11. (Not So) Solitary Obsession
Danmei Fan Fiction as a Bonding Ritual
Hi there. Welcome to Active Faults.
Earlier this week, Archive of Our Own went down due to a DDoS attack for which a group of religious extremists claimed responsibility (though the official statement of Archive says there’s no reason to believe such a claim). Many suspect the copious amount of LGBTQ+ fan fiction was the primary target.
Fanfic enthusiasts everywhere spent an excruciating 28 hours. One tweet reads:
27 hours without AO3: I have begun to see figures in my peripheral vision. The voices are here too. @soobites
I’m really not exaggerating the toll such an event can take on people. Another case in point:
If AO3 is truly going to be down for weeks, it feels like corporate America is about to find out just how much they rely on mentally unwell women that read 🌽(note: euphemism for porn) on the company dime to keep from murdering everyone. @ShhhCandice
Today, let’s look at how fan-produced corn keeps mentally unwell women going.
Timeless
I still frequently think about a legendary fanfic in the Sherlock Holmes/John Watson (specifically the BBC adaptation) fandom that has achieved biblical status. “协奏、交响与独自沉迷” (rough translation: Concerto, Symphony and Solitary Obsession) was first published on MTSlash in October 2010, the hallowed text a sequel and reinterpretation of the TV adaptation consisting 166,000 plus words of pure mastery. Everything was crafted to perfection: from characterisation to narrative pace, writing style and loyalty to the original content. Spanning 13 years, Sherlock and John in the story endure the torments of death, love and loneliness as essential conditions of human existence.
I cannot begin to describe the profound impact “Concerto” left on the teenage me. It’s as soul-stirring as hearing a fetus’ pounding heartbeat in its mother’s womb and marvelling at the force of life before life truly started. Even now, walking past a street performer’s rendition of “Canon in D Major” can briefly transport me back into the mood of the story, as it was one of the numerous compositions played by the violin-savvy detective throughout the plot.
One repost (amongst many many more) of “Concerto” to Tieba garnered over 3,000 replies across 11 years, with comments written by elated readers like me and published as recently as 2022. People across time all marvel at the extraordinary talent of Blue Lotus (the author’s pen name) and analyse the nuances of her fiercely delicate prose. Many writers emulated her tone and felt inspired by her understanding of the ship.
This communal experience of collectively consuming and producing fanfiction is very much dependent on the platform’s habitat. Early-day danmei fanfic writers relied on places like Baidu Tieba in addition to dedicated sites like MTSlash to post their works. The forum nature of these spaces, similar to Archive, permitted genuine albeit virtual connections as shown above: writers and readers are able to exchange their thoughts on plot lines and character arcs, trade quips and polish ideas, or participate in drawn-out discussions the depth of which extend far beyond the entertainment context.
For a work as widely consumed as “Concerto”, the public can take things very seriously. That story actually has multiple versions like a Taylor Swift album, and the two major ones are named “rationality” and “tenderness”. Blue Lotus, tweaking specific vocabularies and syntaxes, created her own array of Sherlocks in love, where one was more reticent in “rationality” and the other more earnest in “tenderness”. However minute these differences were, her readers started an age-old debate as to which version is more “canon” (close to original) and more appealing. Some advocate for love as acts of service and not shallow words, whereas others believe that intimacy is essentially vulnerability. That there’s nothing hotter than honesty.
Finding Phones
“Concerto” is unrepeatable in this decade. Using forums meant that the atmosphere of fanfic consumption was conversational, mostly organic, and multifaceted while remaining content-centric. Later, censorship of danmei droned over MTSlash et al. and caused a forced migration of fics to social media platforms on the rise, like Weibo and LOFTER, because writers want them to remain easily accessible.
That meant, ironically, that fan fiction became less about social interactions and more metrics-centric. The focus is on views, likes and reach, attracting as much readership in the most efficient way possible. Since attention spans shrunk, fan fic consumers crave a “quick fix” rather than 166,000 slices of life. Enter “Found-A-Phone Literature” (捡手机文学), which is fan fiction entirely told through fake screenshots of social media (hence the English name of this genre being “socmed au”, short for social media alternative universe).
The name came from the earliest inventors of this genre captioning their fic “I found xxx (celebrity name)’s phone”. It’s homoeroticism in the form of receipts. Most of the time, the characters’ relationship would pan out as seen in screenshots of DMs and group chats mixed in with Instagram stories or tweets (Weibo posts, WeChat moments, all the Chinese equivalents). These snappy little vignettes with minimum buildup are overtaking conventional fics both in terms of popularity and market share. In idol RPS nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find longer fics that aren’t created to be instantly gratifying porno. No one seems to have the patience for a story - readers and writers alike.
I’m not getting on a high horse and criticising the fast-fashion culture within the fan fiction community - I’m sympathising with us. The sheer difficulties of putting out or enjoying bromantic stories gave people no other option than to resort to quick fixes that don’t leave much room for frolicking. Weibo now censors every word about two men’s doings from the neck down, including pictures with words of that nature. It also started to block weblinks to an external website posted in the comments section, another common method used by authors to post anything mildly NSFW. At first, it was only targeting Archive links, then its mirror sites, and finally Shimo Docs, a Chinese equivalent of Google Docs that authors started to use as an evasive tactic.
Writers go through these alternative sites like burner phones: Shimo, Write.as, Aifadian, Tencent Docs, Jinshan Docs, and so on. These are all services that work as train station lockers in which writers dump their duffel bag of dirty cash, before sending a cryptic text to their followers saying the goods have been delivered. One by one, these safe houses get blown and we’d start searching for the next option. If it’s been a while since I posted smut, I’d have to comb through a ship’s super topic to find the latest, most trendy burner site that people tend to use. When I was recounting this experience to my friend Yan at
, she rightly asked if there are anyone else using these sites for other purposes. The only active users of some of these sites seem to be danmei fic writers.
I don’t know the answer but I do know the danmei fan fic community is turning nomadic. Readers do a series of platform-hopping and are drained so much they won’t read anything longer than 5 texts. Writers are in guerrilla warfare with the censors, weighing how much, where and what exactly they can say. I heard that some might even turn medieval: organising a group chat with their readers and circulating their manuscripts as an encoded PDF.
Exploding Hearts
While writing this issue, I stumbled upon an autobiographical review of “Concerto” on Douban that reads very much like a well-written diary entry. It vividly captures the reader-writer relationship and the essence of fan fiction as a practice:
*(italicized parts are written in English originally)
[Concerto] is our collective memory…even though I am alone in my life there are still a precious few who feel the same as me [about the story] and that’s enough.
Sherlock and “Concerto” never stopped influencing me…I entered the euroamerican circle that was thriving back then but nonexistent by now…still, I rejoice in seeing how deeply the fanwork affected such a large group of people.
In a way, “Concerto” has its own fandom and changed generations. It was a portal to a new world:
“Concerto” was an incredible shock to me as if a bomb dropped on my head…I started listening to and fell in love with classical music because of it when my upbringing would not have exposed me to it at all. It was my first encounter with tongren, with literary delineations of sex, feeling something bigger, so much bigger than myself, which later I found out, was love for life.
My guess is that [Blue Lotus] was in her late 20s [when she wrote it]. Her billowing emotions were conveyed with such pen power I’d never arrive at in my lifetime. I felt my heart exploding with it…I knew it felt right, the thrill of emotions pouring outwards and everything was no longer suppressed. I became addicted to that explosion.
This is precisely what Fang termed as “cathartic release” in their insightful paper on danmei and female empowerment. Danmei fanfiction, they argue, is a space for women to step forward to describe their own erotics and defend the explicit articulation of their female desires.
A seed was planted then [upon reading “Concerto”], the seed that springs into an expectation and longing for love, and a desire to explore the world. Through the eyes of John and Sherlock [in the story] I saw such beautiful sceneries and sunsets, heard such sweet tunes. When they were watching the stars in Switzerland, I can see the milky way imprinted on my retina and smell the clean, crisply fresh snow at the tip of my nose; I saw how Sherlock’s grey eyes glinted under the night sky through John, and I saw the amazement and veneration on John’s face through Sherlock.
Strong attachments can be formed between the reader and the author/text. The “cohesiveness of a female-dominated subcultural community” (Fang, 2021) cannot be more evident in these paragraphs:
I don’t know if my dream to study abroad was planted in my head back then. I just knew the intensity of such a thought was so overwhelming that, despite years of being tortured and feeling disappointed in my family and society, it is still echoing and echoing like a ghost.
I finally surrendered to the ghost. To be honest, I don’t know if this decision is right or not, but I know the feeling very well, the feeling in my gut. I know that push on me to gaze upon the world, feel different emotions, and meet different people. And for that, I am forever grateful. I hope Blue Lotus is now happily living somewhere on lands that’s free, and doing what she loves.
Writing about romance novels and its female readership, Snitow (1983) called the texts “the only socially acceptable moment of transcendence” for women. For the rotten girls, what danmei offers are socially unacceptable moments of liberation that nonetheless linger like ghosts as we traverse across nomadland.
A quick search of “Concerto” on Baidu, even now, yielded many posts asking for “vintage” self-printed (自印) copies of the fiction to keep as mementoes. In the next issue, we’re talking about the act of self-publication and zine-making in danmei fanfiction, and how that could potentially get you jail time.
See you then!