By the way for anyone who is unaware, this seems to take place in a “cultivation” novel setting, which is kinda like wuxia but cranked to 11.
If wuxia can be described as a historical(ish) martial artists and the use of “qi” energy, then cultivation novels would be in the xianxia genre, which takes the martial arts and internal energy base from wuxia, but takes it from low fantasy to high fantasy. Expect a magic system based on yin/yang, and taoist iconography all over the place, demons and celestials, and all manner of supernatural beings and creatures from chinese mythology.
In these kinds of novels the protagonist basically “cultivates”/trains to unlock new supernatural ability and ascend from being a mortal to essentially become a demigod/full fledged god. Along the way they accumulate legendary techniques/abilities, rare magic items, and usually a large harem of women.
Think of it kinda like the equivalent to japanese isekai but rather than a jrpg inspired euro-fantasy setting its got a chinese mythos setting. But the fact that the genre primarily appeals to teenage edgelords and theres a billion trashy novels about OP protags and massive harems is still the same.
(I only know this second hand so anyone who wants to jump in and correct me feel free to do so)
Yes true of what you wrote :3, years ago they usualy will pick the best ones to translate to english since chinese is really hard to learn let alone translate to english thous were fan translations in the early days, but the groups of people started to form and got more orginaized to translate the novels that they made their own websites like the Japanese Novels free translation do, but then china saw the oportunity on selling the most garbadge Chinese novels so it took in its own hands to translate them(there is one huge company in china that has most of the rights to thous chinese novels), resulting in a huge number of junkfood wianxia novels, if you wanna read some chinese martial arts novels better stick to the REALLY old wuxia novels :3 because the wianxia novels have became the most cheep way for authors to make money so they end up having 2000 or even 3000 chapters in total (full of crap since they pay per character a chapter has in china) and they are chok full of xianxia seterotypes :/
last edited at Sep 6, 2022 1:03AM