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Chinese pop culture is crippled by government diktats. There was a brief flourishing in late 2010s to early 2020s of Chinese xianxia martial arts stuff that started getting lots of traction, like Word Of Honor and The Untamed, which was initially pleasing to the Chinese authorities for their popular reception in other Asian countries and increased traction in the west.
Turns out, they were popular because they were adaptations of webnovels written by bored ladies chapter by chapter on long commutes. And these bored Chinese women, like bored western women, write thinly veiled smut.
So you have these xianxia novels with impeccably beautiful men having intense physical and emotional fights with each other as they struggle with their roiling emotions, while a virtuous woman laments at their conflict and tries to use her womanly charm to get them to stop their conflict and kiss and make up And continue kissing, and do more.
These adaptations, greenlit by producers desperate for content and 'blind' to the subtext, go balls out in following the vision of the author, complete with creative reinterpretations that somehow enhance the original vision, and when queried by censors the producers just shrug and say 'its the source material, and people like it'. It doesn't actually have gay kissing on screen, just two beautiful men staring intensely at each other in shiny flowing silk robes as a camera spins around them while dramatic music plays and they verbalize their emotional torments. Totally not gay sex. Oh and the 'disciple' of one of the men is the source of what is effectively a custody battle as both men try to be good role models for the 'disciple' and in the end the men make up and have their own academy with the boy as their head disciple and its totally straight and not a gay romance ending and wait wasn't there a female MC at one point?
Women went fucking feral for this shit, and Chinese cultural products started getting consumed voraciously. Then the CCP figured women were having unrealistic standards for men and mandated no prettyboys in TV, and uptake has slowed accordingly.
The Koreans dramas have a much higher international reception even in English media because the Koreans stay shamelessly pretty, and have the extensive plastic surgery to keep it up. I hate kdramas for their tropiness and generally poor acting, but the koreans have leaned in to their strengths and keep their output at max shamelessness. I don't like Jdramas because their dudes all have some weird fucking hairstyle that makes them look like unkempt hairballs and I watch too much JAV to take japanese live action women seriously.
Was this one of the measures introduced by Wang Huning?
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Chinese actors are still universally very pretty, only with slightly different beauty norms than in Korea. If anything, the dominating beauty norms in china are still more boyish than Korea or even Japan.
The reason Korean dramas are more popular in the west than the Japanese or Chinese equivalents isn't because their actors are better looking, they're not (than the Chinese anyway), it's because they're much better written, acted, formatted and directed. Are they formulaic? Absolutely, but not more so than their Japanese or Chinese counterparts. I do agree that the Japanese sometimes act better though.
I absolutely agree with you that the CCP is a (probably the) major drag on things. Have you noticed the jingle/music they play when the propaganda segments start? I'm of two minds, either this is too is mandated by the party or they're winking towards the audience.
True that the Chinese acting talent pool just seems to terrible. I would personally attribute that to traditional sinic objections to economically precarious professions, with Chinese talent development basically being 30 years behind the evolution of Japanese and Korean talent scouting and development model, compared with the Hong Kong and Taiwanese producer driven model. Given the constraints put on directors and the frankly terrible salaries writers and producers and staff get compared to celebrities, it also explains the formulaic plots and recycled sets. My own limited dealing with Chinese creatives is that they usually leave China, or go into the relatively unmoderated video game scene, which is where you get the Chinese video game trope of 'cute girls with PTSD' being the dominant narrative medium.
As for the CCP tentacles being winked at, I did not notice it. I stopped watching K/C/HK/Tdramas when my wife got bored of them and got hooked on shopping livestreams instead, freeing me from the torment of pretending to care about formulaic love triangles.
There may be great acting talents in these shows, but being shoved into formulaic tropefests for lowest effort highest reward limits opportunities to showcase auteur talents. The Japanese do seem to like their weird shit which lets actors like Hiroyuki Sanada and Ken Watanabe flex their chops, and the Koreans do good KATUSA work with Steven Yuen, and I really like Lee Jung Jae in Acolyte, where he did fantastic work objectively and his performance along with Manny Jacinto elevated an otherwise messy show. For a dude with no native english and just constant micro expressions he did really well, and if Acolyte had focused on him and Dafne Keen instead of the black girl it would have been way better received.
We have not seen opportunities for Chinese auteurs to flex, beyond the stuff from Hong Kong and that is largely the remnants of the 90s-2000s Hong Kong greats like Tony Leung, Andy Lauand Jackie Chan (he was really good in Steelhead). It will be awhile before any modern Chinese actors like Yang Yang will go beyond domestic attention.
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That's funny because all of the xianxia stuff I've read has been pure male story-telling. Intricate power systems, plot focused, progression fantasy, lots of fighting and tactics, struggle for power and status, accumulation of beautiful girls, open sexism and homophobia.
I guess it's the fanfiction.org vs AO3 divide all over again: https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context
Dudes being dudes in on eachother is like bait for women, they love that stuff.
Men care about this kind of thing platonically, in the 'who would win' sense where it's pure love of the game... Women just like how it looks and what it signals. Idk, maybe it's how women put all this effort and brainpower into looking good, they know all these sewing techniques, foundation and makeup:
Or married. I have a wife who explained that to me. Several times, since of course I forgot such useless information to make room for more gun stuff each time.
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Fictional but likely realizable conversation between me and my friends:
Me: can Harry with the Elder Wand take on Mangekyo Sharingan Sasuke.
Guys: autistically calculate power levels and how to resolve conflicting magic systems and Prep Time
Girls: Sasuke takes Harry because he is more Seme than Harry unless Harry is an Alpha and Natuto made Sasuke his omega
Sasuke stomps. Harry doesn't actually have many good combat feats throughout the series; he mostly dodges behind objects and throws out weaksauce spells like Expelliarmus. He wins the final battle of each book due to a dues ex machina power or artifact or a powerful ally (power of love, sword of Gryffindor + Fawkes, Time-Turner, Prior Incantato, Dumbledore, Elder Wand + wand loyalty). The Elder Wand changes little; in canon, it's just a more powerful wand than normal, not some kind of superweapon. Harry's most powerful offensive spell is Sectumsempra, which he wouldn't use unless bloodlusted (the only time he cast it he did not know what it did, and immediately regretted it), and that's basically just a long-ranged sword. His most powerful defensive spell is Protego (not counting the Patronus charm, which is useless against humans). Harry doesn't have the speed or reflexes to use these effectively against Sasuke.
Now, if it was Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres versus Sasuke, that would be more interesting. HJPEV can't lose as long as he is fighting with the Elder Wand, and that gives him a ton of options, even without prep time. Most obvious is to use his Time-Turner to go back in time and plant high explosives where Sasuke is going to be, but Sasuke has survived an attack like that before. HJPEV's best bet might be to talk to Sasuke to find out his motivations and then tell him that in the glorious transhumanist future he can make reconstructive uploads of his clan if he agrees to surrender.
(Actually, it's kind of weird that nobody in Naruto realizes that Impure World Reincarnation + White Zetsu Clones = Free Immortality For Everyone. I guess that's muggle plots for you).
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My girl friends must be much more autistic than normal, while not all of them would be interested in 1, I can't imagine them discussing 2 seriously.
To be fair I've only seen this discussion ONCE in real life. Most of my uncovering of the inner goblins of my college educated lit-minded peers was in one-on-one settings where I express surprise at something like 'I didn't understand the first scene of Sherlock season 2 where they made Sherlock and Moriarty kiss' or 'God Sakura is so annoying the series would be much cooler if they got another girl in the team' and seeing the goblin glint in the girls eye. It only happens with girls who both trust you AND have zero intention of fucking you, which is a sadly rare combination in the current day and age.
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I distinctly remember an ad for some K-Drama streaming service that had "The prettiest people crying" as an explicit selling point.
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I just have to know what you think about Hong Kong cultural output in the latter half of the 20th century.
Mid. So much of the HK dramas dubbed into mandarin for local chinese audiences here in southeast asia are basically the same few stories with different skins. The underlying skeleton of family dramas are the same across all cultures, so whether it is Billions or Succession or Dynasty the centrality of sibling and patriarch dynamics will always be present. I do blame the honkies for shitloads of weird complexes about younger-brother-and-elder-brothers-wife, and the Japs for son-and-stepmother complexes based on certain Noticing of their dramatic outputs. I heard that Indian dramas especially focus on mother-vs-daughter-in-law conflicts but my tolerance for bad filming cannot handle Indian or Latin American editing.
I think the reason for HKdrama exploding outwards and receiving a virtuous cycle of profits and reinvestment was the Chinese diaspora being starving for recognizable content, and the Hongkies were the first to produce media at scale, since the Taiwanese were struggling with their language issues over Hokkien vs Mandarin and the Hongkies went went full Cantonese. The Honkies were happy to license their stuff cheaply to Southeast Asian broadcasters and have their shit dubbed, leading to the first mover advantage of Honkie stuff. Inevitably local productions would spring up, creating inferior copies of legacy HK media and highlighting the appeal of just licensing their stuff and etc etc etc.
The plots and writing for HK shows have been really mid, and it was the brutal competition of talent that let certain auteurs like Wong Kar Wai and John Woo exploit available talent like Chow Yun Fatt and Jackie Chan but only after a long time. Advances in filming and special effect techniques allowed Wuxia and martial arts to ascend, and those filled a niche otherwise missing in most television productions. Maybe China would have had the opportunity to develop their film industry as well for local tastes, but they were too busy making Romance Of The Three Kingdoms or Journey To The West for the 2000th time. Never Water Margin though.
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This was hilarious, in part because I recognize parts of it and partly remember that Chinese clampdown, but also because didn't you once go a great effort post on K-Drama culture? I remember my brief exposure to K-Dramas, and some of the, ahem, interesting male-on-male focus while female protagonist orbited in the plot background.
I don't think it was an effortpost as much as it was a snide/snarky observation on the tropiness of Kdramas and their specific deleterious effect on Asian women regarding expectation management. I do think it is VERY funny to see the specific tropes crop up over and over again and the common trends. one reason my wife got sick of watching these shows is that I ruined everything for her witb my meta commentary. This dude will die and have a secret twin brother! This secretary actually is the half sister! This car is just product placement and it will be that car that will crash!
For my own edification I did follow your stated path of Noticing the intense man on man melodrama and the diminishing centrality of the female MC.
It should be explicated that the main consumers of dramas are women, and that is true across all cultures all over the world. The difference I think is that the Asian women writers and producers lean in to the degenerate goblin woman energy fermenting in their writers room, leading to women following through in putting pen to paper their boiling emotions after seeing two hot men yell at each other. @FistfullOfCrows mentions that this shit is bait for women, and I think I can reliably tell when there is a goblin woman cackling in the writers room depending on how many opportunities for personal conflict are painfully forced into the character interactions. Men write action scenes with autistic attention to power levels and how smartly the characters will use the environment and the situation to their physical or social advantage, women will force these two guys to grab the retard ball together and smoulder/yell at each other as much as humanly possible.
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