This article explores how Girl Top/Boy Bottom (GB) genre in hetero-romance games creates critical spaces where fans actively engage in counter-heteronormative gender and sexuality politics. Using the concept of “constructive fantasy,” this paper examines how women fans negotiate and experiment with gender roles and sexuality in hetero-romance and how their efforts breach the boundary between fantasy and reality. We identify three ways in which constructive fantasy is manifested: (1) fans’ interpretative canonization of the fandom, (2) internal and external “border wars” that define and police fandom boundaries, and (3) the extension of fandom ideals, values, and preferences into other realms of social life. In this way, fantasies motivate individuals and communities to engage in various forms of constructive fan practices at different sociocultural levels. We argue that, by exercising constructive fantasy, GB fans generate new gender and sexuality politics through “female gaze,” challenge dominant beliefs about male effeminacy and amatonormative female representations, and articulate feminist sensibilities within and beyond fandom publics.
AndlauerL. (2018). Pursuing one’s own prince: Love’s fantasy in Otome game contents and fan practice. Mechademia: Second Arc, 11(1), 166–183. https://doi.org/10.5749/mech.11.1.0166
2.
BaiR. (2020). Refashioning Chinese television through digital fun. In The routledge companion to global television, by shawn shimpach (pp. 359–370). Routledge.
3.
Banet-WeiserS. (2018). Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny. Duke University Press.
4.
BeerD.BurrowsR. (2010). Consumption, prosumption and participatory web cultures: An introduction. Journal of Consumer Culture, 10(1), 3–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540509354009
5.
BennettW. L.SegerbergA. (2012). The logics of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–768. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661
6.
ChangJ.TianH. (2021). Girl power in boy love: Yaoi, online female counterculture, and digital feminism in China. Feminist Media Studies, 21(4), 604–620. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1803942
7.
ChenH.ZhangJ.ZhangX.ZengN. (2025). Quasi-virtual intimacy: An exploration of cosplay commission as a new form of virtual-reality interaction. Computers in Human Behavior, 168(1), 108651. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2025.108651
8.
ChungS. W.Au-YeungH. (2023). A narrative inquiry of the life wisdom of female kinky in Hong Kong. China Journal of Social Work, 16(1), 43–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/17525098.2023.2184404
9.
CloughM. (2018). Sexualization, shirtlessness, and smoldering gazes. In McDonaldH. (Ed.), Digital love (pp. 3–36). CRC Press.
10.
CollinsP. H. (1991). Black feminist thought. Routledge.
11.
FairB. (2011). Constructing masculinity through penetration discourse: The intersection of misogyny and homophobia in high school wrestling. Men and Masculinities, 14(4), 491–504. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184x10375936
12.
GanzonS. C. (2018). Sweet solutions for female gamers: Cheritz, Korean Otome games, and global Otome game players. In McDonaldH. (Ed.), Digital love (pp. 225–244). CRC Press.
HalberstamJ. (1998). Transgender Butch: Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum. In Female Maculinity (pp. 141–174). Durham and London: Duke University Press.
16.
HasegawaK. (2013). Falling in love with history: Japanese girls’ Otome sexuality and queering historical imagination. In KapellM. W.ElliottA. B. (Eds.), Playing with the past (pp. 135–150). Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
17.
HerbenickD.FuT. J.ArterJ.SandersS. A.DodgeB. (2018). Women’s experiences with genital touching, sexual pleasure, and orgasm: Results from a U.S. probability sample of women ages 18 to 94. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 44(2), 201–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2017.1346530
18.
HineC. (2016). Ethnographies of online communities and social media: Modes, varieties, affordances. In FieldingN. G.LeeR. M.BlankG. (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of online research methods (2nd ed., pp. 401–414). Sage Publications.
19.
HuT.GeL.ChenZ.XiaX. (2023). Masculinity in crisis? Reticent/han-xu politics against danmei and male effeminacy. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 26(3), 274–292. https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779231159424
20.
HuanY. (2022). Female representation in Chinese Otome games: Comparative research on three famous games from 2017 to 2021. In Proceedings of the 2021 international conference on education, language and art. Atlantis Press.
21.
InwoodH. (2018). The happiness of unrealizable dreams: On the pursuit of pleasure in contemporary Chinese popular fiction. In WielanderG.HirdD. (Eds.), Chinese discourses on happiness (pp. 208–226). HKU Press.
22.
JenkinsH. (1992). Textual poachers: Television fans & participatory culture. Routledge.
23.
JenkinsH.FordS.GreenJ. (2013). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. New York University Press.
24.
JinD. Y. (2017). Mobile gaming in Asia: Politics, culture and emerging technologies. Springer.
25.
KimH. (2022). Rethinking the meaning of boys’ love in an era of feminism: online discourse on “leaving BL” in late 2010s Korea. In WelkerJ. (Ed.), Queer transfigurations. University of Hawai’i Press.
26.
KinderK. (2021). The radical bookstore: Counterspace for social movements. UMN Press.
27.
LaiZ.LiuT. (2024). Protecting our female gaze rights: Chinese female gamers’ and game producers’ negotiations with government restrictions on erotic material. Games and Culture, 19(1), 3–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120231151300
28.
LavinM.YangL.ZhaoJ. J. (Eds.). (2017). Boys’ love, cosplay, and androgynous idol. HKU Press.
29.
LiX. (2020). How powerful is the female gaze? The implication of using male celebrities for promoting female cosmetics in China. Global Media and China, 5(1), 55–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059436419899166
30.
LiangS. (2022). Chinese female desire, gaze, and identity construction: A case study of “boys love.”. Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 28(3), 317–336. https://doi.org/10.1080/12259276.2022.2098556
31.
LinH.ZhouW.MaY.ZhengH. (2023). Sexual minorities within heterosexuality: Psychosocial characteristics of and attitudes toward the “fourth love” in China. International Journal of Sexual Health: Official Journal of the World Association for Sexual Health, 35(1), 181–192. https://doi.org/10.1080/19317611.2023.2171171
32.
LouieK. (2002). Theorising Chinese masculinity. Cambridge University Press.
33.
McCrackenS. (1998). Pulp: Reading popular fiction. Manchester University Press.
34.
MulveyL. (1999). Feminist film theory. In ThornhamS. (Ed.), Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Edinburgh University Press.
35.
MuñozJ. E. (2019). Cruising Utopia. NYU Press.
36.
Ramírez-FrancoJ. (2024). Femmephobia and penetration in the development of masculinity and the (anti)nationalist identity of reinaldo arenas in antes que anochezca. Masculinities & Social Change, 13(3), 1–11.
37.
RottenbergC. (2018). The rise of neoliberal feminism. Oxford University Press.
38.
SedgwickE. K. (1993). Tendencies. Duke University Press.
39.
SmallM. (2009). How many cases do I need? On science and the logic of case selection in feild-based research. Ethnography, 10(1), 5–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138108099586
40.
ThomasP. (2018). Canon wars: A semiotic and ethnographic study of a Wikipedia talk page debate concerning the canon of star wars. Journal of Fandom Studies, The, 6(3), 279–300. https://doi.org/10.1386/jfs.6.3.279_1
WangZ. (2016). Finding women in the state. UC Press.
43.
WelkerJ. (2022). Queer transfigurations: Boys love media in Asia. University of Hawai’i Press.
44.
WilliamsD.CotoL. (2023). “Best sex he’d ever had!”: A qualitative analysis of “most amazing” pegging experiences. Journal of Positive Sexuality, 9(2), 15–18. https://doi.org/10.51681/1.923
45.
YangL.XuY. (2016). Danmei, Xianqing, and the making of a queer online public sphere in China. Communication and the Public, 1(2), 251–256. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047316648661
46.
ZhangW. (2016). The internet and new social formation in China: The fandom publics in the making. Routledge.
47.
ZhaoY.MadillA. (2018). The heteronormative frame in Chinese Yaoi: Integrating female Chinese fan interviews with Sinophone and Anglophone survey data. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 9(5), 435–457. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2018.1512508
48.
ZhouY.PaulB.ShermanR. (2018). Still a hetero-gendered world: A content analysis of gender stereotypes and romantic ideals in Chinese boy love stories. Sex Roles, 78(1–2), 107–118. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-017-0762-y
