#jjwxc

[lunarriviera]

As China cracks down on stories about men in love, female fans mourn the idealized romances

Fans of Danmei same-sex romance stories in China say the government is cracking down harder than ever on the popular genre.

to the best of my knowledge, AP News is now the first (only?) western journalistic outlet to confirm that 袁依楣 Yuan Yimei (MXTX) was detained in 2019 for "tax evasion" ("非法經營罪"), imprisoned for 3 years, and paroled in 2021—there were sinophone reports but with dubious sources. i think we can now take this to be factual.

Yuan Yimei was also (according to 港聞 Hong Kong News) fined 400k RMB, and as always when accosted with this information I have to put my face in my hands and dwell on the unutterably vast amount of capital her IP has been generating (in the United States alone) since June 2019, and ask myself: has she seen even one cent of it.

and, like. far be it from me in these unprecedented times to harsh the global danmei buzz. i can only hold these facts in one hand, and gesture towards @penguinrandomhouse and @sevenseasentertainment with the other, and ask them how well they sleep at night without ever making a single official statement.

anyway here's a petition you can sign! thanks to @elizabethminkel for pointing out this article, and I hope all our beloved and unfathomably nervy writers are safe tonight, at home with people they love.

Sign the Petition

Creators are being imprisoned. Where is Seven Seas Entertainment?

[kangturu07]

Immediate become bestie

[danmeiblr]

English Translations of JJWXC Novel Tags (Part 1)

So, the Chinese web novel site JJWXC has this very handy tag filtering system:

and I’m gonna translate/explain them for my own easy reference when searching for novels. But since there are so many tags, I’m gonna do this in parts. This post will cover all tags in the first column.

Disclaimer: Chinese is not my first language, so if there are any mistakes, just tell me and I’ll fix them.

Last Updated: May 3, 2026

甜文 (tián wén) = sweet stories

穿书 (chuān shū) = transmigrating into a book

种田文 (zhòngtián wén) = farming life stories

业界精英 (yèjiè jīngyīng) = industry elite. stories where one of the main characters is at the top of an industry

快穿 (kuài chuān) = quick transmigration

沙雕 (shā diāo) = sand sculpture. silly, funny, absurd, “interesting” stories/characters

异能 (yì néng) = superpower stories

末世 (mò shì) = apocalypse stories

女配 (nǚ pèi) = female supporting character

柯南 (Kēnán) = Detective Conan fanfics

咒回 (zhòu huí) = Jujutsu Kaisen fanfics?

正剧 (zhèng jù) = serious drama (for stories with realistic, serious conflicts)

轻松 (qīng sōng) = easy-to-understand novels with simple plot and clear structure

市井生活 (shìjǐng shēnghuó) = urban life? slice of life?

科幻 (kē huàn) = science fiction

西方罗曼 (xīfāng luómàn) = Western romance. romance stories with a Western background/setting.

近水楼台 (jìn shuǐ lóu tái) = from the idiom. stories where the protagonist and love interest develop feelings because of forced proximity

全息 (quán xī) = stories where characters engage in a virtual reality game

排球少年 (páiqiú shàonián) = Haikyuu fanfics

日韩泰 (Rì Hán Tài)= Japanese, Korean, and Thai novels?

国风幻想 (guó fēng huàn xiǎng) = Chinese fantasy stories

赛博朋克 (sàibópéngkè) = cyberpunk stories

神话传说 (shénhuà chuánshuō)= mythology and folklore

三教九流 (sān jiào jiǔ liú) = the term originally refers to the Three Religions (Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism) and Nine Schools of thought, but nowadays it’s used to refer to different social classes (idk what kind of stories would fall under this tag)

预知 (yù zhī) = precognition/foresight/prophecy stories

权谋 (quán móu) = political conspiracy stories

吐槽 (tù cáo) = stories where the character frequently makes humorous or sarcastic internal comments about what’s happening around them

失忆 (shīyì) = amnesia trope

古典名著 (gǔdiǎn míngzhù) = fanfics about the Chinese classics (Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, etc.) ???

边缘恋歌 (biānyuán liàn gē) = taboo/forbidden love stories???

总裁 (zǒng cái) = finally, a tag I’m sure of. This one refers to stories where one of the protagonists is a CEO/president

时尚圈 (shíshàng quān) = fashion circle. stories about models, makeup artists, and other relevant professions

烧脑 (shāo nǎo) = brain burn. Suspense/mystery stories that require a lot of thinking to understand. (lmaaao love the tag name)

唐穿 (Táng chuān) = transmigrating into the Tang Dynasty

少女漫 (shàonǚ màn) = shoujo manga???

对照组 (duìzhào zǔ) = control group. Stories with characters that strongly contrast the protagonist in order to highlight the latter. Often used in book transmigration stories, where the transmigrator protagonists becomes the control group cannon fodder character in the story

网红 (wǎng hóng) = net red. stories about influencers

女尊 (nǚ zūn) = female-dominant. stories written by and for women and set in a world where women are respected

美娱 (měi yú) = entertainment stories set in America ??? Hollywood stories???

七五 (qī wǔ) = seven-five. referring to fanfics of The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants TV series (???)

非遗 (fēi yí) = stories about a national treasure/cultural heritage

冰山 (bīng shān) = iceberg. stories with a cold love interest/protag

骑士与剑 (qí shì yǔ jiàn) = knight and sword novels. often Western fantasy stories

BE = Bad Ending

亚人 = Demi-human/Sub-human. Refers to stories with species that look very similar to humans but are not really humans

魔王勇者 (mó wáng yǒng zhě) = fanfics about Demon King and Hero (Maoyu) ???

I did not expect there to be so many fanfic tags in Jinjiang....

And damn, I thought I was already familiar with most CNovel tags, but just going through the first column got me stumbling. So many unfamiliar internet slang. I’m gonna have to double-check these one day, but for now this will do

[zombiecultivation]

not gonna lie, as much as i'm having a blast being back on tumblr and returning to fandom culture (esp. when the fandoms are of novels i've read and loved for a long time, without having anyone to share in my excitement), i'm kind of dreading what happens once we run out of (good) danmei, romance, and other novels from 晋江Jinjiang/JJWXC authors.

For those of you who aren't familiar, MXTX, Priest, Meatbun, Tang Jiu Qing, along with many other famous danmei & romance women writers are all contracted with JJWXC. (So, basically, MDZS/The Untamed, TGCF/Heaven Official's Blessing, Husky and His White Cat Shizun, Ballad of Sword and Wine -- and probably every other Chinese webnovel written by a woman that you've heard of -- were all published on JJWXC.)

JJWXC has been the primary outlet for women webnovel authors in China since the early 2000s. However, there's been a significant decline in highly-acclaimed/widely popular/broadly appealing work coming out of JJWXC since about 2022, and many of the authors we all know and love (all of the above mentioned besides Tang Jiu Qing, actually) haven't posted any new work in the last 2-3 years. So while there might be a backlog of content awaiting English localization/translation and release for the time being, that reservoir is eventually going to run out, if there's no new blood...

I guess times change and all, and maybe we'll all move on to something new and find new communities, but JJWXC stories have been a constant for so many years in my life -- I practically grew up on the dreams, fantasies, and nightmares woven by several generations of JJWXC women, most of whom poured hundreds of thousands of hours of blood, sweat, and tears into their writing on a part-time basis, after their usual school or workdays -- that I can't really bear to imagine the day they become permanently absent from my life.

[baiwu-jinji]

I was reading JJWXC's old announcment of their English website (yep still beating that dead horse) and was confused by how much Chinese readers in the comment section got triggered at the mention of "LGBT." So JJWXC outsourced their English version to Onlinovel, and the latter introduced danmei novels on their app as "LGBT literature":

Chinese readers posted numerous protesting messages in the comments such as "LGBT isn't a good term why're you using it," "what the hell that term is too political," "what does LGBT have to do with danmei." At first I was perplexed - espeically since I haven't been on the Chinese internet for ages because all my Chinese social media accounts got nuked, so I don't always know what's going on with Chinese kids these days - but then it made sense to me because younger generations in China growing up in a national culture that's becoming increasingly insular and jingoistic have their brains conditioned by the belief that China is in an ideological war with the West, and therefore it's their duty to resist the takeover of Western ideology and defend Chinese values. In their minds, "LGBT" is part of the "woke" Western ideology and Western cultural imperialism that shouldn't be allowed to commandeer conversations about 同性文化 (same-sex culture) in China.

I guess it also doesn't help that readers in the JJWXC forum were in general pretty hostile or dismissive towards the launch of the English webiste because 1) JJWXC treats danmei authors and readers poorly and has only ever subjected danmei to increasingly tighter censorship, so its goal is never to promote danmei but solely to profit from danmei's overseas popularity; 2) even though JJWXC claimed that they'd only publish danmei on their English website during the beta testing period, they ended up flooding the app with lots of other genres and didn't even mark out danmei works as a separate category (my understanding is that they do so to get past censorship and bring in more profit to their struggling main webiste without risking the attention).

[foxghost]

answer for anon!

so, (not really) insider information the way I understand it:

jjwxc offers different licenses for regions: PRC, asia (split up into japan se asia, singapore etc etc etc), north america+europe, HK+Taiwan. It costs less to get a license for a small region than a large region.

Essentially the license limits a publisher to where they can sell the book. Each license pays the author a certain variable amount (a book by a well known author that will predictably sell well will cost more), and jjwxc takes a cut.

However, if a company in asia buys a specific region-locked asia license (that costs much less), then releases an english edition without buying the NA/europe license, it is perfectly legal and fine as long as it is sold only in the region they have licensed to sell it in. And there is nothing strictly wrong if they also bought the NA/Europe license and release the book in NA/europe. But if they don't buy that license and release that eng version, and it is purchasable in broader regions, it discourages another publisher from picking it up and paying that license because it would mean lost sales. So it would mean authors would get paid FAR less in the process.

so if supporting the author is your main goal for buying a book, consider buying points on jj and then getting all of the vip chapters in the novel you're buying, and maybe also send "nutrient liquid" in the app. It's so cheap. I just bought a whole baihe novel for like $7? $6? (once they're points i lose track of how much it costs) and it was almost 900k.

(this is all publicly available information)

[call-me-insane-but-wth]

I'm honestly obsessed with omegaverse and sentinel-guide verse right now. Unlike the western take on it, which often revolves and devolves into coercive *claiming bite* (sexual assault), the ones I've seen on jjwxc (bc of heavy censorship lmao) often chooses to approach from a different aspect. There's obviously a heavy romance plot, but there's also an element of social commentary that is more than aware of the exploitative nature of the patriarchy.

As in, ultimately, they recognize that omegas, guides, and those who have the ability to give birth are exploited resources regardless of what identifiers they use. No matter if they're scarce, no matter if the narrative itself waxes poetic about how everyone has been conditioned and propagandized to consider them to be most important and valuable above all, there's always a stone cold consensus that omegas and guides, birth givers regardless of gender, only have rights should they have the power to enforce it. Otherwise, they're living on someone else's good graces.

It's been a long time since I gave up on Western media and literature, so I could just be soap boxing from a place of ignorance, but the main reason why I couldn't just *turn my brain off* and keep reading f/m/m/m, reverse harem shenanigans, or the whole, man from space has no more women so fmc is special and valuable wow(!) trope, is that in the pursuit of easily marketable smut, they leave out any meaningful commentary and self awareness at all from an ostensibly *smart! Empowered! Takes initiative* fmc pov.

What turns me off from going back into and investigating the newest novels and mediums, though, is the consistent disdain abo connoisseur's have against straight het abo. I always thought omegaverse was about exploring gender norms and biases. It's sexist, in my opinion, if people can only appreciate the flipped gender dynamic if the feminine qualities being presented is from a character that is still considered male within the context.

If anything, the pairing that I consider to be most suitable to examine and explore abo-cerse, sentinal guide verse from, is from someone who is *gender neutral*. Not in the sense of gender nonconforming presenting masculine, or just in petulant fashion rebellion, but just as a regular person isekaid from a non guide/non-abo world masquerading as a beta/null*, but still being able to make an impact.

The message being that gender norms are restrictive and unproductive as a whole, and they should move together forward as a society- but with that said, i do prefer if this gnc character is only considered gnc in the verse, but they themselves are women, so I do recognize my own hypocrisy in this lol.

Anyways, my point is that omegaverse, although it's supposed to be a queer space/fertile garden for exploring queer identities and escaping from heteronormative ideals and biases, still fall into those same gendered biases. Still fall into the same toxic trope of straight het romances. Still roll around in the mire of internalized hatred and prejudices, and yet they consider their pairings superior just as long as the omega isn't a woman?

Maybe it's just that Western literature hasn't progressed beyond the boring abo tropes, so i can understand the disdain, but as someone who HAS always found value in female lead female centric stories, it just smacks of unaddressed misogyny.

[mengyueart]

Yuexian~

Pretty wives