Fiction and reality entangled: Chinese ‘coupling’ (CP) fans pairing male celebrities for pleasure, comfort, and responsibility

ABSTRACT

Pairing two male celebrities in both fictional and real-world intimate relationships has become a significant way for Chinese fans to consume celebrities especially over the last decade. Based on unobtrusive observation and semi-structured interviews, this research explores the entanglement and separation of fiction and reality in three CP fandoms pairing actors Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy, Jun Hu and Ye Liu, and Yunlong Zheng and Ayanga. The findings show that after first analysing and judging the celebrities’ potential real-world queer relationship as ‘not real’, ‘real but over’, and ‘real and ongoing’ (respectively), CP fans produce further fantasied creations and reality-based discussions centred on enjoying their own pleasure, gaining comfort from their celebrities’ experiences, or fulfiling the responsibility to support their celebrities. As fans increasingly emphasise celebrities’ real-world queer relationships, their CP practices not only reinforce fan-celebrity connections on a personal level but financially benefit their celebrities. Unlike the Western RPS genre that features purely fictional homosexual pairings, Chinese CP fandoms show increasingly prevalent reality-focused variations in celebrity consumption, which have been catered to by the entertainment industry and criticised by the Chinese public.

KEYWORDS:

• Homosexual pairing
• fantasied creations
• real-world discussions
• fan-celebrity connection
• queer fandom

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Drs. Carol Tilley and Laura Hetrick for their guidance in celebrity studies, interview participants for their great generosity in sharing their important fandom experiences, as well as UIUC Writers Workshop consultants Dani Nutting and Martha Larkin for their writing support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. There are overlaps in target fan groups within this research. For instance, a fan can enjoy the CPs of both Fassbender/McAvoy and Ayanga/Yunlong, and their practices with different CPs are discussed separately and comparably in this article.

2. Ayanga is a Mongolian Chinese actor, and his Mongolian name directly and officially converts to ‘Ayanga’ in English and ‘阿云嘎’ in Mandarin Chinese. ‘Ayunga’ is another English spelling of his name converted from the Mandarin Chinese ‘阿云嘎’; this spelling is also occasionally used in fandoms and on social media. This paper adopts only the official spelling ‘Ayanga’ when referring to this actor.

3. This research is a portion of a broader project studying Chinese celebrity fans’ online practices. The broader project recruited 30 interview participants in total, but only 15 of these fans have experiences and knowledge about CP fandoms and were thus interviewed with this topic.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Qiuyan Guo

Qiuyan Guo is a PhD candidate in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include media fan participation, celebrity fan studies, cultural studies, information literacy and readership, and information behaviour. Her work appears in Transformative Works and Cultures and has been presented at multiple conferences in the US (e.g., Fan Studies Network North American, iConference, FanLIS, Flyover Comics Symposium, PCA/ACA National Conference).