Discussion Why do Cultivators tend to be so ..... Primitive? for lack of a better term.

Forty milleniums of cultivation might be more your style

 

It's all about culture, for instance in the same two hundred years most of the world has advanced technologically certain cultures have not without being forced.

If not for Japan opening it's borders they'd probably still be in a feudal type stage as their culture and the things they believed did not fuel development in the same direction. You can see this same thing in different areas of the world.

Someone mentioned that plentiful resources can lead to no need for innovation and it is a factor as well. Now imagine a culture like in Xianxia where resources are plentiful, fighting and death are frequent but not really wars, and personal strength is valued way above external strength. To top it all off it is impossible for a cultivator to bother with inventing things not related to cultivation.

Technology is the path necessary for the physically weak to survive. It can be proven by the fact 90% of us couldn't handle 1 day with an African tribe or Amazonian tribe with nearly dieing if heatstroke. If we could cultivate to become god like them we would have almost certainly never developed technology like we have, it just wouldn't have been as important. As for why mortals in a Xianxia don't develop technology it is simple, it can not protect them so there won't be people willing to waste time as inorder to build a technology capable of protecting them from cultivators they would need to compete with cultivators for materials... You think that would go well? Supreme personal strength would stymie technological growth, only if cultivation became available to an already technologically saturated culture would technology be integrated and improved.

 

Because the authors can not find an ancient manuscripts that combine cultivation and technology to copy from. Why would anyone want to create a new system to write about, when the same old same old already sells? If someone comes up with it, the other authors just copy them so there is no incentive to come up with anything new.

 

Cultivators don't but Mortals do.

 

Target audience.
Besides, technology can seem too Western and gave political ramifications.

This is where Japanese novels shine, for all it's faults, you get true freedom of artistic expression

 

But unlike modern weapons, those destroyed terrains could easily be reform, and those nukes strikes don't have many lasting effects (radiations and shit). So unless an extremely powerful cultivator decides to blow up the world, the consequences aren't as bad as modern weapons.

 

That is the cause of battles, some damage is bound to happen, at that level nature can still recover, think of them as super sized dinosaurs (cultivators are stronger than dinosaurs after all)
Nuke bombs on the other hand don't do that, nuke bombs eradicate and leaves radiations that continue to pollute and exterminate any future attempts of recovery, besides, they wouldn't cause something like global warming, but then again although they are cultivators they are initially humans so they do make mistakes but their mistakes are the kind that can be reversed naturally

 

But those cultivator fight happen so often in the world it might as well raining nukes. No long-lasting effect? The fight happen long enough, like hundreds of year, it doesn't matter.
The terrain changed so often that carthographer have no day off

It has pro and cons

 

Unfortunately battle happen so often something like natural recovery doesn't have any time to fully recover

 

True but here is another plus (or maybe a minus since they are not real), cultivators can reverse such effects unlike technology (hopefully in future it does)

 

When you think about it, Cultivators dont need "high technology", or the so called "technology and such" used by us mere mortals.

It's a human thing, why create an airplaine if they can just fly, faster if they want. Depends on the mood.

-It's like solving a math problem, why use a "Calculator"? they can solve the problem without using calculator.

It's mean, for them technology is unnecessary.

 

"can" different fron "will". As i bet they'll keep those terrain change as proof of their might or saving face whatsoever

 

But mortal want to be immortal cultivator thus they act/mimic like the immortal cultivator, even they know it's beyond their capabilities. This can be called "Victim of Lifestyle"

Similar how women know high heels is no good for foot but they still crazily buy and use it, the one you call it "Victim Mode"

You should know this don't lend your credit card to woman

 

I create ATG fanfic that covered about that problem, basically human created technology because they need help, they need help to fly, they need to travel far distance, they need help to cook, but if you have power like cultivation where you could do pretty much everything without technology, why bother advancing them?

 

I don't think that is the reason.
Talent to cultivate is different from intelligence or ability to invent.
You can have a genius who gets rejected by the sect recruitment at the sign up booth because their spiritual roots(?) are worthless.

Most sects only accept people within a certain age.
If you miss the sign up date for any reason, or you are the wrong age when it opens, you don't get to join the sect. And for ordinary villagers/townspeople, their options for sects to apply for will be very limited because of how far apart the sects are, and how they probably don't let other sects recruit in their own territory. A mortal on a limited budget wouldn't be able to travel the whole world going to every sect recruitment possible. (though I forget how much of the normal world the sect territories usually cover)

That's 3 ways already that someone talented at inventing could live their life outside of a sect, even if they wanted to join.

edit: I thought of a possibility. Usually the sects leave the mortal world to govern itself, but will go threaten/massacre the mortal rulers whenever they do something they don't like. What if the mortal rulers have been told by the cultivators to prevent progress? And so every time someone starts to invent new things, they get completely shut down, imprisioned or killed?

oooh, and if some crazy mortal rulers were secretly planning an uprising against the cultivators, they could pretend to execute them, but actually bring them somewhere else to help with inventing ways to beat the cultivators? *rubs hands together* I want someone to make a story about this.

 

The simple answer most of the time probably is just that the author doesn't care enough about the mortals in the story to put effort in the worldbuilding for them.
Pretty much all reasonings I've seen to make it work only works under very specific circumstances, so I wouldn't count them unless they are mentioned in relation to a specific story.

 

I disagree, xianxia novels tend to have well refined levels of technology. What they "lack" is electronics - not technology.

Technology is just the application of scientific knowledge for a practical purpose. Xianxia novels are a little lacking in some of the tools we have, but they're not lacking in, for example, architecture, metallurgy, or the medicinal field. Their tech knowledge in those fields generally surpass our own.

 

But how long were we limited to horse and cart? Technology progressed quickly recently, but we’ve spent centuries or even millennia stalled before that. It took thousands of years to go from firepits to pottery and thousands more to worked iron. Our technology jumps have sped up recently with the help of tools / machines, as well as pooling knowledge. Mandatory education and stable food sources are also rather new... and have kind of helped the whole process.

 

Can I order a puppy attack on me?

I do not wear high heels, because I know they’re bad for my feet, and even if I did, I wouldn’t use my husband’s money to buy them. I find the implications of your words rather offensive.

 

Uhn... I think you need to look at it from an author's perspective, not from a reader's perspective.

Like... If you were an author that wanted to create a cultivation novel, it should be safe to assume that you like cultivation novels, and you like them a lot. What does that mean? It means that you like the standard templates that are used in most cultivation novels, even if you wanna do something somewhat different and put your own take on it, you'll still adhere to much of the common sense of cultivation novels in general because... Well, you like them, that's what made you fall in love with the genre in the first place.

And well, what is the usual setting for Cultivation Novels? I don't read them myself, but AFAIK is the eastern variant of medi-fantasy. So... If all the novels that made you fall in love with a given genre are on medi-fantasy settings, do you really want to change it and make a modern setting cultivation novel? For some authors the answer will be yes, but for the vast majority it will be no.

Putting it simply, "modern" cultivation novels don't exist because that's not how people usually play with the genre, and the authors prefer to stick to the medi-fantasy aspect of it because that's part of what made them fall in love with the genre in the first place.