*The Journey of Flower* Is a Hit. So Let's Talk About All These Years of Mary Sue | QDaily Business History

In the Mary Sue market, literary merit and depth are beside the point. What matters is how fast and how effectively a story satisfies desire.

First, meet the immortal-fantasy Mary Sue. If the cringe isn't for you, skip ahead to the point.

Guoguo, whose full pen name is Fresh Guoguo, is a contracted author at Jinjiang Literature City. She describes herself as "a homebody, into older men, into scheming guys in glasses, into master-disciple pairings, and into all kinds of forbidden romance." In 2009 she wrote The Journey of Flower, which ranks 39th on Jinjiang's overall chart. In June 2015, after a year and four months of preparation and shooting, Ciwen Media's television adaptation of the same name premiered in Hunan TV's weekly drama slot. It runs 45 episodes; this week it reached episode 15.

Compared with The Lost Tomb, another web drama adapted from a novel, The Journey of Flower won over more of the original readers. Plenty of people still complain about the cringe. The heroine's talking pet bug (don't ask why) looks like it was drawn for a domestic Flash cartoon years ago; some viewers say they dropped the show the moment it appeared. Then there is the show's logic, which you are not meant to look at directly: the heroine will be walking along, suddenly feel like squatting down to pull up a radish, and squat down to pull up a radish (don't ask why). None of that matters. This immortal-fantasy Mary Sue got one thing right — and, credit where it's due, this is genuinely hard — it has a male and female lead who are not merely bearable but actually have chemistry.

Zhao Liying is by now the mainland's go-to actress for the sweet, guileless ingenue. After Boss & Me, which turned a lot of skeptics into fans, she has proved again that she can play innocent and kind-hearted and be believed. As for Wallace Huo, if you ignore the tabloid gossip and just watch him bat those extra-long eyelashes at the camera, who would dare say that is not "a calm gaze with ice in it"?

So last summer belonged to Li Yifeng and his senior martial brother in Sword of Legends; this summer belongs to the immortal lord of Changliu, at least a thousand years old, and the girl fated to be the trial that could kill him.

On its Hunan TV premiere day, The Journey of Flower broke a 1% rating and took more than a 10% audience share for a single episode, first on both ratings networks. By its second week the single-episode rating had passed 2%, and the show sat comfortably at the top of the day's drama ratings among provincial satellite channels. It also streams on the four big video sites — iQiyi, Tencent Video, Youku and Tudou — and as of last week its 12 aired episodes had passed 3 billion online views.

Wallace Huo plays Bai Zihua in The Journey of Flower

Mary Sue? Everyone knows a few Marys. What's a Sue?

Fresh Guoguo also wrote the drama's screenplay, spending months with the production in Guangxi, Hengdian and elsewhere. There was friction along the way. Wallace Huo, for instance, was supposed to be a man of deep feeling and few words, so how could he possibly have that many lines?

Producer Tang Lijun has told a story about it: Fresh Guoguo's birthday fell during the shoot, and because everyone knew how much she liked Wallace Huo, they lured her to her own birthday party by telling her she was meeting a reporter. She was led in blindfolded. Someone dropped to one knee and shouted, "Guoguo, I love you," then asked her to guess who it was. It was Wallace Huo, of course, and when he wished her a happy birthday, Fresh Guoguo cried.

That is the real plot. Recast as a Mary Sue plot, the story might go: Guoguo is an unknown writer from an ordinary, happy family who fills in for a screenwriter friend taken ill. The crew push her around, she clashes with a female star over a line of dialogue, and in the end her talent wins the producer over, while the male lead, the artsy male director and a guest-starring megastar all fall for her beyond hope of recovery.

That is only one way to write it, of course.

The term "Mary Sue" began as satire of exactly this kind of wish fulfillment. In the 1970s, Star Trek fan fiction was everywhere, and a writer named Paula Smith, unable to stand any more of it, wrote the wish-fulfillment story to end them all: her heroine, Mary Sue, saves all of humanity while collecting every man along the way and — more admirable still — is too pure to linger among them, dying with great resolve and becoming a legend of the Star Trek universe.

See, that is the other way to write it.

The 2013 film Star Trek Into Darkness introduced the series to more viewers in China

Put simply, Mary Sue stories satisfy desires that cannot be satisfied in life: usually the desire for romance, for money, for power, and for loud self-expression. To an eye with princess syndrome, anything unreasonable can be made reasonable. The male counterpart is Jack Sue or Tom Sue — prince syndrome, or more precisely hero syndrome.

Which elements a Mary Sue story needs depends on the reader. Every girl wants to be a princess, but the princess each of them pictures is different, and so is the prince she wants; fujoshi, the women who ship male-male romance, may even want to be a male princess themselves, wilting at the sight of any woman. The same goes for men.

If we count any product that satisfies princess syndrome or hero syndrome as a Mary Sue or Jack Sue product, the stretch of pop culture it covers is enormous. Writers, after all, tend to draw their inspiration from their own desires.

In 1963, Chiung Yao published her first novel, Outside the Window, about the entanglement between a high-school senior, Jiang Yanrong, and her homeroom teacher, and the era of Chiung Yao romance began. In 1973, Brigitte Lin was spotted by a talent scout in Taipei's Ximending and cast in her first film, the adaptation of Outside the Window, playing a heroine with "a delicate, melancholy inner world in need of care." She became a star overnight. The story was Chiung Yao's own: her teacher had been her first love.

And Jin Yong, asked about the one-man, many-women romances in The Deer and the Cauldron and The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber, admitted that "as I wrote on, I put myself into the story without noticing."

Brigitte Lin in Outside the Window

After all these years of Mary Sue film and television, let's take it in three generations

First generation: the 1990s

Representative works: Chiung Yao dramas.

In September 1989, Chiung Yao brought her "Six Dreams" crew to Changsha to work with Hunan Television, and the shooting of Chiung Yao dramas on the mainland formally began. In 1990, Wan Jun aired, and Chiung Yao dramas started their bombardment of mainland screens. The Plum Blossom trilogy, Princess New Moon, Smoke-Locked Chamber and A Curtain of Dreams were all huge hits, up through My Fair Princess I and II in 1998 and 1999, which made stars of countless actors and actresses of the weeping school and the wailing school.

Second generation: 2000 to 2010

Representative works: Korean dramas, Taiwanese dramas, adaptations of Japanese shojo manga, Hunan TV idol dramas.

In 2002, the Korean drama Autumn in My Heart aired on 21 mainland channels. Babies switched at birth, leukemia, a romance between a brother and sister — elements Chiung Yao dramas never had — plus gorgeous camerawork, hit mainland audiences hard and fast. Full House, Winter Sonata, Jewel in the Palace and My Lovely Sam Soon were imported one after another, and all of them worked.

Also in 2002, Taiwan's CTS made Meteor Garden, an idol drama that became a phenomenon — so much so that China's broadcasting regulator issued an order banning it, which only made it sell better in video shops. It was adapted from Boys Over Flowers, the manga Yoko Kamio serialized in Shueisha's Margaret from 1992 to 2004; the original ran to 37 collected volumes and sold more than 59 million copies, and it is still Japan's best-selling shojo manga. Besides the Taiwanese version with Barbie Hsu, Jerry Yan and Vic Chou, Japan and South Korea made drama adaptations of their own; the 2009 KBS version starred Lee Min-ho, who became known across Asia through it.

Shonen magazines such as Weekly Shonen Jump kept turning out hero's-growth epics like Naruto and One Piece, while shojo magazines like Margaret and Hana to Yume kept up a steady supply of eternal love stories.

Over that decade, other shojo classics were adapted in turn in Japan, China, South Korea and Thailand — Hana-Kimi (also released as For You in Full Blossom) and Mischievous Kiss (also released as It Started with a Kiss) — about, respectively, a girl who moves into a boys' dormitory to be near her crush, and a girl who moves straight into her crush's house.

Hunan TV, meanwhile, was both first to import these foreign Mary Sues and busy trying homegrown idol dramas of its own. Ugly Wudi, adapted from the American comedy Ugly Betty, was China's first drama produced in seasons.

The Korean drama Autumn in My Heart, also known as Autumn Fairy Tale

Japan's 2013 version of Mischievous Kiss was another success

Third generation: 2010 to today

Representative works: dramas adapted from web fiction, Korean dramas, Hollywood films.

In 2011, Scarlet Heart, co-produced by Tangren Media and Hunan TV from Tong Hua's novel of the same name, went on air with ratings between 1 and 2 percent and more than 3 billion views on video sites. In 2010 and 2011 alone, pushed by the Hunan TV platform, dramas adapted from web novels came swarming out: Beauty's Rival in Palace, The Glamorous Imperial Concubine, Sealed with a Kiss and more.

One master of the Mary Sue made his name in this period: Yu Zheng. His Palace series made stars of Yang Mi and Yuan Shanshan, and Legend of Lu Zhen did the same for Zhao Liying. Yu Zheng's success rests on his grip on popular taste — casting Joe Chen as Dongfang Bubai, for instance, was a nice touch for female readers already at home with men written as women and women written as men. He is also widely attacked for plagiarizing and making his plots up as he goes, which says something about how much story quality a Mary Sue audience will tolerate.

Empresses in the Palace, in 2012, was a success without precedent. Zheng Xiaolong aged the novel's twenty-something emperor up to his forties or fifties, and the straight-drama treatment won over viewers of every age instead of losing them. Ratings in Shanghai peaked above 10%, the show drew nearly 7 billion online clicks at the time, and it set off an Empresses in the Palace craze in Taiwan.

Korean dramas held up. SBS's My Love from the Star drew more than 5 billion online views in China in 2013 and became the first drama ever to push its Baidu Index above 4 million. From the three treasures of the Autumn in My Heart era — car crash, cancer, incurable illness — to the alien CEO with a split personality in My Love from the Star, to the seven personalities of this year's Kill Me Heal Me, the Mary Sue elements in Korean dramas keep iterating, and keep feeling fresh.

In recent years Hollywood has also shown us how big a Mary Sue can get. The vampire Mary Sue novel Twilight and the archery Mary Sue The Hunger Games were both made into film series that joined the billion-dollar box office club. Fifty Shades of Grey, which began as Twilight fan fiction, is an S&M Mary Sue that could not be released in China and still took $500 million worldwide.

Liu Shishi in Scarlet Heart

Sun Li in Empresses in the Palace

Jun Ji-hyun in My Love from the Star

These Jinjiang heroines have real faces now, and many more are on the way

Ever since Scarlet Heart, homegrown web fiction has been a goldmine for film and TV producers. But this year's overnight boom in "IP" adaptations was driven above all by Gu Man's My Sunshine, a novel serialized on Jinjiang Literature City from 2003 to 2005. The 2015 drama, produced by Shanghai Jukoo, premiered on Dragon TV and Jiangsu TV. Wallace Chung's He Yichen dotes on Tang Yan's character to the point of derangement, so much so that a line went around online: "Ten years of cultivation earns you a Wang Xiaojian, a hundred years a Ke Jingteng, a thousand years a Li Daren, a hundred million years a He Yichen." Then came the film version, produced by LeTV and starring Huang Xiaoming and Yang Mi, which took 352 million yuan at the box office over the May Day holiday. And it isn't over: Enlight Media has announced it holds the rights to shoot another one, with earlier reports naming Deng Chao and Yuan Shanshan as the intended leads.

The Journey of Flower, My Sunshine, The Glamorous Imperial Concubine, Scarlet Heart, Empresses in the Palace — having named these titles one more time, it is time to introduce the home they all come from: Jinjiang Literature City. This women's fiction site was founded on August 1, 2003, and its numbers are worth boasting about: more than 100 million page views a day on average, 2.2 million daily logged-in regular users, 900,000 registered authors and more than 20,000 contracted ones. In 2007 Jinjiang was bought by Shanda Literature, and after Shanda merged with Tencent Literature early this year, Jinjiang went with it into the newly formed China Literature.

Nobody is happier about this than the readers. The heroines they once paid a few yuan to read about are turning into real people on screen, one after another. Tang Qi Gongzi's celebrated Three Lives, Three Worlds, Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms is finally on its way too. In May, Alibaba Pictures and Ruyi Films held a press conference in Beijing to announce the film; in June they announced that Liu Yifei would play Bai Qian. The way they announced it deserves to be called Mary Sue marketing: the film's official Weibo account posted the signature line of the male lead, Ye Hua — "Qian Qian, come here" — and Liu Yifei replied, "I'm coming, where are you?"

Beyond that, Jukoo will go on to shoot Gu Man's Love O2O, and Sohu has invested in Ding Mo's Love Me If You Dare, premiering in October. Wallace Huo, again.

The TV drama version of My Sunshine

Liu Yifei will play Bai Qian, the fox princess of Qingqiu, in Three Lives, Three Worlds, Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms

Mary Sue web fiction is on a tear, and Chinese TV drama is finally letting young people play

For a long time, what television stations had to think about was "women, the old and the idle." According to audience data published by Yi'en Media, apart from Hunan TV, which aims at viewers aged 15 to 35, Jiangsu TV and Zhejiang TV both target viewers over 35, and Dragon TV and Beijing TV over 45. That is why family ethics dramas, spy dramas and historical dramas — the genres that suit older tastes — once dominated Chinese screens.

Once video sites joined in, the game changed. In 2010, China had 420 million internet users. That year Dwelling Narrowness, about young couples who marry with nothing, drew seven or eight hundred million clicks across the major video sites combined. The price of drama rights on new media jumped at once, from 6,000 yuan an episode to 70,000 or 80,000. By 2015, after the "one drama, two satellite channels" rule took effect, video sites are paying as much for top-tier dramas as satellite channels do.

People who watch dramas mainly on video sites are younger than the ones who sit in front of a television, and their taste, trained on web fiction and imported film and television of every kind, runs to faster pacing and stranger material.

All Quiet in Peking, The Old Farmers, Hey, Old Man and Our Parents' Love drew 5 billion online views between the four of them; Sword of Legends alone drew more than 9 billion. Youku's data shows that 68% of the people who watched My Sunshine there were women, 29% were students and 66% were under 30.

One time-travel drama took off and countless others started travelling through time. One drama was carried to popularity by kids, and a lot of producers realized how much power young viewers have — that content good enough will pull middle-school students back to the television.

In The Journey of Flower's second week on air, its share among viewers under 34 stayed above 22% nationally, and its share among viewers under 23 rose sharply from the first week, up 46%. Break that under-23 group down further, and the show's share among middle- and high-school viewers aged 13 to 18 in its second week reached 31.13%.

Television drama is aimed at female consumers, and now that web-fiction brands have taken off, that broadcasting platforms have multiplied, and that Hunan TV has demonstrated how much money is there, Chinese drama finally has both the ambition and the ability to cater to young tastes.

As The Journey of Flower producer Tang Lijun sees it: "The dramas on air right now have far too much arguing in them. Husbands and wives argue, mothers- and daughters-in-law argue, sons-in-law argue with their wives' parents, the two sets of in-laws argue with each other. It's dispiriting, and this pile-on needs to change, fast."

Ethics dramas love to argue and love to moralize; what gets Mary Sue dramas criticized is the opposite — no reasoning, endless cringe. But that is the Mary Sue market: literary merit and depth are beside the point, and what matters is satisfying desire fast and effectively. Novels and manga have always pointed the way for film and television, and Jinjiang's site already shows where things are going. It has been tagged and subdivided as finely as it can be, so a reader can easily find what she wants on the subway home: older man with younger woman, younger man with older woman, rebirth and cultivation, female-dominant, boys' love, girls' love. For the suppliers, one dazzling hit matters less than a large and steady output of gaudy variety — a new world, a new species, anything can catch attention. Some things, of course, never change: true love, for one. Pretty faces, for another. Women are watching.

Finally, a word on what the Jack Sues over on Qidian are up to. One big destination is online games, but that field asks for more than romance does; so far the most successful game adaptation is still 2007's Zhu Xian, released in English as Jade Dynasty.

Jacks like grand subjects — cultivating immortality, slaying monsters, pacifying the realm — that ordinary people are best off not touching; think of Marvel's superheroes. iQiyi bought The Lost Tomb, which pulls in men and women alike, and its budget is said to be several times that of a conventional drama, but the production as it stands struggles to deliver what makes the novel good. All we can do is wait for a Ghost Blows Out the Light film made at a different level of investment.