DB - A Superhero Story?

[ABED]

YYH is set in a more "realistic" world. It's setting is in modern day Tokyo.

[Kunzait_83]

So both Dragon Ball and Yu Yu Hakusho had wuxia in it still yyh had an upbeat modern music and Dragon Ball had an Old Classical Type of music, do you think the music has got anything to do with Wuxia?
Because if it does Then why do Other animes which have influence of Wuxia like Yu Yu Hakusho and Naruto have more upbeat and Modern sounding music?

Classical Wuxia-style music was largely in vogue in Wuxia films and Television shows from the 1920s to the 1980s. By the very tail-end of the 80s and early-most 90s, more modern musical trends began to seep their way into most Wuxia musical scores (while in many cases still allowing trace elements of more old-school Wuxia scores to seep their way in, however subtly or not-so-subtly), typically various forms of Asian pop (Cantopop, Jpop, Kpop, etc. depending on the region in question). Full blown retro-throwback scores would still of course pop up on and off over the years as well: I remember a whole bunch of late 90s Wuxia TV shows being particularly fond of including callback themes from famous classical Wuxia musical scores and cues (the climactic fight of the final episode of some Jin Yong adaptation or other circa 1999 featured a score straight from a Wuxia serial of the 1950s or 60s, complete with intentional audio crackle).

I've mentioned this before in other threads, but Wuxia scores were NOT by any means immune in any way whatsoever to the influence of modern musical trends. Its just that the classical style was also never ENTIRELY 100% completely abandoned either. Even some of the most modern-sounding Wuxia scores might sometimes tend to have some sort of subtle little musical references and callbacks at various points to the classical sound and style of Wuxia music of old. Though with that being said, you're certainly not going to come across very many Wuxia films or shows made within the last 15 years or so (2000s/2010s) that 100% front to back utilize a pure, classic-sounding score either (though I'm sure there's probably at least maybe a small few here or there). More often you'll see, at best, something that's some sort of hybrid between sounds of the eras, to whatever extent or other.

Yu Yu Hakusho's score (much like the series itself) is VERY much a product of the early 1990s, with a score that's heavily derived from contemporary Asian pop beats of that time period (though if you REALLY listen carefully, you may still pick up some very faint threadbare scraps of old-school classical Wuxia-esque music occasionally popping up within a couple tracks: this one most notably). And whether this was intentional or not, it certainly would not at all sound out of place within many of the Hong Kong New Wave Wuxia films of the same time period (which also used very similar sounding scores themselves).

I think it works very well with Yu Yu's modern 90s setting, and YYH overall has way, WAY more of a feel and tone from beginning to end throughout that's more firmly in line with the early 90s New Wave-style Wuxia, whereas DB is much more all over the map and stylistically eclectic: and while DB definitely goes heavily early 90s itself (especially with stuff like the Freeza and Cell arcs), it also still tends to have a bit more of a foot planted in more classic martial arts fantasy by comparison to something like Yu Yu... just with a heavily Toriyama-ized spin (its even set in its own wonky, batshit Toriyama take on the classical Jianghu setting, as I noted above).

Basically, in a battle for the title of which Wuxia-themed anime series is more heavily the by-product of early 90s trends in the genre between DBZ and Yu Yu Hakusho, Yu Yu definitely wins hands down (which is saying quite a bit, considering how ridiculously hard DBZ rode that particular train itself). So if only one of them is going to have a more modern, Asian pop-oriented soundtrack, Yu Yu's definitely the more fitting pick of the two.

All that being said though, no matter which way the musical winds of the present sway the soundscape of Wuxia media as a broader whole... there's no excuse for any score that's simply shitty or generic unto itself. In our case within this fanbase, be it for things like Dragon Ball Kai, Super, or the Faulconer stuff from FUNimation (or whatever the fuck Saban used in the early days of the U.S. dub), bland or terrible music is just bland or terrible music, regardless of the stylistic history or creative intentions therein.

And as for Naruto... believe it or not, Naruto is technically NOT a part of Wuxia at all! Naruto is in fact a part of Japanese Ninja Fantasy, which is its own distinct, separate genre wholly apart from Chinese (or Chinese-derived) Wuxia Martial Arts Fantasy. Ninjas are very much a distinctive product of Japanese culture and have over the years accrued their own specific myths and folklore (though some bits of those myths can indeed trace their lineage and origin points all the way back to Chinese Wuxia folklore as well, albeit VERY tenuously, once again due to how ridiculously much of Japanese culture was wholesale lifted directly from the Chinese) that have been popularized in their own distinct ways throughout countless modern day Japanese media depictions in Television shows, films, serials, manga, anime, etc.

As a genre, Ninja Fantasy has its own distinct history and evolution, one that's totally separate from anything to do with Wuxia (although there's definitely some eerie parallels one can draw in how they've both evolved over time, something that Kendamu and myself have talked a lot about more recently over Discord).

Though its also worth pointing out that Chinese Wuxia Kung Fu Fantasy and Japanese Ninja Fantasy have indeed crossed over with one another in several works: my favorite go-to example being the early-80s Wuxia classic Duel to the Death (which features a number of superpowered ninjas - using techniques straight from Japanese ninja folklore & fantasy - acting as canon fodder for the Chinese Xia protagonists).

Also insert here my obligatory mention that if you're looking for quality examples of Ninja Fantasy in manga/anime, you can more than easily find titles out there that are a FUCKLOAD better than Naruto, without even having to look very hard.

[Ripper 30]

YYH is set in a more "realistic" world. It's setting is in modern day Tokyo.

Yes that can be One of the reasons.

So both Dragon Ball and Yu Yu Hakusho had wuxia in it still yyh had an upbeat modern music and Dragon Ball had an Old Classical Type of music, do you think the music has got anything to do with Wuxia?
Because if it does Then why do Other animes which have influence of Wuxia like Yu Yu Hakusho and Naruto have more upbeat and Modern sounding music?

Classical Wuxia-style music was largely in vogue in Wuxia films and Television shows from the 1920s to the 1980s. By the very tail-end of the 80s and early-most 90s, more modern musical trends began to seep their way into most Wuxia musical scores (while in many cases still allowing trace elements of more old-school Wuxia scores to seep their way in, however subtly or not-so-subtly), typically various forms of Asian pop (Cantopop, Jpop, Kpop, etc. depending on the region in question). Full blown retro-throwback scores would still of course pop up on and off over the years as well: I remember a whole bunch of late 90s Wuxia TV shows being particularly fond of including callback themes from famous classical Wuxia musical scores and cues (the climactic fight of the final episode of some Jin Yong adaptation or other circa 1999 featured a score straight from a Wuxia serial of the 1950s or 60s, complete with intentional audio crackle).

I've mentioned this before in other threads, but Wuxia scores were NOT by any means immune in any way whatsoever to the influence of modern musical trends. Its just that the classical style was also never ENTIRELY 100% completely abandoned either. Even some of the most modern-sounding Wuxia scores might sometimes tend to have some sort of subtle little musical references and callbacks at various points to the classical sound and style of Wuxia music of old. Though with that being said, you're certainly not going to come across very many Wuxia films or shows made within the last 15 years or so (2000s/2010s) that 100% front to back utilize a pure, classic-sounding score either (though I'm sure there's probably at least maybe a small few here or there). More often you'll see, at best, something that's some sort of hybrid between sounds of the eras, to whatever extent or other.

Yu Yu Hakusho's score (much like the series itself) is VERY much a product of the early 1990s, with a score that's heavily derived from contemporary Asian pop beats of that time period (though if you REALLY listen carefully, you may still pick up some very faint threadbare scraps of old-school classical Wuxia-esque music occasionally popping up within a couple tracks: this one most notably). And whether this was intentional or not, it certainly would not at all sound out of place within many of the Hong Kong New Wave Wuxia films of the same time period (which also used very similar sounding scores themselves).

I think it works very well with Yu Yu's modern 90s setting, and YYH overall has way, WAY more of a feel and tone from beginning to end throughout that's more firmly in line with the early 90s New Wave-style Wuxia, whereas DB is much more all over the map and stylistically eclectic: and while DB definitely goes heavily early 90s itself (especially with stuff like the Freeza and Cell arcs), it also still tends to have a bit more of a foot planted in more classic martial arts fantasy by comparison to something like Yu Yu... just with a heavily Toriyama-ized spin (its even set in its own wonky, batshit Toriyama take on the classical Jianghu setting, as I noted above).

Basically, in a battle for the title of which Wuxia-themed anime series is more heavily the by-product of early 90s trends in the genre between DBZ and Yu Yu Hakusho, Yu Yu definitely wins hands down (which is saying quite a bit, considering how ridiculously hard DBZ rode that particular train itself). So if only one of them is going to have a more modern, Asian pop-oriented soundtrack, Yu Yu's definitely the more fitting pick of the two.

All that being said though, no matter which way the musical winds of the present sway the soundscape of Wuxia media as a broader whole... there's no excuse for any score that's simply shitty or generic unto itself. In our case within this fanbase, be it for things like Dragon Ball Kai, Super, or the Faulconer stuff from FUNimation (or whatever the fuck Saban used in the early days of the U.S. dub), bland or terrible music is just bland or terrible music, regardless of the stylistic history or creative intentions therein.

And as for Naruto... believe it or not, Naruto is technically NOT a part of Wuxia at all! Naruto is in fact a part of Japanese Ninja Fantasy, which is its own distinct, separate genre wholly apart from Chinese (or Chinese-derived) Wuxia Martial Arts Fantasy. Ninjas are very much a distinctive product of Japanese culture and have over the years accrued their own specific myths and folklore (though some bits of those myths can indeed trace their lineage and origin points all the way back to Chinese Wuxia folklore as well, albeit VERY tenuously, once again due to how ridiculously much of Japanese culture was wholesale lifted directly from the Chinese) that have been popularized in their own distinct ways throughout countless modern day Japanese media depictions in Television shows, films, serials, manga, anime, etc.

As a genre, Ninja Fantasy has its own distinct history and evolution, one that's totally separate from anything to do with Wuxia (although there's definitely some eerie parallels one can draw in how they've both evolved over time, something that Kendamu and myself have talked a lot about more recently over Discord).

Though its also worth pointing out that Chinese Wuxia Kung Fu Fantasy and Japanese Ninja Fantasy have indeed crossed over with one another in several works: my favorite go-to example being the early-80s Wuxia classic Duel to the Death (which features a number of superpowered ninjas - using techniques straight from Japanese ninja folklore & fantasy - acting as canon fodder for the Chinese Xia protagonists).

Also insert here my obligatory mention that if you're looking for quality examples of Ninja Fantasy in manga/anime, you can more than easily find titles out there that are a FUCKLOAD better than Naruto, without even having to look very hard.

Thanks for explaining the difference, yes i Heard that Naruto took so Many ideas from Other shows like Hunter x Hunter talking of which, will you classify HxH Under wuxia too?

[Kunzait_83]

Thanks for explaining the difference, yes i Heard that Naruto took so Many ideas from Other shows like Hunter x Hunter talking of which, will you classify HxH Under wuxia too?

Uh... no. Absolutely not.

99% of the time its not hard at all to classify what is or isn't Wuxia, how much of something in any given genre mixture is Wuxia, etc. Its an incredibly distinctive and unmistakable genre.

Here's a single image that visually sums up what Wuxia is pretty nicely:



Random generic Shonen action series are in no way whatsoever universally Wuxia across the board, just because so many of them tend to go out of their way to try and rip off something like Dragon Ball. Fist of the North Star, Dragon Ball, and Yu Yu Hakusho are examples of Wuxia - that just so happen to be targeted at a Shonen (i.e. little boys age 5 to 13) demographic/audience - because they focus on supernatural martial arts fighting styles and techniques taken from Taoist myths and folklore as well as character-types, plotlines, concepts, and themes that are intrinsically fundamental throughout the whole genre. That they're aimed at a readership of young Japanese schoolchildren is wholly incidental and irrelevant to their genre status and subject matter.

Something like say, One Piece for example - despite how much it claims to take from Dragon Ball - has pretty much NOTHING to do with Dragon Ball's genre in any way remotely whatsoever. Its a swashbuckling pirate adventure that only borrows certain emotional beats from a very narrow range of relatively small moments scattered throughout Dragon Ball (the pirate cave shenanigans, a small handful of tearful reunions and deaths of major characters, etc) as well as attempts to copy its irreverent, whimsical style of humor and vague sense of world building.

There isn't a scrap of anything remotely connected to Wuxia in it though, other than characters sometimes using fighting moves that on a conceptual level appear to be more taken straight from Dragon Ball itself rather than other martial arts fantasy sources (rendering them an unfocused copy of a copy, divorced from any sense of connection to the original source). In other words for example, in any given One Piece fight, Luffy will throw a million punches at hypersonic speeds not because the character, story, their themes, nor even because the author's areas of interests are at all about or relating to martial arts fantasy fiction... but rather simply because Dragon Ball and Goku did it, and the author likes Dragon Ball without really caring much about WHY Dragon Ball worked on a level any deeper than "it gave me warm fuzzies as a kid".

That's something of a common theme among a majority of Dragon Ball's later imitators throughout various Shonen publications: often they'll attempt to copy incredibly vague emotional beats and shallow, surface level visual cues, without really digging at all at the meat of what kinds of themes or concepts DB was originally deriving its ideas from in the first place. Instead of a slew of Shonen Wuxia-clones cropping up in the wake of Dragon Ball's end, we instead got a slew of generic Shonen action series attempting to clone this vague (not to mention incredibly skewed and lopsided) idea of Dragon Ball's emotional "feels" (to put it in tumblr-speak).

Hunter x Hunter is also, generally speaking, a generic action/adventure series about a guild of treasure hunters (albeit one that to my understanding in later story arcs attempts to deconstruct certain aspects of the whole "post-Dragon Ball Shonen Fighting Action Bubble"). It isn't about characters who are martial arts masters or students, their aims and goals have nothing to do with mystical fantasy martial arts, nor do the core narrative themes of the series. Its not about fiercely dedicated kung fu warriors using fighting moves straight from ancient Chinese fairy tale myths and journeying throughout a magical faraway fantasy land also taken straight from ancient Chinese fairy tale myths in order to grow and become better fighters or to prove their skills against a set of rival mystical kung fu warriors, or meeting and training with powerful ancient and immortal martial arts teachers, and so on.

Instead its about your basic group of ragtag adventurers going on missions to find hidden treasures, rare exotic animals, and sometimes acting as regular old bounty hunters for fairly boilerplate, culturally non-descript fantasy world criminals. There's... no real tie to ancient Chinese martial arts mythology here. Its just your standard, run-of-the-mill action/adventure kinda deal.

From what I gather (I'm much more familiar with HxH's earlier stories than I am its later ones, so forgive my fuzziness here) there IS at least ONE later storyline that DOES delve into Wuxia characters, storylines, and themes: where the main Hunter characters come across some giant tower that's filled with Xia-like martial arts masters, who are trained in all the familiar sorts of mystical Taoist Ki-harnessing fighting arts, compete against one another in martial arts tournaments for personal honor, glory, and betterment of their skills, etc. and exist within their own little Wulin-like community within this single enormous compound. Which certainly makes sense, given that HxH's author's previous notable series before it was none other than Yu Yu Hakusho.

But that's just a single, solitary storyline and story point within the context of a MUCH broader narrative universe. At most you can say that HxH features A single Wuxia-themed storyline or story element. But its only a lone side-element, given screentime only for so long and without ever really acting as the overarching series-wide focus. To once more drag Iron Fist into this, it'd be like if I said that the Marvel Comics Universe as a broader whole were somehow all Wuxia, just because it happens to feature but a single character and accompanying locale which are Wuxia-themed running around within it. That just clearly ain't the case.

If some kind of HxH spinoff series that focused entirely and exclusively around that huge tower filled with mystical martial arts masters and their various fights, rivalries, training, and growth were to be made, then THAT would certainly be a Wuxia series for sure.

But as it stands, no. HxH definitely is not a Wuxia series. It just features a relatively small corner of its much larger universe that's Wuxia-themed.

[ABED]

Your knowledge of the genre is pretty deep, or at least relative to mine. What books, articles, documentaries, etc. do you watch or read on the subject?

[Kunzait_83]

Your knowledge of the genre is pretty deep, or at least relative to mine.

Its... really not honestly. It only SEEMS that way due to how pathetically little of this community was even aware of the genre's very existence before the thread a couple years ago.

Really though, I'm no "expert" by any means, nor have/would I ever claim to be for a moment. All things considered, I'm a painfully average enough fanboy of this stuff. I've just been at it with this genre for a very long time now, since the mid/late 80s or so. So I've been kicking around since the heyday of the whole Hong Kong New Wave boom (and a lot of the bugfuck deranged anarchistic spirit of that stuff is still where a great deal of my heart lies too, which probably best explains my extremely strong continued draw to Dragon Ball more than anything else does in all honesty). So I've racked up a lot of raw experience with it over time.

But really, I'm no more an "authoritative expert" on Wuxia than a typical forum user on an anime/manga board would be for anime and manga. Just take that hypothetical generic, no-name anime forum user and drop them flush into the middle of another community that had somehow or other never even heard of the very existence of anime or manga at all: all of a sudden, that random, average, Joe Blow, no-name anime/manga fan's gonna sound like Toren Smith or Fred Patten by comparison to everyone else.

That's effectively the situation y'all are dealing with here with me on the subject of Wuxia. On any given normal Wuxia fan community, I'd be a completely unremarkable nobody blending facelessly into the crowd. On here though, I'm now apparently the designated "Wuxia guy": mainly because no one else around here's been stepping up to the plate on the subject (overwhelmingly crucial as it is for a series like DB) for the better part of almost 15 years now.

Believe me, its not a mantle I feel remotely in any way comfortable or qualified wearing. At all. Its just that its been like, what, a solid decade and a half now (probably a bit longer) since both the post-Toonami fanbase had completely usurped the older pre-dub U.S. fanbase (many of whom had already generally known and been exposed to WAY more about this stuff by comparison) as the defacto majority of active and visible DB fans in America as well as since this site's community had truly come to fruition; and somehow or other in ALL that length of time NOBODY ELSE has bothered to crack this topic open properly, sooooo... yeah.

I've my own thoughts on WHY exactly that level and degree of blackout ignorance has been the case for so very long within this community, but that's a whole other topic in and of itself (and one that I've finally began to touch on a little bit in other threads).

What books, articles, documentaries, etc. do you watch or read on the subject?

Like I said: I'm just an average Wuxia fan. I'm by no means whatsoever your Herms-esque equivalent on the matter. I don't speak, read, or translate Chinese, and I'm not a trained scholar on the subject: there are actual, literal professors who are the REAL experts on the subject, who have read all kinds of ancient texts and have made whole careers out of their incredibly authoritative study and analysis of the genre's vast, ancient history. I'm just a normal (and not particularly smart: college dropout here) dude who simply hasn't been spending the past 25+ years living in total blind ignorance to the face of the genre's whole existence is all.

The source of my "expertise" on the subject is most primarily (though by no means not solely) Wuxia films themselves, and a plentiful steady diet of them going back since 1987 or thereabouts. No really: a LOT of what I know I know from having gobbled up piles upon mountains upon gobs of Wuxia VHS tapes all throughout the latter half of the 80s and the entirety of the 90s. The 2000s I've spent largely replacing and upgrading my old VHS collection with digital copies of everything while keeping pace with the newer stuff as best I can.

I talked a little bit about the history of Wuxia's Western/North American fanbase in the Wuxia thread, mentioning that the genre gained considerable traction and popularity among grunge-era punk rockers in the late 1980s and early 1990s (which would act as a direct lead-in to the creation of films like The Matrix and the subsequent release and popularity of more mainstream Wuxia films like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon). Yeah, that's my generation right there: a large part of how I got into it (outside of my dad's own vast VHS collection of kung fu movies) was because I'd grown up primarily around the more alternative youth subcultures of the late 80s and early 90s, and had mostly torn flannel-clad skater kids as friends at the time (who also acted as my circle of anime friends from back then too) that would pass around bootleg tapes of all kinds of crazed, unique films from all over the world, including Wuxia and Hong Kong films in general.

At the heart of it all, I'm simply a film junkie and an Asian cinema dork (Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, etc), and that accounts for a GIGANTIC ton of it right there: just watching a FUCKLOAD of Wuxia movies from all across the genre's entire nearly 100 years-long cinematic history over the course of 25+ someodd years while also reading up on as much as I could find on the stuff.

Beyond that however, there's still quite a fair bit more that I've consumed to bolster my grasp and understanding of the genre's inner-workings: I've also read more than my fair share of English translations (both official and unofficial fan-produced) of tons of Wuxia novels... both of major literary significance (Journey to the West, The Kunlun Slave, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, the entries in the Jin Yong and Gu Long oeuvres available in English, etc), as well as disposable pulp silliness (yeah, I've slogged my way through the vast, endless void of teen-targeted Wuxia light novels; no I'm not too proud of myself for that, even though I've come up with a fun gem or two here or there for my troubles).

I've even read what bits of translated ancient Youxia poetry I could come across in used bookstores growing up back in the day. Definitely recommended: David Hinton's various translations in particular are a boundless treasure trove of wonderful, largely Tang-era, writings centering mainly around the fascinating, and antiquated, moral philosophies and principals of Youxia martial artists (Meng Chiao being among my favorite poets).

Though make no mistake, there's still absolutely a GIGANTIC, staggering amount of literary Wuxia material that's still to this day never been translated into English. Dare a mystical martial arts fanboy to hope or dream of a world in which the final concluding chapters of Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils are at long, long last available in English before I'm elderly and gray?

And of course I've collected and read plenty of Manhua (Chinese comics/manga) throughout the decades, which encompass a vaaaaaaaast swath of excellent Wuxia material as well (thank god for Jademan Comics for getting a lot of that stuff out to the U.S. in English back in the 90s: they were without a doubt a Wuxia junkie's best friend at the time).

In my very earliest years of Wuxia fandom, a large majority of Chinese Wuxia TV series were mostly cut off to me (other than maybe a stray episode or two appearing on a bootleg tape every now and again) in ways that movies never typically were. That seal was largely broken however when I had gotten International Channel around the mid-90s or so, which used to air live action Wuxia TV shows every single weekday afternoon right when I'd get home from school. Most of it was raw and unsubbed of course, but I didn't care: after years of lusting after them, I finally got to see in full the classic TV series for things like The Book and the Sword, State of Divinity, Chu Liuxiang, and all 89 kajillion renditions of the Condor Heroes series airing on my own TV day in and day out all week long (right up until IC's tragic demise in the mid-2000s: *tear*).

Course nowadays, all that stuff can be found torrented and fansubbed, and even in many cases just plain uploaded directly onto youtube.

There's was also, as ever, the internet there to help as well: there've always been plenty of Wuxia fan communities, forums, and websites full of information - as well as handy fan translations and subtitles - for about as long as I can remember the internet existing (which is quite a long ways back: I'm a late 80s Usenet-era Newsgroup lurker myself).

Currently as of now there's Wuxiaworld (which specializes in English translations of a dizzying array of largely more recent Wuxia novels from the 2000s and onward, but also some older classics as well) and Wuxiaedge (a general fan site that focuses a lot on more recent Wuxia TV series) that are most immediately popular at present time: the former run by an ex-Chinese Embassy worker no less, and the latter catering largely to a much younger and more female-dominant portion of the genre's fanbase. SPCNET (a site dedicated to Hong Kong TV shows, films, and pop culture in general) is also home to one of the oldest still-active English-speaking Wuxia forums (going strong since around 2000/2001 or so, if not earlier).

Wuxiasociety used to be my number 1 go-to for yeeeeeeeears and years and years, before they unfortunately closed down some years ago and the amazing community with it scattered to the four winds of the internet ether. A new version of the site only fairly recently went up, but while its still home to some REALLY great translations (including lots of classic Wuxia literature), its also unfortunately still but a hollow shell of the amazingly vast, expansive, highly active, and endlessly knowledgeable and helpful community that used to thrive there once upon a time long, long ago.

And of course, as I've mentioned in the Wuxia thread itself, the genre was hardly contained within a vacuum of total and complete obscurity known only to genre-buffs: tons of general film websites would contain scores upon scores of information, reviews, and historical analysis of countless, countless films within the genre (along with historical information about broader genre itself beyond film). Pretty sure that Kozo's old (and exhaustively thorough) Hong Kong Film review website's still up all these many years/decades down the road: though its no longer updated really, its still home to a metric fuckton of archived Wuxia film reviews and articles that date all the way back to the mid 90s.

This book right here is also an excellent primer on the history and evolution of modern Wuxia storytelling across the last couple hundred years or so now.