Taiwan Wuxia Fiction Clichés
by Jin Yong
For the last six months I’ve been reading a lot of wuxia novels. Recently there hasn’t been much wuxia novel output from Hong Kong authors, but on the Taiwan side it’s been surging like a storm, works emerging one after another. I read this kind of fiction exceptionally quickly, reading two books a night, each book between ten and twenty volumes. So the reason i can read these so fast is very simple, it’s because the novels’ plots are all pretty much the same, the stories formulaic, rarely seeing something new when flipping through them.
The following plots can be found in the great majority of Taiwan wuxia novels:
- A “dashing” young xia’s parents are killed by an enemy, so he is forced to roam the jianghu and undergo many adventures.
- Lots and lots of lady xia love him, among them will definitely be a licentious girl with the nickname of “Peach Blossom Something-or-other”, and there will be a lady xia disguised as a guy. This xia will certainly be drugged with an aphrodisiac and won’t be able to help himself from getting involved with one of the lady xia, “making a serious mistake”.
- The backbone of the story will be vying for a secret manual of the martial world or some rare jianghu treasure.
- This young xia will definitely obtain a secret martial arts manual left behind by an extraordinary person from a previous generation, and he will train until his martial arts is unmatched under the heavens, and the manual left behind will definitely have the words “left for one who is fated to receive it”.
- The young xia will definitely incur the favor of a senior who will help him open up his Conception and Governing vessels, get through a life-or-death training trial that will increase his strength one-, two-, or threefold.
- The xia’s antagonist will definitely be a master of a heretical school, some Demon Lord, Divine Lord, Ancestor, or old woman, all written the same, their appearance as grotesque as their martial arts, but with unexceptional personalities.
- Masters from prominent schools like Wudang, Shaolin, Kunlun, Kongtong, etc., will, when faced with the young xia, become completely worthless mediocrities.
The plots are mostly the same, and the language used to write them is also clichéd, stuff like “if it’s a blessing it’s not a disaster, if it’s a disaster you can’t avoid it”, “felt like ghosts were everywhere”, “a rare bud of the martial world”, none of them used by Hong Kong wuxia novelists. Wuxia fiction has been all the rage for less than ten years, but on the Taiwan side it seems to be even more popular than in Hong Kong. But in ten years for so many clichés and formulas to have already become so deeply rooted is really astounding.
Ming Pao, April 25, 1963