Why Do We Love "Cross-Species Romance"? | QDaily Anthropology

Humans have imagined all kinds of impossible creatures, and romance is the emotion we consume most often.

Regular article

In the film The Mermaid, the tycoon Liu Xuan (Deng Chao) looks into the eyes of the young woman Shanshan (Lin Yun) and says: "You are not human."

Shanshan freezes. She thinks he has seen through her. She is a mermaid out of legend who has split her tail, put on shoes and "stood" on land in order to assassinate Liu Xuan, a developer who plans to reclaim land from the sea.

Anyone who has seen the film knows this is a set-up for a joke. Liu Xuan is declaring his love. The line has a second half: "You are an angel."

The film, directed by Stephen Chow, has already taken 3.2 billion yuan at the box office. Audiences like the story of a human man who falls in love with a mermaid. In fact, we have long been used to love stories with a touch of fantasy, and many films and TV shows are built around "cross-species romance."

In February, the Russian film He's a Dragon became the most-watched film on China's Bilibili. In it, a human girl is carried off by a man of the "dragon clan." This "dragon" is not only absurdly handsome and shirtless throughout; he also knows how to give flowers and set off fireworks, which makes him wilder and more romantic. Viewers have called the film the Russian Twilight, a story whose male lead is an elegant vampire and whose second male lead is a muscular werewolf.

In Chinese web fiction, cross-species romance is an even more common premise. In the "text packs" (collections of files) that readers pass around, the categories are sorted as finely as aisles in a supermarket: "human-beast," "ghosts and gods," "xianxia," "aliens"... In Western romance fiction, one very popular category is shifter romance (stories about shapeshifters, roughly the equivalent of "human-beast").

This is a peculiar human hobby: we invent a "species" and then fall in love with it.

Before we throw ourselves into cross-species romance, we should work out where our "love interests" come from

You haven't forgotten, have you? (We're sorry about it too.) None of these creatures exist. People made them up. Whether the tag is "cross-species," "shapeshifter" or "human-beast," all these story labels belong to a larger category: fantasy.

Mermaids, dragons, monsters... many of these marvellous "species" have long histories. Since the day humans appeared, we have imagined creatures that do not exist. The myths and legends of every people include gods, ghosts, monsters and other "species" unlike us.

In European myth, mermaids were at first the same kind of creature as sea monsters: human head, fish tail. They lured passing sailors with mournful songs, distracted them until they lost their way, and finally sank them to the bottom. Chinese folk legend has mermaids too. The Classic of Mountains and Seas calls them "jiaoren." The Extensive Records of the Taiping Era describes them in detail: "The sea-fish people live in the East Sea. The large ones are five or six chi long and look like humans. Their brows and eyes, mouths and noses, hands and nails, and heads are all those of beautiful women, lacking nothing..."

Myths are full of half-human, half-animal creatures like the mermaid. Wikipedia files them under "human-animal hybrid." The examples we know best are Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie in Journey to the West.

These "beast peoples" were mostly born of human awe at nature and the unknown. The ancient Egyptians worshipped many gods and believed that a spirit dwelt in everything around them: earth, air, rivers, sky. These spirits all had bodies, either animal or human with an animal's head. Anubis, the god of death, has a jackal's head on a human body. Why a jackal? Because jackals often prowled around graveyards looking for carrion.

The same creature can mean different things in different cultures, and look different too. In the East the dragon is a sacred symbol. Daoism speaks of the "four sacred beasts," holding that the Azure Dragon, White Tiger, Vermilion Bird and Black Tortoise guard the gods of heaven. In Western Christianity, though, the dragon is evil, an incarnation of Satan. Early lives of the saints are full of holy men fighting dragons.

As humanity developed, imaginary creatures became romanticized

In ancient legend, the mermaid was an eerie sea monster. Some were male and some female, and not all of them were good-looking. The girlish mermaid people love today first came from Hans Christian Andersen's 19th-century fairy tale The Little Mermaid. The mermaid became a beautiful, kind sea princess who falls in love with a human prince and gives up her voice in exchange for legs. In the 20th century, Disney's animated film created the sweet, happy Princess Ariel. Girls love Ariel, buy her toys, and cosplay her with a tail.

The main reason for this change is that the relationship between humans and nature changed. Once humans grew more powerful, they stopped fearing terrifying sea monsters. Across all the mermaid stories, the humans change too. When humans are helpless sailors who fear the sea, the mermaid is a mysterious sea monster. When humans are respectable princes, the mermaid is a kind princess. And in Stephen Chow's The Mermaid, humans are tycoons who destroy the ocean, and the mermaid is a young woman who needs protecting.

In fact, many contemporary stories with an environmental theme use a fairly fragile female figure to stand for nature, such as the alien princess in Avatar. In many animated films, "nature" is not only female but a child: Ponyo in Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo, the forest sprite Aisling in the Irish animation The Secret of Kells, and the seal girl in Song of the Sea. All are the loveliest, purest little girls. People want to cherish them, just as they want to protect nature.

The "male" outsider species has been changing too. He is not necessarily fragile, but he is often romanticized in the same way. The vampire is the most striking example. In "A Study of Vampires," an article by @Hengshu in the Douban group "Vampire Alliance," the author points out that in European folk legend before the 19th century, the vampire was purely a symbol of evil and sin, a blood-thirsty walking corpse. The standard description ran: "Those who have long been dead come out of their graves, suck and drain the blood of living creatures, and destroy their lives."

This is tied to the fear of blood in religion. The Hebrews believed that blood is life and the soul, and also a sign of evil: wherever there is blood, there is sin. It is also tied to diseases people could not treat at the time. People wrongly declared dead who then "came back to life," and patients with porphyria, were both "models" for the vampire.

By the mid-20th century, in the American novelist Anne Rice's books such as Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Chronicles, the vampire for the first time shed the image of a hideous, horrifying demon and instead "transformed into a perfect creature combining nobility, beauty, eternity and everything else good in the world." @Hengshu explains: "After the industrial age, nostalgic people felt that 'tradition' had been almost entirely destroyed, while the vampire, an immortal creature, was the only species that kept the 'old ways'... (The vampire) became a favorite of writers, painters, directors, dancers and musicians, and in people's imaginations grew into ever more wonderful legends carrying the features and symbolic meanings of each era."

In Mary Sue stories, we create the perfect partner

Edward, the vampire in Twilight, has on the one hand everything good about a human: he is handsome, he has taste (which mainly means he sees how beautiful the heroine is and falls for her), and he fits seamlessly into human society (his father is a respected doctor, and his siblings are all top students at high school).

On the other hand, he has powers humans envy: he never ages, he is enormously strong, he needs no sleep, and he can read minds. He is an "improved" vampire. He still drinks blood, but he is a "vegetarian" who drinks only animal blood. Sunlight does not burn him to ash; instead he glitters like a diamond.

In bestselling romance, half-human half-beasts, vampires, aliens and superheroes do the same job as the domineering CEO. We dream up the most attractive figures we can (at any rate, more attractive than real humans) and "fall in love" with them to our heart's content (in our imagination). Women's "species" fantasies today are, at heart, no different from the stories Chinese scholars used to make up about a fox spirit who turns into a beautiful woman and gives herself to them without conditions.

An article on the book-review site Omnivoracious, titled "Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My: Why We Love Shape-Shifter Romances", argues that these fantastical figures can break many limits and do what humans cannot, unbound by the rigid rules of human society. In short, they can give you a free, wild love affair.

Sex, naturally, is a big part of the wildness. Here humans simply cannot compete with vampires. In Twilight, Edward at first fears he will hurt Bella (he is far too strong when aroused) and keeps his desire in check. Only when Bella at last "turns" into a vampire too can they happily and endlessly... So in this novel, sex is the real reason Bella has to "turn"; the dangerous childbirth is merely an assist.

He's a Dragon doesn't spell it out. But the story is about a dragon, or a handsome man, who snatches a girl away to an island far out at sea where, apart from the wild cats, there is only him and her... Can a human man fly you to an island? No.

Most outsider species can take full human form. There are exceptions, of course, such as the mermaid, and then a special kind of prurient curiosity sets in. On Zhihu, quite a few posts eagerly discuss the mermaid's reproductive system.

Besides romance, "beast peoples" have other jobs: hero, satire, comedy and cuteness

Before he created the mermaid, Stephen Chow's best-known role was Sun Wukong in A Chinese Odyssey and Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons. Chinese audiences, who know Journey to the West inside out, have long treated this monkey as a hero, following him on his adventures and identifying with him strongly. In fact, we feel so deeply for Wukong that we think of him as one of us. So if someone reminds you that the love between Joker and Zixia is actually "cross-species," your first reaction is probably that something feels off.

Disney animation is full of animals with human traits: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Simba the lion king... Soft fur on the outside, sincere feelings within. In the newly released Zootopia, a rabbit and a fox, natural enemies, live in peace and solve cases together, which is cute, warm and funny by its very nature.

Sometimes the outsider is there to expose the truth. Aesop's fables use animal stories to teach lessons about how to be human. In BoJack Horseman, the American animated series that was a Netflix hit in 2015, everyone sees a bit of themselves in BoJack, the hero with a horse's head and a man's body. He is vain and lazy, had an unhappy childhood, and grew up to be a loser. His agent is a scheming, snobbish cat. The journalist who interviews him is a whale with an enormous mouth.

This story has sex but no true love. In a bar, BoJack scolds a human girl: "Just because you're pretty doesn't mean you get to have no consideration for other people..." The girl replies: "So you think I'm pretty?" In the next scene they are lying in bed, BoJack is smoking, and the girl says she is going to go online and expose his fetishes.

We love this story, and being exposed by BoJack feels especially satisfying. Humans tend to think themselves "superior" to animals, with intelligence and a sense of shame, able to hide their animal nature and live in hypocritical respectability. When a supposedly "inferior" animal stands up on two legs and speaks cutting truths in human language, the satire and comedy are turned up to MAX.

Cross-species love in real life is another matter entirely

In the 1933 film King Kong and its 2005 remake, a giant ape from a primitive island comes to civilized society and carries off a blonde human woman. We feel differently about this film than about other romances, because Kong has no human intelligence; he is an animal, pure and simple.

Indeed, when "crossing established categories" happens in real life, people take up their fear again. Human-animal love, with the quotation marks removed, has always been a complicated subject heavy with taboo. VICE once made a video about the debate in Poland over whether bestiality should be legal. A man appears on camera to tell his story: he really has formed a "partnership" with a dog. Animal-welfare advocates fiercely oppose this: you cannot know what the animal feels or whether it is suffering.

Beyond forbidden love, as technology advances, people have had to start thinking about real possibilities of "hybrids": genetically modified organisms, human-animal gene splicing, artificial intelligence, human clones... There are always people putting forward bold ideas, and always people who resist them.

After all, in the world of fantasy we are safe and in control. Once we return to reality, there is still far too much that humans do not know.