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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34883 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Is NeZha 2 any good ?

NeZha2 is China's first big blockbuster. It's being heralded as a 'Deepseek moment' for Chinese cinema and I'm confused.

I saw NeZha 1 with my Chinese roommates and I didn't like it. The animation was expensive, but had a stock footage-ness to all of it. The jokes were Minions-esque slapstick and the core story was straight out a children's book. The movie felt miles behind nuanced works like InsideOut or Up. Ghibli is on a whole another planet. Minions is probably the analogy I would go for. Note - I saw it in Mandarin with subtitles, with a PRC Chinese person explaining any nuance I might've lost.

Now, the Minions movies made a ton of money and the west's block busters have been especially bad post-covid. I get it, it's kettle calling the pot black. Normies have terrible taste, so I'm going to avoid equating commercial success with quality. My comment is from the perspective of taste.

And I am a China optimist. My best friends are PRC Chinese and they're smart. I don't doubt that Chinese companies can compete in global entertainment or automobile markets. But why is everything that comes out of PRC China so tasteless ? There is clear absence of nuance, craft and love in every industrialized piece of crap that comes out of there. Deepseek is special because it feels inspired. DJI & Nothing also have a spark within them. But elsewhere it feels competently executed but empty. Nezha is no different. Great execution, no soul.

Is this hype organic ? Am I just a hater ?

I have nothing useful to add, since I hadn't heard of the franchise till about 4 hours ago, when someone was lauding it as a resurgence in Chinese soft power in my Twitter feed.

That being said, it gives me hope that I'll see some proper high-budget Xianxia adaptations, and soon-ish. Hopefully adaptations of the good novels!

which xianxia would you consider one of the good ones? My faves are anything from Er Gen unironically.

I still don't know if people say Er Gen is good unironically or not, though your comment updates me towards the former.

I would say Reverend Insanity, even in its unfinished state, is a 10/10 novel. Contender for best novel I've ever read in fact. I'm trying to hold off re-reading it until my memory fades enough for it to feel fresh again.

Forty Millenniums of Cultivation is a good one, an 8/10 IMO. It was good enough for me to get frustrated reading awful MTL and then track down raws and translate them with modern SOTA LLMs that do a better job.

I never got very far into Lord of the Mysteries, but by all accounts it's supposed to be very good.

I tried Reverend Insanity, and even allowing for a rough translation, the writing was crap.

But this has been my experience with almost every progression fantasy/wuxia novel I've tried. I didn't like Cradle either. I think they're just not for me. But I don't understand how people aren't bothered by tedious exposition about Gu levels written in head-hopping inconsistent tense.

I tried Reverend Insanity, and even allowing for a rough translation, the writing was crap.

Junior, you dare? Kowtow and break all your limbs, and I will leave you with an intact corpse.

Ahem. There's no accounting for taste, but I still think you missed out, or just didn't hold on long enough for the story to get its claws in you. It's an unfortunate Xianxia meme that people will tell you to stick to a story for a hundred chapters because then it gets good, but if memory serves it was around 30 in that RI had me leaning forward. I really can't recommend it enough.

I dunno, maybe I'll try again, but I hate books/series where the fans say "Oh, the first few hundred pages are mediocre but then it gets good." Any other Wuxia/progression fantasies to recommend?

Had the same experience with Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I read the first two books and was underwhelmed. People say it gets good around book four, and my reaction is "So I have to read 2-3 crappy books before I start enjoying it?"

I recommend "Beware of Chicken", here's a royal road link. It's kind of a parody of the genre, so should be a lot easier to get into.

Edit: Nvm, the author had the brilliant idea to hide the novel behind a paywall. You can use the wayback machine to view the old chapters but it's a huge pain in the ass and probably not worth overall.

BoC is now stubbed. Chapter 4 up to book 5 are gone from Royal Road.

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Haven't read BoC, but a LitRPG parody I quite enjoyed was "This Quest is Bullshit!".

I have mixed opinions of BOC. It has a strong start, but ends up becoming repetitive once it keeps playing up its core shtick. Not great, not terrible.

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