A woman becomes pregnant after a tryst with royalty. However, everything changes when she gets a brush with the supernatural and gives birth to 99 children.
This story is from the show Heavenly Gift of the Qilin, which debuted online in June. With bizarre scenes involving wagonfuls of swaddled infants and over-the-top exorcism attempts, the show sparked widespread criticism for its absurd plot and was quickly taken down.
While the show might be an extreme case, its an example of a popular writing trope within web novels called duobaowen, which roughly translates to multi-baby literature. In duobaowen, most of the female protagonists have a one-night stand with a rich, high-ranking man and then give birth to several children. The babies then grow into business wunderkinds, computer hackers, famous child celebrities, medical prodigies, and more, and contrive to have their mother and father reunite and fall in love. As an added twist, the man is usually unaware that he is the father of the kids when he first encounters them.
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Unlike the CEO trope also known as zongcaiwen, in which women win over unrealistically powerful, wealthy men with their unpretentious charm women in duobaowen have children before ever falling in love, with the kids forming the basis of their romance and subsequent rise on the social ladder. In essence, duobaowen completely abandons fairy tale romances in favor of the most basic reproductive logic of raising offspring together.
The trope has quickly provoked the ire of many female elites. Indeed, it has been panned as sow literature for how it implies that a womans value is measured by how many kids she has. Whether intentionally or not, it also brushes over the danger childbirth poses to women.
Yet, while there is plenty to critique about the value of the works themselves, an analysis of user data paints an interesting picture of the trend. It seems that the rise of duobaowen dovetails with the uptick in free online reading platforms in 2020, which have introduced a massive, new readership to web novels: married, middle-aged women.
The impact of the new platform model cannot be overstated. Under older reading platforms like Qidian.com and Pujiang, top consumers could purchase reward votes to select which works would get featured in rankings and recommendation lists, which would then go on to set trends and influence opinions. On free web novel platforms, however, users power the algorithm by interacting with and reading the stories they want, reducing the disparity between connoisseurship and raw consumptive power.
For instance, free web novel platform Fanqie Novel a subsidiary of tech giant ByteDance, owner of TikTok has over 100 million daily active users. Based on the logic of ByteDances big algorithm, the apps recommendations are largely determined by perceived reader preferences. In other words, the more readers seem to like a certain type of story, the more likely it is to be recommended, and the more of a window we may have into the corresponding readerships of web novels like duobaowen.
According to user survey data from a 2021 joint study conducted by Peking University and Fanqie Novel, there were significantly more married than unmarried daily users who read web novels for over three hours in one sitting. The survey also found that married readers were particularly fond of duobaowen and CEO stories.
For this readership, the absurdity of the female protagonists fate in duobaowen is very unlikely to distort perceptions of reality. If anything, it might even fill an emotional void in parent-child dynamics. Married women particularly those from lower classes who are unable to achieve financial independence or extricate themselves from familial relationships are disillusioned with fairy tale romances. These wives take charge of the housework, yet rarely get to see tangible returns for the emotional support they provide for their husbands or children. Their husbands lack of affection and their childrens lack of understanding are part of their daily grind.
However, in the far-off fantasy world of duobaowen, the script gets flipped. Instead of the mother sacrificing everything, the children can become world-class hackers or medical marvels before graduating from kindergarten, and give everything to their mother.
As entertainment experiences become even richer, the aestheticization of everyday life has become a way for the new middle class and elite to achieve self-actualization. However, for the readers of duobaowen including new mothers, manual laborers, and young women outside major cities, according to user survey statistics these displays of style or self-realization are worlds away from their most pressing concerns. After all, there is no room for self-actualization when self-discipline is their only weapon to prevent the misery of the daily drudge from pulling them under. That and self-deprecation to combat the contempt from others that they must endure about how poor people are uncultured or ongoing attempts to appropriate the culture of the underdogs, such as the 2012 hit web series Diors Man, which leveraged the diaosi subculture to achieve commercial success.
Instead, the world of web novels that duobaowen represents offers satisfaction that runs counter to this very self-discipline and self-deprecation, leaning into the nihilistic glee of a world gone mad. In essence, it is a window for escapism and release. Considering that social structures are hard to shake, the lack of moral shame, as well as the colloquial expressions found in these novels, make them rebellions against the elite discourse in and of themselves.
Anthropologist and social activist David Graeber once put forth a theory on the inequality of interpretive labor, in which the onus of interpreting rules falls on the powerless, while those in power are not expected to empathize with those they have power over. The resulting cognitive exploitation and resistance in the workplace also applies to the realm of cultural consumption, where the new cultural middle class consumes art, films, and symphony concerts to separate itself from the aesthetic experience of other classes, while the overlooked cultural proletariat must toil to interpret highbrow, inaccessible works.
With Chinas web novels, the creators, readers, and platforms are forming a cohesive, if not somewhat contradictory, relationship between cultural resistance and capital gain. Writers of web novels have no intention of delving into the upper echelons jargon. Nonetheless, they find professional success while reshaping the millennia-long legacy of underdogs fighting the upper class by providing over-the-top, bizarre, and sensational plots. Meanwhile, the overlooked readers of web novels can block off reality and find freedom in a fantasy world where they are no longer exploited or excluded. Even the core online platforms that wield the greatest capital power have incorporated web novels into consumer behaviors without quashing the new lower classs cultural creativity, ultimately creating a set of commercially sound capital consumption codes catered to their desires.
At a time when domestic consumption is uncertain, I believe we are experiencing an unparalleled moment in history, where all energy and resources are on the front lines of average citizen culture. Try as it might to convince the public that these fantastical stories can be leveraged to boost the stocks of listed companies, capital has not created the culture. Instead, the question we ought to be asking is: What form of meaning and possibility can citizens find in creation, resistance, and rebellion?
Translator: Hannah Lund; editor: Wu Haiyun.
(Header image: Visuals from VCG and @ݸ�� on WeChat, reedited by Sixth Tone)
