The Popularity of Adapted Boy’s Love TV Series and the Ambiguous Social Identity of Gay Group
A Case Study of the Audience Analysis on the New TV Series Word of Honor
- DOI
- 10.2991/assehr.k.211220.283How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- TV series; Boy’s Love culture; Stereotype; Fujoshi
- Abstract
In the 1990s, the Boy’s Love (BL) culture has been introduced into China and developed under the Chinese social context. In the past five years, the adapted editions of boy’s love TV series have been gaining extreme popularity. Most studies claim that these TV series are positive since they bring the gay community to the public, and few argues its drawbacks in sociological aspect. However, the virtual characters in novel or TV are not real, the adapted boy’s love content actually marginalizes the real gay’s love under the control of dominant culture of China. Based on the audience analysis of the TV series “Word of Honor”, this study explores the audience’s thoughts and attitudes toward the gay group. As an evidence, audience analysis is the important source of this case study, collected from Douban, a widely-used comment platform in China. It is discovered that the image of boy’s love in the TV series is too ideal to be applied in reality, which is more similar to friendship in the adaption. For audiences, those who love BL culture only focus on the ideal romance narrative, while the public pays attention to another factors in this TV series. Drawing on the subculture theory of Birmingham School, this paper discusses the implications of the findings and provides suggestions for further researches on the actual behavior of gay’s community and the influence of TV.
- Copyright
- © 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Hongye Ni PY - 2021 DA - 2021/12/24 TI - The Popularity of Adapted Boy’s Love TV Series and the Ambiguous Social Identity of Gay Group BT - Proceedings of the 2021 4th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2021) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 1677 EP - 1682 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211220.283 DO - 10.2991/assehr.k.211220.283 ID - Ni2021 ER -