Entangled Empowerment: Postfeminist Sensibility,Platform Capitalism,and Gendered Narratives in Chinese Costume Idol Dramas

Abstract

This article examines how postfeminist empowerment is mediated and reconfigured within China’s platformed media ecology, focussing on narrative design and affective mechanisms. Drawing on two female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas, A Dream of Splendor (2022) and The Legend of Shen Li (2024), the study combines close textual reading with contextualised paratextual analysis of highly visible discussions on platforms such as Douban, Weibo, and Bilibili. While both series share a genre logic centred on female growth and emotional autonomy, their pathways of empowerment diverge significantly. Female subjectivity is predominantly validated through affective labour, emotional stability, and relational repair rather than sustained structural confrontation. Platform curation and audience affective engagement further consolidate this logic, transforming empowerment into a highly shareable and emotionally resonant cultural form. Through comparative analysis, the article reveals an inherent tension within postfeminist empowerment in the Chinese platform context, where female agency is simultaneously foregrounded and depoliticised.

Keywords

postfeminism female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas female subjectivity streaming platforms platform capitalism feminist media studies

Introduction

In recent years, driven by the global circulation of Western feminist theories, the gradual emergence of local feminist discourse, and the rapid expansion of the digital media economy, particularly streaming platforms, issues of gender have gained increasing visibility in Chinese popular media (Liao 2024; Liao and Ling 2025). This shift is especially evident in the transformation of Chinese costume idol dramas, a genre that combines historical aesthetics with contemporary romantic narratives, targets primarily female audiences, and has expanded within platform-centred media ecologies where algorithmic logics and audience data have become increasingly influential in shaping production and circulation practices (Ying 2020).

This article defines female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas as a subgenre of costume drama whose core orientation does not necessarily rest on an a priori commitment to feminist emancipation. Rather, within platform-based production environments, these dramas position female characters as narrative anchors and emotional focal points, address women as their primary target audience, and often organise gendered affective narratives and viewing expectations through historical or fantastical settings. The genre foregrounds emotional experience, intimacy, and subjective perception from a female perspective, while amplifying these elements through the narrative conventions and market logic of idol drama production (Zhang and Yan 2020).

However, when situated within broader feminist media debates, the rise of this genre does not imply a linear realisation of female liberation or gender empowerment. This tension echoes longstanding feminist critiques that postfeminist culture frequently reframes structural gender inequalities as matters of individual choice, self-responsibility, and emotional self-management, thereby displacing feminist politics from collective or institutional critique (Gill 2007; Scharff 2011). Instead, it is embedded in complex interactions among state ideological regulation, the production logic of platform capitalism, and postfeminist affective culture (Banet-Weiser et al. 2020; Gill 2017).

Within platform capitalist contexts, empowerment discourse is increasingly organised through visibility, affect, and brandable subjectivity, raising critical questions about how gendered agency becomes aligned with commercial logics and affective economies (Duffy and Hund 2019). On the one hand, female experience gains heightened visibility within costume narratives and contributes to a reorganisation of established narrative priorities. On the other hand, empowerment is frequently depoliticised at the structural level, emotionalised, and commodified, a process that recent scholarship has linked to the gendered and paternalistic governance logic of platforms, which reward affective compliance and relational dependence over structural critique (Han 2022). Female subjectivity is more often constructed through individualised choice, emotional resilience, and moral coherence, generating a negotiated and ambiguous tension between surface level autonomy and the reabsorption of patriarchal norms.

This ambiguity points to a deeper structural paradox, namely the entanglement between discourses of individual empowerment, neoliberal femininity, and the persistence of gendered structural constraints (Yang 2023). Existing scholarship has conceptualised this phenomenon as mediated feminism, referring to forms of feminist expression shaped by media logics and commercial mechanisms rather than grounded in feminist political practices oriented towards collective action or institutional transformation (Liao and Ling 2025).

Against this background, this article examines differentiated expressions of female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas within a postfeminist context, taking A Dream of Splendor (2022) and The Legend of Shen Li (2024) as case studies. Both series were produced and premiered as flagship projects on the same major streaming platform Tencent Video, were released within a comparable time frame, and consistently positioned female subjectivity at the centre of their narratives and promotional strategies. These shared conditions establish their comparability, while their contrasting subgenre configurations enable an analysis of how postfeminist empowerment discourse is negotiated and constructed across different genre arrangements.

To avoid reducing platform influence to technological determinism or speculative inference, this study adopts a qualitative and platform-conscious analytical approach. It examines how platform logics become culturally legible through narrative patterns, paratextual circulation, and institutional contexts. The following sections therefore outline the data sources, analytical strategies, and methodological limitations that frame the analysis.

Methods and Data Materials

This study adopts a qualitative and interpretive research approach, combining close textual reading with contextualised paratextual analysis to examine how female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas negotiate the construction of gendered subjectivity within a platformed media ecology. The study does not seek to establish causal explanations between platform algorithms and audience responses, nor does it treat platform technologies as determinative forces. Instead, it focuses on how postfeminist sensibility and platform capitalism jointly organise the conditions and boundaries of gendered meaning production through specific cultural logics, affective patterns, and discursive formations. Following feminist media scholarship that conceptualises platforms as cultural intermediaries rather than neutral technological infrastructures (Hesmondhalgh et al. 2023), this article treats the platform environment as a structural condition that shapes content visibility, circulation rhythms, and interpretive frameworks.

The empirical materials consist of two interconnected layers, textual and paratextual, which are organised into a single analytical chain through a strategy of key scene anchoring. At the textual level, the analysis examines the complete series of A Dream of Splendor (Tencent Video, 2022) and The Legend of Shen Li (Tencent Video, 2024), with particular attention to narrative structure, character construction, affective trajectories, and visual aesthetics. The analysis foregrounds recurring motifs related to female agency, affective labour, configurations of romantic relationships, and modes of narrative closure. To enhance the operational comparability of the analysis, the study selects narrative moments that generated concentrated discussion within platform paratexts during the broadcast period as analytical anchors. These include the crisis in which Zhao Paner is framed by her peers in A Dream of Splendor episode sixteen of season one and Shen Li’s decision to sacrifice herself in The Legend of Shen Li episode twenty-three of season one.

At the paratextual level, audience discourse is not treated as an independent object of study, nor is the analysis intended to provide a comprehensive account of audience attitudes. Rather, paratextual materials are approached as contextual resources for understanding how textual meanings are perceived, amplified, or contested within platform environments. Paratextual analysis is organised around the same key scenes in order to examine the interactions among textual narration, platform curation, and audience affective responses. The materials are primarily drawn from long form reviews on Douban, topical discussions and posts on Weibo, and bullet screen comments on Bilibili.

Douban long reviews were collected from the official series pages during the broadcast periods, covering June to August 2022 for A Dream of Splendor and March to April 2024 for The Legend of Shen Li. Selection criteria prioritised reviews with high levels of interaction and relatively concentrated discussion, with preference given to texts exceeding 1000 comments. This approach aims to capture systematic interpretations and evaluative judgements regarding female subjectivity, emotional maturity, romantic fulfilment, as well as controversies surrounding notions such as pseudo feminism and narrative recuperation. Weibo materials were collected from highly interactive original posts under official series related topics during the same periods. Posts with more than 500 likes were selected, with repost and comment counts and topic popularity taken into account to assess public visibility. These materials are used to observe how specific narrative elements are rapidly named, affectively framed, and disseminated as points of contention within platform-based public discourse. Bilibili bullet screen comments function as supplementary materials for capturing synchronic affective responses. During the analysis of the identified key scenes, bullet comments appearing during official episode playback were examined to trace patterns of immediate emotional aggregation and to observe how their tonal styles resonate with narrative pacing.

The selection of paratextual materials follows a theoretically informed sampling strategy based on key scene anchoring. This involves first identifying core narrative moments closely related to female subjectivity, romantic configurations, and postfeminist tensions through close textual reading. Subsequently, within the corresponding circulation nodes, paratextual cases characterised by concentrated discussion, high affective density, or pronounced controversy are selected based on quantitative thresholds such as comment volume and interaction intensity. This strategy emphasises the functional role of paratexts within the analysis, namely to provide contextualised corroboration for textual interpretation and to reveal dominant interpretive frames that are more likely to gain visibility within platform ecologies, rather than to achieve statistical representativeness of audiences.

In terms of analytical strategy, the study employs a theoretically guided thematic analysis that iteratively moves between textual scenes and paratextual responses. Drawing on postfeminist sensibility and mediated feminism as analytical lenses, concepts such as romantic closure, discourses of self-care, affective labour, and embodied aesthetics are operationalised as concrete analytical categories and examined within narrative contexts and platform discourse. For instance, in analysing affective labour, the study attends not only to how characters resolve crises through emotional management and relational maintenance, but also to whether evaluative expressions such as emotional stability, healing, and reassurance recur in paratextual discourse to confer value upon these traits. This approach illuminates how such qualities acquire legitimacy within platform contexts and are translated into circulating discourses of empowerment.

It should be noted that this study does not directly measure the operation of platform algorithms, nor does it aim to produce generalisable conclusions regarding audience reception. The focus lies instead on how gendered meanings and affective orientations are culturally organised and mediated through the coordinated operation of textual narration, platform curation, and audience affective responses under platform mediated conditions. By clearly specifying data sources, selection principles, and analytical procedures, the study seeks to balance interpretive depth with methodological transparency.

Negotiating Empowerment in a Platformed Chinese Context

Postfeminism is not a theoretically stable or politically unified paradigm, but rather a cultural formation that has emerged in Western societies since the late twentieth century, reflecting the complex entanglements among neoliberalism, consumer capitalism, and contemporary gender discourse. Gill (2007) argues that postfeminism should not be equated simply with anti-feminism. Instead, it constitutes a cultural sensibility organised around discourses of empowerment, choice, and self realisation, within which women are constructed as agentic subjects while remaining embedded in ongoing structures of gendered discipline and self-regulation. Scholarship on postfeminism has broadly developed along three analytical trajectories. The first understands postfeminism as a cultural continuation or transformation of second wave feminism (Brooks 2002). The second, represented by McRobbie (2008), adopts a critical perspective that emphasises how postfeminism reabsorbs feminist claims into neoliberal and patriarchal orders by declaring feminism to be complete. The third focuses on how postfeminism is concretised and normalised through mass media, popular culture, and consumer practices (Genz and Brabon 2017; Gill 2007, 2017). Despite their differences, these approaches all point to the inherent tension within postfeminism between discourses of empowerment and mechanisms of regulation.

Within media studies, postfeminism is more often conceptualised as a mode of gendered meaning production that is organised and amplified through media logics. Gill (2007) and Scharff (2011) observe that in contemporary popular culture, feminist language frequently operates alongside neoliberal rationalities, producing ideals of an empowered femininity centred on confidence, self-love, and self-management. Such forms of empowerment, however, are not inherently critical. They are deeply embedded in consumerist logics and regimes of affective labour, and while they emphasise individual responsibility and emotional self-regulation, they tend to weaken attention to structural inequalities (Orgad and Gill 2021). As a result, the political implications of postfeminism cannot be assumed at an abstract level, but must be examined within specific media texts and their conditions of production and circulation.

As postfeminist theory has travelled into non-Western contexts, it has also been taken up within Chinese media and cultural studies, yet its conditions of emergence and modes of articulation differ markedly from Western experiences. Rather than developing from internal transformations within local feminist movements, postfeminism in the Chinese context has largely taken shape through the combined effects of state gender governance, media commercialisation, and transnational discursive circulation (Dosekun 2015; Li 2014; Thornham and Pengpeng 2010).

Against this backdrop, Liao and Ling (2025) propose the concept of mediated feminism to describe the ways in which feminist discourse is organised and presented through media mechanisms and commercial logics within platform-based environments. This concept highlights how, under highly platformed conditions of circulation, feminist expression often appears in affective, commodified, and visibility-oriented forms, without necessarily corresponding to feminist political practices aimed at collective action or institutional transformation. This article does not treat mediated feminism as an independent or alternative theoretical framework, but rather as a contextual analytical concept that captures the specific operational form of postfeminist sensibility within the Chinese platform media system. Existing research further suggests that when feminist discourse enters popular culture in Chinese digital media contexts, it is frequently reshaped into narrative styles centred on emotional comfort, identity affirmation, and personal growth, prompting ongoing scholarly debate over whether such expressions tend towards depoliticisation (Hou 2020; Wang and Driscoll 2019; Yin 2020, 2022).

It is within this cultural and institutional context that female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas have emerged as a highly visible media genre. Their narrative safety boundaries cannot be attributed solely to market preferences or algorithmic optimisation, but should be understood in relation to the increasingly institutionalised governance frameworks regulating online audiovisual production and publishing since the mid-2010s. Following the introduction of national regulations on online publishing and online audiovisual content in 2016, platform-based drama production became subject to more formalised requirements concerning ideological discipline, value orientation, and compliance risk. These regulatory pressures intensified after 2021 with the launch of the Qinglang Action, a state-led initiative of cultural governance and censorship aimed at curbing the excessive commodification of fandom, regulating celebrity-centred entertainment, and realigning platform culture with broader social and moral norms (Wang et al. 2025). By targeting fan culture, idol economies, and fan capital operations, the Qinglang Action reshaped industry expectations regarding content legitimacy, publicity strategies, and ideological risk management. Under these conditions, platforms recalibrated their content strategies by privileging low-conflict narrative structures and affectively stabilising themes such as self-development, emotional maturity, and healing forms of intimacy, while translating potential gender tensions into affective and temporally contained narrative moments.

At the level of genre, female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas occupy an intersection of historical fantasy, idol aesthetics, and gendered storytelling. They are both products of domestic television genre evolution and deeply embedded within media infrastructures centred on streaming platforms. Existing scholarship offers divergent definitions of female oriented media. Some studies emphasise their role in enhancing the visibility of female subjectivity and transcending the male gaze (Fu 2017). Others approach them as affect-driven entertainment forms designed to meet women’s emotional and leisure needs (Zhang and Yan 2020). Still others adopt broader criteria, using the presence of a female protagonist as the defining feature (Yang and Hu 2024). Building on these debates, this article defines female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas as a genre form that places female subjectivity at the narrative centre, driven by growth-oriented plot progression and affective resonance mechanisms, within which meaning production continually generates tension between surface level empowerment discourse and deeper gender norms.

Structurally, the formation and operation of this genre reflect at least three interrelated logics. First, by situating narratives within imagined histories, fictional dynasties, or mythological universes, these dramas relocate contemporary gender issues into symbolised historical spaces, enabling indirect and relatively safe forms of expression. Second, platform-based gender oriented production relies on user profiling, content tagging, and recommendation mechanisms, rendering the so-called “she economy” a key reference point for both narrative design and commercial strategy (Duffy and Hund 2019; Yu and Chongchong 2022). Third, narratives typically revolve around female growth, romantic choice, and affective autonomy, producing a negotiable oscillation between empowerment and regulation. Platformisation further restructures the conditions of television visibility and circulation priority. For example, across major Chinese streaming platforms, content zones and branded drama slots oriented towards female audiences have explicitly positioned affective resonance and aesthetic consumption as core selling points (Hong 2018).

Platform mechanisms influence not only distribution pathways but also the overall visibility environment through bullet screen interactions, trending rankings, and social media feedback. In turn, these circulation cycles reinforce narrative motifs that are more likely to generate emotional resonance and platform exposure. Existing research has incorporated these dynamics into broader discussions of algorithms and cultural production, including algorithms as cultural intermediaries (Gillespie et al. 2014), the effects of algorithmic curation on meaning hierarchies (Van Dijck and Poell 2013), the modulation of affect and visibility by algorithms (Bucher 2018), and the amplification of emotionalised and gendered content within visibility economies (Banet-Weiser et al. 2020; Duffy and Hund 2019). In the Chinese context, this process of platformisation is further entangled with state sanctioned cultural value systems and the consumption logic of the she economy (Sun and Yang 2021). While it intensifies aesthetic consumption and affective appeal, it also sustains ongoing debates over whether feminist expression is increasingly depoliticised (Bao 2023; Liao 2025).

Overall, female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas should not be treated as unidirectional indicators of feminist progress or regression. Rather, they constitute a highly platformed cultural field whose internal tensions emerge at the intersection of postfeminist sensibility, platform-based production conditions, and genre conventions. The following sections examine how this logic of empowerment is articulated, modulated, and negotiated through narrative practices and platform circulation, based on a combined textual and paratextual analysis of A Dream of Splendor and The Legend of Shen Li.

Narrative Conventions and Cultural Mechanisms of Female-Centred Chinese Costume Idol Dramas

As a hybrid genre that combines costume-based fantasy with female oriented affective storytelling, female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas have, in their mature stage, developed relatively stable narrative conventions. These texts typically place women’s personal growth and affective autonomy at the centre of their narrative organisation, embedding explorations of subjectivity within everyday and emotionally oriented narrative processes. Through poetic visual styles and symbolically rich imagery grounded in cultural traditions, they construct a soft and intimate aesthetic register.

Although The Legend of Shen Li and A Dream of Splendor are situated within different generic contexts, the former drawing on fantasy and myth and the latter anchored in historical realism, they nonetheless display marked convergence across several key dimensions under the shared constraints of platform-based production and visibility mechanisms. It is along four such dimensions that the following analysis identifies significant points of narrative alignment.

Comic Tone and Softened Modes of Expression

This section begins by comparing a set of recurrent comic narrative mechanisms in A Dream of Splendor and The Legend of Shen Li, including humorous dialogue, exaggerated bodily movement, and emotionally responsive musical cues. It examines how both series mobilise comic tone to recalibrate the ideological weight of gendered narratives and to transform potential gender tensions into affectively acceptable narrative forms. Comic strategies function not only as devices of entertainment but also as mechanisms of affective modulation, easing narrative conflict and enhancing audience receptivity. As Bai and Wu (2022) observe, recent female oriented Chinese television dramas frequently combine light-hearted comic tone with affect-driven storytelling in order to articulate gender issues through softened modes of expression and to strengthen emotional resonance with audiences.

In A Dream of Splendor, characters such as Chen Lian and Chi Yanei exemplify conventions of marketplace comedy, grounding the narrative in a sensorially accessible everyday aesthetic and evoking the vitality of urban life in the Song dynasty. The Legend of Shen Li further extends this tonal register by integrating comic elements into character design, audiovisual rhythm, and musical signalling. For example, in episode twenty of season one, the scene in which seven talking carp spirits care for Shen Li employs anthropomorphism alongside an absurd sound effect in which a suona imitates the crowing of a rooster. This produces a surreal comic effect marked by auditory dislocation, offering emotional relief within the broader narrative arc centred on Shen Li’s role as the Bi Cang Wang and her military responsibilities.

At the formal level, The Legend of Shen Li places particular emphasis on the integration of original musical compositions, such as The Ginseng Seller and Playing in the Human World, with narrative action. Through the construction of a soundscape, the series combines surreal auditory humour with lyrical fantasy. The scene of the seven talking carp spirits caring for Shen Li in episode twenty of season one demonstrates how the organisation of soundscape juxtaposes surreal comic sound with lyrical imagination, transforming humour from a decorative element at the level of dialogue into a structural device that shapes narrative rhythm and emotional transition. Such softened narrative strategies both dilute the seriousness of grand narrative motifs and enhance the sense of intimacy between characters and viewers.

At the level of paratextual circulation, highly interactive Weibo threads under the topic “The Legend of Shen Li is funny” frequently frame the series’ bodily comedy and sound-based humour through evaluations such as “funny without being vulgar” and “light-hearted without lowering intelligence.” Bullet screen comments on related clips on Bilibili are likewise filled with immediate affective responses such as “so funny” and “so cute.” It should be noted that such paratextual expressions do not necessarily represent all audience positions. However, their repeated appearance within highly interactive and easily shareable discussion chains indicates which forms of affective framing are more likely to gain visibility advantages in platform contexts. Audiences often interpret this comic quality as an emotional pressure release valve within strong female-centred narratives, thereby folding potential gender tensions into a lighter tonal register that circulates more smoothly across platforms.

Slice of Life Aesthetics, Healing Affect, and Mechanisms of Affective Regulation

This section proceeds by comparing narrative segments in both series that centre on everyday labour, domestic space, and temporal rhythms, in order to examine how slice of life narrative structures are institutionalised as mechanisms of affective regulation within female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas. As Lin (2024) argues, this narrative mode achieves a poetic reconfiguration of sensorial experience and domestic temporality. On the one hand, it resonates with East Asian aesthetic traditions. On the other, it aligns with contemporary audiences’ desires for emotional stability and de alienated forms of time.

In A Dream of Splendor, tea culture functions as a narrative thread that connects affective trajectories with practical action, linking the life experiences of three women through processes of migration, entrepreneurship, and mutual support. Elements such as tea rituals, tea craftsmanship, and performative tea practices, many of which draw on intangible cultural heritage, are not merely represented as ways of life but also serve as aesthetic media for reconstructing the refined urban culture of the Song dynasty. Through visual references to cultural artefacts such as Along the River During the Qingming Festival and The Eastern Capital Dream of Splendour, the series constructs an immersive fantasy of Northern Song urban culture, in which night markets, music and dance, poetry, food, and artisanal performances together produce a highly aestheticised historical space.

By contrast, The Legend of Shen Li situates its narrative primarily within pastoral dreamscapes. Spaces such as the Liuyun courtyard, grape trellises, and fishing villages are rendered through naturalistic cinematography and suffused with mist, mountain scenery, and seasonal imagery. This visual texture evokes a philosophical conception of what may be described as the humanisation of nature, in which natural space is understood as a site for emotional anchoring and everyday dwelling. In this way, utopian imagination is located within a conceptual space shaped by East Asian intellectual traditions. The rural vision of three meals a day, four seasons, and one shared home constructs a fantasy of intimate everyday life, offering emotional consolation for anxieties generated by high levels of modernisation and temporal compression in contemporary society.

Observations of highly rated long reviews on Douban, highly interactive posts on Weibo, and related bullet screen comments reveal that the Liuyun courtyard is repeatedly named as a healing scene of ideal life and a place audiences wish to inhabit. In multiple highly rated reviews, similar expressions recur. One review states that the Liuyun courtyard represents the reviewer’s ideal dwelling and that watching the series produced a sense of emotional healing. This affective framing resonates with Tencent Video’s curated clips promoted under the label immersive experience of the Liuyun courtyard, through which pastoral everyday life is stabilised within platform contexts as a shareable site of emotional dwelling.

At a deeper level, this slice of life aesthetic performs the cultural function of decentring grand narratives while foregrounding intimate affective experience. It also embodies a postfeminist sensibility in that it prioritises micro perspectives, emotional resonance, and individualised subjectivity rather than direct political critique. In A Dream of Splendor, this mechanism is realised through the repeated depiction of everyday labour within the tea house. In The Legend of Shen Li, it is concentrated in the pastoral intimate space constituted by the Liuyun courtyard. At the same time, highly interactive discussions on Weibo commonly frame both series through affective categories such as healing and reassurance. However, at narrative moments marked by more explicit closure and increased male intervention, accusations of recuperation and pseudo feminism also emerge in parallel. As a result, healing discourse and critical discourse coexist within the same platform space.

Through their soft and lyrical visual language, both series construct a simulated utopia rooted in traditional cultural imagination. While responding to audiences’ needs for affective anchoring, this utopian aesthetic simultaneously reaffirms deeper structures of cultural belonging.

Affective Labour Based Subjectivity and Platform Normativity

In A Dream of Splendor, female subjectivity is not primarily constructed through direct confrontation with patriarchal institutions or gender structures. Instead, it is consistently situated within a narrative framework centred on affective resilience, ethical self-cultivation, and relational labour. A representative example is the crisis in which the tea house is framed by rival merchants in episode sixteen of season one. Zhao Paner’s pursuit of economic independence is not articulated as resistance against unjust commercial systems. Rather, she resolves the crisis through a series of practices involving emotional management and relational maintenance, including calmly mediating tensions, reassuring those around her, and efficiently organising staff to handle the aftermath. At the narrative level, her agency is encoded as emotional stability. Her competence, propriety, and affective composure within commercial space become key sources through which her subjectivity is recognised and validated.

This construction of subjectivity centred on affective capacity is further affirmed and normalised through paratextual circulation within platform contexts. For example, Tencent Video’s officially curated highlight clips employ labels such as moments of Zhao Paner’s emotional stability, while highly rated Douban reviews use formulations such as Zhao Paner’s calmness makes people feel reassured to complete processes of value confirmation. In this sense, platform curation and audience feedback jointly reinforce an interpretive framework that equates female agency with affective resilience.

In parallel, another cluster of highly interactive discourse directs critique towards the distribution of narrative power, pointing out that the resolution of key crises repeatedly relies on the intervention and adjudication of the male protagonist Gu Qianfan. Through this mechanism, female agency is re authorised within frameworks of romance and authority. Official platform promotions and frequently circulated clips likewise tend to foreground moments of emotional intimacy between characters, scenes of warmth associated with female solidarity, and points of moral consolation. This reinforces a visibility framing centred on emotional stability and amplifies audience sensitivity to accusations of narrative recuperation and pseudo feminism.

Comparable mechanisms can also be observed in The Legend of Shen Li, despite its shift towards mythological and fantasy settings. Shen Li’s power is constructed simultaneously as a symbol of martial strength and authority and as inseparable from emotional endurance, responsibility, and relational maintenance. Her narrative high points are frequently accompanied by sacrifice and endurance, such as her decision to sacrifice herself in episode twenty-three of season one in order to protect her people, rather than by sustained structural conflict.

Platform oriented promotional language and highly circulated clips repeatedly reinforce Shen Li’s affective qualities of calmness, restraint, and reliability, leading empowerment discourse to be naturally equated with emotional resilience. This framing is more readily converted into visibility advantages within platform circulation. Shen Li’s strength is emphasised through a sense of reliability rather than confrontation and gains greater circulation efficiency within affectively adhesive and shareable contexts. Long reviews on Douban and highly interactive Weibo posts often affirm her emotional management through evaluations such as strong but not outwardly aggressive and steady and reliable. At the same time, bullet screen comments expressing questions such as why does she always have to carry everything render this strength visible as a form of affective cost.

From the interaction between textual narration and paratextual circulation, female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas do not simply represent empowered women. Rather, within platform mediated environments, they reorganise empowerment as a narrative logic centred on affective legibility and relational stability. Female agency acquires narrative meaning precisely because it is coupled with affective labour, therapeutic emotional orientations, and relational stability. These qualities possess higher circulation efficiency within platform ecologies oriented towards participation, shareability, and affective attachment. In this sense, postfeminist empowerment is not directly determined by algorithms. Instead, it is incorporated into a relatively stable assemblage of platform governance through the coordinated operation of narrative encoding, platform curation, and audience affective responses.

Female Alliances and the Platformisation of Affective Capital

If the previous section focuses on how affective labour shapes individual female subjectivity, female alliances constitute an extension of this affective logic at the relational level. Here, connections among women do not merely function as background elements of character emotion. They are organised as narrative mechanisms endowed with moral legitimacy and affective value.

In The Legend of Shen Li, the intergenerational sisterhood between Shen Li and Shen Muyue, characterised by relations that are simultaneously maternal and pedagogical, as well as the trust-based alliance she forms with Youlan, together constitute a female support network centred on care, understanding, and sacrifice. This mode of representation deliberately avoids traditional narratives of competition and jealousy among women, instead shaping sisterhood as a gentle, stable, and highly moralised affective space. At the paratextual level, Weibo trending posts and bullet screen comments more frequently extract affective peak moments such as mutual support and she understands her, completing value confirmation through phrases like female mutual support feels so reassuring. As a result, female alliances are more readily refined into healing forms of intimate relationships within platform circulation, rather than being extended into issues with sustained capacity for action.

In A Dream of Splendor, female alliances are explicitly situated within a narrative framework of economic cooperation and mutual survival. The partnership among Zhao Paner, Song Yinzhang, and Sun Sanniang appears to construct an imagined female economic community that combines affective support with entrepreneurial practice. However, the series relies heavily on traumatic events as triggers for emotional bonding, rendering solidarity primarily as a reactive response to external crises rather than as an outcome of shared structural awareness. At key narrative moments, such as the establishment of the tea house in the capital between episodes ten and twelve of season one, female cooperation is repeatedly interrupted or reset by male intervention, thereby weakening its potential as an autonomous narrative force.

When this narrative configuration is placed alongside the circulation logic of platform paratexts, its depoliticising tendencies become more pronounced. In highly interactive discussions on Douban and Weibo, sisterhood is frequently framed through affective labels such as enjoyable to watch, warm, and the pinnacle of female mutual support. Discussion focuses primarily on intimacy and emotional comfort, with limited extension towards reflections on whether female alliances possess sustained agency or structural orientation.

At the same time, controversial discussions often juxtapose these affective high points with later narrative recuperation, translating questions of female solidarity into public accusations of pseudo feminism. Official platform promotions and short video edits likewise tend to foreground healing interactions among women while giving less emphasis to the gendered and class based structural conditions in which these relationships are situated. Consequently, sisterhood is more easily amplified as an affective selling point within platform visibility mechanisms, while its potential critical edge is simultaneously weakened.

The foregoing analysis indicates that beneath the apparent narrative convergence of A Dream of Splendor and The Legend of Shen Li lies a profound divergence in empowerment pathways. The roots of this divergence lie in differences in authorial structure and genre resources. The Legend of Shen Li relies on an author centred production model, with the original novelist Jiu Lu Fei Xiang leading the adaptation, and on fantasy genre conventions that allow female creative intentions to maintain greater continuity. Female subjectivity is more frequently affirmed through ethics of responsibility, such as the sacrificial decision in episode twenty-three of season one, rather than through romantic relationships. By contrast, although A Dream of Splendor is also produced by a predominantly female creative team, it is more deeply embedded within the industrial norms of historical realism. As a result, the female autonomy articulated in its earlier stages is more visibly recuperated in later episodes through romantic closure and male adjudication.

This divergence reveals the conditional nature of postfeminist empowerment within platform ecologies. The question is not simply whether empowerment is present, but how empowerment is configured and what forms of subjectivity it legitimises under specific production conditions.

Across both series, female alliances thus operate primarily as forms of affective narrative capital. While this empowerment logic increases emotional density and moral legitimacy, it remains confined to the domain of private relationships and psychological repair, limiting its capacity to translate into sustained gender political demands. This configuration exposes a core tension within postfeminist narratives under platform conditions. Female solidarity is highly celebrated, yet it is safely situated within algorithm friendly and commercially viable affective frameworks. Beneath the surface appearance of empowerment, this arrangement sustains an avoidance of structural inequality.

Conclusion

Taking A Dream of Splendor and The Legend of Shen Li as case studies, this article has examined how female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas construct female subjectivity within China’s platform-based media ecology. The analysis demonstrates that while this genre significantly increases the visibility of female characters and foregrounds women’s experiential perspectives, its pathways of empowerment are frequently mediated and reorganised through affective, depoliticised, and consumption-oriented narrative mechanisms. Female agency is not centred on sustained structural confrontation. Instead, it is more often recognised through affective labour, emotional stability, and relational repair, thereby producing a negotiated tension between empowerment and discipline.

Comparative analysis shows that although both series share a genre logic centred on female growth and affective autonomy, they diverge markedly in their modes of narrative closure and mechanisms of subjectivity validation. Drawing on fantasy genre resources and a relatively continuous authorial structure, The Legend of Shen Li allows female subjectivity to be affirmed primarily through ethics of responsibility and decisive action. Its narrative meaning is not fully recuperated into romantic resolution. By contrast, under the constraints of historical realism and industrial norms, A Dream of Splendor more visibly integrates the female autonomy developed in its earlier stages into romantic narratives and male authority in its later episodes. This divergence indicates that postfeminist empowerment is not an abstract or unified cultural trend. Rather, it is differentially constructed through specific production conditions and the mobilisation of genre resources.

Within platform contexts, the cultural visibility of empowerment is further filtered through affective logics. Through the coordinated operation of textual narration, paratextual circulation, and platform curation, female subjectivity is more readily framed as an affective disposition centred on emotional stability, healing sensibility, and reliability. Whether in Zhao Paner’s emotional management during moments of crisis or in Shen Li’s assumption of responsibility within narratives of sacrifice, female agency is naturalised as affective resilience and relational competence, and gains legitimacy within highly shareable environments of circulation. This process is not unilaterally determined by algorithms. Rather, it is continually amplified and normalised through the interaction of narrative encoding, platform curation, and highly interactive paratextual feedback.

Female alliances are similarly celebrated in both series, yet their functions remain largely confined to domains of emotional support and psychological repair. Whether manifested as survival-oriented cooperation in A Dream of Splendor or as care centred relational bonds in The Legend of Shen Li, these connections are frequently distilled into healing moments of intimacy within platform circulation. They are less often translated into gender political issues with sustained capacity for action or structural orientation. As a result, female solidarity becomes a narrative resource with high affective value, while being safely situated within privatised and depoliticised emotional frameworks.

Through its analysis of A Dream of Splendor and The Legend of Shen Li, this article argues that female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas constitute a highly mediated gendered cultural field. Within this field, empowerment and discipline, agency and regulation are not simply opposed, but are tightly entangled and operate simultaneously. The significance of this genre lies not in whether it achieves empowerment in a normative sense, but in revealing how female subjectivity is permitted, rendered visible, and recognised in specific forms under conditions shaped by platform capitalism and postfeminist sensibility.

The contribution of this article lies in situating female-centred Chinese costume idol dramas at the intersection of postfeminist media culture and platform-based production mechanisms, and in highlighting the negotiated relationships among textual narration, platform curation, and paratextual circulation. In contrast to approaches that treat platforms, texts, or audiences as isolated objects of analysis, this study demonstrates how female empowerment unfolds as a mediated cultural process. It thus provides empirical material and an analytical perspective for understanding the conditionality and internal tensions of gendered narratives in the contemporary Chinese media context.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Zhang Lu

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Zhang Lu is a lecturer at the School of Literature and Communication, Zaozhuang University, China. Her research interests include critical media studies, feminist film and media studies, Chinese women’s cinema, and Chinese cultural studies.

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