A select list of terms for those new to the genre. All of our releases also include footnotes and/or guides specific to that series.
Danmei:
a Chinese fiction genre focused on romanticized tales of love and attraction between men, similar to BL (boys’ love) from Japan. The majority of well-known danmei writers are women writing for women, although all genders produce and enjoy the genre.
Donghua:
a term for animation from China, used in the same way as anime is for animation from Japan.
Manhua:
a term for a comic from China, used as manga (Japan) and manhwa (Korea). Manhua can be color or black and white, and pages read left to right.
Baihe:
the woman/woman counterpart to danmei, similar to Girls’ Love/GL or yuri from Japan.
Xianxia:
a fantasy subgenre of wuxia, with characters striving to achieve immortality. Xianxia has heavy Daoist and “cultivation” themes, includes magic, and might expand beyond the mortal realm to the heavenly realm, the ghost realm, and the cosmos.
Cultivators:
in xianxia, cultivators are spiritually powerful martial artists who seek to understand and be in harmony with the will of the universe, known as the dao (“the Path”)—a concept in many schools of Chinese religion and philosophy, including Daoism. Cultivation is the general process of training and strengthening one’s innate qi and spiritual core, which powers magical/spiritual abilities and can make one immortal (immune to illness and aging).
Qi:
sometimes written as chi, qi is the vital energy that exists in all living things, both righteous and poisonous. Cultivators strive to cultivate qi by absorbing it from the natural world and refining it within themselves.
Transmigration:
similar to the isekai genre in Japanese media, where a character—usually from the modern world—is transported to the past, the future, or a fantasy world, often one that was originally a novel or video game the transmigrator may have recently experienced in their first life.