Question What are your pet peeves in cultivation novels?

One of mine is how much an asshole everyone is most of the guys pick fights with the mc for dumb reason while many of the women are nearly as bad being bitchy/cold for no reason.

 

Too numerous to mention.
The list would be as long as your typical xianxia.

 

Needless arrogance

 

How there's always another level higher with the same dumb idiots doing the same dumb things just on a larger scale and in a flashier manner just to name 1

 

Romantic interests come in a very limited set of cardboard cut-out formats. The 'important person's daughter' the 'antagonist's fiancé' 'female high lvl cultivator with a yinyang problem ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), and the '(eternally left behind) childhood friend/family member'

 

- when most of the chapter full of explanation how mc breaking through.
- describing something, then re-describing it again the next paragraph.

 

The excessive patting of word count.. I mean, I get that they get paid per word but come on.. some authors just take that sh*t too far, even the decent authors sometimes get carried away by this crap that it’s sickening. I can put up with cliches, I can put up with plot holes (minor ones), heck I can even put up with nonsensical power levels but the word count sometimes really pisses me off

 

My biggest gripe would be how suicidal the MC’s tend to be~!!​

 

Forgotten side characters that were supposedly important to the main character.
Endless level jumping to the point it makes you wonder why the author even bothered to lay out a strength system in the first place.

 

How all numbers have to be stupidly massive. Somehow the protagonist and enemy x are throwing physical punches while standing 50 km apart, with each blow destroying an area 10,000 km across...and the normal, non-cultivator people watching not only can see and breathlessly describe each move the two of them make, but they're all perfectly unharmed. Somehow.

And this small country has 3 trillion inhabitants. And the next town is further away than the distance to the Sun. Whee. Talk about breaking immersion.

 

From what I am told Ancient Strengthening Technique is the worst for this

 

Hate how similar they ten to sound you can cut and past the summaries for many novels and be mostly right.

 

The Ridiculously Massive sizes everything especially planets/planes are. 'Mysterious' backgrounds and missing parents, that every MC seems to have. The only one that bugs me but i can understand is the arrogance and constant troublemakers in the novels. The way of cultivation is a 'spiritual' path, that's why enlightenment and the like work how they supposedly do. The only real issue i have for those fights is that real Aristocratic families are never ever so lackadaisical about how they raise their children. These troublemakers are almost always spoiled rotten lazy ass children, real nobles would discipline the crap out of their children if they dared to act like that outside of the family, throwing the face of the family in ones actions is a big no no.

 

Only in these novels where someone being an ass can lead to a family being wiped out

 

The ubiquitous peanut gallery.
The males who can only think of more power and sex.
*Low Profile* MCs who go around winning tournaments and doing stupid things.
The inability to have an ordinary female as a love interest.
The transmigrators who are just transmigrators in name only and become *just* another murder hobo.
MC being termed as *shameless* because he doesn’t do stupid things in the name of Face.
The encouraging of murderous infighting as *competition*.
The inability of young masters to realise that some people might just have more power than they show.


Too many to count tbh.

 

Lack of an actual sense of scale, in terms of distances, time, strength differences and so on.

The problem is not even merely one of personal preference, which it can be given I also dislike sci-fi where you human populations of trillions in a gazillion different planets etc.
The real problem is that it functionally doesn't work even within the moral framework of the given society, for example why do sects even exist? They are often portrayed as places where you can go to advance yourself and are portrayed almost as some sort of alt-universities where you can freely choose where to go, but why would that be the case in a universe where strength differneces between individual are so big that people a couple of realms/levels above one another can dominate even with a numerical disparity? The logical consequence of such a world is complete tyranny, not this half-assed sect-system with weak kinship bonds between members, in theory and in practice.

Exactly, is this just a Xianxia thing though?

@ToastedRossi does this happen in historical novels too? Is it just a literary device? I hope not.

 

How the heck do spirit stones work as a currency

 

They hypocrisy of the so called righteous sects. They are righteous because the do not cultivate the devil path abd call themselves good people while they are killing innocents and weaker people and lottong the dead and hella racist in terms of cultivation. They only do what benefit themselves and use the excuse of the end justify the means but for themselves and it seems like that cultivation people are all idiot. The do not know the basic common sense or morality and science. Ie. Where did the water come from? From my mystical arts. Like why dont they think about water in the air? Like how rain is water from the sky. They dont need to be like water is around us but at least be like, since rain is water from the sky than we can assume there is water in the sky or the air

 

>Implying that any sensible economy is in place...

 

I will stay away from the and other chatacters since there is a long list that is still being written for them.

The biggest would be when choosing a cultivation art/technique/skill.
They would always decribe 3-5 choices but none of them got chosen.
Im fine about how them mc chooses a plain, probably incomplete, old book and it somehow turns into a hidden gem but the described choices before is never heard from again.