BREAKING NEWS: Shen WenLang and Zhan JunBai 🤝 Brothers Under The Skin
Often in political, queer Dangai the reason there are two potential couples, in which two or more of the men is committed to performing hegemonic masculinity - ie he’s not a good or safe person for the Uke/Shou to be in intimate relationship with when we meet him, is to demonstrate that *not every man is redeemable*.
I can’t be the only one noticing how ABO Desire’s double CP’s story is akin to the double CP trajectory in Killer and Healer where men deep in the cult of masculinity, heavily influenced by the trauma of having morally corrupting male role model fathers from the same cult, is extremely pointed about which men are able to overcome the trauma of masculinity indoctrination and which enthusiastically succumb to it and destroy themselves. For those who are paying attention to more than cinematography and hot scenes - both also do an excellent job of explaining why.
As a veteran of Chinese BL/Bromance with double male leads I feel I owe it to the BL Commons to share some insights with disgruntled LangTu shippers who’re mad a powerful man didn’t end up with the less powerful man he’s consistently and unrepentantly abusing.
- Why Zhan JunBai and Shen WenLang Get the Identical Dangai Narrative Treatment -
Not every transgression is to be redeemed in the name of performative “happy ending” is the message of both Chinese BL dramas. But this is a message many fans of both violently rejected in the immediate aftermath. Eventually, it was HIMpathy they came to reject in the months, and for some, years after critical thinking was reasserted, in the Killer and Healer international fandom at least. It took an awful lot of critical thinking-infused fanfic writing, and feminist reasoning against the grain of social media discourse for the emancipatory consensus to finally be accepted that the ending is not a function of bad writing or directing, it’s not poor pacing - it’s good politics!
The CP that struggles, does the emotional labour and achieves a rough equality between them is able to sustain a love relationship. Where the hierarchical differential remains vast, because the more powerful man does absolutely nothing to close that gap, love is not possible.
In 37 magnificently executed episodes - more than double the runtime of ABO Desire, great writing, directing and acting arrives at the same political conclusion for Killer and Healer, and that is right and good as we shall see.
Without giving too much away, Jiang YueLou and Zhan Jun Bai are the Seme/Gong protagonists in each couple whose actions drive Killer and Healer’s narrative. They’re both driven to make their mark on China’s new Republic using indiscriminate violence and manipulation accompanied by large-scale death and destruction, to achieve widely divergent ends. One is driven by self aggrandisement to gain money and power while the other is motivated to create a better society in which the majority can live in collective prosperity and peace.
Both of them fortuitously encounter men who fulfill every dream they have, including reciprocating romantic interest along the way, but only one man is able to make that potentially dream man his.
- How the CP Dynamics Converge and Diverge in each Story -
In ABO Desire we meet both Alphas who have a profound disregard for omegas; Shen WenLang expresses his contempt for Omegas by avoiding them while Sheng ShaoYou expresses his hatred by intensively exploiting Omegas exclusively for sexual labour, discarding them unceremoniously when they outgrow their usefulness just as any dehumanised, disposable object. This is clearly a result of historical trauma, trauma that itself is caused by their violent incorporation into masculine hierarchies.
However between Sheng ShaoYou and Hua Yong there is never the opportunity to objectify, sexually commodify and discard Hua Yong as is his normal practice. Shen WenLang however exposes Gao Tu to 10 years of vile Omegaphobia some of which is directed at Gao Tu himself only because WenLang believes Gao Tu to be a Beta in proximity to an Omega!
Likewise in Killer and Healer, a violently mercurial Chief Jiang YueLou and the sophisticatedly deadly Director Zhan JunBai both embody pathological mindsets from their interactions with the role model males of their formative years. YueLou endures a terrible family background centered on an abusive relationship with his father which bleeds into and influences even his relationship with his mother. We don’t know much about JunBai’s parents but we do know that his foundational role model was his rogue military uncle who continues to be a misogynistic, warping moral presence in his life into adulthood.
Jiang YueLou having been adopted by a new father figure along with a new mother figure is helped to change the course of his life but his psyche is still significantly deformed in terms of the trajectory of his intimate adult life. That’s until he meets someone he actually loves in Dr Chen YuZhi who often presents an immovable object with whom he has to wrestle frontally with his own moral and psychological shortcomings and take responsibility for becoming a better man - which he eventually does. This is the route Sheng ShaoYou also takes as a result of his emotion work and character development with Hua Yong.
Diametrically, when confronted with his own past Zhan JunBai, just like Shen WenLang speeds past every single off-ramp to personal growth which dooms any potential he has for the thing he covets the most, without which his life is simply not worth living.
Therefore, with these divergent paths, and in order for the politics of the narrative to be internally consistent only two of these couples has any potential to become a real love match, because only two do the work to change their toxic dynamic while the remaining two stubbornly do not.
- Oppression is neither Sexy Nor Romantic -
Sexual attraction, sexual desire or even an intense motivation to sexually interact with someone on a long term basis is NOT love. It’s not even remotely connected. Love requires at least six basic dimensions: Care, Knowledge, Responsibility; Commitment; Respect and Trust - and then some, like Sacrifice that undermines potential for domination. These must not only be present; they must also be consistent.
The precondition for these ground zero dimensions is *equality* and that equality must be produced disproportionately by the emotional labour of the more powerful partner otherwise it’s just entrenching inequality if the less powerful person is forced to sacrifice their dignity, essentially to adapt to the abuse dynamic, which is the patriarchal heterosexual norm. Milena Popova describes this differentiating factor that distinguishes BL romance narratives from the classic male-female romance trope in this video clip:
💬 0 🔁 11 ❤️ 49 · Consent in BL With a Section on the ABO/Omegaverse Question A currently airing Chai Jidan Dangai is again making waves,
- Alpha Males Shen WenLang and Zhan JunBai As Authoritarian Personalities -
As powerful adult alpha males successfully incorporated into Masculinity Shen WenLang and Zhan JunBai are unable to form intimate bonds. Yet they cannot endure their own aloneness and fears as a result of their underdeveloped and even extinguished skills all human beings have the capacity for but boys are forced by masculinity indoctrination to kill off during their transition to patriarchal manhood.
This psychological deformity means they learn to use feminised bodies, of people believed to be inherently beneath them, to launder any emotional discomfort - anger, frustration, grief, fear - all through sex. This dependency manifests more like an addiction, not two people creating intimacy and pleasure.
The long-term performance of masculinity means jettisoning all the practical knowledge and labour associated with CARE - for oneself and others. It is a learned lack which you cannot fail to have noticed BL has taken on the task of returning to a place of centrality as a mode of ideal male intimacy. The psychologist Erich Fromm describes this learned helplessness of the dominant man, coupled with a parasitic dependence on the subordinated other, as the authoritarian personality. This is WenLang and JunBai to a ‘T’.
Neither Zhan JunBai nor Shen WanLang have been able to reach emotional or reasoning maturity. They’re retarded because they’re still stuck in masculinity performance, eroticising and leveraging dominance and submission and therefore destroying their chances at love. Conversely, by renouncing masculinity and it’s sexualisation of dominance, Shen ShaoYou, like Jiang YueLou, is able to reject hierarchy, come to terms with his trauma and reciprocate love on the basis of equality with another human being - not by giving sexual expression to hegemony.
In Capitalist environments where BL is made for profit not for purpose, fans have been conditioned to expect 100% rate of redemption for irredeemable men to ensure the actors giving representation to the characters are marketable for lucrative fan-service by corporate sponsors. This takes BL away from the point of why this genre of storytelling has been invented which is first and foremost to meet a logic of human need rather than a logic of capitalist’s profit.
It makes sense that instead of from a BL industry full of queer mercenaries, it is from China, a country that like Jianghu is run on Marxist principles that we get an authentic redemption story that has something useful to say about masculinity and the conditions under which men can recover from it, grow, reason and ultimately to love.
