Is WuXia dying?

Its funny how you think a merge between chinese and japanese to work.

 

Pretty sure none of wuxia readers are young anymore.
Yeah, xiaoaojianghu is disastrous this few years, when the story is so good. Though I'm still finding my wuxia doujin about the 50 years prelude before the shediaoyingxiong. The stories about the wangchongyang and zhoubotongs master. And the stories of guojing and yangkangs father.

 

Blame the adaptations, not the genre. Poor directing choices will make any masterpiece suck.

On that note, scriptwriter Wang Juan is heading Snow Sword Stride, an upcoming wuxia series starting Zhang Ruoyan (Joy of Life).

I won’t get into details but Wang Juan is one of the few peeps in c-net actually famous because of his good scripts. His recent works include Joy of Life and Young Blood, so I say wait for that drama to come out and see how it goes.

 

Well as I say they probably don't achieve all the things the books do and are probably better appreciated on their own terms, but they're absolutely doing unprecedented things in terns film history. I'm not just trying to be hyperbolic, there's a lot of academic literature on this, David Bordwell one of the major film historians whose books Film Art: An Introduction and Film History: An Introduction, which are both well regarded and standardly used textbooks on the subject, has a book called Planet Hong Kong which thoroughly goes through all the film techniques they use and what makes them unique in terms of film history overall. There's a lot of specialized knowledge that was developed, between the stuntmen, the props department, the camera and editing, not just how to choreograph really good fights, but how to make them read well for camera.

That said, I am coming to this from the context of film history, and I'm only just starting to get into wuxia literature, so I'm sure there's a lot of things wuxia literature does that that films can't reproduce being made in a fairly fast moving studio system. But these films are also taking from a lot of other influenced besides literature, adapting aspects from classic westerns and samurai films too, and they hold up very well compared to similar film genres. I'm sure there's still further things that can be done in terms of bringing out all the qualities from the rich literary tradition, but doing it well also requires a knowledge of how to adapt things well to film, and any filmmaker or film fan who skips over the 60s-90s films risks missing out on some of really unique and special achievments in world film history, and it would be a shame to lose these contributions.

 

This is the correct answer. The two shows mentioned in the OP are bad, and they got bad ratings because of it. It'd be a different matter if that happened to a good show but that hasn't happened yet.

That's pretty cool, but it's only peripheral to this particular thread. We're talking about wuxia adaptations and these live primarily in television. Wuxia isn't particularly well suited to shorter forms like film so film historically has taken ideas from the genre but is rarely a good representation of it.

 

as cat who watched old ver hmm this cat think the industry want new way~
look cool, look sparkling, slow motion look from multiple angle, plenty of good looking actor and actress ect~
feel like imho wanna make poetic movie but this cat reaction

generation gap perhaps?
dunno cn entertainment news, imo it feel like tv series pursue "look" more than anything else~

 

I'm literally watching the show with 2x speed. Lmao.

 

If you're suggesting it's dying in China, then I'd argue otherwise. If it was, they wouldn't keep pumping out wuxia content. It's still popular in Vietnam and even Korea. Not sure about Japan.

If you're suggesting it's dying in the West, well, I don't think it ever was that popular. Doesn't help that, for the most part, wuxia is synonymous with xianxia and xuanhuan in the West, consequently becoming collateral damage. Before they consume any wuxia, their distaste for modern xianxia and/or xuanhuan deters them. There's also the translators' side. If most are having problems with the current "conventional" Chinese, how many will be able to handle those written in gufeng style?

 

Yes, novel updates isn't helping this either with both been the same genre. Though both are vastly different, to read most wuxia one must need to understand the Chinese history to understand the context. Honestly it didn't helps in the west.

While xianxia is ero-novel now a days mostly? Sorry to all those xianxia translators...
Wuxia is mostly like water margain.
Xianxia is mostly like The Investiture of the Gods.
Xuan huan is fantasy, smiliar to qihuan. Like how final fantasy is zuizhonghuanxian. Works of xuanhuan is similar to baishezhuan？

 

Ugh I wish this was subbed but this video gives a good review of a recent wuxia series that’s actually pretty commendable in sensible ways, in that:

Cross dressing girls actually look like guys
Not everything is about romance and pretty costumes/sets
The protagonists are young but realistic, and mature throughout the course of the story

 

Too much CGs nowadays, I think that affects the filming. And yes, most of the wuxia remakes look like idol dramas;they just find eye candies.