Arcturin
Many xianxia books feature notable similarities - development of the dantian as a source of power, sudden enlightenment leading to huge breakthroughs, people yelling "you are courting death!" before getting stomped, and so forth. What are some of your most liked and most disliked themes and similarities found across xianxia novels?
Will Wight
That's a good question. The interesting thing is, you can probably answer this for me. The reason why, is Cradle is my version of that genre with the stuff I dislike cut out and the stuff I like included, with one notable exception. The notable exception being, I really do like the deep roots and Taoist mythology and the themes of intellectual and spiritual self improvement. I've basically stuck with kind of magical martial self improvement, I think I could have done more character development. So I like those things, and I didn't include those mainly because they're not really included in those books, they're more culturally included. So the author often doesn't develop them at all, the reader just understands, the reader in the native culture that these stories are intended for, kind of understands the cultural context there. So Western readers often don't, I know I didn't, didn't get any of this Taoist immortal cultivation stuff. So I like that stuff, and I left it out of Cradle, so that's the only exception to that.
What I did with Cradle primarily was, I was reading these Chinese cultivation novels, and as well Korean and martial cultivation novels, there's some Japanese stuff in there and other nationalities and cultures that they came from. So I was reading these stories and I really liked a lot of the concepts, I loved progression, I loved the tie between magic and the universe, I loved all this stuff, the problem is when I recommended them to other people, my friends, they were turned off by the hasty writing. Often they are written in haste, because they're written one page or one chapter at a time every day, and so you can't spend a whole lot of time on each chapter.
Or they're turned off by the translations. The translations are done by fans who I think typically do a fantastic job, but they are fan translators and so they often don't read like they're written in English, they read like they're written in another language and then translated which is perfectly appropriate, but some people don't enjoy that.
They were tuned off by some other cultural differences, and one of the main cultural differences that turns people off is they way Chinese novels treat women. The treatment of female characters in Chinese cultivation novels is often very unfortunate, so I'm not going to go too much into that 'cos that's the sure fire way to get myself clubbed over the back of the head, but it is not good. For one thing, on the lowest level, women are treated as weaker than men, even though there's no like in universe magic system reason why that should be true, 'cos all of your strength comes from your cultivation and your advancement and your magic so therefore why should your physical body have any impact on that whatsoever.
So it's always weird that why in this culture would there be a hierarchy between sexes because at no point in this cultures development were men actually stronger than women. So that's always kinda weird, but then also there tends to be a lot of over sexualization/sexual abuse, there's high level of chivalry that ends up kinda being condescending and patronizing in, I'm not naming any specifics here but that tends to be the trend in a lot of the genre. So I was very much not a big fan of that.
So that was one of the things I really I didn't like, and another thing I didn't like, this is something I liked and didn't like, was the ruthless pursuit of power, because on the one hand, if you live in a world where you can learn to do anything, including fly and be immortal, yeah everybody is gonna be ruthless in they're pursuit of power, because that makes sense, why wouldn't you be?
So obviously I kept that to a degree in Cradle, but what I didn't really like was that the main character was very amoral. So what I've tried to do was that I've tried to take Lindon as more toward that side and make him less like that as he's grown and progressed as a character. So I've tried to make him, not more moral, but more sympathetic or more compassionate.
Those were some of the things I that liked and didn't like, what I loved is the action focus, the progression focus, the fast pace, a lot of times even though they're telling the same story over and over and over and that does kind of wear on you, because basically every single cultivation novel is the same story, 90% of them I guess. There's always some difference, and the other thing is there's really an infinite amount of ways a story can play out, because it's all about progress, and it's all about personal development, and it's all about getting your universe. So seeing the same story play out in dozens of different ways is honestly pretty cool, I kinda liked that. I started off seeing that as a detriment, and now I almost see it as a pro rather than a con.
All the stuff I thought was really good about cultivation novels, the pacing, the progression, the way magic is influenced into the culture and the way that there is no highest level, where the ladder never ends, all that stuff was worked into Cradle. The stuff I didn't like, the treatment of women, the way that it relied on cultural assumptions to deliver the magic system and the general kinda relationship to the reader, and then some of the repetition that I also didn't like, so I cut that stuff. The stuff I liked but then couldn't include was the cultural background which is very rich and amazing and one of the reasons I encourage you to check out the originals, because the original cultural background is really cool.