“What Am I To You?”: Masculinity and Care in The Untamed

[by: lil] The Untamed takes restrictive discourse about masculinity and about sexuality and imagines a world in which its protagonists are free to be the men they want to be.

One of the most frustrating things I hear from fellow Asian Americans when I tell them that I listen to Kpop and watch Chinese dramas is, “But the men look like girls.”

There is a lot to unpack in this sentiment, but a prevailing thought for me is how sad it is to have such a narrow (predominantly Western-centric) view of masculinity, a view in which men have to act, perform, and look a certain way.

The show points to acts of care passing down generationally, beyond the strictures of nuclear, heteronormative family.

The Untamed—and its source material, the novel Mo Dao Zu Shi written by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu—takes all of this restrictive discourse about masculinity and about sexuality and imagines a world in which its protagonists are free to be the men they want to be. This act of imaginative possibilities continues to be incredibly moving for me as I go through the live action for the first time (currently on episode 30) and the donghua as it airs its English subtitles.

This post will be about The Untamed, because I think it is the live action drama that makes explicit this message about masculinity. A recurring theme throughout the series is an ethics of care, which feminist scholar Virginia Held describes as “skeptical of…reliance on universal rules [of impartiality and rationalism] and questions the priority given to them” (The Ethics of Care 11). It is a kind of care that pushes one such as Lan Zhan out of the strictly written, black-and-white moral codes in his clan’s library; a kind of care that motivates Wei Ying to care about the marginalized, going against the entrenched social codes of his upper-class peers; a kind of care that the show demonstrates towards the most disadvantaged of characters.

During the Phoenix Hunt, Lan Zhan and Wei Ying speak in the woods, away from the other clans. “What am I to you?” they each ask the other. It is clear that there is much unspoken here, both for Chinese censorship reasons and for diegetic character reasons. The answer is, of course, that they mean very much to each other despite their clans wanting each to stick to the rules: clan loyalty is integral to individual identity. For Lan Zhan, Wei Ying is what catalyzes him to sneak into a forbidden library in order to learn meditation songs that might help Wei Ying’s spirit which is purportedly corrupted by the Yin Tiger Seal. Lan Zhan will bend the code of his clan—the code by which he has hitherto defined himself—for his concern for Wei Ying’s wellbeing. He will stand outside of his uncle’s house, kneeling in the snow for hours as punishment for going off-script and attempting to aid Wei Ying.

Wei Ying’s sacrifices for Lan Zhan are less immediately legible, and on the surface nonexistent. Upon first glance, it seems like Wei Ying is the more generally humanitarian of the two, the driving force behind his actions justice and general humanity, rather than the wellbeing of another singular individual (so it seems). However, Wei Ying shows care in a different way. In a teaching seminar, I read about constructive and destructive group behaviors, and Wei Ying definitely veers towards the Risk Taking category of constructive group behaviors, defined as “Willing to risk personal loss or embarrassment for the group’s success.” It is precisely Wei Ying’s prioritization of group wellbeing that Lan Zhan is attracted to, and it is this behavior that explains why Wei Ying will attempt a joke to deflect others’ concern about him. He is the jester, the entertainer—but not in the shallow meanings of these words. He will risk personal happiness for those around him. He is form before content, putting a performance on for the world, imagining a better one, and hoping the world will reflect back what he has put forth. Put more simply, he plays lighthearted in hopes that the world will become that way, too.

Wen Ning of The Untamed does not perform traditional masculinity. His sister devotedly cares for him, heals him when he is injured, speaks up for him. As a child, he was touched by spirits and it is hinted several times throughout the show that he is neurodivergent. He is prone to shyness, has a stammer that characters repeatedly identify him by, and has to undergo a ritual whereby his spirit is reawakened from a zombie-like state. All this said, he is not the butt of the joke in the show. He and Wei Ying have a humorous dynamic (see episode 29 and 30), surely, but consider his first instinct when given a bowl of Shijie’s soup: “I want to bring this to A-Yuan.” In a hopeful gesture, the show points to acts of care passing down generationally, beyond the strictures of nuclear, heteronormative family. This is not steal from the rich, give to the poor mentality. This is I have been cared for and gotten this far, and I will care for those I can care for in turn.

To my memory, I have never watched a scene in which a young man who is not a father feed a child—a child who is not his son—soup. Rarer still is seeing a man who has survived the worst kinds of abuse not turning to violence himself, but stopping that cycle and caring for others, consistently and without a second thought.

What is touching and radical and queer and beautiful about The Untamed is that it imagines a world that is just as bitter and violent as ours, but a world in which men can show such a wide range of care and emotion towards one another. A world in which rules do not come from the top, but from human relationships that feel real and close.

Works Cited and Further Reading

“Constructive and Destructive Group Behaviors.” University of Texas. https://cns.utexas.edu/

images/CNS/TIDES/teaching-portal/Constructive_and_Destructive_Group_Behaviors.pdf

Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford 2006.

The Untamed. Tencent Video 2019.