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Well, you started off with a really strong claim that "most of the commentary on Chinese culture is unironically racist in the old-fashioned sense of prejudice and ignorance." Now it seems like you're backing off of that and just saying it's the language barrier? Seems like a flimsy excuse, when we have millions of Chinese language speakers in the west, and live in an age where both professional translators and auto-translation are in abundance. I really think that if there was a lot of great art coming out of China these days, we'd hear about it.
If your main example is Genshin impact... I dunno man. Sure, there's a lot of kids these days addicted to it. But if you tell a regular person that you love Chinese culture because you're addicted to spending money on pictures of sexy anime girls in Genshin, they're going to look down on you. I realize culture is subjective, so I can't prove that it's bad but.. cmon. you know it's bad. We can do better.
I reiterate that we are literally ignorant of what's going on in China. I am ignorant. You are ignorant. This is the kind of comment I was reacting to.
How does anyone know that Chinese manhua sucks? Have they actually read it? Listened to 'Chinese music' such that they can characterize it? Have they played many Chinese games? How can it be obviously impossible for China to do such things if Wukong is at 96% positive on Steam with 300,000 reviews and FF VII Remake Intergrade is at 89% positive and 24,000 reviews? Don't the stats show that Wukong is as good as Final Fantasy? FF XIV is in that same territory, 87% positive.
Wouldn't I be an outlandish clown if I said that American music sucks? WTF is American music? Rap? Country? Taylor Swift? A philharmonic orchestra somewhere? Metal? Rock? I bet most people haven't heard more than a few Chinese songs. I haven't.
However, I have played some Chinese games. Some are good, some are bad, some are excellent. Dyson Sphere Program is at least as good as Factorio. And the Steam reviews back me up, 97% to 96% in DSP's favour. Gunfire Reborn is also a pretty good game but nobody's ever heard of it. Most Chinese games aren't even on Steam, I don't even know where you'd look to find them. Some Chinese website presumably.
I've read some Chinese novels. It's the same wide range of quality you find in the rest of the world. Some are really good! Most people just haven't read them because they're on weird Chinese websites and have to be translated into English. Plus they have different values and worldview to Western fiction.
People seem to have got it into their heads that China can only copy, or the CCP crushed Chinese culture into paste. It's just not true. They are perfectly capable of producing good entertainment products. People are literally prejudiced in that they have already worked out their opinion and will look for evidence to back it up. They'll say, with no evidence, that China is using bots to prop up the review score of a AAA game. And at the same time, they'll point out that China's been suppressing the video game industry anyway because it's decadent and a distraction for the youth... Come on, the simplest answer is that it's a good game and people are enjoying it.
Which Chinese novels did you like? Were they "real" novels, written by a professional author to be sold in bookstores, or just amateur webfiction? Because all I've ever seen coming out of mainland China is the latter. And I'm not a total snob, I do sometimes enjoy webfiction, but the all the Chinese stuff I've seen has just been garbage. Endless leveling up "cultivation" fantasies for boys, or "romance" about being raped by a billionaire for girls. I judge it as "it sucks" because I read it and that's my opinion, and I'm assuming that's what the other person also did. Perhaps there's some hidden gem that simply never caught fire or got translated or anything. But perhaps not. There's no "conservation of culture" law that guarantees that a large country must be able to produce great culture in proportion to its economy or whatever. If anything it seems to work the opposite, where the best art comes from the descendants of families that were once rich but lost everything in great tragedies.
I really think that part of the reason "3 body problem" went viral was that people were hungry to see something out of China, and this was the first time we'd ever seen a real fiction book from them. But it was... very mediocre, in my opinion, and it wasn't followed by anything else.
Reverend Insanity, webfiction, very long and unfinished due to some unclear spat with publishing. Selfmadehuman liked it.
Levelling up and cultivation, plotting but also a lot of human-condition/character stuff in the allegorical in-universe Legends of Ren Zu. Original, interesting world. It constantly goes in directions you wouldn't expect. Characters have real theory of mind. I think it's great fun watching this amoral sociopath run rings around people who are tied down in social constructs of their own creation such that they can't use their strength. And what edge there is exists for a purpose.
I fully expect you'll look at Chapter 1, see that 'he took my body's purity line' and think 'oh this is degen trash'. That's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. I have no idea why the author put that line in since our MC is the least sexual man on that planet (or why there was a random 'hehe gays are funny' side story 2000 chapters in). There's a certain weirdness to it, so be it.
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