Slashing Three Kingdoms: A Case Study in Fan Production on the Chinese Web

The Three Kingdoms period, popularly taken as lasting from the chaotic last years of the Han to the unification of China in 280 CE, has been a lasting inspiration for the Chinese literary imagination.1 For more than a millennium, numerous works, from written to visual, have been produced about the Three Kingdoms, and the interest in the period is only growing stronger today. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi), a masterpiece of the Chinese novel produced in the fourteenth century, has been widely disseminated and reworked in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, making the fascination with the Three Kingdoms not just a Chinese but also an East Asian phenomenon. A new chapter in this long tradition of the construction of the Three Kingdoms imaginary has opened at the turn of the twenty-first century by a body of works produced by young Chinese female fans in cyberspace. This essay focuses on a particular subset of these fan works, namely, male-homoerotic fiction and music videos (MVs). In studying this particular subset of Three Kingdoms fan production on the † I am grateful to the two anonymous MCLC readers for their feedback and to Kirk Denton for his many corrections and comments.