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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   1750 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 28, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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as the alleged gem of the xianxia

This is clearly heresy, for there can only be one: Beware of Chicken (not least because it's a parody of the generally mindblowingly stupid genre)

Full version can be found with fairly trivial googling.

As a preface, I'm someone who has read a lot of Chinese xianxia, dozens of different stories, most for at least 500 chapters and have come to the conclusion that most English authors completely misunderstand xianxia.

Xianxia is a low brow genre, on the same level as litrpgs and light novels, but it is extremely fun to read. The issue is that most xianxia writers get paid by word, so the more they write, the more they make. In turn this has resulted in a number of common tropes that exist solely to pad the word count. Extremely easily offended young masters are the most common example. And these are also the novels most English authors read, and are inspired by.

But the issue is, those stories aren't well constructed, and if you try to create another story off of it, it will be also be built on shaky foundations. Like it's easy to poke holes in common tropes, but while you can write one book about it, it just doesn't work in the long form structure that webnovels are written in.

All in all, xianxia is a great genre, that offers something you will never find in the West, but also is hard to understand without reading enough of it/or just growing up in China.

Maybe I just heavily dislike comedies.

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