Cliché-ridden Online Danmei Fiction? A Case Study of Tianguan ci fu

Popular literature online is often misconstrued as being cliché-ridden and formulaic, and has thus not attained as much critical attention as ‘serious’ literature. I propound that popular literature published in China’s cyberspace deserves more attention and hermeneutic scrutiny, and I place an emphasis on danmei (耽美) fiction that features male-male romantic and/or erotic relationships and is predominantly published on a female-oriented website called Jinjiang Literature City. In this research, I investigate an online danmei novel entitled Tianguan ci fu (天官赐福) that concerns a homosexual romance against a background of ‘immortality cultivation’ (xiuxian 修仙 or xiuzhen 修真), which had been maintaining the highest ranking on readers’ voting list since its release on Jinjiang Literature City in 2017. I postulate that Tianguan ci fu does not deploy clichéd plots pertaining to quasi-heterosexual relationships, which frequently occur in danmei fiction. Apart from conveying the theme of love, the narrative concerns the complexity of human nature via an array of characters possessing multifaceted personality traits. More significantly, with a setting of mortal and immortal realms, the narrative entails religious ideologies, especially the indigenous Daoist ascension, mortality-immorality polarity and yin-yang integration. Furthermore, ethic-religious Confucian precepts such as benevolence and filial piety are also demonstrated, along with the Sinicised Buddhist creeds of reincarnation and retribution, which embodies the amalgamation of (sub)religions as a preponderant ideal of ‘the unity of Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism’ (san jiao he yi 三教合一). Therefore, analysing this exemplary online novel can shed light on (a)theistic attitudes adopted by creators and consumers of Internet danmei literature.