Why does the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (MDZS) Matter as a Queer Work

Introduction 

Maybe you’ve seen some art of these men in long flowing hair and robes; chances are, they might be from the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation!  

The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, or Mo Dao Zu Shi (MDZS for short) is a Chinese webnovel written from 2015-2016. 

MDZS has gained a lot of popularity in mainland China but has gained a lot of popularity globally in the past few years. Likely thanks to having many adaptations, such as the live action TV show The Untamed (which aired in 2019), and to official translation.  

The basic premise is that Wei Wuxian, the main character, has been resurrected thirteen years after his death, and finds himself in the middle of a mystery. the novel flips between flashbacks of his life before, giving context to the characters and events. In the present he goes with his not-so-nemesis Lan Wangji to solve a mystery that ends up unraveling the truth of how he was framed in his original life and how that lead to his death—the relationship between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji slowly develop over the course of the novel and they do end up marrying at the end!  

MDZS is part of the dānměi genre, which are stories that depict male loving male (MLM) relationships, typically having an emphasis on aesthetic beauty in terms of characters. danmei was originally a carry-over and heavily influenced by Japanese yaoi in the 90s, but has since developed into its own genre, with its own tropes, styles, character archetypes, and aesthetic. There is a common perception of danmei that it is a genre mostly written by cishet women for cishet women. There are arguments whether this is fetishistic or resistance against patriarchal structures and expectations—I’m not going to go too deep into this, as this isn’t really the purpose of this video.  

It is hard to believe that in such a situation where danmei writers can and have been arrested and sentenced to jail time for writing danmei, fetishizing MLM relationships is their main motivation to take this risk, when writing heterosexual relationships is much more profitable and widely accepted (having much wider audiences and being a much larger part of the web-novel market), and carries much fewer risks.  

What underlies this assumption is that the writers who take so much risk upon themselves to write this content are themselves not queer; and neither are the audience—and I would like to ask, why not? This assumption is heteronormative—and even if the audiences who read it are mainly female or heterosexual, does that have to take away the impact or value of MDZS as a queer work? Does it lessen the value queer people who have read this work find in it? Especially when MDZS centres an obviously queer relationship, I want to examine MDZS not through a heteronormative lens but a queer one. 

I want to examine why MDZS resonates as a story with so many people, of different audiences—whether it is those from the mainland to Chinese diaspora. What value does it bring as a story that is both queer and Chinese, and how does it create space for people to build kinship networks? 

Mainland 

First off, if I want to examine how MDZS is valuable, I first have to understand how it was meant to be read. Alfred Martin, who wrote about queer media studies, says that “the text does not come to us untethered”, (Martin 69) and that we need to take into account what has been built up around the text, because the text cannot exist separate from it. 

As I cannot read Chinese, I tried to do as much research done by those who can to further my own knowledge and analyses. However, I can’t verify nor deny their primary sources, so if I am wrong, please lend me grace! And let me know, of course. 

In danmei, an oft-recurring trope is the gong/shou archetype, slightly similar to that of the seme/uke in yaoi. The gong/shou relate to sexual roles and other character traits, gong typically being the instigator of contact and associated with being older, mature, decisive, while shou is the receiver, younger. In MDZS, Lan Wangji, the gong, is older, described as being more reserved, while Wei Wuxian, the shou, is younger, with more playful personality—seemingly fitting these roles. 

This is what Shaikh calls the “hetero-gendered dichotomy”, where gong/shou archetypes seemingly reflect sexual/power dynamics reminiscent of stereotypical heterosexuality. MDZS and other danmei novels have often been criticised for portrayals of consent, but this comes out of the belief that the gong/shou archetypes reflect heterosexual archetypes, where gong/shou is believed to adhere to the masculine/feminine, active/passive, what Natalie Wynn coins as default heterosexual masochism (DHSM) these supposed arbitrary pairings of opposing traits for what heterosexual desire ought to look like (Wynn 2024). Gong/shou archetypes don’t work in this way. The relationship between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji demonstrates this. 

MDZS clearly establishes Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji as equals—even though they are not of equal political standing, they are of equal strength (this is how they first meet each other, by duelling on the rooftop. This not only physically shows how they match each other’s martial prowess, but also how both of them are equally staunch in their beliefs—Wei Wuxian’s insistence on enjoying his drink, Lan Wangji’s steadfastness to his clan’s rules that prohibit alcohol. This is reiterated throughout the course of their relationship, where they often clash with opposing political convictions for the best course of action, but are equally zealous to share them, uncompromising on what they believe to be best/true.  

In the novel when Wei Wuxian defects from his clan to help the remnants of the war, he is ostracized by the gentry because he practices unorthodox cultivation methods, using resentful energy rather than spiritual energy. Lan Wangji consistently urges Wei Wuxian to go with him to Lan Wangji’s sect—it is never made clear why, Wei Wuxian believes it is because Lan Wangji believes that Wei Wuxian should be punished for using unorthodox method, but later on he finds out it might be out of concern for Wei Wuxian himself that Lan Wangji says so. Wei Wuxian is equally adamant on staying with the refugees, as he believes it is the morally right thing to do.  

This dynamic extends to their relationship after his resurrection—"When everyone was praising him out of fear, Lan Wangji rebuked him to his face. When everyone spat and hated on him, Lan Wangji stood by his side. (Mo Xiang Tong Xiu 351)” 

So they are shown to be equals in terms of power within the novel. They are also equally shown to instigate moments of intimacy. There are multiple moments that Wei Wuxian, going beyond just teasing Lan Wangji, initiates kissing or other kinds of intimacy (notably in chapter 49 and 95). In both these instances, Lan Wangji is drunk, and clearly not of a state where he is fully able to consent, which Wei Wuxian feels incredibly guilty about (that he had “exploited a situation when Lan Wangji was easily susceptible to manipulation.”) and realizes that Lan Wangji wasn’t in a state where he could properly consent, and thus Wei Wuxian breached his trust.  

Wei Wuxian undermines the concept of the gong as the one always in control, as the only instigator of intimacy. His consent is clearest in both scenes, where Lan Wangji’s is not.  

Assuming that the gong/shou dichotomy functions as heterosexual dynamics is what Shaikh describes as an “attempt to 'read' heterosexuality into BL texts in a manner that resists thinking about them in queer terms"; this obscures how gong/shou roles are used to question heteronormativity. 

In an extra chapter where through a shared dream, Wei Wuxian visits a younger version of Lan Wangji, he tries to act as the instigator, but Lan Wangji reclaims the role regardless of his age. This reversal of roles shows how gong/shou roles (determined by physical characteristics like age) are culturally constructed and can, and are, open to resignification. 

There are several instances where Wei Wuxian refers to himself as the “wife” to tease Lan Wangji—it furthers a play on gendered associations, and is a queer nod towards the performativity of gender and the fluidity of sexuality by adding heterosexual references even when there is no heterosexual referent, them being in a queer relationship.  

So MDZS subverts expectations of “hetero-gendered dichotomies”, pushing for queer readings and possibilities for re-signifying these tropes. 

MDZS also shows possibilities for reconciling cultural identity and queer identity, it “queers” cultural identity. In a study, Geng Song argues that the aesthetic of effeminate men threatens or creates anxieties that China will appear weak—he describes how there are cultural, social and political backlash against effeminate male actors in contemporary China. But the reception of MDZS and MDZS’ live-action tv adaptation, the Untamed, Chen Qing Ling, (CQL) contest the idea that effeminate men cannot correspond with national pride or an idealized version of masculinity. Lan Wangji is described as a gentleman-scholar, junzi (君子), traditionally accomplished and upheld as a paragon of Chinese morality. In the novel, it says “By all appearances, Lan Wangji was a well-bred and refined young master. Although he was slender, his strength was not to be underestimated.” Instead of his effeminacy being associated with being weak or anti-nationalistic, it’s characterized as being a traditionally accomplished gentleman-scholar. This add more possibilities of what queer existence can look like, a way for queerness not to be divorced from tradition and culture but as a connection using the spaces where the ambiguity of these codes allow for them to intersect.  

As censorship on danmei works has gotten stricter, scholars analysing the Word of Honor adaptation has seen how different strategies have been adopted by danmei adaptions to bypass censorship. This includes stripping overt details that reference the romantic relationship—however there are also details added so that audiences are meant to do a “queer recontextualizing” of the relationship—in Word of Honor, a lot is done using mouthed words, where the actors mouth different lines different from the official dub, that are obvious to native Chinese speakers; in CQL this is done subtly by using camera placements that Shaikh says “compare them to het couples in the show”, and in the animated adaptation details like turning their robes both fully red in a scene, similar to wedding robes (Episode 33). As only emotional intimacy can be shown on screen, this result also reverses censorship’s association of queerness with pornography and obscenity. These narratives also offer a kind of resistance, where queer existence itself is enough to invoke political and social wrath, queerness being a part of personal life, not in the sense of being a hidden trait, but rather, not needing for there to be a “coming out” common in western media to live happily and authentically, and their association with Chinese traditions aligns their queerness with their cultural identity.  

This more subtle version of queerness portrayed in The Untamed and the MDZS animation adaptation can resonate with people, for who it is not viable to advertise their queerness so obviously, for political or social reasons, for their safety. This can help imagine possible futures where their queerness or their pride in their queer identity is not defined by the loudness of proclaiming it but by finding queer kinship networks—especially through means such as online fandom. It can speak to those experiences that fall outside of what a “queer story” looks like in western media, which are born from a history of resistance – but resistance does not always have to be loud, sometimes survival is already resistance. 

Also the ambiguity of the relationship between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji in the adaptions allows people to take part in the media when they might not feel safe to do so with more explicitly queer content… this can be true internationally as well—it reminds me of how my friend really wanted to watch the Heartstopper show when it first released but didn’t feel comfortable enough to at home. 

Diaspora 

Next, I also want to examine how MDZS, the story and characters, being both queer and Chinese, allows queer Chinese diaspora to express multi-faceted identities in the fandom. Speaking from my own experience with this novel, this was my first encounter with a piece of Chinese media that was so easily accessible and obviously queer, and I felt really drawn to this world that existed completely outside of the western sphere yet felt really connected to. In pumpkinpaix’s words,  

MDZS is one of the first and largest franchises of cmedia that has become popular and easily accessible outside of China. Moreover, it’s a piece of queer Chinese media that is easily accessible to those of us overseas. For many non-Chinese fans, this is the first piece of cmedia they have connected with, and it’s serving as their introduction to a culture previously opaque to them. What perhaps is less obvious is that for many Chinese diaspora fans, this is also the first piece of cmedia THEY have connected with, found community with, seen themselves in. Many, many of us have a fraught relationship with our heritage, our language—we often suffer from a sense of alienation, both from our families and from our surrounding peers. For our families, our command of the language and culture is often considered superficial, clunky, childish. Often, connecting with our culture is framed as a mandatory academic duty, and such an approach often fosters resentment towards our own heritage. For our non-Chinese peers, our culture is seen as exotic and strange and other, something shiny and interesting to observe, while we, trapped in the middle, find ourselves uprooted and adrift. [MDZS] is a precious thing to us, both because we love the story itself, and because it represents a lifeline to a heritage that’s never felt fully ours to grasp. (pumpkinpaix 2021) 

Several people in the fandom have noted how it was the first time that they felt like they were able to appreciate and feel more connected to their culture and that global audiences celebrated their culture. 

As MDZS reconciles queer and cultural identity, rather than othering them or divorcing them from each other, it is particularly suited for people with both these identities to express both these at once. The queer identity expressed is rooted in Chinese culture, values, and settings; even the English translations keep in Chinese language terms such as familial terms of address, diminutives, and familiar terms of address. This creates a shared vocabulary of meaning that allows Chinese diaspora to articulate bilingual experiences with little language barrier, as readers are used to reading and picking up Chinese terms, as it’s the mode the translated novel is written in. 

The main difference from the Chinese fandom and the English fandom is that the English fandom does not have the 1st person context and ability to interact with the author to interpret the novel. So for the English fandom, the discourse that happens within the fandom, whether that is discussions on social platforms or sharing of creative works (like fanfiction and fanart) becomes the paratext by which fans relate back to the text.  

Zhang writes, “interactions within the fandom of The Untamed work to extend one's identity transculturally by attaching identity to the Asian pop culture productions, their fandoms, and the cultural memories created by the fans.” The characters of the novel become the shared language by which they can express a reconciliation of the dissonance some diaspora can feel between the multiple facets of identities they hold (whether that is their queerness, their Chinese-ness, their relationship to the culture of where they live, being second-generation immigrant, or anything else).  

An example of how this works in the MDZS fandom is in the fanfiction “Only Fools Rush In” by justpeace, who situates themselves as Asian-American (in US). It reimagines MDZS characters as Chinese-Americans living in the US, where they are college students. Wei Wuxian, whose point-of-view the story is told from, is a former foster kid who became adopted in this story. He talks about the difficulties of keeping ad improving his language skills because of being in the foster system and not being as exposed to the language, as well as being expected to communicate in English by non-Chinese speakers, and then being shamed for not being “Chinese” enough by his 1st-gen immigrant adoptive parents. In a section of the fic where Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji have a heart-to-heart conversation, this experience is described in terms of this bi-cultural identity feeling like a single-plank bridge—precarious, and difficult to reinforce.  

[“It’s like--” and now he’s grabbing for a metaphor, which is never a good sign, “My connection with my...with being Chinese is broken. Like it was supposed to be a sturdy bridge, but it was blown up, or taken apart for scrap. All I have is this little single-plank bridge to walk along, and everyone’s looking at me, like, why can’t you go faster? Because their bridges are strong, and whole, and they can’t see mine. But I’m on a single fucking plank, you know? It shouldn’t even be able to hold me up. I’m trying to reinforce it, but it’s hard when I know it’ll probably take my whole life, and it feels like everyone has opinions about how I’m doing it.”] 

This story explores different kinds of Asian-American experiences, ranging from those who have difficultly understand the language, to those who can understand but have difficultly speaking or reading and writing, and those who might be very fluent but aren’t familiar with other aspects of Asian-American culture. In this case, Lan Wangji in this fic speaks and reads fluently, but isn’t familiar with a lot of the media that his peers are familiar with. 

The writer uses these characters as a device to explore the nuances of queer/diasporic experiences, and the multiplicities of diaspora experiences.  

There’s a conversation where Wei Wuxian talks to his foster sister and realizes that she also experiences being shamed for not being close enough to Chinese culture, even though in his eyes, her language skills are perfect. She brings up an interesting reflection that the reason for her parents’ dissatisfaction with their children’s cultural identity might be a coping mechanism resulting from their own grief from leaving home.  

“We’re not broken because we don’t do the things that mom and dad want us to do. What they did...leaving their home and their family...it marked them. The stakes are so high because they need it to have meant something, and at the same time they desperately miss the connections they lost. None of that is our fault.” 

This can resonate with a lot of people who are children of immigrant parents, whose ways of communication can be deeply shaped by loss and grief, and can lash out as a mechanism to cope with a need to feel that their pain has a reward, an outcome that measures up to what they feel is owed for their suffering. Even if it isn’t the child’s obligation to fulfill their parents’ dreams.  

Zhang argues that the nature of fan culture (where fans are both the consumers and producers of content) works to bridge the distance between Chinese diaspora; where by being fans of these works, fans produce new cultural memories that become attached to MDZS within their fandom sphere. MDZS fandoms can create kinship networks that particularly appeal to Chinese queer diaspora, and results in finding kinship in the intersection of different diaspora experiences.  

In the collection Danmei Diaspora Creatives which “Only Fools Rush In” is a part of, there are other fics set in many different places. There is one set in Singapore, one written by someone who is from Britian about being British-born Chinese and attending Chinese school. It was very interesting for me reading those works and “only fools rush in” because obviously I am not American or Singaporean or British but there are still parts of those experiences that people write about that I do very much relate to: the feeling of not quite being able to fit in or meet expectations, feelings of guilt for not having perfect fluency, considerations of what it means to be queer and Chinese, etc. Through the shared language of the MDZS characters, people are able to finding commonalities in diasporic experiences even if they are living in different places and cultures.  

MDZS is very well positioned to facilities this sharing of Chinese diasporic experiences, and I believe it appeals to so many diaspora because of how inextricably Chinese-ness and queerness is tied to MDZS and its characters. Even the way that Lan Wangji speaks, which is very brusque, is tied to the Chinese language, because in Chinese, Lan Wangji is very eloquent—he uses the poetic style of classical Chinese, where 4-character idioms are common, so the more formal register is actually less wordy than the vernacular. 

This causes for different interpretations in English fics and representations of Lan Wangji’s dialogue, as in English, eloquence is usually associated with using more poetic/literary devices, which usually means more words, so using lesser words is associated with being less eloquent. So when these characters are interpreted into English spaces, these qualities that are very innate to the character are still taken into consideration, yet are open to reinterpretation. As the discourse and fandom grows, so do the possibilities of reading MDZS differently. Diaspora adds on their own experiences, adds more ways to re-signify what these characters can mean to people, allowing space for multiplicities of identities.  

Diaspora identities have a unique position of having a foot in two very different spheres. Cwspider wrote on twitter, “I never really got to be diasporic Chinese in fandom space or met so many diasporic Chinese. I've always felt like I have to pick one identity or the other, Chinese values vs. Western ones. / I've been in Chinese fandoms for Chinese media and it just... Never connect[ed] with me the same way cause my values are different. But like... Meeting other Chinese diasporic folks... Wow.” As someone who grew up in a largely Chinese-diasporic community locally, I still feel this especially in terms of media—this sentiment expresses the way I feel that MDZS and its fandom has bridged the gap I felt between Chinese media and Queer media, as feeling like two separate categories.  

MDZS fandom creates the space for diasporic identities to exist as they are, and not just partly Chinese and partly American or Canadian or British but viewing diasporic experiences as its own identity. This space creates a queer approach to identity.  

In the essay “Queer and Now”, Eve Sedgewick writes about the heterosexist assumption of the many many factors that are assumed to come together neatly to form one’s sexual identity, including your gender, sex, your partner’s sex and gender, whether you want to have children, your preferred sexual acts, fantasies, among many other things. She points out how many assumptions you have to make to assume that everyone’s identities work in the same way, when for many, not all these factors are true or line up the way they are expected to. She argues that one of the things queerness can refer to is the “practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other”. And I think this rings true for cultural identity as well, or any aspect of identity. Rather than looking at it through a lens of trying to fit it into arbitrary categories, there can be so much more gained by looking at the ways where someone’s identity can’t be fit neatly into a category. 

Conclusion 

I want to end off this video by laying out why I started this project: I wanted to learn more about how censorship functions and how queer works circumvent and thrive despite it. It’s not something I’m very knowledgeable in, but gets sort of mentioned all the time when interacting with MDZS and its adaptations, so I wanted to educate myself. Even though I’ve tried to read a lot of what I could get my hands on with my monolingual reading skills, there’s still a lot of context that I have to rely on other people to try to grasp. I tried to do my best to defer my knowledge on this subject to those who’ve done the research. I realized that I didn’t have enough information do to a good analysis on censorship just on its own, as I don’t have access to first-hand information. So I changed course, to instead analyze why so many people relate to this work. 

The scope of this project also started snowballing as I’ve read more, and found more that I wanted to explore. I feel like there is definitely still so much to talk about, what MDZS offers to global audiences at large, the tensions between the Chinese and English-speaking fandoms.  

There’s often a lot of shame associated with media like MDZS, which is in the danmei/BL genre, because of common perceptions about what it means to be a consumer of those works. And I want to push against that. Because no fanbase is monolithic, and as a work that features a queer relationship, why are we trying to read heterosexuality into it? What do we gain from that? Why shouldn’t we queer analyses of MDZS and works like MDZS, trying to situate it where it is, and then trying to find meaning in the ways that it is at odds with societal expectations, and the intersections of different identities within the fandom.  

As Sedgwick writes, "queer" can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically” … and I believe this to be a view we can take forward to see value in MDZS, and any other queer work. 

I’ve seen through this process of research that MDZS can offer people value in how it subverts dichotomies, reconciles cultural and queer identity, and encourages the creation of kinship networks among diaspora, besides other reasons.  

Maybe it’s more queer to leave this space for the complexities of others’ identities to exist rather than to expect a clear, one size fits all answer. just as we live, so do fandoms, and they are riddled with disagreements, arguments, but it lives, and it continues to change as its people change. There might be disagreements as things get lost in the language barriers, but it is centred on a central love, and that in itself, gives me hope that we will gain more understanding when we argue about the little things and big things that matter to us.