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Wuxia Is VERY Idealistic and Light Hearted, Take Your Game of Shit Elsewhere

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Wuxia Is VERY Idealistic and Light Hearted, Take Your Game of Shit Elsewhere >Wuxia is VERY idealistic and light hearted, take your game of shit elsewhere More on this; it's not that there's no politics or social manipulation in wuxia, it's that usually there's next to no moral ambiguity about who is the bad guy and who is the good guy. Since Chinese society is all about acting proper and the Wulin is all about acting proper or someone beats you the fuck up over it there's LOTS of convoluted social manipulation a going on in certain scenes where characters trade words like they trade blows, testing each other to and trying to get each other to back down. It gets pretty ridiculous sometimes as they play these Death Note-estate word games with each other to get one person to reveal their weaknesses or secrets without revealing anything themselves or forcing themselves into a social corner. Arguably this happens more than actual FIGHTS do in wuxia novels because frequently characters go up against characters of near-equal or even greater strength than themselves so they don't want to risk a direct confrontation. >Shounen tier training arcs where the hero learns the "super secret dangerous badass ultimate technique of destiny" in a week when it allegedly takes decades More elaboration; The thing that's noticeably different from shounen stuff is how the training itself is percieved to work. In shounen very frequently the training is just shown to be intense physical labor and workouts and doing kungfu moves, but in wuxia doing JUST the physical part of kungfu means you're basically doing a third of the necessary work, because any idiot can just pump up his muscles over time and it's not even that hard to do it, otherwise there'd be millions of Xia all over the place instead of the relative scarcity of powerful ones you see. Instead you need to work on your Qi cultivation (special breathing techniques) as much (or more, depending on the school) as your muscles, which looks to most folks like just sitting there and meditating. You also need to study hard and understand the philosophical theories and applications behind your school's techniques and forms. Frequently when a character's talent in martial arts is remarked upon his intelligence is brought up; this is because a more intelligent person can understand the theories behind the style in question and extrapolate more uses out of them then a less clever man. VERY few wuxia heroes are shounen- style "idiot heroes" (with at least one notable exception), and most are highly intelligent and analytical people who are at worst somewhat naive about people's intentions or motivations rather than mule-headed dunces. They sometimes seem moronic when it comes to the advances of the opposite sex, but to a large degree this is just Confucian ideals at work; you NEVER talk about sex or open relationships or approach the fairer sex until you're both married, and even then only in private and away from everyone else, including family. Even physical nearness is a fairly strong social taboo. >Tsunderes are everywhere, bonus points if they use fighting a hero as an excuse to get close to him More elaboration; tsundere is basically automatically the default female character archetype in wuxia. There might be better behaved or more "proper" heroines, but these characters will only rarely ever get anywhere with the hero and frequently will instead fall in love with and marry side characters. This is mostly because Jin Yong's novels set the standard for wuxia back in the 60's and he clearly had a thing for that archetype; one notable protagonist primary love interest is basically a villain and starts manipulating him and enacting more and more schemes just as an excuse to spend more time around him. >Highly dangerous forbidden techniques often come at the price of using up insane deadly amounts of your own chi And some more elaboration because I woke up too fucking early today. Rarely do "forbidden" techniques do the the sort of "I've used up too many Super Bars, my powers are drained!" thing you see in shounen; qi thematically isn't a recharging energy bar, and you get it back literally just by breathing. Instead they frequently give you an edge by subjecting you to truly horrific training methods that warp your body out of whack, kind of like dangerously manipulating your own biochemistry to gain a physical advantage but at the cost of your overall health. EXTREMELY frequently doing this sort of thing can cost you your sanity because you just so badly imbalance your natural abilities that it affects your personality and mind. Other stuff often has bizarre physical affects; a really common "evil" technique is giving a character a venomous touch, and it frequently involves repeatedly dosing themselves with dangerous toxins and animal poisons to gain and immunity and "naturally" turn their qi into one aligned with poisonous effects. This is generally seen as a pretty sketchy thing to do in most wuxia (most poison touch Xia are morally ambiguous or outright evil) because the wrong kind of poisons can warp your mind, and besides that it's pretty fucking hardcore to train by having your arms bit by venomous snakes and spiders and centipedes over and over again, and anyone willing to go through with that sort of thing repeatedly often suggests at least a MILDLY unstable mindset. >You have to master both body and mind to use "magic". Not in the book learnin western sense either. Magic in wuxia tends to be the sole purview of explicitly supernatural beings such as deities and immortals (humans who ascended to immortality). The stuff you can do with kungfu is pretty fantastical and in many ways is not very much different from Western-style sorcery, but there's hard limitations on it in most cases, the biggest one being that you do NOT get to extrapolate more superpowers from the ones you already learned. If you can make fire from your hands by learning social kungfu, then you make fire from your hands; you can't use your knowledge of heat manipulation to do other crazy stuff like make ice by absorbing heat, you can't make force fields of fire (though blocking shit with your qi aura is pretty standard fare anyway), and so on and so forth. To learn an entirely new application of what seems like an identical power you need to learn an entirely new type of kungfu, which you will not necessarily have any access too. Meanwhile magic seemingly can do ANYTHING compared to kungfu training. It's often less immediate sorts of stuff (more ritualistic in nature) but you can do things like change people into animals, lay complex curses that last generations, change the weather, see the future, and almost all such users of magic live forever as a matter or course. Anyone can become a Xia with training and such, but even though humans CAN become Immortals it's not an easy thing to accomplish and seems to by default "remove" you from mortal affairs to some degree. More on social stuff. One of the biggest recurring things you'll see in wuxia (and one of the most hilarious you'll see) is what I like to fondly call Kung-Fu Dick Measuring. Basically, if you can prove to a guy you've just met that your Kung-Fu Dick is bigger then his Kung-Fu Dick without even starting a fight then you look like a total badass and everyone is hugely impressed by your simultaneous show of skill and restraint. This usually involves stuff like tests of impossible dexterity, or incredible feats of endurance or stamina, or even weirder shit like playing Go SUPER well or just kicking so much ass at flute playing that you cripple the other guy with your sick flute tunes. To give a basic example; in one wuxia story a group of constables is coming to the location where a criminal act is suspected of being committed so they ask to question the head of the house. The household keeps giving them a runaround, and even tries bribing them with a huge chest of gold ingots. When it becomes apparent the bribe won't work, one of them grabs to ingots and tosses them at a hero who easily catches them, discovering that with one hand he had melded the two ingots into one with a firm squeeze as he threw. >"Imagine if that strength had been applied to two human heads!" he says, "jokingly". The hero is unimpressed and answers: >"Gold is a soft and weak metal. The human skull is tough and strong. You cannot compare the two!" He then tosses back the two ingots SO HARD that they fucking melt into slag on the way over to the guy as he catches them, burning the shit out of his hand. And thus with who's Kung-Fu Dick is firmly established as being harder, they go and get the head of the household. >Make him feared but that's basically It I have a perfect character example for this. Cloud (one of the two main characters of Storm Riders) is a full-on antihero and tends to rather viciously kill anyone who insists on getting in his way even if in terms of personality he's not an especially bad person. Most Xia leave their foes hurt but alive, but Cloud tends to drop TONS of bodies wherever he goes.
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