In the People's Republic of China, the state takes a didactic approach towards the diffusion of media and forbids the depiction of homoerotic relationships on the big and small screen. Chinese web...Show moreIn the People's Republic of China, the state takes a didactic approach towards the diffusion of media and forbids the depiction of homoerotic relationships on the big and small screen. Chinese web series "The Untamed" (Chen Qing Ling 陈情令) however adapts a web novel containing an explicit homoerotic romance to public acclaim. This exploratory study examines how the directors of this series navigated government censorship and conveyed the homoerotic subtext between the two protagonists. In order to answer this, the thesis makes use of visual discourse analysis (divided into the layers of the image, the soundscape and the montage) on shot protocols as outlined as in Schneider (2012) while also building upon the theoretical frameworks of Van Leeuwen (1996; 2008), Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) and Iedema (2004). The analysis is contextualized by a literature review spanning the topics of the history of homosexuality in China, the importance of representation and television, homosexual representation in the Chinese media landscape to end with the topic of the state approach to media and censorship mechanisms of web series. The thesis concludes that the directors successfully depicted homoerotic subtext by using a wide range of audio-visual and narrative techniques while leaving enough space for deniability, which might bring about more adaptations of such materials and influence public opinion about homosexual individuals.Show less