cashew | Wednesday, October 30th, 2024

Second, will be busy hosting family.

Third, I'm kind of on the wrong fandom kick for generating fic. Right now I'm bouncing between HSR (although technically only running around in the 景枫/景恒 stuff), 《君子盟》 (兰砚知己), and 敖李敖 RPS. None of these things are inspiring me to write long fic. (Yes, I do intend to finish that one 凤求凤 effort...I'm just...building my vocabulary. Ahem.)

Fourth, I want the golden age of mysteries to come back again.

Meanwhile, as I'm ever so slowly slogging through the last quarter of 《少年歌行》, I'm seeing a lot of elements that also show up in HSR. 飞剑, sword nerds, elemental power associations, 药师 as the evil cult, evil cults existing, 剑首/剑魁, 以身为剑, five-man band... I know some of these are more generic storytelling tropes, but some stuff, like 药师, feels a little narrow and are possibly plagiarized ideas. Or just repeatedly copied to the point of meaninglessness. I don't know; clearly I haven't read enough modern Wuxia to figure out which are tropes and which are over-plagiarized proper nouns. Point is, I'm guessing 《少年歌行》 (the novel, which was initially published in 2017) was probably fairly influential (both in the ideas it invented and ideas it revitalized). There was a while when Wuxia was a bit of a dead genre, but then now it's everywhere again, which may be due to the novel's popularity.

(Or CGI is finally good enough that people can enjoy the power up eye candy instead of cringing at the really cheesy special effects.)

Again, I don't follow the genre evolution close enough to say one way or another. I'm just noticing a lot of repeating tropes/themes/ideas and it's like...who's copying whom?

And on a completely different note again, I've given up on reading web novels. Like, it's technically good writing, 100 points for style, but the content is so bland. Also, it's utterly baffling to me (and many viewers) why the production company bought the IP for 《张公案》 when the final product (《君子盟》) has nothing to do with the original work. Other than the names, nothing is the same. Backstory, personality, inter-personal dynamics, plot...pretty much everything is original. At this point, why still call it an adaptation and not just sell it as an original work? I'm so, so confused.