UltraInstinctRorikon wrote: ↑Thu Mar 04, 2021 12:27 am
While I’ve only addressed Hong Kong comics in particular here, the root of Kunzait_83’s argument that Dragon Ball is intended to be a wǔxiá series is also flawed. Not because it’s 100% wrong, but because Dragon Ball is a combination of countless different influences, and kung fu movies is only one of them, with wǔxiá being a subset of those films. You can argue that it’s a kung fu inspired series, for sure, but not that Toriyama intended it to be a wǔxiá series. The similarities are mostly by happenstance as he made the story up week to week. In part, through his subconscious sublimation of countless tropes and character archetypes as a result of watching thousands of hours of these films as he drew each chapter.
Since I was specifically named in that above quote, I'd like to note that at no point have I ever once made the claim that Dragon Ball took influence "solely" from Wuxia. Obviously the series has
numerous cross-cultural influences, including Western ones. Hell, I've even gone into exhaustive depth about how Wuxia ITSELF as a genre (even totally divorced from Dragon Ball) had eventually gone on to incorporate cross-cultural, Western influences throughout its modern day evolution (well long before DB itself ever came along in fact).
What I HAVE said though is that Wuxia encompasses the most fundamentally important backbone of DB's overall creative DNA. I singled it out as the most IMPORTANT and
central of its influences, but hardly anywhere close to its ONLY one.
For that matter (and its annoying that I keep having to repeatedly restate this, especially for well-read people like Padula) I also have never made the claim, nor even once inferred, that Toriyama was some sort of scholarly expert on Wuxia nor that he set out to make Dragon Ball with the specific and purposeful aim of making some highfalutin' statement on the genre.
What I HAVE said is that the tropes and themes of Wuxia are SO pervasive and widespread across much of East Asian culture, that someone like Toriyama can easily craft a Wuxia story without knowing a great deal of in-depth scholarly analysis about it, PURELY from cultural osmosis. Much like how an American who's never once watched a classic Western film nor knows anything about the genre's history or cultural roots on any kind of well-read level can very easily still write a competent enough and even reasonably authentic Western story purely through how deeply ingrained the genre's most important and fundamental tropes are, and have long been, in our culture's national psyche.
Because I'm a fucking dork, I actually have done my share of in-depth, analytical reading and study on Wuxia as a genre and its cultural roots and history, and the whole point of my sharing it with you guys on here back in 2015 was because A) this shit is critically important to Dragon Ball's creative DNA, regardless of how consciously, deeply knowledgeable of it on a literary level Toriyama is or was, and also because B) almost NO ONE that posts on here or contributes to this site or broader community for much of the past 20 someodd years now (post-FUNimation dub and Cartoon Network boom in popularity across the American mainstream at least) seemed to even be aware of the very EXISTENCE of this genre in even the most basic, and cursory fashion.
Thus, it was necessary to describe and outline the ENTIRE genre's basic fundamentals and history - which are absurdly dense and long, seeing as how its literally thousands of years old at this point, and when taken in its totality ranks as certainly among the oldest genres of fantasy storytelling in human history (and note while the NAME Wuxia is only about a couple hundred years old or so, the GENRE ITSELF is far, far, FAR older than that) - for an audience here who was aware of pretty much NONE of it, on ANY kind of conscious or unconscious level. Thus the absurd denseness of the original thread I made for it on here: most people here didn't know shit about
any of this, so I had to start quite literally from scratch in my rundown of even just its
basics.
The problem with rebuttals like Padula's (and that of a few other folks that I don't want to bother naming, because I don't have the patience or inclination to get into dumb internet beefs over this stuff) is that they rest on incredibly silly and blatantly not true assumptions about the central thesis of my statements on DB and Wuxia: that because I wrote so much detailed analysis of a foreign, unfamiliar genre (to this audience anyway) with a funny-sounding, weirdly spelled name, that must mean that I am inferring that Toriyama was some kind of literary and scholarly genius on the subject of Wuxia, and that I'm trying to project all this dense, pretentious artiness onto what is fundamentally a dumb, silly children's comic/cartoon. And no, I am not extrapolating that conclusion: I've had several notable people in this community state as much about my writing on this topic fairly blatantly.
The reality of course is that I've neither said nor inferred ANY of this at ANY time in a
single one of my posts on the matter, and in fact have repeatedly stressed quite the opposite in fact.
The reality is that Wuxia is an INCREDIBLY mainstream, populist, and crowdpleasing genre in its native Asian territories (much like superhero films and Hollywood blockbusters are over in our neck of the woods), whose entire history of content spans everywhere from high, middle, and low brow examples... with Dragon Ball quite clearly embodying the latter-most of those three. Like an American who might try to write a Cowboy or Vampire or Warewolf story for children despite probably not knowing a great deal about those genres on any kind of academic level, Toriyama is a nerdy pop culture junkie who mainlined a whole ton of Asian media throughout his life... among them including obviously a great deal of martial arts (of both a grounded/traditional and Wuxia/fantasy variety) movies, shows, what have you.
Thus, from the osmosis stew of his own native culture came Dragon Ball, which drew primarily upon Journey to the West, Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee films, the Shaw and Harvest canon, and other assorted martial arts and Wuxia-heavy material... alongside a ton of other stuff like Terminator, Cinderella, and various other Western action and sci fi films of the day. No deeply-read academic knowledge of ANY kind required here whatsoever... just an abiding love of broad, silly, cheesy genre movies and TV.
The problem is what is culturally ingrained and deeply entrenched in the broad, mainstream, collective subconscious of one culture on one end of the globe will sometimes (as it certainly is here) be totally alien, foreign, and unknown entirely to another culture on the other side of the globe. Unfamiliarity breeds exoticism, which carries with it (for some folks anyway) an air of high minded pretentiousness, regardless of whether or not any sort of high minded pretentiousness is in fact actually present in the first place. Hell, Japanese anime itself as a broader medium is no stranger to this whatsoever here in the U.S., especially during the earlier periods of its crossover onto our shores.
And clearly with Dragon Ball, high minded pretentions are very much NOT a factor, as it certainly isn't with a tremendously large amount of Wuxia content that's been out there well long before, during, and well long after Dragon Ball came and made its mark.
tldr: Just because I wrote a lot of incredibly detailed, in-depth writings on the scope and history of Wuxia as a genre does NOT mean that Toriyama has nor that he even
needed to have a similarly encyclopedic breadth of knowledge on the genre, given his cultural surroundings, in order to write a story like DB, that is primarily Wuxia at its core (i.e. martial arts fantasy fiction heavily steeped in Chinese Daoist mysticism) first and foremost above all else... alongside a gigantic stew of other contemporary influences as he pulled this shit out of his ass week to week for 11 years straight.
My writing in a lot depth about Wuxia does NOT mean that I therefore think or claim that either Toriyama is a fountain of academic, scholarly knowledge on the subject, nor that the series is infused with far more depth than it is, nor that all of DB's OTHER myriad of genre influences are somehow NOT there or are somehow NOT important in any way.
NONE of that is true, and at no point have I ever once even came CLOSE to making those claims.
