Chinese Internet Fictions in the Transmedia World

This chapter suggests that Internet fiction carries a centrifugal force of "what if" that calls for a "detached engagement with worlds beyond our own place and time" that is characteristic of world literature according to David Damrosch, It outlines the development of three dominate categories of Internet fiction that show a "what if" deviation from the realistic setting: the male-oriented fantasy involving physical transportation to a magical landscape, the heterosexual romance with temporal transportation to a distant past, and the male–male romance that fabricates unconventional love that would be impossible in a real-life scenario. Each of these categories has undergone three stages of development: sporadically emerged in independent forums in the 1990s, monopolized by the major literature websites in the early 2000s, and adapted to televisual dramas, animation, and video games in a "what is" expansion of the original story world facilitated by the commercial IP system since 2011.