Drawing on Taoist notions like “self-cultivation” - through which sages sought immortality and transcendence - they created an alternate, parallel universe, complete with its own language and logic. In “The Analects,” Confucius explicitly avoids discussions of “extraordinary things.” In zhiguai and xianxia, the extraordinary is everything.īy the late 1990s, Chinese artists and storytellers were mixing elements of xianxia with the typical “swords and magic” of Western fantasy novels like J.R.R. Zhiguai - and its descendent, xianxia - told tales and myths of supernatural phenomena that mainstream Confucian society preferred to ignore or suppress. Literally meaning “records of anomalies” or “tales of the strange,” zhiguai literature originated during the third century AD. Xianxia is a cousin of sorts to wuxia, with both genres tracing their modern roots back to Xiang Kairan’s 1923 novel “The Peculiar Knights-Errant of the Jianghu.” But while wuxia authors preferred the down-to-earth and unpretentious styles of classic novels like “Water Margin,” xianxia was more indebted to a different, even older part of the Chinese canon: zhiguai. However, even as wuxia culture was reaching new heights of popularity on the Chinese mainland, the influence of xianxia began to spread, first online, and gradually into mainstream Chinese culture. Its popularity was further boosted by a wave of Hong Kong and Taiwanese film, television, comic book, and video game adaptations in the 1980s and 1990s. In the early years of the People’s Republic, the genre’s influence was limited to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese diaspora communities, but when the mainland opened its borders and markets in the 1980s, wuxia novels quickly appeared on shelves across China. Literary masters like Louis Cha, better known as Jin Yong, crafted escapist fantasies of righteous warriors who traveled the land, righting wrongs and exacting justice with their martial arts skills. Wuxia literature emerged in its modern form during the Republican era (1912-1949), but it’s in the 1950s that it became a cultural phenomenon. In the 1990s, as Chinese developers gradually transitioned from reskins to original games, no literary genre was more popular with Chinese audiences or more widely adapted than wuxia martial arts novels. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, top international titles were routinely “ reskinned” with superficial elements drawn from China’s literary canon. In its infancy, the Chinese video game industry was heavily dependent literary adaptations for both content and stylistic flair. And while wuxia never fully disappeared - it’s particularly common in Western game studio portrayals of East Asia - xianxia dominates the Chinese market - not just in video games, but also in online literature, television, and film.Ī woman holds a copy of “The Legend of Sword and Fairy III Plus,” 2018. Just to give two examples, the wildly popular mobile games Honor of Kings and Onmyoji are both influenced heavily by xianxia. In the two decades since, the center of the industry has migrated from Taiwan to the mainland, while xianxia fantasy themes have overtaken wuxia martial arts stories as the industry’s bread and butter. The contrasting market performance of these two games proved to be a watershed moment in the development of the Chinese video game industry. The two-dimensional Legend of Sword and Fairy II, produced by Softstar’s Taiwan office, stayed true to the first installment’s wuxia martial arts theme and aesthetic, while the three-dimensional Legend of Sword and Fairy III, produced by Softstar’s Shanghai subsidiary, had a dramatically different look based on xianxia, or “chivalric fantasy.”Įven at the time, Softstar’s decision to release drastically different sequels to an eight-year-old game in such quick succession was perplexing, but the market’s verdict was clear: Whereas the wuxia-themed second installment was met with a tepid popular and critical response, the high fantasy-inspired third installment proved wildly popular, selling hundreds of thousands more copies and scoring significantly higher on review aggregators like Douban. Although the two sequels were released in a span of months, they bore little resemblance to each other. In 2003, Taiwan-based video game developer Softstar released two follow-ups to its 1995 hit The Legend of Sword and Fairy.
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