Xiong, Yuelei <br/><br/>
Making family with characters and dolls 

 -  2026.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 86 
<br/><br/> This essay examines virtual intimacy as an emergent relational form shaped by digital media, consumer culture, and gendered social structures among Chinese mobile otome game players. Drawing on digital ethnography conducted between 2022 and 2025, it analyzes how practices such as doll-raising and virtual family-making extend romantic fantasy beyond gameplay and reconfigure intimacy through human-nonhuman relations. The study shows how players’ projections and identifications with characters and dolls remain fluid, negotiated, and situational, unfolding within ongoing tensions between player communities and game companies. Situating Chinese otome culture within a comparative East Asian framework of girlhood and shōjo culture, the article further argues that virtual intimacy operates as a form of substitutive intimacy that buffers emotional risk under conditions of heteropessimism, marriage anxiety, and reproductive pressure. Rather than rejecting reality, virtual intimacy enables flexible selves to inhabit a suspended space between attachment and autonomy in contemporary China.