[Not A Fiction] How To Tell If You Are In A Danmei

Useful for if you get hit by truck-kun

[With apologies to The Toast.]

The sole motivation of any entity in the cultivation world is to menace you sexually.

You met someone when you were ten and imprinted on him like a newly hatched duckling. You have never experienced a hint of sexual attraction to anyone else. You have never questioned your exclusive devotion to the man you met when you were ten. You have never dated him. You are five hundred years old.

You are thirty years old and completely aromantic and asexual. Then you meet a man, and a shiba inu bonks you on the head with the horny stick. All your goals and motivations are eradicated and replaced with the singular desire to get this man’s dick inside your asshole. As far as you’re concerned, this is completely normal heterosexual friendship and you are not gay.

You have been in love with the same person for twenty years. Instead of asking him out, you alternately ignore him, perform grand romantic gestures that he can’t trace to you, and save him from cultivation world residents bent on sexual menacing.

You met a handsome man who was mysterious, silent, and intriguing. What hidden depths lay behind those expressionless eyes? Once you started dating him you realized he just had autism.

Your boyfriend is exactly one head shorter than you and always bottoms. Everyone keeps commenting on how feminine he looks. You call him your wife. You might think from all this that he has a noticeably feminine personality, but actually he is the most stubborn, impulsive, unhinged chaos muppet on the Dao’s green earth and you can count the number of good decisions he’s made on the fingers of one rhinocerus.

Some people say that what people like in bed is the opposite of what they like in real life. This may or may not be true in general, but it’s definitely true for tall masculine doms who always top, every one of whom is worshipful, obedient, and at all times about five minutes away from cleaning their boyfriend’s shoes with their tongue.

Magic, a sexually menacing cultivation world resident, an extremely contrived misunderstanding, etc. have arranged matters such that you sexually assaulted your crush in a way no reasonable person would ever blame you for. You hate yourself. Truly your crush would ever not want to be with a despicable monster like you.

Circumstances keep arising such that the only possible way to reach a particular magical, medical, espionage, military, or survival-related goal is for you to platonically touch, cuddle, or kiss a handsome, powerful and mysterious man exactly one head taller than you.

Welp! Looks like once again the best response to this situation is to pretend to be gay.

Everyone is an identical-looking long-haired androgynous twink. Fortunately, everyone dresses in their own theme colors and always carries their unique accessories. If someone decided to add a new color to their wardrobe to freshen up for spring, you would never be able to recognize them again.

Even though you all live in imperial China, everyone except your feminine boyfriend/wife (who is exactly one head shorter than you) is over six feet tall.

There is a complex system of ranking various people’s magical powers, but the only reason it ever comes up is to establish that you’re the coolest.

You live in China. Where in China? When in China? Who knows. China.

Everyone has sixteen different names. Which name you choose to call them by is laden with deep relationship subtext. All their names are meaningful, symbolic, and probably prophetic. All weapons have meaningful, symbolic, and probably prophetic names too, but they get by with only one, probably because weapons almost never have gay sex.

Presumably women exist for the continuation of the species, but you’ve never met one.

Everyone in a position of power is evil. All institutions are corrupt. All wars are pointless cycles of revenge between people who would get along if they could just talk it out. It is impossible to improve this situation in any way. You decide to maintain your moral purity by fucking off to the mountains to have lots of kinky gay sex.

Everyone is a Taoist. No one has ever, for one single moment, engaged in inaction of any sort.

It may seem like there are dozens of people you regularly talk to. In fact you only ever interact with four people, each of whom is maintaining fifteen secret identities and frantically switching masks and running from place to place like they are the protagonist of a door farce. Each secret identity has its own sixteen names.

You can’t have a confession of love, a fight, an argument, a revelation of dark and personal secrets, or even a normal conversation without the sudden arrival of your archenemy, your cousin, your cousin’s wife, your old martial-arts master, your fiance, your fiance’s mom, your fiance’s legal father, your fiance’s secret biological father who is also her uncle, a demon, the person who murdered your cat in front of you when you were four, and six random peasants. All of them have opinions.

Everyone important or powerful is your uncle. If there appears to be some important or powerful person who is not your uncle, there’s a dark secret and you’ll never guess what it is.

You wound up trapped in a hostage situation, prison, hell, sapient mountain, etc. with everyone you’ve ever had a conflict with and now you’re collectively undergoing the world’s worst group therapy session.

Someone loved you once but she died.

No one can know the dark, secret truth about you: deep down, you’re a good person.

You tortured a bunch of people but it’s all right because you’re very sad.

Anal sex is unbearably painful but you put up with it because of the intense pleasure when his dick brushes against your prostate. It does not occur to your noble, self-sacrificing boyfriend who has attempted to die for you at least sixteen times that the two of you could do a different sex act. You have never heard of lube.

You are not a homophobe, but those two gay men keep getting distracted in life-threatening situations by making googly eyes at each other and saying schmoopy baby-talk compliments and discussing all the fantastic sex they’re having, and you are starting to reconsider your queer allyship.