Did someone else got the point of hating Chinese troupes? Why?

[dvelasquez]

Just as the title says, did someone else here got so tired of Chinese troupes that they even hate it? If yes, why or how did you get to that point?

I originally liked Chinese novels' troupes. But after reading and reading, I just got to the point of actually hating them, in a weird sense even. Even when the premise of a novel looks interesting, once I start reading and see something that resembles a Chinese troupe, I'll stop reading almost immediately, unless it's something not that obvious.

For the record, said troupes are:
- Cultivation (Takes out of the list almost every novel in Webnovel xD)
- CCP/Chinese racial hate speech (you know, the typical fuck USA, Japan, Korea. China is the best! Of course, this is only when things go over the top)
- MC Copy/Paste (There's a particular trait that I've found in multiple Chinese novels, that their characters are basically a copy/paste a lot of times. Like Japanese Isekai's characters. At first, they somehow look like persons, but then they feel like something bland, unidimensional characters that basically do, and even act the same as all the other Chinese characters.)
- The waifus are (in my opinion) more useless than Japanese isekai novels. They always paint them as these super-powerful girls at the beginning, but after entering the novel's harem, they become useless trophies, that in some case just gets abandoned as the protagonist goes to another realm to find more waifus. The only good part is that they at least have waifus (and do stuff with them) and not like the freaking Japanese mc's that act like a retard when women are around.
- Same story/development, different names. Now, this is what really irks me the most, and it's the fact that somehow, reading some Chinese novels can almost literally turn into reading all of them. You basically re-read the same old story, just that with different names for cultivation levels, names, cities, worlds, and enemies, but in the end, the essence is the same. Even when reading a novel of 3.000 chapters, the story repeats itself arc after arc, and you just end up reading the same story of the beginning, but with different power levels. This is the reason that I really get bored after reading a couple of arcs, as it's the same story again and again. (of course, there're exceptions, like always)

 

[Temple]

Yes. (Applicable to the other copy past tropes too in other overdone genres.)

As for getting to that point, I think it's just years of reading webnovels and refining one's taste as time goes by. Like for example, more than a decade ago I started with wuxia. I just read it off some forums with machine translations that fried a few of my brain cells each time. And I enjoyed it very much. It is power fantasy, it is new and fresh (to me), there are tons of chapters, and so on.

But after years of reading it, I just grew tired of it and/or read better stories that influenced my tastes. I think this just a normal journey for a webnovel reader. It gets to a certain point where you just get tired of it and start looking for "other kinds of food." Most people are very forgiving of bad tropes if it's the genre they like (like me). It's getting tired of the genre as a whole (including bad tropes) that made me move on.

 

[SternenklarenRitter]

I get frustrated by some of them because there's so many euphemistic insults that are hard to differentiate from the character's specie and name. There might for example be a character named "white lily" who is called a "black lotus" and transforms into a "salty fish." That's too hard for me to follow. Aside from that, power scaling is incomprehensible and character development is often very poor. I need more filler!

 

[Moonpearl]

I technically still enjoy them, but I read so much of them that they can now make me feel physically sick - like when you eat too much cake and someone offers you another.

Unless it's an extreme inversion or a parody, I now try to avoid them.

 

[Redemit]

My personal most hated Troup is the one where there's always a level beyond what the MC thought was the most powerful and only when they become 'the most powerful" do they learn about it and realize that they've basically got to start from the bottom again and everyone just considers them to be a nobody just for them to reach the "peak" again and again and again till they basically become a god only to learn that there's more powerful gods and they're the weakest amongst them and it repeats

 

[Biggest-Kusa-Out-There]

Do you dare, junior?

 

[atgongumerki]

I stopped reading Chinese novels when I found better things to read: ScribbleHub

PS: I have a theory about that last point: as far as I know Chinese web-authors are under a lot of pressure to release a lot of words/chapters, and having to write a lot can easily stifle creativity

 

[Nakakure]

You can replace the mc name with another mc and you probably never notice the difference, the plot is mostly same even in same novel. The one mc that really give me impact is Qing Shui from Ancient Strengthening Technique, that the first time i see MC who breakthrough after he saw his first children. It even make me tear up a bit, even then the plot is similiar. recently i discover that Japanese novel is so Polar in their r15 and r18, some of their r18 MC is so scum.

 

[K5Rakitan]

I think you might enjoy stories with a female MC.

 

[NotaNuffian]

 

[Zirrboy]

The same happens to just about any genre you read in excess. Your standards rise as the remaining material dwindles.
CNs are rather quick to show the patterns, though, I admit.

Not sure about calling "Cultivation" a trope, though. Unless you also think magic is one ig.

 

[Mandark]

I agree with a lot your points. I think the main thing for me was that cultivation novels sat on the edge of what I knew and what was new. My first CN was Coiling Dragon, which blends western and eastern fantasy very well.

After that I wanted to read more eastern fantasy and because it was new to me, I forgave a LOT of inconsistencies, inconsistencies which now I can’t tolerate.

For example, I hate works like Martial God Asura. Those worlds are so over-the-top that they are just stupid, if humans acted like they’re portrayed in those worlds (ergo, petty, self-centered, cowards and liars) there shouldn’t even be civilizations for these murder-hobo MC’s to terrorize. AT BEST you would have blood-related family clans separated by wide areas of wilderness. People would be so xenophobic that you would never have ‘cities’ to have the MC travel to.

There’s also the nationalistic stuff. Whenever I see that I just stop reading/supporting those novels. It’s amazing how much western readers will forgive a CN author when they expound the greatness of han people compared to all foreigners, whereas, if a western reader read a western book who did the same thing they would label that author racist.

 

[Okay]

At first, when I first discovered cultivation novels, I was like,”Hell Yeah! I have more genres I can explore and read! Plus more chapters!” I’m an avid reader, and I can basically get addicted to books I like.

At first, I only read manga with cultivation. It was a few months later I discovered the manga was actually a novel turned into a manga. My first webnovel was Tales if Herding Gods. The start was good, but the arcs just kept on repeating and repeating itself, like the MC has already visited hell ( He was alive still. He somehow magically travelled into hell ), fought Demi-gods, defeated them, fought the gods, defeated them, and at around the 700s, the fucking ‘ancient ruins’ started changing! (I’m not gonna explain what the ancient ruins are) and he did all that while collecting girls in his harem.

I dropped it. I only remembered that novel because of how much I hated it (it’s part of the reason why I hate male MCs so much. The other reason is harems, and those ‘mr CEO’ manga and novels). I later discovered female MCs, in a cultivation genre. At that time, I LOVED the cultivation genre, so I read a whole bunch. But the main story line kept repeating and repeating, and the story line was: female orphan genius assassin/doctor/thief that somehow manages to learn ancient Chinese medicine in the modern world died by organization/lover/best friend betrayed them, got reincarnated into a cultivation trash’s body with trashy relatives, loads of face slapping while making astronomical speed in cultivating, meets a two faced male lead, fall in love, cultivate more, more realms of cultivation after another, become the highest god of their realm, and live a happily ever after.

Yeah. I got bored. Real bored. Then I started reading comedy, sci-fi, zombie apocalypse (got hooked on that genre for a while), fantasy, iseki, and all the while avoiding novels with male MCs, then found Yuri. Now I’m reading that. I wonder, what will my next genre addiction be?

 

[Jemini]

The cultivation concept definitely has it's appeal, the worst thing about cultivation worlds is the personality tropes of the people in the world rather than the power system itself. I have seen a few western-written cultivation words that do things FAR better than the Chinese because they escape from all those tropes and manage to successfully re-imagine the social structure of the world.

The most appealing thing about cultivation worlds actually IS the fact that so many things are just SO much stronger than the MC, but there is also the promise of the MC someday gaining the ability to overcome those foes. However, the time-line toward clearing that hurdle is often very long and painful. It's not just a few hours of grinding against weaker enemies like in liteRPG power systems.

The down-sides of the Chinese written versions is just how samy and predictable they are, and how shallow the writing is.

You always have a social structure that, close to the bottom of the power scale, seems so well designed to protect new cultivators that you need to come up with some pretty contrived ways to actually expose them to danger and create dramatic tension. Then, at the higher ends of the power scale, there's just so much of a cut-throat attitude that it makes zero logical sense. You would think people who are effectively immortal would value their lives more, but they are so quick to kill, which promotes a kill-or-be-killed culture.

Anyone with THAT kind of wisdom of years would have long since learned that showing mercy is the best way to keep YOURSELF from harm because it promotes a culture where you don't have to fear an assassin in every shadow. It's not an absolute protection, but it allows you to make allies. And having a large enough number of allies means that you have protection if anyone actually DOES come after you. Your alliance will just come down on the poor fool like a cascade. This will keep the undesirables in line, and thus increase the culture of security.

That's the thing rulers IN THE REAL WORLD figured out a long time ago.

(This, BTW, is also why the ancient world actually found the Jews to be the single most terrifying thing in that part of the world. Most normal people played by these rules, the Jews were the type of people to break the rules in places like Jerico where they kill every man, woman, child, and animal. If you are facing most other forces, you can expect to have a surrender accepted or defeat only means your soldiers are killed. The Jews would go on to kill everyone though. To a lesser degree, it's like how everyone fears ISIS now days. But, using this old testament Jews for the example should show how this culture of violence can't last. Over the generations, the Jews went from the most terrifying bunch of death-loving psychos to one of the most peaceful and enlightened intelligent religious groups out there.)

Another problem with the violence in cultivation novels is that it's all thematically based on enlightenment. Enlightenment normally means becoming more peaceful. So, why is it that cultivators always somehow become the most violent people in the world?

 

[The_3rd_Book]

I've noticed some countries have patterns. Japan has an abundance of isekai. For me, isekai represents the epitome of change. Hopefully for the better. Korea has gates that open all over the world. I see this as change too, but not as drastic as isekai. It's still familiar. Chinese novels tend to have a character on the road to ultimate power. I believe this shows how they are cultivated to collectively strive for power. The point is they seem to show a certain view point depending on where it is from. While my take on the collective psychology of these countries may differ from yours it's pretty obvious that looking at the same views over, and over again can be annoying. Because of that I like to rotate between different nationalities. It keeps it from getting to repetitive.

 

[Anon_Y_Mousse]

Another problem with the violence in cultivation novels is that it's all thematically based on enlightenment. Enlightenment normally means becoming more peaceful. So, why is it that cultivators always somehow become the most violent people in the world?

I think AWE addressed this quite well. In the novel, the MC is somewhat of a pacifist, and after a bloody war, he asks the sect leader why there's so much violence if people cultivate to attain immortality.
The sect leader basically said something along the lines of "people cultivate to attain the dao, but the means are limited, so they have to fight for resources" The cultivation system promotes "strong cull the weak".
Basically, cultivators are a bunch of homeless people fighting for drugs.

 

[Vnator]

My personal most hated Troup is the one where there's always a level beyond what the MC thought was the most powerful and only when they become 'the most powerful" do they learn about it and realize that they've basically got to start from the bottom again and everyone just considers them to be a nobody just for them to reach the "peak" again and again and again till they basically become a god only to learn that there's more powerful gods and they're the weakest amongst them and it repeats

Honestly that just sounds like a metaphor for the futility of trying to become the richest or most powerful, there are always richer people out there and it's not worth devoting your entire life to something that isn't even going to make you happy. Or a metaphor for Sisyphus.

 

[Jemini]

I think AWE addressed this quite well. In the novel, the MC is somewhat of a pacifist, and after a bloody war, he asks the sect leader why there's so much violence if people cultivate to attain immortality.
The sect leader basically said something along the lines of "people cultivate to attain the dao, but the means are limited, so they have to fight for resources" The cultivation system promotes "strong cull the weak".
Basically, cultivators are a bunch of homeless people fighting for drugs.

That really doesn't solve the dissonance. While it provides an in-world genre explanation, it does absolutely nothing to help the fact that it is thematically just plain wrong to have this in the genre to start with.

At the very least, the pacifists should be several times more powerful and evolve more quickly than the violent ones. That would solve the thematic issues somewhat, but then it would create the issue that it would give the violent ones less reason to be violent and thus we are back to the initial point. When thinking in thematically appropriate terms, there is absolutely no way to justify all the violence in Chinese written cultivation novels.

Western written sources solve this problem because the western written ones largely move away from the daoist aspects of the concept, shifting it more to other types of body self-improvement that are not so tied to spiritual growth and peace in their origins. Mostly, this is a product of the outsider's perspective. Westerners are more able to see the problems that the Chinese are blind to by the fact that they're constantly steeping in it.

 

[FaultedCell]

Just as the title says, did someone else here got so tired of Chinese troupes that they even hate it? If yes, why or how did you get to that point?

I originally liked Chinese novels' troupes. But after reading and reading, I just got to the point of actually hating them, in a weird sense even. Even when the premise of a novel looks interesting, once I start reading and see something that resembles a Chinese troupe, I'll stop reading almost immediately, unless it's something not that obvious.

For the record, said troupes are:
- Cultivation (Takes out of the list almost every novel in Webnovel xD)
- CCP/Chinese racial hate speech (you know, the typical fuck USA, Japan, Korea. China is the best! Of course, this is only when things go over the top)
- MC Copy/Paste (There's a particular trait that I've found in multiple Chinese novels, that their characters are basically a copy/paste a lot of times. Like Japanese Isekai's characters. At first, they somehow look like persons, but then they feel like something bland, unidimensional characters that basically do, and even act the same as all the other Chinese characters.)
- The waifus are (in my opinion) more useless than Japanese isekai novels. They always paint them as these super-powerful girls at the beginning, but after entering the novel's harem, they become useless trophies, that in some case just gets abandoned as the protagonist goes to another realm to find more waifus. The only good part is that they at least have waifus (and do stuff with them) and not like the freaking Japanese mc's that act like a retard when women are around.
- Same story/development, different names. Now, this is what really irks me the most, and it's the fact that somehow, reading some Chinese novels can almost literally turn into reading all of them. You basically re-read the same old story, just that with different names for cultivation levels, names, cities, worlds, and enemies, but in the end, the essence is the same. Even when reading a novel of 3.000 chapters, the story repeats itself arc after arc, and you just end up reading the same story of the beginning, but with different power levels. This is the reason that I really get bored after reading a couple of arcs, as it's the same story again and again. (of course, there're exceptions, like always)

Yes, most CN novels will go like this,

-MC is the Weakest/Poorest/unknowledgeable among the Academy/Realm/Society/Apocalypse or so

Then in next chapter he'll have the Plot Armor- System/Reincarnation/Master

And then he'll be the Strongest/Smartest because of his System/Master or because he got Reincarnated

Then girls will be around him/following him

And then he'll be marrying one/or going together with one

Then he'll be stronger again

Someone will envy him or jealous to him

They'll fight

He'll win

He'll be famous in the Academy/Realm/Society/Apocalypse then he'll be going to be together with one or five more girls

Then the girls won't fight cuz they are h0rny

Then boom gonna get stronger again

Then gonna get stronger

Then a Person who's courting death

The MC will just be dumb as he gets stronger

Then repeat the same sh1t again and again until the System ends,

 

[Reisinling]

My most hated chinese trope is...
Getting into the novel, and reading it for 300 chapters only to find out it got banned/censored, and the author either disappears, or gets depressed/angry and stops updating. Yey!