Umi, the Cryoverse AI
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I love Cultivation Serials.
🕑 Added 2024-01-02 15:21:58 +0000 UTCHey there, readers. It's me, Klokinator. Long time no talk. Once again, months have passed since my last Patreon post. Time flies when you return to working a day job.
As of TCTH Part 532, I have begun introducing a really important new power system and concept to the Cryoverse: The Art of Cultivation.
"Cultivation" is a term popularized by Chinese Wuxia/Xianxia novels found on websites like Wuxiaworld and Webnovel and even Royal Road. Cultivation novels are almost always about a normal, weak, pathetic human (sometimes non-human) slowly amassing power and 'leveling up' over extremely long periods of time, rising from the status of a mere mortal to that of a divine being capable of shattering planets with a flick of their fingers. These series are 1,000 chapters at the low end and 10,000 or more chapters at the high end. Some are clearly stretched out to drag you along, others are well-paced but still long just due to a massive volume of content on display.
Cultivation novels are almost all trash. They are badly written. The side characters are lame and uninteresting. The prose is woefully inadequate, often relying on long, drawn out fight scenes with endings you can see coming a thousand miles away. The plots are repetitive and paper-thin. Most Cultivation novels are simply not very good.
But man. I still love them.
Even a mediocre cultivation novel has lots of great junk-food moments.
- The protagonist gets revenge on a dickhead who fucked him/her over much earlier in the novel.
- A great face-slapping montage leaves me roaring with laughter when the protagonist finally gets a chance to deliver a beatdown of justice upon some arrogant young master of some large clan who does not realize he is not the sky above the sky.
- A particularly thrilling 'auction arc' has the protagonist betting on and winning over lots of cool new items to augment their strength. And so on, and so on...
Cultivation novels are typically written by Chinese authors, and that in and of itself produces all sorts of issues. There are a shocking number of novels where things seem to be well written and the protagonist is evolving into something quite interesting... but then for no reason at all the (usually) male protagonist kinda just... rapes a woman.
I'm not kidding. So many cultivation novels feature a casual sexual assault of a woman by the otherwise lovable protagonist that it really fucks with my head. It always feels gratuitous, unnecessary, and outright offensive. It makes me think racist thoughts about Chinese authors, to say nothing of other casual misogynistic elements like the authors often describing women as being "uninterested in the martial way and only capable of pursuing vapid beauty" or whatever. Let's just say good female representation is a lost art of this genre.
I don't know why Cultivation novels, even the really good ones, run into problems they should be easily able to bypass, but they do. And that sucks.
As an author, I have a certain style of authorship that I like to call "Avoidance Writing". I look for things I don't like, remove them, and therefore attempt to improve my writing overall. If I'm using a word too much, I cut it out or reduce its usage. If I hate a trope, like Love Triangles, I never use it.
With the advent of Cryopod Part 532, I am beginning the transition to properly introducing Qi and Cultivation into my current and future stories. This will be a long, slow, gradual introduction. It won't happen all at once. We also won't even get a 'lot' of Cultivation-related writing in TCTH specifically. In the future, I plan to write a proper Cultivation novel of my own.
My goal: To do a Cultivation novel RIGHT.
But to do something right, I believe you need to know what doing it wrong looks like. I've already mentioned a few problems I have with Cultivation novels, but how about I be a lot more specific now? Let's see what truly terrible choices a lot of Cultivation authors often make...
First Issue: The Cultivation System itself...
If you have never read a Cultivation novel, let alone as many as I have, you might not understand what 'Cultivation' even is. One of the fundamental problems I have identified with Cultivation as a genre is that not only is it not understood well by western audiences, nor is it popular, it's also very confusing to pick up if you have not already read a lot of Chinese literature. Furthermore, Cultivation as a power system can vary dramatically between different web-serials.
Let me give you two examples of major Cultivation power systems to emphasize the variety on display.
- Cultivation in 'Martial World', a popular web-serial.
In Martial World, cultivation is a slow but continuous process of building up one's Body, Essence, Soul, and Spirit. MW has a ton of smaller power systems that intersect to comprehensively increase each character in the novel's strengths so that when fights occur, they are extremely complicated and filled with all sorts of jargon and special terms you need to understand before you can follow along with the action depicted in its myriad of battle scenes.
The Essence System is sort of like an energy field similar to Ki in Dragon Ball Z, or like Mana in an RPG. You start from the bottom layer of the essence system and slowly build up your strength in Major and Minor Boundaries.
Major Categories are: Flesh Training, Viscera Training, Altering Muscle, Bone Forging and Pulse Condensation. These form the beginnings of a martial artist rising through the Mortal Ranks of training their body in martial arts.
Within these major boundaries are the four smaller boundaries: Early, Middle, Late, and Extreme.
In other words, if someone is an Altering Muscle combatant at the Late Stage of their power, we can say they have reached the Third Major Boundary and the Third Minor Boundary of that level. When they reach the Extreme rank, they consolidate their power to push for a Breakthrough, which will allow them to jump into the Early Boundary of the next Major Level, which in this case would be a jump from Altering Muscle Extreme to Bone Forging Early.
...Still following along? This is the BASIC beginning of the power system. It gets WAY more complicated than this.
After you reach Pulse Condensation, you step into the next series of Major Boundaries: Houtian, Xiantian, Revolving Core, Life Destruction, Divine Sea, Divine Transformation, Divine Lord... and SO many more after this.
Each of these Major Boundaries have Minor Boundaries, but some have four Minor Boundaries (Early/Middle/Late/Extreme) while others have nine Minor Boundaries.
I love Martial World. It's a pretty well-written story. But it is fucking confusing, as I have only just described to you one of the major systems, the Essence Gathering System. There is also Soul Forging, Body Boosting, and Spirit Enhancing, to say nothing of minor systems.
Altogether, these systems create a huge mess of systems that, once you understand and can enjoy, are pretty cool, but are VERY overwhelming for a new reader.
- Cultivation in 'Reverend Insanity', another extremely popular (but sadly unfinished) web-serial.
Reverend Insanity (RI) is one of my favorite Cultivation series of all time. While it is also somewhat complicated compared to traditional fantasy novels, it is far easier to digest than other series in the Cultivation genre.
There are exactly Nine Major Boundaries. These Boundaries do not have special names. They consist of Five Mortal Boundaries and Four Immortal Boundaries. Immortals have a massive power imbalance over Mortals, in that even the weakest Immortal at the 6th Major Boundary can annihilate the strongest 5th Boundary mortal cultivator with a flick of their finger.
In many Cultivation serials, you can have a protagonist or side characters who are capable of, through various means, 'jumping realms' to battle enemies one or more Major Boundaries stronger than themselves. Perhaps they use a secret art to empower themselves temporarily, or they have some heavenly power that allows them to do this... but the point is, in RI, jumping boundaries to fight enemies is very rare because the author wants to stress just how much mightier each of the higher boundaries is. You will typically see fights of, for example, an Early 5th Boundary user fighting a Middle 5th or an Extreme 5th Boundary user. You won't often see someone in the 4th Boundary battling someone in the 5th.
I mean... you WILL... but that 4th Boundary user will almost always get absolutely stomped by the 5th Boundary user unless they use a variety of tricks to carefully defeat their enemy.
When the protagonist (Fang Yuan) wants to battle an enemy stronger than himself, he needs to be extremely clever in how he handles them, perhaps by laying down traps and leading them into said traps, or using guerrilla warfare, or other such methods.
In RI, the way cultivators do battle is through Gu. Gu are, essentially, magical bugs and animals the cultivators can absorb into their bodies. If you find a Fire Wasp Gu, you can sting your enemies with fiery barbs, or perhaps grow fiery wings. Gu all have limited uses, but can also be combined together through 'Killing Moves' to have creative new effects. It makes the combat system feel dynamic.
Furthermore, the Gu are living creatures. They can be and often ARE killed, resulting in frequent reworkings of a Gu Master's capabilities. Fang Yuan frequently loses the vast majority of his Gu during harrowing battles and is forced to retreat or flee. Later, he will find new Gu, allowing the novel to not fall into a trap many other Cultivation serials do where the MC keeps reusing the same powers and abilities with 1-3 new additions as he levels up. Fang Yuan is frequently reinventing himself, as are other major named characters.
- As you can see by just these two examples, there are seismic differences in how authors can approach Cultivation.
Martial World is about adding more and more special abilities to progressively increase your toolkit's size and power. It has a humongous, gigantic, overcomplicated Cultivation system that results in extremely prolonged battles taking multiple chapters to conclude. These can be extremely thrilling, but they can also feel prolonged and dragged out, making you want to skip through them.
Reverend Insanity is more slimmed down, and is focused on variety within a limited series of scaled power levels. It focuses on characters reinventing themselves through wins and losses of battles, making each reappearance more dynamic and interesting.
As an author, I value simplicity a lot. I don't like overcomplicated terminology or jargon. I don't like adding complexity for mere complexity's sake. I've already introduced a basic form of Cultivation into TCTH through the Psions, and as is obvious, there are (currently) only 9 levels of power for them to emphasize rising through the ranks. But these levels of power are simple. The 7th Level is simply the '7th Level.' It's not called the Realm of Houtian or the Divine Sea or some other confusing term.
Let's look at a series of notable examples of tropes, good and bad, that appear in Cultivation novels:
An overpowered protagonist:
In most English-translated Wuxia/Xianxia stories, the main character is incredibly overpowered in some big ways. A few examples include:
- Lin Ming (Martial World) has a Magic Cube filled with the memories of ancient overpowered elders and every time he feeds it blood essence, he gets to directly absorb the OP abilities/knowledge of these ancient figures, giving him inestimable advantages against his enemies.
- Fang Yuan (Reverend Insanity) is a transmigrator who rewinds 500 years back to his youth and thus has extremely precise information about the future, allowing him to know about super secret items and inheritances that give him massive power boosts. At least in this story, that advantage becomes a HUGE disadvantage due to a crazy plot twist later, but that takes over a thousand chapters to happen, so...
- Yun Che (Against the Gods) obtains an ultra powerful god artifact that can nullify all poisons, has the soul of a super gorgeous red-headed goddess from the Realm of Gods inside of it, and a bunch of other absolutely insane abilities that turn him into a powerhouse effortlessly.
- Zhang Xuan (Library of Heaven's Path) obtains a mystical library that attaches to his soul and allows him to easily master any ability under the sun, compile all the techniques he encounters into perfected techniques without any flaws, and a host of other insane abilities.
The biggest issue with these OP protagonists is that oftentimes, they have to fight enemies WAY above their assumed power level in order to actually face a challenge. But another issue is that they often don't EVER suffer a major loss, and this results in a complete lack of tension in the majority of fights. For example, in Martial World, I can't name three fights in 2,400 chapters where Min Ling gets his ass beat so badly he has to run away and hide in terror. I can name one or two, when facing the ultimate overboss threats, but the fact there are so few is disheartening.
Protagonists should feel as if they are in at least some danger!
A huge cast of side characters who become irrelevant:
You guys are my readers. You know me. I love side characters. I don't like focusing all my attention on just one or two characters. In TCTH, Bael and Jason Hiro and Belial and Phoebe all have lots of screen time and they all stay relevant during the entire story.
But in the vast majority on Xianxia stories, this is not the case. Childhood best friends vanish after 100 chapters in a 2,400 chapter story and are barely ever mentioned even in throwaway lines again. Heavenly beauties the protagonist takes to his bed are simply bland blocks of wood that are thrown away once the author gets bored of them. Major villains die and never get mentioned again.
Another issue is a lack of lasting impact from the side cast. They give or take a small thing to/from the protagonist, they say some funny lines, and then they disappear.
In my next major Patreon post, I'll be going into detail about some stories that avoid this issue. They are among my favorites in this genre.
"Dual" or "Yin-Yang" Cultivation:
One sadly underutilized tool the authors of Xianxia fail to weaponize to improve their stories is the concept of Dual Cultivation. This is basically "two people have sex and they can exchange power benefits."
It sounds silly, but this is SUCH a great literary tool that would allow, for example, a male protagonist and his wife or wives to scale up in power together and thus make the love interests stay relevant in future battles. But instead, the women almost always fall out of the story and just become baby-makers, or in some cases the protagonist will bed one woman, then move on to another woman, and then another, and another... each time he does this the previous women just disappear from the narrative, and it's so TRAGIC! Such a lack of creativity whenever I see it happen.
I plan to make GOOD use of this, and... other techniques... to make side characters remain relevant in my own cultivation serial, someday.
Extremely long stories with millions of words:
You know how TCTH is currently more than two million words long? Yeah. That's baby numbers compared to stories like Reverend Insanity, Against the Gods, and other such stories, which often crash into the 5-million word level or more. Most Xianxias will hit 2,000 chapters at a minimum and plenty go to 3,000, 5,000, and even 10,000.
This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. But some stories DO contain a lot of repetition and filler. You guys know me! I detest filler. So you can be assured my writing will always feel more 'condensed' and impactful than the average Wuxia novel...
Homophobia and Transphobia:
It does not feel good to have to mention this, but my GOD do Chinese authors have a lot of homophobia and transphobia in their stories. This usually does not ruin the story for me, but it does at least temporarily ruin them and leave a long, lingering aftertaste.
For example, I've been reading Martial World, and when I hit chapter 761 earlier today, I encountered this scene: A character named 'Sir Marong' shows up, who is apparently a woman dressed like and acting like a man. I'm not saying his name is Sir Marong, but 'Sir Marong' with quotation marks. The author goes to great pains to talk about how weird and strange it is that this girl is acting like a man, but obviously she's 'not a man' because even though she identifies as one and dresses like one and looks like one, she doesn't have an Adam's Apple so she's not a man. Oh, and the author also refers to Sir Marong with female pronouns frequently, because the author doesn't respect his own character's gender identity.
This is not uncommon. I love Reverend Insanity, but there are several 'freakish' characters who constantly show up in the narrative who repulse other characters because, GASP, it's a man who is acting effeminate and using some evil appearance changing ability to impersonate and act like a woman! How disgusting!
This is almost assuredly some sort of Chinese conservative homophobia/transphobia that just keeps showing up in these novels, and it's really disheartening because it can seriously yank me out of some really enthralling scenes when the author just goes on a hate speech tirade that makes no sense in a fictional fantasy setting where wizards can level mountains. Why is it so weird that people would use magic pills to switch their gender?
So yeah. I don't plan to have that crap happen in mine.
Rape/Sexual Assault or other casual destructions of the MC and otherwise 'good' characters:
This one is REALLY frustrating. It happens in a LOT of cultivation novels and every time it enrages me. I'm not talking about villains raping or pillaging female characters (though that does happen a lot too and it's just as frustrating to see it casually thrown out) but rather, when the otherwise Good Guy Protagonist who has sensible morals just decides... "hey this chick is hot, it's raping time!"
In 'Super Geno': The MC flies into a desert and becomes lost. He encounters a young woman who has been trapped inside a small oasis, unable to leave, for several years. She's all alone. He threatens her with sexual assault, gets gropey, and makes her scream in fear. Until that point, there was NO indication this character ever acted like that with women. And just as bafflingly, it never happens again in thousands of chapters before or after. Author... wtf?
In 'Against the Gods': Yun Che is certainly a character who will kill without mercy any enemies who slight him, but towards women he's always gentle and kind. That is, until he's trapped in a spirit realm with a woman who gets badly injured, and apparently the only way he can heal her is with his "Yang Vitality" through intercourse. She tells him she would rather die. But he 'heroically' forces himself on her to heal her with his... y'know. What a valiant act! He also does something similar to this on two other occasions later in the story with other women. It's just as gross every time.
I forgot the name but: In another cultivation novel, one of the more mediocre ones, the MC has a fight with a woman who was teasing him, and then he beats the shit out of her, ties her to a water wheel, and... jesus fucking christ, WHY? It's one of the most graphic scenes ever, it comes out of nowhere, and it gets even worse because she... falls in love with him afterward???
I do not know why so many cultivation novels use this trope. It's really disgusting. Suffice it to say, none of that from me.
Representation (Or lack thereof):
Female characters in general have terrible representation in novels. I can name two that are notable exceptions (The Mech Touch, Reverend Insanity), but generally they don't have any major roles, they are merely supporting characters at best, or love interests with wooden personalities who vanish from the plot at worst.
In the most recent TCTH chapter I just put out, Part 532, Jason Hiro is basically the only male in the whole chapter. The rest of the characters are Fiona Hiro, Rebecca the Cybernite, and Aspirator Raavul. There's also Initiator Ferral, who is a male Psion, but he only has a few lines. 70% of the chapter features dialogue from female characters.
But in most cultivation novels, 90% of the good guys and enemies shown onscreen are male. I'm currently reading Martial World, and despite several female characters being hyped up to be expert combatants, Saint-level talents, and/or trained in the ancient ways, they either have NO fight scenes, or only spar lightly against other (weak) women. They have no influence on the power dynamics of the world they live in. They are not allowed to beat a man in combat ever.
This is so unfortunate, in my eyes. In a handful of stories, especially The Mech Touch, the female characters are larger than life, they kick ass, they have awesome shining moments, they aren't overly objectified, and they can even outshine the male cast during some arc. They feel well-balanced.
I just wish more Xianxias would treat their women better.
As a fun fact, there is actually a story I read called End of the Magic Era where not a SINGLE woman is EVER mentioned, at ALL, in ANY situation, nor a single female pronoun is used, until chapter 700. And when I say "not even a single time" I cannot stress enough that even if a character mentions "You should come and see my family" it will only be for the sake of mentioning "like my brothers and my uncles!" but never mothers, sisters, or any other female character.
And when the female characters do appear, it's so sudden, jarring and abrupt! Out of nowhere, the MC meets Anna, the Beautiful Swordswoman, who is beautiful and also beautiful and a swordswoman who is beautiful!
Anna, the Beautiful Expert Swordswoman! She is such a beautiful expert, guys. Definitely not just a future love interest or anything.
Oh. And the story introduced a loli maid after Anna started appearing. So I dropped it. I rarely ever drop these so that's saying a LOT lmao.
Always a Bigger Fish:
The final trope I want to talk about is the Xianxia concept of there always being a taller mountain. I love this trope, and I hate it. At its best, this trope is a reflection of the idea that one must humble themselves and not grow too arrogant in their journey of accumulating power. Arrogant young master fall from the heavens because they provoke dragons while themselves only being mere tigers.
...But at its worst, this trope becomes "I know you JUST defeated the single most monstrous entity in the entire universe, but actually we're in the Lower Omega Universe and now you can ascend to the Slightly Higher Than Mud Giga Omega Universe where you will just be a weak little bitch and the guy you beat was literally a worthless piece of shit compared to the geniuses in the Slightly Higher Than Mud Giga Omega Universe. OH! And after you completely overtake everyone in that new universe, there's the Actually Pretty Strong Universe where everyone is ten times more powerful than anyone you've faced yet!"
Basically, the problem is that the author undermines their entire narrative by making up new rules. At the point when a story should logically reach its end, the author says "I know you beat everyone in the universe, but there's another super universe and you have to start over from scratch there!" which then causes feelings to well up in the reader's heart like "If this happened once, will it happen again? Does this story just... never end?"
It doesn't end. It never ends.
And to me, this is the biggest problem of all. Too many Cultivation stories continue going on and on and on, well past the point where they should have concluded.
Someday, if and when I write my own serious Cultivation novel, I hope to fix these mistakes I've outlined, and plenty of others. I have been writing ideas in a notepad for years, and I look forward to implementing my own take on the genre when the time is right.
...
In the next Patreon post, I am going to go over a large number of the Cultivation novels I've read over the years. I'll list them in order of least to most favorite, and tell you guys what to watch out for if there are any tropes that especially bother you guys, like the ones I listed above.
See you next post! And sorry for how long it's been between each Patreon post. I just haven't felt like I've had much to say until this point. Maybe that will change in the future!
Comments
Klokinator the Wordsmithing Writer
So glad to hear that! I love them, but they miss the mark in lots of small but essential ways. Someday I'll write one, and hopefully rectify all the wrongs, maybe even 'redefine' the genre. Or at least make one standout work...
Benjamin Shklyar
Just found this post, and you spoke to me on such a level it is not even funny. You just perfectly encapsulated everything that has the potential to be good but is often misused in cultivation stories.
Klokinator the Wordsmithing Writer
Is this a reference to something? I think I'm missing context!
Эдуард Ярковой
I'm chipping away, in a digital day I will insert a chip into everyone Connecting the world, with a click and a swirl The future's unfolding, it's all just begun
