DaoSearch

Save search

Give these filters a name so you can return to them later.

Blog

How to Find Danmei Novels in English: Filters, Boards and Booklists

The famous danmei titles are a few dozen books. JJWXC lists a great many more. Here is how to get past the ones everybody has already read.

JJWXCFanqieGuide 6 min read

Danmei (耽美) is Chinese male-male romance, and nearly all of the titles English readers know came from one site: JJWXC, 晋江文学城. On the site itself the category is called 纯爱, "pure love", which is the current mainland word for the same thing. Here it's labelled Danmei (BL), because that's what people search for.

The trouble with finding more of it is scale. A recommendation thread gives you the same twenty novels. JJWXC's danmei category is its second largest, and most of its books have a handful of readers. This is how to work through the middle.

Start with the category

Danmei (BL) on JJWXC is the whole shelf, sorted by favorites, the number JJWXC readers themselves rank by. The first page is the canon. If you're new, that page alone is a reading list.

The Subgenre filter splits the category by era: Ancient Era, Modern Era, Alternate History, and Fantasy & Future. Era is JJWXC's own second axis, so a book is always filed under one.

Three filters do most of the work from here.

Status. Completed danmei, by favorites is the safest list on the site. JJWXC marks only a minority of its books finished, and most of the rest stopped long ago.

Length. JJWXC novels run short next to a cultivation epic. The Length filter starts at 20k Chinese characters and tops out at 1M, and Max length caps it from the other side. Completed danmei under 200k characters is a shelf of books you can finish in a weekend. A thousand characters is very roughly 600 to 700 English words.

Minimum favorites. The Min. favs filter puts a floor under the list: 10, 100, 1k, 10k or 50k. The typical JJWXC book has only a few favorites, so even the 1k step removes most of the catalogue and leaves books a real audience finished.

Shou lead or gong lead

JJWXC records whose point of view each story follows, and for danmei that is the question readers ask first. The POV filter uses the fandom's own words:

  • Bottom-Lead (Shou), 主受: told from the shou's side. The large majority of danmei.
  • Top-Lead (Gong), 主攻: told from the gong's side. A much smaller shelf, and one that's hard to browse anywhere else.
  • Switching, 互攻: no fixed roles.

Every JJWXC book page shows its POV as a chip beside the theme and age rating, and the chip opens the catalogue filtered the same way.

Free or paid

JJWXC is a paid site. A popular novel usually opens with free chapters and then locks the rest as VIP chapters, which readers buy. Plenty of books never go VIP at all, especially shorter and older ones.

The Access filter separates the two: free completed danmei with 10k favorites or more is a list of finished, well-loved novels with no VIP chapters on JJWXC. Paid here means the book has VIP chapters. Each book page says which it is.

DaoSearch doesn't host any of it. The Source link on a book page goes to the novel on JJWXC.

Tropes

JJWXC uses about 300 tags for its whole catalogue, so each one covers a lot of ground. Always pair a tag with the danmei category, and usually with a status or a floor. The ones danmei readers reach for:

Tone has tags too, and the exclude box matters as much as the include one. Sweet danmei with angst excluded is the list for a week when you don't want to be hurt. Swap the two and you get the opposite.

The full vocabulary, with book counts, is on the JJWXC tag index. What the labels mean, and why we translated them that way.

The boards

JJWXC's rankings come sliced by channel, and Danmei (BL) is one of the six every main board has. Four are worth knowing:

  • Completed Gold, Danmei (完结金榜): finished books ranked against finished books. A hundred deep, and the best single page to pick a completed novel from.
  • Monthly, Danmei (月度排行榜): what's leading right now. Mostly ongoing serials.
  • King Ticket, Danmei (霸王票总榜): ranked by the paid tickets readers throw at a book. The fandom's biggest spenders, so the biggest fandoms.
  • Hall of Eternity, Danmei (长生殿): JJWXC's long-run honour board.

VIP Gold (VIP金榜) goes one level finer. It has a board for each of JJWXC's sub-channels, which split danmei by setting: Urban Danmei, Ancient Danmei, Modern Fantasy Danmei and Fanfiction Danmei. These are the top-earning paid serials in each, so read them as "what danmei readers are paying for this season".

A book's page lists every board it sits on under Honours.

Reading the numbers

A JJWXC row shows three figures, and they aren't the ones you know from other platforms.

  • Favorites (收藏): readers who added the book to their collection. The headline number. Six figures is a real hit.
  • Clicks/ch (章均点击): the average clicks per chapter, not a total. A book that keeps its readers to the end scores high, so sorting by it favours novels people finished.
  • Gifts (营养液): the free "nutrient" votes readers pour on a story they like. Enthusiasm, not money.

Book pages add a reader score where JJWXC shows one, which is only for a minority of books. The full explanation of JJWXC's figures.

Booklists: other readers did the sorting

JJWXC readers curate booklists constantly, and danmei lists are a large part of them. JJWXC grades its lists A, B or C. A-level lists are the ones to start with, and the Min. follows and Min. books filters narrow them further.

The better route is backwards from a book you loved. Open its page and look at "In booklists". Every list there was built by someone who liked that novel too, and the rest of the list is their recommendation. The booklists page also has a Book picker that finds every list containing a given novel.

Inside a list, the control row sorts its books by favorites, clicks per chapter or gifts, and filters them by status and length. A long list filtered to Completed is a ready-made shelf. More on how to mine booklists.

Danmei outside JJWXC

Fanqie, the free app, files it as a tag and not a category. Danmei (BL) on Fanqie sorted by all-time reads shows what got big there. Two Male Leads (双男主) is the neighbouring tag: two male protagonists sharing the story, romantic or not, so read the synopsis.

Fanqie's danmei is free to read on Fanqie and tends to be faster and lighter than JJWXC's. What Fanqie's read counts mean.

A starting sequence

  1. Open Completed Gold for danmei and pick two synopses you like.
  2. Note the tags they share, then filter the danmei category by those tags with a favorites floor.
  3. Exclude the tags you've learned you dislike.
  4. Open the booklists your favourite of those appears in.
  5. Save the search, so next month's finished novels show up in it. How saved searches work.

If a book you want has no English yet, its page has a Request a translation button that opens the request form on RandomTranslator, our sister site, with the title and author filled in. If RandomTranslator already has it, the button reads Read the translation.

Explore the catalogue: JJWXC (novels, rankings, stats); Fanqie (novels, rankings, stats).

Keep reading