The censorship has gotten worse recently. Basically, there's now a substantial cash reward given to people who report "illegal" online content and the Chinese BL fandom has been hit hard by this new ruling. Awareness on Tumblr A lot of content creators have been removing their fanart and fanfic, especially since one BL author was sentenced to 10 years of jail for selling her works online (SCMP news). It's such a ridiculous situation and a slap in the face of progressiveness.

I'm not sure how this is going to affect LGBT media coming out of China from now on because, despite the existing ban, there were still BL movies/series being made but they maintained a low-profile online presence where fans can purchase the content while avoiding the censorship authorities because there is (or was) less intense scrutiny of online media. That said, there were still cases where productions were halted prematurely and usually because the movies/series gained some popularity that it attracted the attention of the censorship board. I'm not sure if other markets pick up these media but a lot of it has ended up on Youtube.

This is why Guardian is kind of a first in that, compared with all the other Chinese BL media produced so far, it's very ambitious, has relatively speaking a much larger budget and better production values, with two lead actors who have quite a few credentials to their names instead of being complete unknowns. If I'm not mistaken, it's the most high-profile BL novel adaptation so far even though the final product was marketed as a "bromance". The latest update on Guardian in China is that the ban has been lifted so it's back on the Youku platform but with some cuts made to the original release. And because of its massive popularity, it has been officially picked up by South Korea and it's currently being broadcast on their Chinese television network without any censorship.

You know, I completely agree about the narrative potential of subtext vs more overt romance. I feel that so much of BL content is lazily written with too much dependency on the common tropes of the genre and for some reason, I find this even more obvious in live-action - maybe it's harder for me to tolerate cliché-riddled BL with actual people as opposed to anime/manga/text. Sorry, that was a bit of a rant.