Qian Shen

Qian Shen

May 05, 2026

Micro-dramas, Affective time, Emotional structure.

In recent years, contemporary romantic micro-dramas have rapidly developed on mobile platforms in China. Although these works demonstrate a high degree of convergence in plot patterns and character structures, they still display strong market vitality. In view of this phenomenon, this article probes into this issue from the perspective of affective narratology, to examine the structural organization of emotions in the adaptation practice of micro-dramas.Through the analysis of representative texts, this study finds that in the media transformation process, the micro-dramas have systematically compressed the extended temporal structures of their source materials. These changes include the early appearance of conflicts, the concentrated appearance of rescue scenes, and the speeding up of relationship confirmation, thereby shifting the narrative logic from "story integrity" to "emotional efficiency". At the level of gender structure, male power is transformed into emotional commitment through such a repeated cycle of "threat-rescue- confirmation", thereby creating a stable emotional production mechanism.  Meanwhile, influenced by the platform logic and the accelerated media environment, narrative time is reconfigured as affective time, and emotional satisfaction becomes the main criterion for the completion of the narrative. From this perspective, the so-called "homogenization" of micro-dramas should not be understood as the absence of narrative diversity, but rather as the highly standardized organization of emotional structures under the production conditions of the digital audiovisual industry.

© 2026, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license