Chinese historical fanfiction (Chinese History RPF, 历史同人) is a unique form of cultural production at the intersection of popular culture, history, and digital media (Zheng, 2016). In this mode of creation, historical figures are re-contextualized and reimagined to explore contemporary social and cultural issues (Lu, 2016). Similar to traditional historical fiction, fanfiction serves as a contemporary cultural response that reflects on China’s self-perception and national imagination during its long history of feudal monarchy and military as well as cultural conflicts with its Eurasian neighbors. These narratives can elevate history into stories of victory, humor, play, and parody, for example allowing readers to imagine an emperor with his beloved general together opening an invincible imperial history.

This re-imagination is not mere parody but a complex cultural practice. This suggests that historical fanfiction is not just for entertainment but also a medium for expressing personal and political intentions, such as re-imagining ideal male and female masculinities and re-imagining their Chinese identity (Tian, 2015). Therefore, romanticization in fanfiction is not merely a creative act of romance; it is also a negotiation of gender, power, and national identity within a constrained digital environment (Lu, 2016). In these texts, historical figures are more than just historical figures; they become avatars carrying modern anxieties and aspirations. Fans usually use the re-imagined relationships to negotiate historical narratives, re-evaluating power dynamics, gender roles, and national identity. Therefore, quantifying the structural patterns of these relationships is essential for understanding the shared cultural priorities and imaginative practices within the fandom.

This research proposal outlines a pilot study using computational methods to explore the structural characteristics and narrative of character relationship networks in Chinese historical fanfiction. The central question of this project is: How is the mostly romantic reimagination of historical figures expressed structurally and thematically in the Chinese historical fanfiction corpus collected from AO3, and what quantifiable patterns do their character relationship networks exhibit?

Despite the above mentioned qualitative research on historical fanfiction, there is a lack of large-scale quantitative analysis of its character relationships. This is a challenging endeavor because the venues for fanfiction creation and sharing are often decentralized and possess a degree of community privacy. While public web novel platforms like Jinjiang and Qidian host some works, vast amounts of fanfiction are written and read on dedicated fanfiction platforms such as Archive of Our Own (AO3) and Lofter, or exist within the private sphere of social media fan communities like QQ and Weibo, making the acquisition of a representative dataset extremely difficult. Furthermore, the social relationships depicted in historical fanfiction are complex and intricate, encompassing familial bonds, friendships, rivalries, and romantic relationships. Coupled with the tradition of subtle expression in Chinese history and classic literature, clear judgment of relationship types can be difficult.

We choose to utilize the fanfiction metadata from AO3 to effectively address these issues. Firstly, AO3 features a substantial and diverse corpus of Chinese historical fanfiction. As of September 2025 (the data collection date), there are 8,040 fanfiction works (97.7% in Chinese) associated with the “Chinese History RPF” tag, involving a total of 2,878 historical figures, which to some extent reflects the scale and popularity of historical fanworks. Secondly, AO3 possesses a comprehensive metadata system, allowing authors to clearly indicate which characters, romantic pairings (Character A/Character B), and non-romantic relationships (Character A&Character B) are included in a work. Authors can also detail characterization or plot settings, such as “Modern AU” (Alternate Universe), where historical figures are placed in a contemporary setting. This publicly accessible metadata enables us to conduct an analysis of the dynamic relationships presented in Chinese History fanfiction.

To address the research question, we collected information on 2,878 different historical figures from AO3. The most frequently tagged character appeared in 959 different stories, with an average of 13.5 stories per figure. However, it is noteworthy that only 25% of the figures have four or more stories, and over half are associated with only 1 story, indicating a clear concentration of popularity in historical fanfiction. We ultimately selected 349 figures with a work count greater than the average, spanning historical periods from the Shang Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, for further study of this popularity. By complementing the AO3 data with information on the figures’ lifespans and main active dynasties from Wikipedia, we generated statistics on the number of characters and average works per character for each dynasty (Figure 1),

Figure 1. Comparison of Character Count and Average Works Per Character by Dynasty

A prominent finding is the high number of historical figures from the Three Kingdoms Period featured in fanfiction (Tian, 2015). The figure with the most Chinese History Fanfiction is Sima Yi (司马懿). Conversely, the Shang Dynasty, with only three characters, has a remarkably high average of 461 stories per character. This is an interesting discovery. The Three Kingdoms Period, a time of complex alliances and rivalries between the states of Cao Wei, Shu Han, and Eastern Wu, probably inspires historical imagination due to the complexity of the relationships among its figures.

This project will conduct descriptive analysis of the fanfiction metadata, construct character networks, and perform quantitative analysis on the depicted relationships using graph-theoretic metrics including centrality, clustering coefficient, and community detection (Borgatti et al., 2018; Newman, 2018). We will then compare these findings with the relationship records in the China Biographical Database Project (CBDB) (Tsui & Wang, 2020) to further understand the reconstruction of historical figure relationships in Chinese history fanfiction.

This study makes several contributions. First, it applies digital humanities methodologies to a large-scale, non-Western, user-generated content corpus, demonstrating the potential of computational methods for studying nuanced cultural phenomena (Moretti, 2005; Kozinets et al., 2014). Second, it will provide empirical data on the social and literary practices of the Chinese online fan community, filling a gap in quantitative research in this field. Finally, it will through statistical and network analysis computational methods offer a new perspective on historical imagination, moving beyond traditional close reading to explore how networked character relationships shape a cultural resonance.

References

Borgatti, S. P., Agneessens, F., Johnson, J. C., & Everett, M. G. (2024). Analyzing social networks.

Kozinets, R. V., Dolbec, P. Y., & Earley, A. (2014). Netnographic analysis: Understanding culture through social media data. Sage handbook of qualitative data analysis, 262-275.

Lu, J. (2016). Chinese historical fan fiction internet writers and internet literature. Pacific Coast Philology, 51(2), 159-176.

Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, maps, trees: abstract models for a literary history. Verso.

Newman, M. (2018). Networks. Oxford university press.

Tian, X. (2015). Slashing Three Kingdoms: A case study in fan production on the Chinese web. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 27(1), 224-277.

Tsui, L. H., & Wang, H. (2020). Harvesting big biographical data for Chinese history: the China Biographical Database (CBDB). Journal of Chinese History 中國歷史學刊, 4(2), 505-511.

Zheng, X. (2016). Borderless fandom and contemporary popular cultural scene in Chinese cyberspace (Doctoral dissertation).