Silent Yearning Glances are the peak queer experience.
They’re going right up to the line demarcating “gay” from “not gay” and playing Gay Chicken with it.Įxcept that, as you know, hours and hours of Silent Yearning Glances are actually MORE GAY than two dudes kissing.
Totally a bromance, guys, nothing to see here. So in shows like The Untamed or Guardian (another good good show based on a canonically-gay original novel), the showrunners make it JUUUUUUUUST not-gay enough to get past the censors. And when their books become popular, and adaptations are made, the showrunners have to make adjustments – for the sake of everyone’s careers, physical safety, and actual lives. In 2018, one author was arrested for writing gay erotic novels and sentenced to TEN YEARS IN PRISON. (From Wikipedia: “Although the 1982 constitution guarantees freedom of speech, the Chinese government often uses the “subversion of state power” and “protection of state secrets” clauses in their law system to imprison those who criticize the government.”)īecause of that difficult political climate, authors who want to write queer content do so anonymously under pseudonyms. In China, this is not something that a person can currently write lightly. They kiss, they have some very kinky sex, they are canonically married, they have a son together. The original novel (that the live action show, the graphic novel, and the animated version are all adapted from) is Actually gay. okay, how long do you have? a couple hours? We’re gonna need a couple hours to talk about the queer barely-BARELY-subtext, but also WHY IT IS LIKE THAT.īasically, “is the Untamed actually gay” is a complicated question, because of the Chinese censorship laws. Is there queer subtext in The Untamed? oh. There is no long drawn out UST between the two main characters that ends in “haha WOMP WOMP actually they’re both straight, here’s some gratuitous naked women to prove it to you” Is there queerbaiting in The Untamed? Not a speck of it to be seen anywhere. One of those is infuriating and lame (queerbaiting). Before I answer that, I want to draw a fine distinction between “subtext” and “queerbaiting”.