Representing New Women in China: The Female Characters in Otome Games and TV Dramas

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-277-4_96How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Otome games; TV dramas; Female characters; Feminism; China

Abstract

As women’s social status improves, the portrayal of women in the media has also evolved. Many popular TV dramas in China now focus on women’s personal growth, and their images are no longer restricted to traditional roles such as housewives. Instead, these dramas depict women as competent professionals who excel in the workplace. At the same time, video games have become an increasingly popular yet understudied form of mainstream media. Simulate love games, specially designed for women, known as Otome games, sets off a boom in China. The consumer demographics of TV series and Otome games are different. To explore the differences between TV series and Otome games in portrayal of female images due to the consumer demographics and their ideological implications, this study uses the semiotic analysis method to analyze the heroine images in TV series and Otome games and compares them. Despite many similarities between the female lead characters in TV series and B-girl games. However, the main difference is that the heroines in the TV series can achieve feminist awareness in their careers after going through struggling experiences. By contrast, the heroines’ abilities are denied in the Otome games and they rely solely on men to succeed. Popular TV dramas can portray women’s abilities and their process of feminist awareness to a certain extent, while the heroines in the Otome games mostly represent conservative women stereotypes and are less independent.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Mengyu Li
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/09/02
TI  - Representing New Women in China: The Female Characters in Otome Games and TV Dramas
BT  - Proceedings of the 2024 10th International Conference on Humanities and Social Science Research (ICHSSR 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 873
EP  - 884
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-277-4_96
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-277-4_96
ID  - Li2024
ER  -