This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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 ?
Not everything that comes out of China is tasteless, they produce plenty of good stuff.
Wukong and Marvel Rivals are good, though they're not my kind of game. There's Genshin Impact which is pretty good though again, gacha isn't my thing. How is that not tasteful? They made up a huge original fantasy world that captivates millions of people just like Star Wars. Mechabellum and Dyson Sphere Program are quite strong in the strategy genre, which is my thing. There are a bunch of Chinese mods for even fairly obscure games like Star Sector that got translated back into English for people for people to play here. You can't make game mods without craftsmanship, nobody does that seeking a profit.
And there are plenty of good translated Chinese novels, as mentioned downthread. The Three body problem series for one, how is that not tasteful or sophisticated? It dares to break some conventions and says that treehugging and spiritualism isn't such a great idea, let's embrace technology. It points out that men are getting more effeminate and soft over time and projects this trend into the future in a mildly unsettling way. It has a wide range of original ideas in an expansive universe, truly alien aliens...
China is a very big country! You can't judge the entire output of such a huge country from a single film. It's like watching the highest grossing American movie Avatar, and concluding that all American culture is CGI moralist slop with no deeper meaning or value than 'empathetic scientists good, mining and military bad'. And maybe there are a few exceptions.
If someone came to that conclusion about the US you'd assume they had an axe to grind against America. There is more to American film than Avatar, there is horror, comedy, superheroes, romance, oscarbait... There is more to American culture than one Hollywood film, as we all know because America projects their entertainment all around the world. Plus a huge number of non-Americans speak English.
China doesn't project its culture all around the world, much of it is never translated (especially smaller, niche products). So you see a bunch of slop like Honour of Kings (Chinese DOTA) and some gems and think 'oh it's mostly slop with some exceptions' because you never see the niche products in the first place. They're not vomited out at you by a gigantic global media system. You don't look for them and they might not be in English (or have a lame sounding name like Honour of Kings). You get the equivalent of Chinese Avatar and Call of Duty, never see Chinese Homestuck or Worm or Factorio. And you hear about some Chinese gems but never see a gem in your own preferred areas.
I think this is probably the answer in the thread that best captures what I think about this. China does produce a fair bit of good media of its own, it's just that it is exceptionally insular and most of the media that gets made domestically also gets consumed domestically. And once you add some cultural unfamiliarity into the mix as well as a Place, China effect that creates a bit of an aversion to most native Chinese media, virtually none of their media ends up making it into the Western cultural consciousness. It's basically the opposite of Place, Japan.
The funny thing is that our attitudes towards China used to be the opposite of what they are today; Western countries had a fascination with everything Chinese for a long while. Sinophilia basically infected the entire western world throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, to the point where Louis XIV adopted Chinese-style ball attire and ordered the Trianon de Porcelaine to be built on the grounds of Versailles, a building that was meant to emulate the Tower of Nanjing. Chinoiserie spread throughout Europe and hugely influenced the development of the Rococo style. Granted, the influences it included were not limited to Chinese culture, but in the main Chinese styles were the trends Western artists and architects borrowed from when developing their syncretic fusion.
Then the Opium Wars happened, disrupting trade, then after a brief resurgence in interest in Chinese culture, China became a Marxist state and self-mutilated a whole bunch during the Mao era. Meanwhile, the Perry Expedition (initially just meant to secure a safe harbour for America in the Pacific) opened up Japan and the Meiji Restoration propelled it at turbo speed into modernity. And now people seem to view everything Chinese as nothing but authoritarian PRC bullshit, whereas even after the stagnation of Japan's economy people seemingly can't get enough of Japanese culture, both traditional and modern - I mean, look at how many words for snow there are in Japan. And Korea, apart from a number of its pop culture exports, may as well not exist as a country in most people's minds - despite its recent modernisation, there's still this lingering idea of it as an insignificant Asian backwater in all other respects. Korean traditional culture? What is that? What are you even talking about?
It's fascinating to me how these fashion trends evolve overtime, and it seems like people's perceptions are very tenuously linked to the quality of that country's output at best. They reflect geopolitical relations more than they do any kind of impartial evaluation of quality. (It's not just media either, I've been on a bit of an East Asian travel kick recently and have visited some travel forums as a result, and it's this phenomenon on steroids; I could document some of the truly terrible takes I've heard but we'd be here for hours.)
I blame Pinyin, you have to get certification to intuitively read that stuff. "Oh yes let's make 'q' represent the 'ch' sound" - statements made up by the absolutely DERANGED.
English's "let's make 'gh' represent the 'f' sound... sometimes" does not seem to deter people all over the world from enjoying English media, though.
Bough
Though
Cough
Only the English or madmen would make it so none of these words rhyme.
If you aren't already familiar with it, The Chaos is relevant.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link