway, at least in terms of Chinese/Taiwanese BL,

hollyberries is far more qualified than me to talk about that.) However, in the second post, I will be talking about the “grey zone”, where fanservice and quasi-canon overlap, or it’s not possible to tell which it is or whether the author even intended to imply anything at all.

As for why… first of all, I find that being able to interpret these hints really deepens your understanding and enjoyment of the source material, and because a lot of them lean on cultural signals and genre tropes, they can be easy to miss or misinterpret for a western audience. Personally, I love this shit, and I wanted to share at least a taste of this joy with our readers, especially since we are currently reviewing a drama based on a BL web novel where the lead characters lean hard into that relationship in spite of the censors, and it is particularly pertinent as we lead into our discussion on episode 3 of Guardian (or, as we refer to it, the Sad Lesbians episode).

The second reason is that I’m choosing to be optimistic about the possibility that spreading a little more understanding on the topic might cut down on the number of western fans slapping the label “queerbaiting” on things where it really doesn’t belong. (Possibly futile, I know, but this is one of my pet peeves and hope springs eternal.)

So before we get into this… what IS queerbaiting?

Well, reader, I’m so glad you asked.

I suspect that most if not all of the people reading this post already have at least some idea about this, but making assumptions about shared knowledge got me a proverbial smack over the knuckles from more than one teacher in my life, and it is also a helpful way of leading into this topic, so: Queerbaiting is the practice of hinting at a same sex relationship and then never following through, either leaving it in the territory of “nudge nudge wink wink” or laughing it off as the butt of a joke, often either in an attempt to be funny or to attract the kind of audience who will be drawn to that kind of relationship without possibly offending more conservative members of your mainstream audience. An example of this in practice is Sherlock BBC, which constantly jokes and flirts with the idea of Sherlock and John as a couple but then repeatedly goes “haha no homo though”.

As a criticism of media, it comes from a very western perspective, in a particular period of time, and it carries a lot of cultural assumptions and baggage associated with that. Is queerbaiting a genuine problem? Absolutely. But it is also very rooted the western landscape of media and society, and even then, it gets overused and sometimes applied to stories that don’t deserve it.

Given this, frankly, I don’t like to apply the term to Asian media at all, even things that include blatant fanservice. I particularly don’t appreciate it being applied to Asian media where authors, actors and others are genuinely working to portray a queer relationship within the boundaries of what is acceptable in mainstream media in their domestic markets— which brings us to this blog post.

Okay, but why don’t they just make it gay?

Two key reasons: cultural barriers, and avoiding censorship.

In the case of mainland Chinese media, censorship is the big one. China censors all kinds of things in its mainstream media (including depictions of the supernatural in a setting after 1949, which is one of the reasons the drama adaptation of Guardian is such a nonsensical hot mess), and this absolutely includes homosexuality. You can get away with a lot more in a web novel on the internet— which is a good thing, or else the original novel version of Guardian would never have been written— but once you film a TV series, or try to release your book through traditional publication, the censors will have their eyes on you.

In this context, it’s amazing that Guardian actually got away with as much as it did. We know from interviews that Bai Yu (Zhao Yunlan) and Zhu Yilong (Shen Wei) have both read the novel, and they have clearly kept the original relationship between the characters in mind in how they’ve acted their roles. The show does everything it can to convey it without stating it outright: intimate body language, meaningful looks, a story that is still at its core built on the bond between the two of them, as well as more subtle signaling like Zhao Yunlan changing his hairstyle at the point in the drama where they start acting as partners (mirroring the traditional custom of a woman putting her hair up once she marries).

This isn’t queerbaiting or fanservice; it’s flirting as closely as they possibly can to the line of getting banned, if not sliding ever so slightly beyond it. I have no hesitation in saying that the actors, the screenwriters and the production crew as a whole did everything they could in terms of being true to the relationship between Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei, within the confines of what was permissible. (Please note that very specific framing to the relationship, because that is pretty much the only thing they did right, bless their hearts. The general consensus of the Scholars Collective is that they should have just gone with a period drama so we all could have been spared a really disastrous attempt at turning myths and legends into aliens, but c’est la vie.)

As it so happens, Guardian actually was pulled from the Chinese web due to censorship reasons, not for homosexuality, but because it ALSO strays too close to the line on the supernatural— if not particularly effectively or coherently— and got reported by a rival production company. (The fact that we can even still watch it at all is by virtue of YouTube being blocked in China— another facet of censorship colloquially known as “the Great Firewall of China”. If you want to check your gmail when travelling in mainland China, you’ll need a VPN.)

All of this to say, China DOES NOT FUCK AROUND when it comes to censorship. So yeah, any queer subtext is absolutely going to stay that way, or else the whole show gets canned and all those production dollars go down the drain.

Now, you might be thinking: that explains China, but what about the rest of East Asia? Japanese pop culture often includes same sex fanservice, but it is much more unusual for there to be explicitly confirmed same sex relationships between main characters outside of genres particularly geared to that market (BL games, yaoi, yuri, etc). Which brings us to the second key reason— cultural barriers. Even in the absence of hard-line censorship, there are soft barriers in terms of what is and is not acceptable, and what you can and cannot get published. For example, I can quite easily think of a handful of shoujo manga with explicit same sex relationships off the top of my head (Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Hana-zakari no kimi-tachi e), but I start to draw a blank when it comes to shounen. These expectations possibly play into a particularly Japanese cultural attitude about not wanting to impose on others; it is likely that to the degree that same-sex relationships are still not completely accepted as mainstream, creators feel (whether consciously or subconsciously) like they should avoid imposing those types of relationships on members of the audience who may be inconvenienced by it, and instead leave it as something that can be seen by those open to seeing it, and ignored by those who choose to ignore it. Which also means they will not come straight out in interviews to confirm it either, although they will continue to hint around the edges. Is this ideal? No, but it is also something that is likely to change gradually over time, as social attitudes evolve and these boundaries continue to be pushed back.

This cultural factor also overlaps with the fact that often the creator wants to tell a story that is not, at its core, about romance. Nirvana in Fire and Yuri on Ice are both cases of this.

Does this prevent heterosexual relationships from being made clear canon? More often than you might think, particularly depending on the genre. Quite a lot of shounen stories imply a romantic interest between the male lead and a female characters, but a lot of them leave it at that, relying on the fact that the audience will see the cues without feeling the need to actually make anything happen on screen. (As an example of this, the writer of One Piece, Oda Eiichirou, has stated in interview that there will be no onscreen romance in the series.) Furthermore, traditional East Asian depictions of romance convey feelings through intimacy and more subtle cues, rather than blatant statements of love and physical acts like kissing. A good example of this is Natsume Souseki’s famous translation of “I love you” as “the moon looks beautiful tonight”: this anecdote is a good century old, but even now, the Japanese language of love tends to be far more subtle than the western equivalent, and it is similar for other East Asian languages and cultures. In this sense, shoujo and more romance-centered dramas often stray much closer to echoing western romances, but there are still plenty of examples of the more subtle traditional forms of showing romance, particularly in historical settings.

There is also definitely no shortage of examples in both eastern and western media where a romance is shoehorned into the background of a story where it probably would have been a more compelling relationship (if not story as a whole) if left to subtext, or more subtle signs.

When you have to contend with censorship or soft barriers against depicting a same sex relationship, particularly, I’m sure all of this factors in. The Nirvana in Fire novel, despite being posted on a BL forum, did not have any explicit textual romance in it— the relationship between Mei Changsu and Jingyan is at the core of the story, but the story itself is about justice and righting ancient wrongs. Unlike Guardian, which hinges on the relationship between the two leads, the feelings the characters have for each other are important and inform their motivations and how they act throughout the story, but that is not what the story is ultimately about. So there is almost certainly an artistic choice here on what to focus on, to tell the story in the most effective way, which was possibly also influenced by the fact that including anything more blatant would require substantial rewriting if the story were to be dramatized or released as a book through traditional publishing.

Similarly, Yuri!!! on Ice is not actually subtle about the central importance of the (clearly romantic) relationship between Victor and Yuuri, but it is still essentially a story about ice skating underpinned by that relationship, not a story about that relationship. Rather than a romance with an ice skating setting, it is a sports story about making a comeback in the face of personal hardship that is supported by a strong romance subplot. This is one of the things that makes it so groundbreaking: it is not BL. It was not marketed as BL, and the story beats do not follow the BL genre. It's a sports anime, which is a subset of shounen. And by having a relationship between two men at the heart of the story, it defies the genre expectations of shounen.

To summarize: this is the way these stories get told. For now, at least, it is in many cases the only way these stories get told. If the choice is between queercoded quasi-canon subtext (which, for Guardian and Yuri!!! on Ice, is an understatement) and no queer relationships in these genres and mediums at all, personally, I am more than happy to take the subtext. It is also worth bearing in mind that progress often happens in stages; you don’t leap from zero to 60 with representation. These shows are stepping stones— and in the case of Yuri!!! on Ice, a very big step that personally left me stunned.

So please, whatever you do: think twice before calling these stories queerbaiting, and if you see someone who does— maybe link them over here?

Join me again next week for Part 2 of this In the Weeds special feature: Recognizing the Subtext Signs.