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Bittersweet Love — China Has Better Danmei Than This
Sometimes I genuinely don't understand the choices being made with Chinese BL adaptations. China has produced some of the most imaginative BL novels I have ever read. Case File Compendium combines romance with psychological obsession, medical mystery and science-fiction elements, while Guardian builds its relationship around supernatural investigations, gods, ghosts and an entire mythology. These are stories where the romance exists inside something much larger than simply watching two attractive men fall in love. And then we get Bittersweet Love. Once again, a poor young man is brought into an influential family, treated as inferior because of his background and expected to endure humiliation until one of the rich men eventually becomes emotionally attached to him. I have watched versions of this story in Chinese heterosexual dramas for years. Seeing essentially the same structure transferred into BL does not suddenly make it feel new.
To be fair, Bittersweet Love is not pretending to have invented this story in 2026. It adapts Cheye Liuxiang's older danmei novel The Man Who Married into a Wealthy Family, which is explicitly set in 1990s China. Lu Xiaofan is a poor rural school dropout who enters the powerful Bei family through a sham marriage to their daughter and gradually becomes emotionally entangled with her brother, Bei Luqing. The original novel was already built around class, humiliation, family obligation and the enormous social distance between these two men. So perhaps my frustration is really with the decision to adapt this particular kind of danmei now. Chinese BL is finally finding new ways to reach international audiences, and Bai Xiao Studio is developing an entire slate of danmei adaptations specifically for overseas distribution. Bittersweet Love is one of the studio's first major releases, with other adaptations already announced behind it. When you have such an enormous library of Chinese BL literature available, beginning with another rich-family melodrama feels strangely conservative. I can understand the practical reason. This is an inference rather than something the studio has stated, but a family melodrama set mostly in homes, offices and social spaces is considerably easier to produce than something on the scale of Guardian or Case File Compendium. Supernatural worlds, investigations, action, elaborate sets and science-fiction concepts require much more money and production experience. A class-difference romance is a much safer first project.
Safe does not automatically mean interesting. My biggest difficulty was Lu Xiaofan himself. While watching the drama, I kept asking why an adult man who has already spent his childhood being treated badly would continue accepting humiliation so quietly. My instinct is almost the opposite: when people have spent years being pushed around, eventually they learn to defend themselves, become angry or start pushing back. I found myself thinking that no man would remain this submissive for so long, and frankly that even many women placed in his situation would eventually rebel. Psychology made me reconsider that slightly. There is no universal reaction to childhood mistreatment. Some people become confrontational, but others learn that resistance only creates more punishment. Repeated experiences of having little control can contribute to helplessness, avoidance and difficulty asserting oneself later. Family environments also influence how assertive young adults become and how they handle relationships. Trauma therefore does not necessarily create someone who fights back; sometimes it creates someone exceptionally skilled at surviving by becoming small. And strangely enough, that is much clearer in the novel. Cheye Liuxiang describes Xiaofan almost like a weed that survives wherever there is a tiny crack available. He continuously changes his expectations according to whatever position other people permit him to occupy. Even early in the novel, his family openly treats his educated older brother as more valuable, and Xiaofan has already internalised the idea that sacrificing himself for that brother is reasonable. He lowers his head not because he possesses no personality, but because he has been taught where he believes his place is. That distinction matters enormously.
A novel can keep us inside someone's thoughts. We understand humiliation because we hear the calculations behind it. We understand why Xiaofan says nothing because we know what he thinks he will lose by speaking. Passivity can therefore become characterisation. Television cannot simply remove that internal voice and expect the same behaviour to communicate itself. In the drama, Xiaofan too often just looks weak. Instead of thinking, "He has learned that accommodation is how he survives," I found myself thinking, "Why are you letting these people do this to you again?" Those are completely different reactions. If the adaptation wanted to retain such an unusually submissive protagonist, it needed to make his psychology visible through stronger dialogue, private moments, anger he suppresses, or small decisions showing that remaining quiet is itself a choice. Without that, the character begins to feel less like a complicated product of his environment and more like another BL protagonist designed to suffer until a powerful man decides he is worth protecting. That is particularly disappointing because the original Xiaofan is not actually completely powerless. The novel's description emphasises his adaptability, and older readers have specifically commented on the pleasure of watching someone initially perceived as weak eventually demonstrate considerably more awareness than people assume. The screen version preserves much of the suffering but, for me, loses some of the intelligence behind it.
Bei Luqing creates another familiar problem. He is handsome, educated, wealthy and socially untouchable, exactly the kind of emotionally restrained upper-class character Chinese romance has produced countless times. His attraction to Xiaofan is supposed to become interesting precisely because Xiaofan represents everything his social environment teaches him to look down upon. Yet even that dynamic feels oddly familiar now. Rich, cold man slowly discovers feelings for poor, warm, socially inferior person. Class difference. Family disapproval. Sacrifice. Misunderstanding. Separation. Reunion. Changing the poorer character from a woman to a man does not automatically make the structure innovative. That is why I kept thinking about Chinese danmei itself while watching. The literary genre has already moved far beyond this. Chinese authors have written political thrillers, historical epics, supernatural mysteries, science fiction, crime stories, psychological horror and some extraordinarily complicated morally grey romances. The international success of books such as Guardian and Case File Compendium demonstrates exactly how broad danmei can be.
So why does live-action BL so often retreat toward familiar melodrama? Part of the answer is probably economics. Another part is risk. Complex danmei requires complex production, and Chinese BL projects aimed overseas are still developing a sustainable model. Bai Xiao Studio currently has an ambitious list of adaptations in development, but Bittersweet Love does not yet give us a production catalogue large enough to judge whether the company can successfully handle something much more demanding. I could not find a substantial previous completed BL catalogue from the studio that would allow me to compare its writing, directing or production quality across several works. That makes this feel almost like a test case. Unfortunately, it is not a test case that makes me particularly excited about the future. The series itself looks competent enough, and Guan Yue and Yan Ruihao have moments where the relationship becomes genuinely touching. But competence is not what frustrates me. It is the lack of ambition. The material repeatedly circles the same humiliation, class inequality and emotional dependence rather than making those themes feel new.
Even the 1990s setting should have created something much more complicated. Being gay in that environment is not simply another obstacle equivalent to having disapproving parents. The social and legal reality surrounding two Chinese men openly forming a life together would have been enormous. Same-sex marriage is not legally recognised in mainland China even today; Chinese government guidance still defines legal marriage as between a man and a woman. That makes the ending especially strange. If their "marriage" is intended as a symbolic private commitment, I can accept it as romantic fantasy. People do not need state permission to promise themselves to one another. But if the drama expects the audience to read it as anything resembling an ordinary recognised marriage in 1990s mainland China, it becomes historically impossible. Interestingly, even the original novel eventually reduces the resolution to something close to a romantic declaration rather than pretending Chinese law suddenly changed. One older description of the ending has Bei Luqing finally finding Xiaofan after two years and simply telling him they should marry. It works as emotional language: "I choose you permanently." It does not need to mean that the government issued them a marriage certificate. The drama could have used that contradiction beautifully. Imagine ending with two men deciding that they consider themselves married even though their country does not. That would immediately say something about love, society and the limits of official recognition. Instead, when the surrounding story has already simplified so much of their emotional development, the marriage risks feeling like another convenient happy-ending image.
Final Thought
I started Bittersweet Love wondering why Xiaofan was written as such an unrealistically weak man. After looking more closely at the novel and the psychology behind his behaviour, I no longer think "unrealistic" is quite the right criticism. Someone raised to believe that his needs matter less than everyone else's can absolutely become an adult who survives through appeasement rather than confrontation. A person can spend years adapting instead of rebelling. The original novel seems to understand this much better than the television adaptation because we are allowed to see the thought process behind Xiaofan's submission. The drama gives us the behaviour without enough of the psychology. And that is ultimately my problem with Bittersweet Love. It takes ideas that could be psychologically and socially fascinating—poverty, class shame, childhood neglect, family obligation, homosexuality in 1990s China and loving someone from a world that considers you inferior—and turns them into another familiar rich-family romance. I don't dislike this kind of story because it is Chinese, or because it is melodramatic. I am frustrated because I know what Chinese BL literature is capable of.
I've read Guardian. I've read Case File Compendium. I know how strange, intelligent, dark and ambitious danmei can become. So when Chinese BL finally has another opportunity to exist openly on screen for an international audience, I want more than another poor boy entering a rich household and waiting for someone powerful to decide that he deserves love. The literature has already shown us how much further they can go.
To be fair, Bittersweet Love is not pretending to have invented this story in 2026. It adapts Cheye Liuxiang's older danmei novel The Man Who Married into a Wealthy Family, which is explicitly set in 1990s China. Lu Xiaofan is a poor rural school dropout who enters the powerful Bei family through a sham marriage to their daughter and gradually becomes emotionally entangled with her brother, Bei Luqing. The original novel was already built around class, humiliation, family obligation and the enormous social distance between these two men. So perhaps my frustration is really with the decision to adapt this particular kind of danmei now. Chinese BL is finally finding new ways to reach international audiences, and Bai Xiao Studio is developing an entire slate of danmei adaptations specifically for overseas distribution. Bittersweet Love is one of the studio's first major releases, with other adaptations already announced behind it. When you have such an enormous library of Chinese BL literature available, beginning with another rich-family melodrama feels strangely conservative. I can understand the practical reason. This is an inference rather than something the studio has stated, but a family melodrama set mostly in homes, offices and social spaces is considerably easier to produce than something on the scale of Guardian or Case File Compendium. Supernatural worlds, investigations, action, elaborate sets and science-fiction concepts require much more money and production experience. A class-difference romance is a much safer first project.
Safe does not automatically mean interesting. My biggest difficulty was Lu Xiaofan himself. While watching the drama, I kept asking why an adult man who has already spent his childhood being treated badly would continue accepting humiliation so quietly. My instinct is almost the opposite: when people have spent years being pushed around, eventually they learn to defend themselves, become angry or start pushing back. I found myself thinking that no man would remain this submissive for so long, and frankly that even many women placed in his situation would eventually rebel. Psychology made me reconsider that slightly. There is no universal reaction to childhood mistreatment. Some people become confrontational, but others learn that resistance only creates more punishment. Repeated experiences of having little control can contribute to helplessness, avoidance and difficulty asserting oneself later. Family environments also influence how assertive young adults become and how they handle relationships. Trauma therefore does not necessarily create someone who fights back; sometimes it creates someone exceptionally skilled at surviving by becoming small. And strangely enough, that is much clearer in the novel. Cheye Liuxiang describes Xiaofan almost like a weed that survives wherever there is a tiny crack available. He continuously changes his expectations according to whatever position other people permit him to occupy. Even early in the novel, his family openly treats his educated older brother as more valuable, and Xiaofan has already internalised the idea that sacrificing himself for that brother is reasonable. He lowers his head not because he possesses no personality, but because he has been taught where he believes his place is. That distinction matters enormously.
A novel can keep us inside someone's thoughts. We understand humiliation because we hear the calculations behind it. We understand why Xiaofan says nothing because we know what he thinks he will lose by speaking. Passivity can therefore become characterisation. Television cannot simply remove that internal voice and expect the same behaviour to communicate itself. In the drama, Xiaofan too often just looks weak. Instead of thinking, "He has learned that accommodation is how he survives," I found myself thinking, "Why are you letting these people do this to you again?" Those are completely different reactions. If the adaptation wanted to retain such an unusually submissive protagonist, it needed to make his psychology visible through stronger dialogue, private moments, anger he suppresses, or small decisions showing that remaining quiet is itself a choice. Without that, the character begins to feel less like a complicated product of his environment and more like another BL protagonist designed to suffer until a powerful man decides he is worth protecting. That is particularly disappointing because the original Xiaofan is not actually completely powerless. The novel's description emphasises his adaptability, and older readers have specifically commented on the pleasure of watching someone initially perceived as weak eventually demonstrate considerably more awareness than people assume. The screen version preserves much of the suffering but, for me, loses some of the intelligence behind it.
Bei Luqing creates another familiar problem. He is handsome, educated, wealthy and socially untouchable, exactly the kind of emotionally restrained upper-class character Chinese romance has produced countless times. His attraction to Xiaofan is supposed to become interesting precisely because Xiaofan represents everything his social environment teaches him to look down upon. Yet even that dynamic feels oddly familiar now. Rich, cold man slowly discovers feelings for poor, warm, socially inferior person. Class difference. Family disapproval. Sacrifice. Misunderstanding. Separation. Reunion. Changing the poorer character from a woman to a man does not automatically make the structure innovative. That is why I kept thinking about Chinese danmei itself while watching. The literary genre has already moved far beyond this. Chinese authors have written political thrillers, historical epics, supernatural mysteries, science fiction, crime stories, psychological horror and some extraordinarily complicated morally grey romances. The international success of books such as Guardian and Case File Compendium demonstrates exactly how broad danmei can be.
So why does live-action BL so often retreat toward familiar melodrama? Part of the answer is probably economics. Another part is risk. Complex danmei requires complex production, and Chinese BL projects aimed overseas are still developing a sustainable model. Bai Xiao Studio currently has an ambitious list of adaptations in development, but Bittersweet Love does not yet give us a production catalogue large enough to judge whether the company can successfully handle something much more demanding. I could not find a substantial previous completed BL catalogue from the studio that would allow me to compare its writing, directing or production quality across several works. That makes this feel almost like a test case. Unfortunately, it is not a test case that makes me particularly excited about the future. The series itself looks competent enough, and Guan Yue and Yan Ruihao have moments where the relationship becomes genuinely touching. But competence is not what frustrates me. It is the lack of ambition. The material repeatedly circles the same humiliation, class inequality and emotional dependence rather than making those themes feel new.
Even the 1990s setting should have created something much more complicated. Being gay in that environment is not simply another obstacle equivalent to having disapproving parents. The social and legal reality surrounding two Chinese men openly forming a life together would have been enormous. Same-sex marriage is not legally recognised in mainland China even today; Chinese government guidance still defines legal marriage as between a man and a woman. That makes the ending especially strange. If their "marriage" is intended as a symbolic private commitment, I can accept it as romantic fantasy. People do not need state permission to promise themselves to one another. But if the drama expects the audience to read it as anything resembling an ordinary recognised marriage in 1990s mainland China, it becomes historically impossible. Interestingly, even the original novel eventually reduces the resolution to something close to a romantic declaration rather than pretending Chinese law suddenly changed. One older description of the ending has Bei Luqing finally finding Xiaofan after two years and simply telling him they should marry. It works as emotional language: "I choose you permanently." It does not need to mean that the government issued them a marriage certificate. The drama could have used that contradiction beautifully. Imagine ending with two men deciding that they consider themselves married even though their country does not. That would immediately say something about love, society and the limits of official recognition. Instead, when the surrounding story has already simplified so much of their emotional development, the marriage risks feeling like another convenient happy-ending image.
Final Thought
I started Bittersweet Love wondering why Xiaofan was written as such an unrealistically weak man. After looking more closely at the novel and the psychology behind his behaviour, I no longer think "unrealistic" is quite the right criticism. Someone raised to believe that his needs matter less than everyone else's can absolutely become an adult who survives through appeasement rather than confrontation. A person can spend years adapting instead of rebelling. The original novel seems to understand this much better than the television adaptation because we are allowed to see the thought process behind Xiaofan's submission. The drama gives us the behaviour without enough of the psychology. And that is ultimately my problem with Bittersweet Love. It takes ideas that could be psychologically and socially fascinating—poverty, class shame, childhood neglect, family obligation, homosexuality in 1990s China and loving someone from a world that considers you inferior—and turns them into another familiar rich-family romance. I don't dislike this kind of story because it is Chinese, or because it is melodramatic. I am frustrated because I know what Chinese BL literature is capable of.
I've read Guardian. I've read Case File Compendium. I know how strange, intelligent, dark and ambitious danmei can become. So when Chinese BL finally has another opportunity to exist openly on screen for an international audience, I want more than another poor boy entering a rich household and waiting for someone powerful to decide that he deserves love. The literature has already shown us how much further they can go.
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