Dragon Ball's True Genre: We Need to Talk about Wuxia

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DerekPadula
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Re: Dragon Ball's True Genre: We Need to Talk about Wuxia

Post by DerekPadula » Thu Mar 10, 2016 7:20 pm

Hi Kunzait_83,

Thanks for the praise. I’m glad that there are people out there who appreciate the hard work that goes into these longer articles. Most of the articles I work the hardest on receive the smallest reaction, while the shorter articles get a larger reaction. Alas, I prefer writing longer articles, even though they’re always exhausting to do.

Regarding the confusion over the kung fu films being cited, I think I can explain why that occurred. From what you said, I’m not the first person to believe that you were saying the kung fu films were actually wǔxiá films. And if I had a difficult time separating the two in my mind—after reading through your post from beginning to end more than 3 times—then other people likely did as well.

The first thing to realize is that your post is titled “Dragon Ball’s True Genre: … Wuxia.” As a result, the reader is going to assume that everything you say will somehow be relevant to wǔxiá.

Second, everybody has their own writing style, which is a good thing, however, when writing non-fiction and trying to make a point, it’s essential to cut down on superfluous information. In this case, if you’re citing Drunken Master or Snake in Eagle’s Shadow, for example, and you’re saying it has an ‘Assassin character,’ then you’re doing that because you were trying to connect it to the ‘Assassin’ archetype in wǔxiá, right? It’s one of the archetypes that you had defined as being common to the genre. Same for the ‘monk’ archetype in 36th Chamber. As a result, the reader is connecting the dots between the two and is led to believe that you’re bringing these films up because you are saying that by virtue of having such archetypes, they are connected to wǔxiá, and in some way are wǔxiá films. If those examples weren’t relevant to proving that ‘Dragon Ball is wǔxiá,’ then they shouldn’t have been referenced. As a result, it either leads the reader to that conclusion, or to confusion, where you’re not sure what the difference between the two genres is. Stipulating the differences would have helped, along with saying that ‘example X’ not wǔxiá, while ‘example Y’ is wǔxiá.

Third, the post is long and filled with a massive amount of information and multimedia—most of which is brand new to readers. You’re bound to not be able to memorize everything verbatim. It takes me an entire day to read it each time I go through it, and I’m a fast reader with a high attention to detail, but I still can’t recall every word or point you’re attempting to make.

Fourth, because of the huge amount of information, some of which strengthens your argument that ‘Dragon Ball is wǔxiá,’ and some of which does not, the water gets muddied and a reader is unsure of what to take away from it, other than a sense of awe. Granted, it’s an overwhelming topic to begin with, so it’s not an easy one to write about in a concise or linear fashion. I’m impressed at the amount of effort that went into your post, and especially at the amount of multimedia, which I can attest to being a draining process, where you have to find them, pick the rights ones, edit them, or make them from scratch, and then insert them into the article. But ultimately, the reader isn’t sure what to take away from the article other than that ‘everything in this article is wǔxiá, including Dragon Ball.’

You said in your recent reply, “As much as the focus of this thread was on Wuxia specifically, I did also intend for it to also be focused to a degree on DB's non-Wuxia, "grounded" kung fu fiction influences.” That clarifies the issue at hand and also explains what I just said. It’s an article titled ‘Dragon Ball’s True Genre: … Wuxia,’ but then you have non-wǔxiá content in there. In a long post like this, readers can’t remember every word or point that’s stated, and instead just remember the overall message. So you might not have specifically stated that ‘Drunken Master is wǔxiá,’ but the overall message is that ‘all of this stuff is wǔxiá.’ As a result, the reader is likely to think as I and others have.

The same logic applies to the misconception that Herms, Kei, myself, and others have, about you not intending to argue Toriyama intended Dragon Ball to be wǔxiá. If the thesis of your article is that ‘Dragon Ball is wǔxiá,’ then through logic by association it also conveys that you’re saying Toriyama intended his series to be a wǔxiá series. If you had instead stated that you were not arguing this, and added a caveat that, ‘at the very least, it ended up as a wǔxiá-like series by happenstance,’ this might have alleviated such reactions.

Regarding the issue of wǔxiá being unknown to Western Dragon Ball fans, and not seeing the connection between the two, it’s pretty simple. Wǔxiá is something that fans in the Western world have never encountered before. No parallel had ever been drawn between wǔxiá and Dragon Ball, so it comes as a big surprise when they see your post. It was even a shock to me, and I’ve studied Dragon Ball’s cultural roots every day for the last 13 years.

Dragon Ball Z started to become popular in 1998. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001) is our primary exposure to the wǔxiá genre, and it didn’t look or feel anything like Dragon Ball. Afterward, Dragon Ball continued, and stuff like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon vanished from the Western pop culture scene, with only a few exceptions, such as The House of the Flying Daggers (2004). Hong Kong and Chinese mainland filmmakers were still producing such content, but mainstream America wasn't seeing it. In contrast, Hollywood filmmakers don't make wǔxiá films. So it shouldn't be too surprising that Westerners are unfamiliar with this genre, especially because it has a foreign name that is hard to pronounce and which no one in the West uses on a regular basis. Most of us didn’t grow up watching wǔxiá content, and even when introduced in the 2000s, it didn’t resemble Dragon Ball enough to ring any bells.

Regarding the use of wǔxiá to refer to content that predates the coinage of the term, I have my opinion on it. That opinion may change as I continue to research the history of the genre, and in particular, the history of Asian cinema. Nonetheless, I don’t think I’ll ever say that Toriyama intended Dragon Ball to be a wǔxiá series in the true “Jīn Yōng” novel sense of the word. The influences are clear to see in his work, but these wǔxiá-like elements, just like the rest of Dragon Ball, exist as the end result of a fusion of multiple different influences, arrived at through a sudden spark of inspiration under a deadline, that then point back to cultural roots. I’m still undecided on whether or not I’ll call Dragon Ball ‘wǔxiá,’ but even if I do, and even if it’s at the core of the series, it’s still just one part of it. So to define it so strongly, and state ‘Dragon Ball is wǔxiá,’ seems inaccurate and lacking. Like I said in my ‘What genre is Dragon Ball?’ article, it can be added to your definition, such as ‘action-adventure-comedy-wǔxiá,’ but it should not simply be ‘wǔxiá’ by itself. Nor at the moment do I think it should be ‘wǔxiá plus some other stuff.’

On a somewhat unrelated note, since you mentioned it, Heroes of the East was a fun movie. The martial arts choreography was well done, and there were a lot of creative surprises. I recommend it to anyone that is reading.

I didn’t mean anything personal by saying “Kunzait_83 admits he isn’t a scholar.” I don’t think being a scholar or having a degree of any kind is a necessary prerequisite to talk about Dragon Ball. Rather, I stated that for the reader’s sake, because it was necessary to establish the context of who was speaking. I have to assume that they are not going to take the time to read your post where you say a similar thing, and then after having read the entire post, finally form their own opinion about its content. I think writing a post like this is fine, regardless of who writes it.

The issue that a scholar or more hardcore Dragon Ball fan could take with it is the broad and perhaps overreaching claim that Dragon Ball’s ‘true’ genre is wǔxiá. If that claim is being made, then it needs a bulletproof argument. Especially when being presented to an audience of English speaking Westerners who have no familiarity with this term.

But by all means, if you have another one of these in store for us, please share it. They are unique and enlightening.

I updated my article as requested.
Author of Dragon Ball Culture and the It's Over 9,000! book: https://thedaoofdragonball.com/books and The Dao of Dragon Ball website: https://thedaoofdragonball.com/blog

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Re: Dragon Ball's True Genre: We Need to Talk about Wuxia

Post by Kunzait_83 » Sat Apr 09, 2016 9:08 am

I meant to respond to DerekPadula's above post awhile ago, but stuff wound up happening IRL and it got away from me.

Nonetheless though, I needed to bump this thread to share something IMMENSELY fucking awesome that also reminded me of something I'm kicking myself for forgetting to include in the original Wuxia history lesson here.

So: in my scatterbrained, spur-of-the-moment cobbling together of the entire goddamned history of the Wuxia genre, I covered everything from stage plays, operas, novels & poetry, paintings, comic books, television, film & serials, animation, and so on and so forth.

There was however one OTHER noteworthy medium of performance art that the genre had also been a significant part of and that I had stupidly, stupidly forgotten about and neglected entirely like the airhead imbecile than I am... Puppetry!

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Considering how ancient the Wuxia genre's history stretches back (assuming you count works that predate the cointage of the term itself like I tend to), it makes perfect sense: puppet shows were a popular form of traditional performance art in China stretching back well over 2000 years. Starting out originally as Shadow Play - a form of really archaic puppetry using flat cutout figures whose shadows were shown against a lantern lit backdrop - circa the Han Dynasty in 200 B.C., Chinese puppetry would of course evolve later into more articulated, three dimensional wood carvings. Ancient puppets that date back to the Shang Dynasty (16th century BC or thereabouts) have also been discovered over the years showing its origins may go back even longer, but so far as we know for sure, puppet theater has been a significant part of Chinese culture across classes and social castes (among palace royalty and peasantry on the streets alike) since at least the Song Dynasty circa 900 A.D.

As I detailed in the meat of the Wuxia write up going back to the first page, Youxia Poetry were among the earliest prototypical forms of what would later become Wuxia, and as such tales of Youxia heroism, bravery, and strength were detailed as much in ancient Chinese puppet performances as they were in prose and with flesh and blood actors on an opera stage.

Naturally of course while declining in visibility and prevalence a significant deal, traditional puppetry hasn't TOTALLY died out with the advent of modern culture and media in the 20th century. Traditional Chinese and Taiwanese Puppet Theater has indeed persisted into the modern era, with Wuxia tales of course being especially popular.

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In fact, 1971 saw a the first airing of a very notable Wuxia Television show in Taiwan called Shi Yan-Wen: The Scholar Swordsman which was notable not only for its IMMENSE popularity at the time, but also the fact that it was ENTIRELY comprised of puppetry.

As the title very directly denotes, the show told the story of Shi Yan-Wen, a scholar turned badass Youxia swordsman (see my breakdown on Wuxia character archetypes for further elaboration) whose adventures brought him into conflict with a never ending parade of great fighters, gods, and demonic entities. Political intrigue and commentary was just as much a part of the show as mythical supernatural martial arts action, and the show was such an incredibly beloved smash success that the reason it was inevitably yanked off thee air in 1976 was due to the fact that its airings would directly disrupt the daily routine and workflow of the Taiwanese population. Whenever a new episode of Shi Yan-Wen aired, students would skip classes, farmers and factory workers would leave their duties abruptly to tune in, etc. As a result it caused quite the national controversy over there at the time.

A big part of the the show's immense appeal (beyond just the general awesomeness of Wuxia Puppetry) was its combination of traditional Youxia gallantry with political commentary coming at a time in the early 70s when Taiwan had just withdrawn from the U.N. and the populace and culture was becoming increasingly disaffected and despondent.

The show's mass national disruption of workers' output and student attendance, coupled with the fact that its dialogue was spoken in traditional Taiwanese (at a time when the government was trying to impose Mandarin as the national language) meant that the show was somewhat of a lightning rod for the Taiwanese government's media watchdogs, resulting in its abrupt cancellation while it was still in its prime.

Sadly the show also aired at a time when television archiving still wasn't what it is today (and has generally been since the 1980s), so to the best of my or anyone else's knowledge, no footage of the original 70s run of Shi Yan-Wen can be presently found anywhere.

The show did have quite the tremendous pop cultural impact across Asia during its time though, and was a HUGE factor in re-popularizing the use of puppetry as a medium for Wuxia storytelling throughout the last 40 years.

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(And its memory has still lived on even among a younger generation of Chinese/Taiwanese fans, thanks in part to anniversary/reunion live stage performance tours by some of its original voice actors and puppeteers.)

Once again, dipping back into inter-Chinese/Japanese cultural cross pollination as I did in the main write up, there was even a Japanese arcade fighting game released around 1988 or so called Reikai Doushi: Chinese Exorcist, whose look and aesthetic is very much taken directly from Chinese Wuxia puppetry performances, digitizing actual puppets for the character sprites, and being among the very, very first digitized fighting games ever (predating even Pit Fighter and the original Mortal Kombat).

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(Sadly not a terribly great game gameplay-wise as you might expect, but goddamn is the graphical style to fucking die for. Also some of those Jiangshi and demon characters ought to look more than a tad bit familiar in their visual design to most of you.)

Taiwan would also not see the last of Wuxia Puppetry after the demise of the original Shi Yan-Wen. In the mid 1980s, a Taiwanese Wuxia Puppet TV series called Pili would begin a VERY lengthy, decades-long run of several TV and film series, and even live stage shows.

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An unbelievably famous and well loved wuxia puppet series, Pili took up the mantle left by Shi Yan-Wen's 70s run and continued on well into the 2000s. The show has grown into a pretty massive multimedia empire with all sorts of toys, books, and assorted merchandise that's been floating around steadily since at least back in the 90s, and its had pretty massive crossover appeal throughout Asia outside of its Taiwanese territory, including in Japan.

And now here's where I really rope in some of the hardcore Cartoon Network/Toonami fanatics around these parts: around early 2006 or thereabouts, a (VERY heavily re-edited and re-written) dubbed adaptation of Pili was made for American audiences and aired on Toonami. You folks may well possibly remember it under the title of “Wulin Warriors”.

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It (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the audience) wasn't a particularly huge or noteworthy hit and didn't last very long and is probably among the most short lived, obscure, and forgotten shows on the Toonami block from back during its original day.

But nonetheless credit where its due, a rare, rare bit of props from me towards Cartoon Network/Toonami (which I normally, unlike most everyone else here, don't tend to have very many nice things to say about in general usually) for attempting something even vaguely, remotely like this at all: even though the show certainly was HEAVILY and tragically hacked and “reversioned” to within an inch of its life, almost sorta like another wuxia anime we all well know (and also probably a lot more similarly, due to the live action nature, to something more like Power Rangers and other such Saban-ified Toku shows).

So... most of that stuff I'd known already and just neglected to include it earlier because I'm a an absolute fucking moron who bit off WAY more than he could chew on such an IMMENSELY dense, positively humongous fucking topic like this, and stuff just got lost in the shuffle of my brain.

BUUUUUUT.... what I did NOT know until just last night (a massive, massive shout out to old school Kanz member Velasa for throwing this my way, which also spurred me to belatedly add all this misc info here onto the pile) is that there have still been even in very recent years, a whole bunch of much newer Wuxia Puppet projects circulating out there that I had heretofore been totally clueless about!

Over in Japan, Pili's international success over the years has lead to the Taiwanese studio behind the franchise teaming with Japanese anime/visual novel writer and creator Gen Urobuchi in the development of a brand new Wuxia Puppet show called Thunderbolt Fantasy made specifically for the Japanese market, and which has just begun running over there earlier this year.

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Along with that, yet another very much brand new Wuxia Puppet series has just begun over in China and Taiwan called Golden Light Puppet Theatre (roughly translated I think).

As I only just found out about these new(er) wuxia puppet shows mere hours ago last night (how the fuck am I letting these things slip by me in my old age?), you can be DAMN sure I'll be tearing through whatever - very likely raw and unsubbed - episodes I can find of them and will be mainlining them like heroin for probably the next few weeks.

In the meantime though, since Wuxia media that isn't Dragon Ball (and a few other similar Shonen-ish anime like Yu Yu Hakusho and so on) is still a new thing to a lot of you folks, I wouldn't dream of leaving any of you still reading this thing hanging without a glimpse of what Wuxia combat with Puppets looks like in the 21st century.

So here's a random, ass kicking fight scene from Golden Light Puppet Theatre in all its awesomeness.

You're welcome.

*EDIT*

Bonus clip. Same show, different fight scene.
http://80s90sdragonballart.tumblr.com/

Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Dragon Ball's True Genre: We Need to Talk about Wuxia

Post by DonAce » Fri Apr 15, 2016 10:22 pm

This is my absolute favorite post from anywhere ever.

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Re: Dragon Ball's True Genre: We Need to Talk about Wuxia

Post by Kunzait_83 » Sat Apr 16, 2016 2:38 pm

DerekPadula wrote:Tons of stuff
Oh right. This. Fuck. I should probably respond to this now huh?
DerekPadula wrote:Hi Kunzait_83,

Thanks for the praise. I’m glad that there are people out there who appreciate the hard work that goes into these longer articles. Most of the articles I work the hardest on receive the smallest reaction, while the shorter articles get a larger reaction. Alas, I prefer writing longer articles, even though they’re always exhausting to do.
Perils of living in the Twitter age: everything's gotta be in soundbite sized microsnippets or else tons of people just tune right out. Whatever though, fuck 'em. So long as the information exists out there and gets around in SOME capacity, that's ultimately what matters most.
DerekPadula wrote:Regarding the confusion over the kung fu films being cited, I think I can explain why that occurred. From what you said, I’m not the first person to believe that you were saying the kung fu films were actually wǔxiá films. And if I had a difficult time separating the two in my mind—after reading through your post from beginning to end more than 3 times—then other people likely did as well.

....

*TONS of insightful, helpful points*
Great, great, GREAT constructive criticism all over the place here. Thank you so very, very much for that.

So far as my talking about some notable examples of standard, "grounded" Kung Fu films amidst the Wuxia, I did so of course primarily because Dragon Ball takes SO much of its overwhelming artistic influence just as much from them as it does the supernatural/mythical stylings of Wuxia. Overall what Dragon Ball most takes its cues and tropes from is Martial Arts Fiction as a collective whole: both standard, grounded, non-fantasy-fied kung fu tales as well mystical, super powered Wuxia myths and folklore.

Alright so... bit of personal, behind the scenes backstory here to explain where my mindset was throughout all this and what lead to this whole thread eventually getting made in the first place:

A long, long time back when I was still a regular here, I was asked increasingly numerous times by a number of users to do a post outlining and detailing the comparisons between Dragon Ball and martial arts films, as it was coming up more and more frequently in a lot of my posts and discussions here at the time: and its also at the very least common enough knowledge that Toriyama took a great deal of inspiration from Jackie Chan's output (which of course is overwhelmingly and decidedly non-Wuxia). I think I was even slated for about 2 seconds there to go on the podcast and talk about it.

At that point, Wuxia seemed to be a term and a general concept that only I (and like two or three other VERY older and no longer active users from the forum's earliest days) seemed to be familiar with here. Before I'd left, I realized quickly that a "martial arts film comparison" post about Dragon Ball wouldn't simply have to cover a few Jackie Chan movies in order to make any kind of sense: I'd have to literally explain EVERYTHING about damn near the ENTIRETY of martial arts fiction as a collective genre, up to and including all of Wuxia (which by itself is a far beyond tremendous fucking topic to begin with), completely from scratch for a fairly large audience who were otherwise total and utter Tabula Rasa's to the concept.

This... was a DAUNTING fucking task for anybody: least of all for myself, who apart from being just not all that bright of a bulb when it comes right down to it, was at the time (and still have been continuing to right along, even up to presently) going through a physically, mentally, and emotionally draining and terrifying health/medical crisis (without going into any more detail about it than that).

Due certainly in part to numerous and immensely important issues surrounding said-health crisis, I'd given up on this place (I'd also done so for other, non-medically related reasons too, which I may possibly go into at a later point: not in this thread though of course) and with it went the very notion of me writing about any of this Martial Arts/Wuxia Fiction stuff at all.

That is until a point came late last year where I was about to undertake a VERY risky procedure that could've potentially helped solve my long ongoing health issue... but at a tremendous possible risk in terms of side effects (again, I'm being purposefully oblique here, as I'm not comfortable with airing out all the details, as they're irrelevant to the topic at hand anyhow).

This was back in September/October of last year. At that point I was an utter terrified fucking basket case of a quivering emotional trainwreck about the (not joking, EXTREMELY severe) risks I was undertaking in going through with this (still fairly experimental) medical procedure. As my various nerd interests and hobbies have always throughout my whole life gone in cycles and "kicks" of various kinds, I wound up during the weeks leading up to the procedure (which went on for almost an entire grueling month) delving through a GIGANTIC fuckton of my whole lifetime's worth of collected Wuxia media: all my films, my manhua, books, video games, anime and other TV series, etc.

While doing this, while reflecting back on my whole life up till this point and specifically in this particular case the GIGANTIC impact that martial arts (both the real life and the fictional kind) and Wuxia media had always had on me, I suddenly found myself just writing about them. Not for this place or for anyone else: just for myself. Almost like an impromptu "journal" of sorts chronicling my whole life's experience with the genre, and my POV watching how much it had all grown and changed and evolved throughout my lifetime growing up.

I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote as I was rewatching and rereading a TON of stuff, some of which I hadn't revisited since possibly before some of you people were even born, or at least cognizant. And as I wrote, I started creating images and gifs, and collecting video clips and other assorted scraps of media. Almost like a "digital scrapbook" of sorts.

A conversation on Skype with Kanz user Innagadadavida prompted and inspired me to rejigger what I had been working on up till then and come back here with all of it and splay it all out as my much, much, much belated post about martial arts fiction and media and its impact on Dragon Ball.

I know, I know: I'm all too painfully aware that this is all just ultimately lame-ass excuse-making for what is ultimately shoddy writing and negligent framing of exceedingly important information. But I'm saying all this to also illustrate to you all exactly just how very, very, VERY much this whole affair was so spur of the moment and how it really started out not at all as something intended for outsiders and people with no experience with any of this, but as something I was just doing only for myself to help me get through a particularly horrible time of pain and existential terror in my personal life.

I had to do a LOT of drastic re-framing in how I wrote it, especially throughout the earlier half of it (as well as adding a bunch more stuff in the latter chunk of it): I did the very, very best I could under the circumstances to make it all understandable and easy to follow for people who had absolutely NO prior experience with any of this stuff. I did the best I could, but obviously its still not anywhere close to perfect or ideal, and I want to thank Derek Padula very much for pointing out holes in the presentation and framing that I hadn't noticed: specifically that I didn't do anywhere near a good enough job at marking the clear distinction between grounded Kung Fu fiction and Wuxia, as well as which works cited within were which.

All I can ultimately say in my defense is that when you're as steeped in familiarity with so much of this stuff (and when the vast majority of your day to day thoughts are steeped in panicky fear and gut-wrenching existential terror about your health and your general future on top of that), it becomes VERY easy to take certain key details for granted as just being so obviously a given, including the distinction between Wuxia and grounded Kung Fu fiction: I simply took the difference between the two as so blatantly self-evident that some part of my subconscious didn't see it as worth commenting on (as I was juggling SO much other information as well on top).

I feel like I almost want to revisit this at some point and rewrite/re-explain certain portions to better clarify a lot of these points. Not sure if/when that'll be, but its something that I'm certainly considering doing, hopefully in the not too distant future.
DerekPadula wrote:The same logic applies to the misconception that Herms, Kei, myself, and others have, about you not intending to argue Toriyama intended Dragon Ball to be wǔxiá. If the thesis of your article is that ‘Dragon Ball is wǔxiá,’ then through logic by association it also conveys that you’re saying Toriyama intended his series to be a wǔxiá series. If you had instead stated that you were not arguing this, and added a caveat that, ‘at the very least, it ended up as a wǔxiá-like series by happenstance,’ this might have alleviated such reactions.
To comment on this particular issue a bit more: I think that "happenstance" is FAR too strong and misleading of a term that implies too much in the way of pure, random chance and accident. CLEARLY the parallels between Dragon Ball and Wuxia/Kung Fu fiction as a whole are WAY too stark and far too numerous and sepciffic to write the entire thing off (as a few people in the IRC chat have in previous months recently) as if literally this ENTIRE thing can simply be chalked up purely to one great big cosmic coincidence.

Its not. Not in the least bit. If someone genuinely thinks that the core-most narrative tenants and basics that Dragon Ball's entire framework hinges upon being so closely synonymous and parallel with Wuxia lore is all entirely just one big happy accident, then there's no other nice way to say this: that's just flagrantly, on-its-face idiotic and willfully ignorant.

Conversely however, I do agree, based on what we know of the guy, that Toriyama is in all likelihood probably not in the least bit some Rhodes Scholar on the topic of Wuxia lore and its wider cultural significance beyond the Japanese mainland. Its also just as likely (as Kei noted) that he very well may not know the word itself at all: something which I, once more perhaps mistakenly, took from the outset to be a given being that Wuxia is a Chinese word and all rather than Japanese. Though to be fair, Dragon Ball still contains an impressive amount of Chinese words and terminology for a Japanese work. So ultimately who knows, but I think there's enough evidence in the manga's cultural points of reference to show that its very possible that Toriyama might be at the very least a BIT more studied on the subject of martial arts fantasy storytelling lore from a more Chinese perspective than some of us might be tempted to give him credit for. That's a debatable point though ultimately.

I digress. The word I feel that probably best conveys the likely reality of this issue would certainly not at all be "happenstance" anymore than it'd be some sort of calculated, studied purposefulness: rather the word I'd use, as I've noted before, is "Osmosis". I think that when all's said and done, the impact of Wuxia is so strong and undeniable - even in the face of Toriyama's own silliness as an author - that the best and most likely reason for its presence is, to borrow an TVTropes term (much as I'm loathed to do so), "Pop Cultural Osmosis".

Again, unlike in much of mainstream North America, over in Asian territories the tropes and cliches of Wuxia fiction are a DEEPLY ingrained and indelible part of the broader popular culture. If you were born, raised in, and grew up in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, etc. then the odds are VERY likely, particularly if you are in ANY way media/pop culturally conscious (as we know for certain that Toriyama is) that SOME significant degree of the overall influence of Wuxia and Martial Arts storytelling narratives have likely seeped their way into your mind, if only from pure cultural osmosis.

As I've said, you don't have to be a scholarly expert on the academic history of Wuxia to write a reasonably competent and well executed Wuxia story if you're some random, nerdy person who lives in an Asian territory, anymore than you'd have to be, as an average Westerner, an expert or an academic on the histories of Marvel or DC Comics to write a reasonably assured and compelling superhero narrative.

These sorts of things are just that deeply baked into our various culture's collective pop cultural consciousnesses.
DerekPadula wrote:Regarding the issue of wǔxiá being unknown to Western Dragon Ball fans, and not seeing the connection between the two, it’s pretty simple. Wǔxiá is something that fans in the Western world have never encountered before. No parallel had ever been drawn between wǔxiá and Dragon Ball, so it comes as a big surprise when they see your post. It was even a shock to me, and I’ve studied Dragon Ball’s cultural roots every day for the last 13 years.

Dragon Ball Z started to become popular in 1998. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2001) is our primary exposure to the wǔxiá genre, and it didn’t look or feel anything like Dragon Ball. Afterward, Dragon Ball continued, and stuff like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon vanished from the Western pop culture scene, with only a few exceptions, such as The House of the Flying Daggers (2004). Hong Kong and Chinese mainland filmmakers were still producing such content, but mainstream America wasn't seeing it. In contrast, Hollywood filmmakers don't make wǔxiá films. So it shouldn't be too surprising that Westerners are unfamiliar with this genre, especially because it has a foreign name that is hard to pronounce and which no one in the West uses on a regular basis. Most of us didn’t grow up watching wǔxiá content, and even when introduced in the 2000s, it didn’t resemble Dragon Ball enough to ring any bells.
Hoo boy. There's a FUCKTON I have to say about all of this, but this probably isn't at all the thread for it.

All I will say about it is this much for the time being: as I mentioned in the write up (specifically the VERY long section detailing the modern media history of the genre) Wuxia had up until the year 2000, throughout much of the 1980s and 90s, gone through a TREMENDOUS degree of VAST stylistic changes. The 80s and 90s, the so-called "New Wave" era, was one of massive, MASSIVE amounts of experimentation and genre-hybridization (the details and reasons/cultural origins for which I went into in great detail in the write up).

Dragon Ball, as it so happened, had come up RIGHT SMACK during the mountain height peak of this era of Wuxia media. A LOT of what it does in terms of genre melding (especially during the Z portion) owes a LOT to this specific general zeitgeist of martial arts film and comic/literary media. None of this is in any way coincidental at all: the trend of fusing traditional Wuxia narratives and storytelling tropes with outside/foreign genres (sci fi, horror, cyberpunk, slapstick goofball comedy, etc.) was SO palpably overwhelming and inescapably ubiquitous during those decades that almost every other work within the genre that came out during those years were all feeding off of it in some form or degree or another.

The Hong Kong New Wave approach to Wuxia and its impact became to the genre was the rough equivalent of the impact that 1980s hardcore punk rock had on what would eventually evolve and mutate into the "grunge" sound of mainstream rock music in the 90s: even if you had NO idea the origins of where this style came from, the effects were VAST and far, far reaching to the point that literally EVERYONE was affected by it in one fashion or another.

For those of us who were already exposed to and were following various bits of Asian media (both Japanese and Hong Kong specifically) during those years, it all made perfect sense and felt generally of a piece with one another. So long as you were nerdily plugged into it enough, it wasn't very difficult whatsoever to trace where all this was coming from and where this was all going at the time.

Crouching Tiger meanwhile (and once more, this was all detailed to one extent or another in the main write up) marked a SHARP and abrupt turn away from all this. If any of Crouching Tiger feels unfamiliar and disconnected from something like DB in terms of its more immediately outward style and presentation (apart from one being animated and the other live action that is, obviously), that's because Dragon Ball is very, VERY much a product of a TOTALLY different era in wuxia media: the unhinged, crazed, hyper-cocaine-fueled genre and tonal mixing that was at its most fevered pitch across Wuxia (and even just Wuxia derivative) media all throughout the entirety of Asia for the better part of 20 or so years up till then.

Crouching Tiger was so notable (apart from being an introduction to the genre for so many here in America) for being such a stark palette cleanser that helped reset the whole paradigm and wash all of that away for a very, VERY long time afterward. Other noteworthy examples of Wuxia films that followed in its wake (including the one you cited, House of Flying Daggers) were following in a similar suit: bringing the genre ALLLL the way back to its most rigidly traditional ancient roots while intentionally throwing aside any and all traces of the quirky, bizarre, modernized trappings that had thoroughly consumed and helped define the genre for so much of the 80s and 90s: an era and style of wuxia upon which Dragon Ball, as a work of wuxia (or wuxia-derived) fiction itself, utterly lives and dies on.

In terms of the overall direction that Wuxia media had taken throughout much of the 2000s from Crouching Tiger and onward (i.e. the decade of media that the Toonami generation had largely come up in) Dragon Ball is VERY much anachronistic and a distinctive relic of a time in Asian pop culture and wuxia media from well long before then.
DerekPadula wrote:On a somewhat unrelated note, since you mentioned it, Heroes of the East was a fun movie. The martial arts choreography was well done, and there were a lot of creative surprises. I recommend it to anyone that is reading.
Seconding that. Heroes of the East is an outstanding classic, and just a fantastic martial arts film that I'd recommend to just about anybody, particularly those who hang around here and are so fixated on a work like Dragon Ball, which as a piece of martial arts media, shares more than its fair share of comedic sensibilities and stylistic quirks with Shaw films like Heroes of the East.
DerekPadula wrote:I didn’t mean anything personal by saying “Kunzait_83 admits he isn’t a scholar.”
I didn't necessarily take it as such, don't worry. Forgive me if the response came across as reactionary.
DerekPadula wrote:But by all means, if you have another one of these in store for us, please share it. They are unique and enlightening.
That's... oh boy. Yeah. About that.

I technically DO have I think one final Kunzait-style post to end all Kunzait-style posts left in me on the same rough scale as this one. It covers a BROAD range of topics, but ultimately its an examination and deconstruction of both my own 27 year long anime fandom (gah!) and 24 or so year long Dragon Ball fandom, as well as that of the broader modern, post-Cartoon Network fandom of the last 16 some-odd years.

In a weird way, I learned a LOT from my time spent here among a lot of you good folks. For better or worse, my time as a Kanz (formerly Daizex) regular wound up being one of several notable factors that has a surprisingly significant impact on me during the bulk of the mid to late 2000s. Certainly beyond what I could've concievably predicted, considering this is a fucking Dragon Ball site of all things. As such, there's a large part of me that wanted to talk very openly about a lot of that in this (hypothetical, future) post.

The idea would be for me to first go back and examine the earliest history of anime fandom in the U.S. (which goes back to well before I was even born) and how it evolved over time, how I got mixed up into it as early on as I did back in the day, what it was like to be a fan back then (from my own firsthand account at least), and then trace my own perspective of following the transition and transformation as the older guard of my generation from back then eventually gave way to the Toonami-bred millennial fans of today and comparing the core, fundamental differences between the two (of which there are SOOOOO many that are so stark its almost comical).

Its not at ALL an easy topic to write about considering the audience here: this is a site that is primarily made up of late-most 90s/early-most 2000s Cartoon Network-bred fans (both for Dragon Ball and for anime as a broader whole) and who generally tend to also be VERY exceedingly sensitive and defensive about it whenever the topic comes up. I'm on the other hand someone who is not only NOT in any way the least bit a part of that era, I'm also someone who has a LOT of strong, divisive, and ultimately VERY negative views and opinions about the overall whole of that generation of fandom's effect on the landscape and the long-term impact its had on anime in the West.

I want to be honest and thorough and not hold anything back while at the same time trying to be as respectful as humanly possible... but regardless of however delicately I can conceivably deliver this particular pill, that means that, considering the audience of this site, its probably going to have a whoooooole lot of stuff said in it that's pretty incendiary and challenges the very core nature of why a lot of people here ultimately got into anime at all in the first place.

I'll be perfectly frank, ever since I first posted the Wuxia thing, I've been struggling GREATLY (in the here and there interim where I'm not busy with other, vastly more important stuff) with writing it, and ultimately I'm not at all sure if I'll end up pulling the trigger on it: there's a whole, whole ton of other stuff of a great deal more priority on my plate IRL as it is. Time will tell I suppose. If it DOES ever end up coming to fruition, it certainly won't be as "fun" as this one here: but I can only hope it'll at least be enlightening to some small degree for at least some people here.

I'll say this much: if I do end up doing it (and that's certainly an "if"), I can only imagine that the blowback and response to it will be exceptionally awkward and uncomfortable all around. But ultimately I find myself continually coming back to it because I think there's a LOT of stuff in this topic that hasn't really been said (or at least not said enough nor in enough real examining detail) about a LOT of aspects of modern day anime/Dragon Ball fandom that I cannot help but view as being exceedingly dysfunctional, regressive, and ultimately self-defeating.

Some strong, heavy shit, that I can only find myself laughing at the fact that it all came out of such a daffy, ridiculous, stupid little magical kung fu show for Japanese children. The irony in that is in no way lost on me. :P
DerekPadula wrote:I updated my article as requested.
A great many (albeit belated) thanks for that. :)
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Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Dragon Ball's True Genre: We Need to Talk about Wuxia

Post by Kunzait_83 » Sat Jun 25, 2016 7:09 pm

Fun little minor tidbit I forgot to include in the original writeup.

In the original Zu Warriors, there's a moment where Ting Yin transfers a bunch of his Ki to Ming Chi via pressing his palms into his back. The transfer of such powerful energies all at once causes Ming Chi's chest/muscles to stretch and warp gruesomely for a little bit.

Image

Stop me if this reminds you of another certain moment in DBZ.

Image
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Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Dragon Ball's True Genre: We Need to Talk about Wuxia

Post by Kamiccolo9 » Sat Jun 25, 2016 7:15 pm

Well that's neat.

And gross.

But also neat :lol:
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Re: Dragon Ball's True Genre: We Need to Talk about Wuxia

Post by Lord Beerus » Sat Jun 25, 2016 7:47 pm

The closest we'll get to seeing a big breasted Namekian.

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Re: Dragon Ball's True Genre: We Need to Talk about Wuxia

Post by DragonBallFoodie » Sun Apr 04, 2021 6:25 am

Thank you Kunzait for a long, but entertaining and well-versed and worthwhile read.

I'd like to put this thread on a few other forums so that it attracts the interest of others.
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Re: Dragon Ball's True Genre: We Need to Talk about Wuxia

Post by Ten na nGael » Fri Apr 01, 2022 5:05 am

Kunzait,

Thank you for this very interesting thread. I recently read Dragonball, which I hadn't done since I was a child, and was struck by how Wuxia influenced the manga was. Something I didn't appreciate when I was younger. Your thread was really informative, especially for the character archetypes you mentioned. Also of course just the wealth of films I have to check out now. Your description here matched and complimented nicely the description of Wuxia I found in the tabletop RPG "Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades".

Dragonball strikes me now as a Wuxia manga mixed with Toriyama's Dr Slump humour and love of vehicles both modern and futuristic.

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Re: Dragon Ball's True Genre: We Need to Talk about Wuxia

Post by Asin » Fri Apr 01, 2022 6:34 pm

As much as I'm glad to see someone else appreciate Kanzenshuu's local essay writer extraordinaire, I would like to let you know that as far as I recall, thread necromancy isn't something really allowed much here on Kanzenshuu. Just letting you know.

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