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Oh, huh. I was playing the game earlier and noticed that one "Hall of Fame" place in the game listed Nyaa among the honored immortals so I figured I'd look it up to see if he had a LP about it, and whaddaya know, not only does he have a LP about ACS he literally just finished the game. Wonderful timing I have. Haven't had any time at all to read over the LP proper but I noticed there were a bunch of posts by Evil Kit talking about some of the tropes and ideas behind xianxia. Would anyone be interested to hear about some of the actual modern culture and ancient history backing some of the tropes behind xianxia novels?
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Nov 15, 2021 02:35
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Scalding Coffee posted:I would. I would also like to hear if there are any stories of friendly relationships between any animals gaining human forms and humans. What a coincidence, that was where I was going to start! Now before I begin, two things I'd like to make clear - first, this is all stuff I picked up from bits and bobs of Chinese pop culture, I'm by no means an expert in Chinese mythology nor even really super representative of the culture. Second, it's important to note that xianaxia and its tropes and mechanics are a relatively new invention - new enough that my father, a Taiwanese Boomer, had never heard of most of the stuff in xianxia. In his time, the hotness was wuxia which is basically martial arts +1 without nearly as much in the way of magic and escalating power levels. This means that while xianxia does draw on a bunch of traditional Chinese mythological concepts, they bear as much resemblance to their original forms as modern Hollywood concepts of vampires and werewolves bear to their original Western roots - not that this is a bad thing at all, just important I think to keep in mind. With that in mind, let's talk about animals. In most Chinese stories, animals are just animals - in Outlaws of the Marsh, for instance, heroes often go around killing tigers to prove their strength and courage, and nothing much is made of the tiger's thoughts on the matter other than that they sure want to eat them some manflesh and are dangerous. Traditional Confucian doctrine as practiced by Chinese elites (who usually wrote down said stories) tended to have a humanist worldview that disdained superstition and belief in magic, so animals only mattered in how they might potentially help or harm humans in the mundane way that animals do. However, folk traditions and folk religions as practiced by the non-elite are another matter entirely. The idea of animal spirits with some kind of human or near human form are very common, though it must be said that the idea of, say, "humans with fox ears" are a relatively recent codification - older stories tended to be more vague about any tells of their animal forms, if any existed, or about what exactly their monstrous features looked like, if any. Just as commonly animals could just turn into human beings without any flaws and only a wise monk or a clever magician could see through their facade. Again, the mythology is kinda vague and takes multiple forms over time - there's a general agreement that animal spirits can transform into humans, but beyond that the extent of their powers, what rules if any govern their abilities, what weaknesses they possess and in general the hard mechanics of animal spirits are vague and pretty much up entirely to the whims of the storyteller. These animal spirits would often be malicious in some way. Journey to the West is a standout example of this, where most of the demons trying to eat the monk Tripitaka were animal servants of various Buddhas and Taoist sages who managed to escape and set up shop in the mortal world so that Sun Wukong has something to fight. Outside of Journey to the West, the idea of animal spirits taking human form and then seducing or tricking mortals to suck away their life force is also pretty common, calling for the services of a dedicated exorcist - Daoist exorcists tended to use rituals to summon the powers of heaven and earth to drive away such demons, while Buddhists used sheer holiness and the name of Buddha to compel obedience from the demons. It's interesting to note that Buddhist stories, such as Journey to the West or the tales of the Mad Monk Ji Gong (look him up, he's a blast) usually focus on redeeming the demons somehow - forcing them into submission, and then extracting a promise from them to reform their ways and practice peaceful cultivation instead of being such a nuisance to humanity. Which brings us handily to the friendlier forms of animal spirits. "Neutral" animal spirits tend to feature more in short ghost stories - a traveler runs across an elegant mansion in the wilds and has a pleasant dinner and conversation with the master/mistress of the house, only to wake up and find out that oh, actually the mansion was a ruin or a cave and the host was actually a fox spirit or something who just wanted a bit of company for the night, how mysterious! Such stories are more often about the strange whims of spirits rather than presenting them as threats or opportunities. There are I think a couple of more benevolent interactions, but the biggest one I'm familiar with is the story of Madam White Snake. Edit: Xun posted:I know there's a story where a guy and a white snake lady fall in love Yep, here we go! Now there's a couple of versions of this story floating around, but the version that I'm aware of goes like this: A white snake either practices cultivation or manages to eat a pill of immortality and thus gains magic powers including the ability to transform into a human and naming herself Bai Suzhen. While wandering around as a human, she meets and falls in love with a human named Xu Xian, and the two get married. A local Buddhist monk called Fahai, himself in fact a turtle spirit in human form, notices this and for whatever reason resents this relationship, and so he advises Xu Xian to get his wife drunk and then look on her while she's sleeping. He does this, and sees her in her true form as a giant white snake. This causes the guy to have a heart attack and more or less die, so Bai Suzhen goes on a quest to find medicinal herbs from Taoist immortals to revive him. Upon doing so, he decides that you know what, it doesn't actually matter that she's a snake, she's still the woman he fell in love with so what the hey. Bai Suzhen eventually gives birth to a baby boy, Xu Mengjiao, but shortly after this the monk Fahai returns and after some shenanigans imprisons Bai Suzhen beneath a pagoda and scatters the family. Xu Mengjiao, however, grows up to become a respected imperial scholar, and in a display of filial piety returns to the pagoda to mourn his mother's imprisonment. Moved by such fine feelings, Heaven relents and permits Bai Suzhen's freedom, reuniting mother and son. Note, by the way, that tribulation doesn't feature at all in any of these stories. In fact I don't think tribulation as a concept seriously exists outside of xianxia as far as I'm aware - heaven can certainly punish people sometimes but it's usually with less direct means than a magical thunderstorm with your name on it. Again, not at all an academic or comprehensive overview of animal spirits in Chinese mythology, but I hope this was interesting!
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Nov 15, 2021 13:16
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Xun posted:Nice! Although you talking about Journey to the West reminded me, I think you're a bit too negative on animal spirits in mythology? Like all of Sanzhangs disciples are animal spirits (monkey, pig, fish) and even the horse is a dragon. I feel like animal spirits are much more neutral instead of explicitly "good" or "bad" overall. Ah, Journey to the West is kind of an outlier in a bunch of ways. Pigsy and Friar Sand, for instance, didn't START as animals - they're explicitly celestial officers who screwed up somehow and were punished by being banished to the mortal realm and given monstrous forms. I'd have to double check to swear on it, but I think Pigsy at one point bemoans how handsome he used to be for instance. Dragons also don't really count as animals usually in Chinese mythology - they're rarely bestial monsters and are more often elite, intelligent members of the celestial bureaucracy. Journey to the West actually does feature a dragon as an antagonist at one point but that's a fun case of nepotism more than anything else - apparently one of the Dragon Kings had a nephew who was kind of a useless layabout so the King decided to send him off to lodge with a local river god and maybe learn a few things and do some work for a change. The Dragon King wasn't expecting his nephew to straight up evict the river god and take over his residence and proceed to wreak havoc and try to eat Tripitaka as you do. His response when Sun Wukong came to complain basically went "Oh geez, oh gently caress, oh, no, the loving idiot did WHAT now oh my god I am so sorry I will sort this all out immediately (please don't hit me)" Meanwhile, Sun Wukong is A: a walking bundle of exceptions (his birth is elaborated on because it's so unusual), and B: A rabble-rouser and rebel who came within a toucher of overthrowing the Jade Emperor before being subdued by the Buddha and imprisoned under a mountain for hundreds of years. That being said, Journey to the West is kind of a weird one anyways since the entire thing is basically an extended Buddhist parable about the inner journey of the mind towards enlightenment - in fact if I recall correctly some of the monsters are implied to have been more or less acting on their master's orders in order to test Tripitaka and company. Mind, talking about the dragon kings did remind me that the guards and soldiers of heaven and hell are often animal-headed humans, horses and oxen often, while the dragons kings are specifically noted to be able to rally in their defense "shrimp warriors, carp soldiers, eel officers, and turtle generals" and so on. These beings are generally set dressing whenever they show up to denote how weird and supernatural and not human at all things are, though, and I don't think the stories often explore where they came from - they just are. I DID originally want to talk about "good" animal spirits and how they focused on cultivation and being helpful to humans, however! The trouble was that while I could have sworn I've run into them in the past, outside of Madam White Snake I'm having some trouble recalling any specific stories about them so I wasn't sure if I was just making it all up in my head. Malicious or neutral animal spirits are a lot easier to recall. That being said I do agree that in general, animal spirits aren't really specifically noted to be good or bad by nature, just different and usually in possession of magic powers. Also, that's an interesting video! I'm not sure how far I'd agree on the idea of meritocracy being inherent to Chinese culture throughout history (at the very least anyone who can afford to spend a lot of time studying and not scrabbling for survival is already a significant cut above the rest of society, and in any event the examination system fell in and out of favor over time) but it's interesting that she touches on how traditional mythology can be based on the ideas of the civil service examination because when I have time, the next subject I want to tackle is the gaokao - the modern Chinese examination system, and how in my view it deeply, deeply affects a lot of the themes and tropes of xianxia webnovels.
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Nov 16, 2021 21:51
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Right, I've been a bit busy but if anyone is still interested I'd like to talk a bit about some of the cultural background behind xianxia stories. Now as I mentioned before, xianxia is actually a very new genre, and is largely written for Chinese youths - as such, despite the historical trappings the stories reflect the values, experiences, desires, fears, and hopes of the Chinese youth and absolutely nothing, NOTHING has as much of an impact on the lives of pre-teens and teenagers in China as the dreaded gaokao. Understanding the gaokao actually explains a lot about why certain xianxia tropes and stories are structured the way they are, so as I go through my overview here, think about the xianxia stories you might have read and see how many bits you can think of that match up to what I'm going to describe (because if I stopped every time to point out a parallel this is going to take all day). (Note: I did not go through the gaokao myself, but my father went through the Taiwanese gaokao which works similarly, and I've spoken to my mainland friends for some extra clarification.) So what is the gaokao, exactly? It's the Chinese national state examination system, something like a turbocharged version of the SAT. That in and of itself might not be so bad - it's a hard test, what of it? - except that Chinese colleges look ONLY at the gaokao results when deciding admissions - school grades, extracurriculars, entrance essays, none of that matters, only the gaokao score does. Not only that, but it's not simply the absolute score that matters but the relative score - your result is ranked nationally and compared to everyone else who took the gaokao, so Peking University for instance might only take applicants who score in the top 1% or so, leaving you out in the cold if your score is absolutely high but relatively below the cut. This matters even more because, simply put, China's educational resources are limited compared to its massive population. It's widely considered that only the top universities have any educational or career worth at all, and going to some no-name provincial university might possibly be better than nothing, but is widely regarded as a failure and will almost certainly preclude you from attaining the glittering heights of Chinese elite society. Employers look closely at which university you came out of, and a poor one acts as a glass ceiling beyond which you're unlikely to progress further (unless you step out of mainstream Chinese society, but that's another issue). Despite this incredible pressure, parents tend to be broadly in favor of the gaokao because of China's economic inequalities. While opening up the country has been a major boon for the Chinese economy, most of those benefits are clustered in the big cities, while the rural population (i.e. most of China) get by on very little with very few opportunities. A child succeeding in the gaokao is viewed as a merit-based golden ticket to a brighter future - the phrase "a carp leaping over the dragon gate" is a reference to mythological ideas of a carp leaping over a magical gate and transforming into a dragon, but in modern slang it refers to someone from the provinces who scored high on the gaokao and managed to get into a top university. So for any parent who hopes for a better life for their children (or indeed expects their children to maintain their current level of status and wealth), the only way forward is cramming, cramming, and more cramming. Almost every spare moment from the moment they're capable of academic learning must be devoted to study. Anything that can offer an advantage must be taken - extra meals, nutritionally balanced to provide brain food, after-school tutoring sessions, "study pills" (like Ritalin or Adderall) that might help improve focus and keep kids studying late at night, etc. etc. Students are told that their entire future rides on doing well, and any sort of failure or distraction is to be avoided at all costs lest their taint their chances, and are generally made to feel deeply guilty for any such failures or distraction. Nor is it only one singular test, either - in the past, there were exams for those going from elementary school to junior high, and from junior high to senior high though I think the elementary to junior test has been dropped lately. These exams determine which school you go to just like the gaokao does for university, and this can have significant impacts on your future as snowballing benefits accrue - getting into a good junior high puts in a position to get into a good senior high, which has advantages for getting a better score on the gaokao to get into a good university, etc. My father had a classmate who managed to score himself into Taipei's top high school - apparently, 98% of his classmates there happened to go on into Taiwan's top university at the time. A good early foundation makes it that much easier to ascend to the highest levels, while failing early makes it that much harder to claw your way back. Even within schools such competition continues, however. As mentioned, China's educational resources are pretty strained, and local administrators are rewarded for how many high-scoring students they can produce - one teacher straight up told his class that if they did well, he could buy a new car. Since a handful of really top-flight students means more on an administrator's resume than a large number of above-average students, schools often have internal elite programs where those students identified as having the most potential to gain high scores are segregated into their own elite classes and have the bulk of the school's resources assigned to them - everyone else is left to muddle by as best they can with what's left over. Naturally, despite the common perception that this is a merit-based system, since available educational resources matters a lot students in urban areas tend to do much better than students in rural areas since urban schools have the wealth of the cities to draw upon. The difference between the two can be incredibly stark - look up GIS of "Chinese rural school" to get an idea of the kind of baseline we're looking at. Plus, the top universities are all based on large cities, and often maintain "affiliate" high schools for people hoping for a fast-track into those universities (though in practice such affiliates may or may not live up to the standards of their patron but boy can you get a lot of money from people hoping for an easy ride). Now with so much riding on the line you might wonder, "Well, what if someone tried to use underhanded means to get ahead on the test?" Well, I've a funny story about that, as it happens. See, a few years ago the central government noticed that a bunch of the students at a certain provincial school all had the exact same scores and answers, and smelled a rat. As such, on the next test they sent in a team of central invigilators to root out cheating, replacing local (and easily bribed) teachers and hunting out whatever methods of cheating they could find. Panicked students texted their parents, and the next thing you know there's a full-blown riot with the invigilators barricaded inside the school while the parents outside chanted "There is no fairness if you don't let us cheat!" - on the basis that everyone ELSE is cheating, so not letting US cheat gives us an unfair disadvantage. Of course, accurate statistics about how common cheating really is are hard to come by, but there certainly is the perception that those with money, connections, and a decent degree of cunning and unscrupulousness can find a way to smooth the path of their children. Funnily enough, with all this going on what happens AFTER the gaokao is almost an afterthought. This is now less true than it used to be, but Chinese universities were thought of as "hard to get into, but easy to graduate from," in contrast to Western universities which were considered "easy to get into, but hard to graduate from." In general, doing well on the gaokao means you made it, and there are much fewer academic demands placed on you after you get into your university of choice, and those universities that offer a better education start focusing on learning and teaching methods that turn away from the raw rote memorization needed to do well on the gaokao. University will often become more a matter of making connections and banking on your stored prestige...which leads to an interesting effect for those who jumped over the dragon gate. "Exam experts from small towns" often feel rather dislocated once they managed to shake off the dust of their upbringing and enter into the elite environments of top universities because their success came from an obsessive, single-minded focus to preparing for the gaokao. This leaves them unprepared for an environment where constant cramming isn't a path to success anymore, and many find networking difficult as their rural upbringing leaves them out of sync with their more cosmopolitan, urban peers. Given that often their extended family pooled their resources to afford their tuition, this can lead to a strange situation where their family back home imagine them to be doing well in some kind of academic paradise when in truth they're struggling, homesick, unhappy and depressed. That, then, is the gaokao, pretty much the major defining aspect of the life of a Chinese student and I think the cultural source of a LOT of themes, concepts, and ideas that pop up over and over in xianxia. Once you know what's going on the parallels are hard to miss, and in particular I suspect that tribulation has its roots not so much in ancient mythological ideas as it does with surviving the gaokao. It's also worth noting too that generally, people who end up writing webnovels for a living are probably not those who did well on the gaokao (though exam experts from small towns might be uniquely positioned to write such stories, given a combination of high academic achievement and personal experience of success within the system mixed with just enough personal dissatisfaction that they didn't end up taking the elite route their peers often did). As such, xianxia is undeniably a power fantasy - but in some ways, it's less a power fantasy about being a big strong magic man, and more a power fantasy about doing well in a veiled form of the gaokao plus cool explosions. Or at least, that's my take on it. Tomn fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Dec 13, 2021 |
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Dec 13, 2021 20:16
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