The reception of fan and official translations of a Chinese Internet novel in the transmedia context

This paper draws on two favourite characters from British reality television show, Love Island 2018: Jack Fincham, a former stationery sales manager, and Alex George, an Accident & Emergency [A&E] doctor, to explore how heterosexual norms are constructed and challenged. We study the romantic on-screen relationships these characters have with the female contestants, and between the two male characters themselves through the notion of ‘bromance’. Through a textual analysis of the spoken words and physical interactions between characters in episodes forming the fourth series of Love Island and analysis of social media posts and articles in popular press outlets, we use the notion of gender performativity to explore how these characters perform both hegemonic and, what we argue is, ‘threatened’ masculinity. We use the ‘Male Gaze’ to methodologically lens the performances by characters and their romantic interactions on the television show. In particular, we focus on Jack and Alex’s budding relationship and the condemning of this relationship by the public amid Alex’s termination of his romantic relationship. The decision by Alex to end this relationship led to many viewers questioning his sexuality, with specific reference to his adoration for Jack. Whilst broadly, this paper contributes to debates on the sociological potential of reality television shows, such as Love Island, its specific contribution is to a small, but growing body of international scholarship on homosocial relationships and male love stories in television and film. With this paper, we also contribute towards redressing the marginalization of women within the study of bromance.

Fan practices involving translation open up opportunities to explore language learning practices within the fandom (Sauro, 2017). We examine how three fans capitalize on fan translation and language learning. We consider the cases of Selo (an English–Spanish translator of games), Nino (a Japanese–Catalan fansubber of anime, and Alro (an English–Spanish translator of fanfics). A corpus was built consisting of 297 minutes of interviews, 186 screenshots of language learning events from online sites, and 213 minutes of screencast videos of online activity. Drawing upon the conceptual framework of new literacy studies (Barton, 2007), we set four themes to present fans’ literacy practices and language learning: (a) fan translation, (b) understanding the original text, (c) writing and preparing the translation, and (d) tools, resources, and collaborative online practices. Results indicated that the three informants encountered an open space for agency, creativity, and identity building and reinforcement through fan translation. Their translations provided content and represented the generators of the semiotic fabric in their fandoms (Gee, 2005). As fan translators, they learned language in multiple ways, such as peer-to-peer feedback, autodidactism, and creative uses of Google Translate. Future research may attempt to transfer knowledge from digital wilds into formal education.

This study conducts qualitative research on female players of otome games, exploring the mechanisms of romantic relationship formation within these games and their impact on perceptions of real-life intimate relationships. The findings reveal that the parasocial romantic relationships formed in otome games are not entirely detached from reality; instead, they are embedded in daily life through game interaction mechanisms and the players’ internalized imagination, thereby influencing the reconstruction of real-life intimate relationships. Female players show a high degree of acceptance and immersion in these romantic relationships, focusing on the emotional support provided by male characters. These relationships play a positive role in fulfilling emotional needs, regulating negative emotions, constructing self-identity, and redefining perceptions of intimacy. The intangibility of physical contact remains the only significant shortcoming, as perceived by a minority of players, pointing to a primary direction for the future development of otome games.

Guatemala has one of the world’s highest teenage pregnancy rates and 92% of young people report not using contraception for first sex. We conducted narrative-based thematic analysis of a sample of narratives (n = 40; 15 male-authored, 25 female-authored) on HIV and sexuality, submitted to a 2013 scriptwriting competition by young people aged 15–19 years from Guatemala’s Western Highlands. Our objective was to identify dominant cultural scripts and narratives that deviated positively from that norm with a view to informing the development of educational curricula and communication materials promoting youth sexual and reproductive health. The narratives are characterised by romantic themes and melodramatic plotlines: three in four had tragic endings. Rigid gender norms and ideologies of enduring love make female characters blind to the potential consequences of unprotected sex and vulnerable to betrayal and abandonment. Unprotected sex is the norm, with contraception and sexually transmitted infection protection mentioned rarely. In the four positively deviant narratives, female and male characters’ interaction is based on mutual respect, dialogue and genuine affection. The narratives reveal opportunities for action to increase sexual health knowledge and access to services and to challenge harmful cultural scripts, potentially by leveraging the positive value attached to romantic love by authors of both sexes.

Abstract: This thesis will compare the romantic stories between respectively three relationships from “The Legend of Condor Heroes” and five tunes of “Tragedy and Chivalry Sentiment” to outline romantic characteristics of the two famous works. Altogether divides into five chapters briefly stated as follows: The Chapter One is an introduction and shows the research motivation, research scope and methods, and recent literatures about Chin Yung’s knight-errant novel, and details the typology and characteristics of knight-errant novel. Based on these typology and characteristics, this chapter reviews sources and development of Chinese knight-errant novels. The Chapter Two sketches the romantic stories of “The Legend of Condor Heroes” and five tunes of “Tragedy and Chivalry Sentiment” and then scratches out whole plots and their romantic value in the bases of respectively three relationships of the two works. The first section is to present the development and analysis of main three romantic relationships in “The Legend of Condor Heroes.” The three relationships indicates Jing Guo and Rong Huang, Kuang Yang and Nian-Ci Mu,、Xuan-Fong Chang and Chao-Fong Mei. According to the three couples’ romantic interactions, this chapter will present a fixed model of romantic plot in Chin Yung’s works. The second section focuses on three couples’ stories in “five tunes of tragedy and chivalry sentiment.” This section briefly shows the process of three couples’ romantic relationships and development. Those stories include dilemma between friendships and love faced by Mu-Bai Li and Xiu-Lian Yu, the relationships of love and enmity between Xiao-he Jiang and A-Luan Bao, and suffering relationships and love between Xiao-Hu Luo and Jiao-Long Yu not getting blessness under a feudal period. Chapter Three, Four, and Five respectively present the comparative analysis of “The Legend of Condor Heroes” and “five tunes of tragedy and chivalry sentiment.” Creation and development of romantic relationships have a close connection with characters’ personality and growth backgrounds. So, Chapter Three, Four, and Five respectively discuss and compare “romantic story between couple of Jing Guo and Rong Huang and couple of Mu-Bai Li and Xiu-Lian Yu, between couple of Kuang Yang and Nian-Ci Mu and couple of Xiao-he Jiang and A-Luan Bao, and between couple of Xuan-Fong Chang and Chao-Fong Mei and couple of Xiao-Hu Luo and Jiao-Long Yu Further, based on the three different couples’ stories, I discuss and make further analysis about development process of romantic relationships, the dynamical change of psychology, and the ending of romantic relationships. Also, about characters’ images and descriptive skills, the characters in the two works have their own unique personality and weakness in human nature that are not perfect creation of personality shaped by the authors. On the images of male and female characters, the thesis will discuss and evaluate their behavior styles, upright or dishonest, in the bases of virtue, aesthetics, and moral integrity.

This article is a brief study of four female characters—a pair of daughters and a pair of mothers—who give voice to the majority of the poems in the Aiṅkuṟunūṟu, an Old Tamil anthology of love poetry from the early decades of the third century CE. Taking cues from recent ethnographies on friendship in South Asia and from Alan Bray’s compelling study of friendship in modern Britain, I will examine the ways in which bonds between female friends are expressed in the dense natural imagery so characteristic of Old Tamil convention, most often found within the poems in double entendre and in brief, almost allegorical statements. I focus primarily on the figure of the tōḻi, the ‘girlfriend’, who speaks with greatest frequency in these poems as she acts as the mediator between the talaivi (the ‘heroine’) and the talaivaṉ (the ‘hero’) through every stage of their romantic relationship, and also between the talaivi and her mothers—the cevili-t-ta −y or ‘foster mother’ and the naṟṟa −y, the ‘biological mother’ of the talaivi. In passing, I will briefly contrast this quartet with the voices of their corresponding male characters, which we hear especially within the context of the pa −caṟai, the ‘war camp’. I will analyze how the voices of the characters change—both in content and in register—according to shifts in poetic settings, and will discuss what these shifts can tell us about aesthetic representations of female friendship in early South India. Through a study of the conversational settings among these characters, I will illustrate how friendship, intimacy and love are conveyed in language and rhetorical gesture.

Relationship violence refers to any attempt to control or dominate another person physically, sexually, or psychologically, causing some level of harm (Wekerle & Wolfe, 1999). According to the Ministry of Female Empowerment and Child Protection of the Republic of Indonesia, almost half of the perpetrators are boyfriends or friends. This concerning phenomenon is what Edwin, Posesif’s director, tries to portray in his film. He represents this reality as a means to raise awareness of obsessive love that turns to violence among teenagers, who just left their childhood and are going to a romantic relationship by seeing the signs of such a relationship. However, without proper understanding on why the characters in this movie are involved in violence relationships, it will not be easy for the audience to learn from the movie. We need to acknowledge the characters’ background and purposes in the romantic relationship to reveal why they are trapped in relationship violence. Therefore, the question is why obsessive love happened to them. Why is the male character, Yudhis, obsessed with Lala, the female character, and why does Lala not end her relationship despite what has happened to her? Bandura’s social learning theory and Bowlby’s attachment theory are used as a framework to unfold their background and behaviors. Both theories include the role of caregivers to the young ones that set templates in their behaviors’ responses in life. In this study, it is known that Diana, Yudhis’s mother, and Lala’s father are both failed in giving adequate attention to their children that causes Yudhis and Lala trapped in a co-obsessive relationship, putting Yudhis as the perpetrator and Lala as the victim. By understanding this, this film can encourage adults and teenagers to be aware of obsessive love and prevent violence in any relationship.

The widespread use of digital technology and devices has fundamentally transformed people's social life in recent decades, particularly in interpersonal relationships. Two popular social phenomena elucidate how social connections and interactions have dramatically evolved due to technological advancement. Sexting has surfaced as a popular way of getting attention or flirting among young populations over the past decade. Online dating also has emerged as a viable avenue for people to seek interpersonal romantic and/or sexual relationships. Based on survey data collected from two Chinese universities and one U.S. university, this study links sexting and online dating by comparatively assessing the prevalence of sexting victimization and factors influencing such victimization among young online daters. Bivariate and multiple analyses reveal that American college students are more inclined than their Chinese counterparts to be victims of receiving sexts. Chinese students with higher degrees of rape myth acceptance are more likely to experience sexting victimization, but such an association does not exist among U.S. students. Internet-related activities were only weakly connected to sexting victimization among college students. LGBT young adults, regardless of their country affiliation, are at a higher risk for sexting misconduct. Female and younger American students were more likely to experience sexting victimization, whereas Chinese students in a romantic relationship were more inclined to experience sexting victimization. If possible, future research should employ a random sampling strategy to draw a larger number of college students from different types of universities in different regions. Future studies should include other theoretically relevant variables, such as self-control and opportunity variables, into the sexting victimization research.

The current study investigated how romantic relationships affected socially shared memory in heterosexual couples. Experiment 1 explored the influence of material sharing and intimacy on shared memory. Both romantic pairs and strangers showed memory effects from retrieval practice, but socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting occurred only in romantic pairs. Experiment 2 examined differences in neural activities during dyadic retrieval practice processes between romantic and stranger pairs. Results suggested that romantic pairs exhibited distinct memory effects compared to strangers, with higher brain activation in the prefrontal cortex and greater neural synchronization. This study sheds light on social memory in romantic relationships, highlighting implications for shared memory and knowledge organization.

Within social and personality psychology, researchers interested in narrative and storytelling have most often considered participants’ life stories, or narrative identities. This focus has led to the construction of the “narrative identity approach,” a conceptual and empirical paradigm tailored to assessing participants’ storied sense of self. Narrative processing is a common route by which individuals understand not only themselves, their lives, and variety of social phenomena, including their romantic relationships. As such, we argue on behalf of the application of the narrative identity approach to the study of romantic relationships. In this paper, an overview of the theoretical and methodological components of this approach is presented. This is followed by a summary of a preliminary study piloting a method for assessing the story-based identity couple members have constructed about their current romantic relationships. Twenty female-male couples completed an interview assessing the story of their romantic relationships. These interviews were administered individually, such that each couple member provided his or her stories separately and privately. Associations between the affective features of these stories, attachment styles, and relationship satisfaction are explored. Those who disclosed affectively positive stories tended to report lower levels of avoidant attachment and higher levels of relationship satisfaction. The narrative identity approach represents a noteworthy resource for relationship researchers that will be useful for future research on romantic relationships.

Sexual behavior usually begins in adolescence, and is mediated by biological, personality and socio-cultural variables which can affect the expression of preventive and risky sexual performance, as well as sex and age differences. To determine sex differences in the age of sexual initiation, the use of protective methods and mate selectivity in young men and women, as well as preventive practices according to age, and the prevalence of partner aggression. Participants were 484 university students from public and private institutions, aged 22 ± 3 years (59% women) assessed using a diversity of self-report measures of personality traits, romantic relationship quality, sexual role, attachment type, socio-sexual openness, and self-esteem; they also answered questions regarding sexual behavior, and violence. Differences in age of sexual initiation, risky sexual behavior, and socio-sexual openness were observed between men and women. Aggression prevalence in romantic relationships also varied according to sex and age. Similarities and differences in patterns of behavior and personality variables were observed in relationship quality, sexual role, kindness, and responsibility in males and females. The findings present consistencies with the international evidence and differences that may be due to context specificities, providing also an empirical referent to consider in health planning.

Romantic activity is a social psychological phenomenon. Gender, race, and peer networks are key contexts for understanding the social construction of this behavior as gender‐ and race‐based norms structure feelings and behaviors that define “appropriate” romantic activity and peer networks serve as incubators of this activity. With a nationally representative sample of adolescents (N= 8510) drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study explored the linkages among peer networks, conceptions of idealized romantic relationships and actual romantic relationships, and the ways in which gender and race moderate these associations. Several characteristics of peer networks predicted adolescent attitudes about romantic behaviors as well as actual romantic behavior. Moreover, the linkages among peer networks, romantic attitudes, and romantic behaviors varied by race.

This study aims to explore the complex spiritual belief system and ritual practices of the Toraja people through a qualitative research design. Aligned with the study's objective of unraveling the multifaceted layers of ritual and understanding the connections between tradition and modernity, an ethnographic approach is employed. Researchers immerse themselves in the Toraja community to gain a deep understanding of cultural practices, beliefs, and values. This immersive experience involves participant observation and engagement with community members. In-depth interviews with key informants, such as elders or individuals knowledgeable about the ma’nene’ or corpse preservation tradition, provide insights into cultural nuances, symbolism, and changes over time. Audio-visual documentation, including recording rituals, interviews, and cultural events, enriches the study's depth and authenticity. Thematic analysis identifies and analyzes themes related to the ma’nene’ tradition, such as cultural preservation and the role of ritual in shaping collective identity. The discourse surrounding the ma’nene’ tradition reflects a complex spiritual belief system and ritual practices of the Toraja people, blending elements of animism, ancestor veneration, and a deep connection to the natural landscape. Specific items in offerings and their ritualistic consumption highlight the importance of symbolic actions in religious ceremonies. These findings extend beyond academic curiosity, impacting cultural appreciation, academic research, interfaith relations, and cultural heritage preservation positively. Through this comprehensive exploration, the study contributes to a deeper understanding and appreciation of Toraja spirituality and culture.

Maintenance behaviors play an important role in sustaining relational states, especially within committed romantic relationships. Limited research, however, has considered media portrayals of these behaviors. From the framework of social cognitive theory, this content analysis examined relational maintenance behaviors portrayed by committed romantic couples (heterosexual, gay, and lesbian) on prime-time network television. The frequency of maintenance behaviors (positivity, understanding, self-disclosure, assurances, relationships talks, tasks, and networks) varied by type, valence, program genre, and couple type (married/civil union or cohabitating). Results indicated that comedies featured more frequent relationship maintenance behaviors than dramas. In addition, comedies exhibited more frequent negative maintenance behaviors than dramas. Differences also existed between couple regarding the types of maintenance behavior exhibited. No sex differences in maintenance behaviors were observed between male and female characters.

Male idol groups form one of the most successful contemporary Japanese popular music genres aimed at a female audience. Previous writing on the subject (Aoyagi 2000; Darling-Wolf 2003; 2004) suggests that their image and performance, which pervade many types of mainstream media, promote obedience to hegemonic social norms such as a male-dominated hierarchical system and the privileging of heterosexuality. I would like to explore this through the locus of gender: the presentation of male idols in terms of masculinity and the homosocial, in official media and in texts produced and consumed by female fans. Coming to focus on the strategic performance of male-male attraction, I will discuss the ways in which mainstream media images position idols between youth and adulthood, the nonsexual and the sexual, and how certain fans manipulate these performances to create their own texts centering on male-male relationships, especially in the form of “boys’ love” dōjinshi (fan-drawn comics depicting romantic or sexual relationships between male characters).