A Chinese fan of "SuperBat" works holds up a comic by South Korean fan art illustrator Gihoo. Photo: Li Hao/GT

Superman and Batman may be at odds in the new American blockbuster Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but in the imaginations of many Chinese superfans, the pair work better as lovers than as adversaries.

"Superman and Batman complete each other," says Guan Xiaokun, a Chinese graduate student in the US who's also a prolific writer and translator of fan novels about the romance between the two superheroes. "Just like when there's light, there's always shadow."

While the idea of two male superheroes getting it on may be a foreign (or even a blasphemous) one to mainstream Western audiences, it springs from a growing subculture in Asia that revolves around works focused on romantic relationships between male characters. While authors of this genre were already producing work that focused on Superman and Batman - who, like so many power couples, have become known among many enthusiasts by a portmanteau of their names, "SuperBat" - according to Guan, it wasn't until the recent release of the Warner Bros film that the attention kicked into overdrive. As of Monday, the film has raked in 571 million yuan ($88 million) in China, according to cbooo.cn, a website on China's box office statistics.

For instance, the Superman-Batman fan group on Baidu Tieba (a popular Chinese online forum) alone has more than 12,000 followers and features around 100,000 posts about the couple. Chinese Superman-Batman fans also have their own forum, "World's Finest," which boasts 7,600 registered members.

But enthusiasm over this CP (character pairing) isn't just limited to China, or even Asia - communication among fan communities in different countries is growing, thanks to a number of active sites and forums featuring authors from all over the world, including Tumblr, Sina Weibo and Archive of Our Own, an English-language community of fan works. While they share the same love for the couple, each community features distinctive kinks as well. 

Works by South Korean Superman-Batman fan art illustrator Gihoo, who works under the pen name "Lapuger," are popular in the fan community. Photo: Li Hao/GT

An international community of fans 

While newcomers to the genre might imagine rather sordid depictions of the two muscle-bound heroes' love, not all of it tends toward the prurient. Gihoo, for example, a 20-something South Korean artist active in the community, says her initial attraction to the couple was sentimental.

 "Although they are very different, there's a bond, and absolute trust, between Superman and Batman - I think it's what made me have a crush on them," Gihoo said.

"[I] draw cute things like them hugging, kissing, consoling each other, stuff like that," she said. She draws chibi-style (a slang term borrowed from Japanese, meaning "cute and small") fan art, usually in the form of a one-piece illustration.

Among the different genres of fan works, comics and videos are the most popular. And according to the fans interviewed by Metropolitan, one reason is that there's no language barrier.

Already active on Tumblr, Twitter and Pixiv (a Japanese online community for artists), Gihoo opened an account on Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, in September 2015 to share her love for SuperBat. There, she says, she has found a number of like-minded fans.

"The reason I joined this platform was to talk about my interest," she said. Her Sina Weibo page now has more than 4,500 followers. According to Gihoo, Chinese fans are "more intense, in a friendly way."

Another illustrator whose work has drawn attention in the online community is Hai Ning, who hails from Taiwan and says her initial attraction to the couple stemmed from their contradictory personalities. Though both feature complex and nuanced characters, Superman is generally regarded as the mild-mannered do-gooder, and Batman as the wealthy, destructive loner.

The two characters' traumatic backgrounds also lend themselves to forming a deeper bond. As Batman's parents were brutally killed in front of him as a child, and Superman is the orphan of an annihilated planet, Hai believes they share similar pasts and similar goals for the future.

"I think this is the strongest bond between the greatest superhero characters in the history of comics," she said. "This CP contains everything I like, but the complexity and the spirits behind the characters are the main reason why I love them."

Like Gihoo, Hai has also found like-minded fans on Sina Weibo, since signing up six years ago.

"In the past, there weren't so many fans of American comics. So to communicate with fans from different countries, I have tried different platforms," she said. Thus far, Hai has joined Sina Weibo, Plurk, Twitter, Tumblr, DeviantArt and Pixiv, where she says she's gotten enthusiastic feedback, especially in recent weeks.

East-West divisions in the subculture

Guan, who's done extensive reading of both Chinese and Western fan works, says that a major difference between the communities is that the Chinese authors and readers are more concerned with who's the top and who's the bottom in the romance.

 "Domestic authors don't accept either switching positions or being versatile," she said. Western authors, by contrast, seldom write fiction that features non-reversible positions.

Among the true believers in each hero's role is Anna Ma, a fan illustrator of the two superheroes, and staunch supporter of Batman being the top and Superman being the bottom. According to her, it's an unpopular position, with the majority of fans supporting Superman being on top. Preferences of this kind, though, don't necessarily mean that fans favor one superhero over the other.

"The Superman I love is an orphan from another planet, but he seeks identification as a human being from the beginning to the end," Ma says. "This kind of struggle really attracts me - a god in a human and a human in a god."

Despite her countrymen's preference, Guan says she is fine with the relationship going either way, since what she values most is the quality of the writing and characterization. "So far as this couple is concerned, I think they're equal partners, so going both ways would be fairly reasonable, not lessening either party," she said.

Another difference, Guan said, is that Western works are more likely to contain erotic and violent elements, while the majority of domestic CP fiction has traditionally been more innocent.

Hai agrees, saying that she thinks Western fan communities are generally less inhibited. "Fans from certain countries tend to be more open about expressing their kinks, while the Chinese community might be comparatively conservative," she said.

In Hai's experience, though, that's starting to change. "Now [in China], if there are no sexual elements to a work, people [in the community] won't want to read it," she says. In fact, a number of popular tropes in Chinese fan fiction have been imported from abroad, such as BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism, or anything involving erotic power exchange, pain play and other sexual kinks), and the ABO universe.

The ABO universe, which stands for Alpha/Beta/Omega, is a kink trope in which all people have biological roles based on a hierarchical system. In it, Alphas, both male and female, are dominant over both Betas, who are in the middle, and Omegas, who are lowest in the hierarchy and can be impregnated by an Alpha. It appears in one of Guan's most popular translations to date, an ongoing serial entitled What We Are by a user named Evilpixie, in which Batman is a closeted Omega and Superman the unsuspecting Alpha.

So far the serial has been viewed  more than 21,000 times on movietvslash.com (a Chinese forum dedicated to fan works based on Western films and TV series) alone, as compared to its original English version, which has been  viewed about 30,000 times on Archive of Our Own. 

The changing hearts of devotees

Another major difference between Western and Chinese fans is that the latter tend to be more fickle in their affections.

"The girls from overseas that I follow, I feel like they have been writing [about the CP of Superman and Batman] for 10 years or even more," Guan says. "But domestic fans often just follow trends, and when certain films' popularity fades way, they change to other couples. They have a higher 'turnover rate.'"

Many Chinese readers who Guan knows change their favorite CP every six months to one year on average.

"It seems that ever since the trailer for the movie was released, the Superman-Batman CP has been growing more and more popular," she said. "As long as the film remains popular, it will continue to be hot."

Guan herself isn't loyal only to SuperBat, saying that she also enjoys other DC Comics, as well as Marvel, superhero CPs, such as the Ironman-Captain America CP.

According to Guan, as Batman v Superman is only the first of DC's films to include multiple superheroes, the Superman and Batman CP has not yet gained as much traction among the homoerotic fan fiction community as Disney-owned Marvel's superhero couples, but she predicts DC superheroes will catch up soon. Warner Bros, which owns all big-screen copyrights for DC's superheroes, is set to launch a series of multi-hero films following this one featuring the Justice League.

 Meanwhile, devotees like Guan and Ma predict that China's fan art subculture related to superhero romances will continue to grow, with Ma pointing to its multiple translation groups dedicated to releasing Chinese-language versions of overseas works as well as volunteers who organize the fiction into archives.

Though it's an obsession that many would find difficult to understand, for Ma it makes perfect sense - not just because of the appeal of fantasy, superheroes and fan fiction, but because of the compelling chemistry behind this particular CP of Superman and Batman. "They are both lonely," she says. "They are completely different but drawn to each other. Nothing is more beautiful than this."