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vintagegeekculture · 3 years

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The Chinese Cultural Inspirations for Dragon Ball Z and Super

Journey to the West was only the beginning.

A lot of people are vaguely aware that Dragon Ball was inspired by Chinese culture and Hong Kong Kung Fu movies and novels, but are unaware of how deep and long lasting it goes. The Japanese spent the 1980s fascinated by China, which opened up from being a closed society for decades in 1978; the most famous human being in Japan in the 80s was either Michael Jackson or Jackie Chan.

In fact, a lot of people commonly believe that the Chinese action movie and Kung Fu novel cultural and media influence on Dragon Ball ended very early on. This is untrue. Sure, we started to see qipaos and cheongsams less frequently when they headed to West City, but it absolutely did not finish, because there’s tons of influence to see even as impossibly late as Dragon Ball Super. Interestingly, I don’t think any of these point of inspirations have been pointed out before, mainly because a lot of Chinese adventure novels are simply not available in English.

The Piccolo/Gohan plot was inspired by the Chinese action novel “Heavenly Sword and Dragon Sabre.”

Okay, tell me if you’ve heard this story before: a truly demonic, weird looking monster villain is defeated by a martial arts hero, but by circumstance, is forced into training his greatest enemy’s young son. The villain trains the young boy, the son of his enemy, in martial arts and over time, becomes like a second father or uncle to him and his family, putting the boy in his “evil” sect, and thanks to his love of his rival’s son, this baddie turns over a new leaf and goes from evil to just…grumpy, and becomes a loyal, though gruff, ally of the boy.

Of course, the events of Heavenly Sword and Dragon Sabre are a bit different from Dragon Ball in details. The Lion King becomes Wuji’s teacher because they are both stranded together on an island after a shipwreck, for instance, and he is blinded and made vulnerable. Also, the Lion King wasn’t so much evil so much as he was misunderstood by the orthodox martial world. However, in broad outlines, this trajectory for a face turn (becomes friends with his greatest enemy’s son, and becomes like a second father to him as he trains him, causing the villain to become a gruff good guy and ally) is essentially from one of the most famous Chinese novels ever written in the 1960s.

Oh, and while we’re at it, Gohan is likewise inspired by another character from a Louis Cha novel: the Prince of Dali Duan Yu in the Kung Fu novel Demigods and Semi-Devils. The Prince in that novel is a naïve, pacifistic scholar who prefers books to fighting, and who was raised to be timid and avoid combat, absolutely out of step with his family, all of whom are martial artists and warriors. In fact, the beginning of the story is the prince gets incredibly lost in the wilderness, where the hopelessly naïve prince is utterly out of his depth, with all the robbers and scary beasts, and needs to be saved by real martial artists that protect him like fairy godparents. He spends the first part of the story running away from everything, scared as hell. However, by circumstance, he has naturally high power he cannot fully initially control, and eventually realizes that even scholars and others who hate fighting have to sometimes become fighters to protect those they love.

The Duan Yu part of Demigods and Semi-Devils was made into a film, the Battle Wizard, which was reviewed by PewDiePie. The Dragonball similarities went over his head because, honestly, PewDiePie does not strike me as a perceptive person.

Hit was based on the screen persona of Chow Yun Fat.

Chow Yun Fat was a Hong Kong cinema superstar who was to director John Woo what Robert de Niro was to Martin Scorsese. There are three giveaways that Hit was based on Chow Yun Fat. One, he’s an assassin, same as Chow Yun Fat’s character in the Killer, and is even given a sequence that’s a John Woo homage with an assassination in an office building with guns pulled on an empty elevator in an act of misdirection. Second, he’s wearing the single piece of clothing Chow Yun Fat is associated with, a black trenchcoat (fun fact: in Hong Kong today, trenchcoats are called Brother Mark Coats, after Chow Yun Fat’s character in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow). Third, his power is essentially bullet time, a visual technique refined by John Woo in Hong Kong in the 80s and 90s in his gunplay triad movies starring Chow Yun Fat (what, you think the Wachowskis invented it?).

The Goku/Vegeta relationship is from “Legend of the Condor Heroes.”

Here’s a story you might have heard before. It’s about two rivals, but by circumstance, one is raised in the wilderness beyond civilization, where he becomes an honest and goodhearted, though overly naive bumpkin, martial arts prodigy. The other is raised a wealthy prince by a conquering enemy, who grows up to also become an armor wearing martial arts expert, but also a cunning, arrogant, emotionally distant sociopath.

The similarities go into their love lives, too. The unsophisticated bumpkin hero is betrothed to a daughter of a powerful bearded barbarian king against his will, while the one hint of vulnerability and loss of emotional detachment in the otherwise sociopathic prince, the crack in his smirky arrogance, is that he loves a girl he otherwise pretends to hate, and even fathers a child with her who becomes a main character later.

This is Guo Jing and Yang Kang from Legend of the Condor Heroes. The most fascinating similarity, and proof that female psychology is the same all over the world, is that the fangirls love the emotionally distant, arrogant, and sexy/evil prince (remember when Rhonda Rousey said her first crush was Vegeta?). Girls everywhere love bad boys and sexy villains, and oh boy, do they love Prince Yang Kang. I think you can probably guess who all the fan art is about for Legend of the Condor Heroes, and what ship is the most popular.

I have to emphasize that Legend of the Condor Heroes, which came out in the 1950s-60s, is possibly the most widely read novel by the most widely read novelist on earth - the sales on that dwarf Twilight and Harry Potter. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say nearly every Chinese person, even if they never read it, knows who these characters are. In fact, Yang Kang and Guo Jing from Condor Heroes are basically repeated over and over in Asian, Chinese, and Japanese culture. Does the unsophisticated but gifted martial arts prodigy bumpkin hero, and the glib, arrogant wealthy prince rival remind you of….another duo of rivals?

Gohan/Videl comes from Little Dragon Maiden

One of the most important and influential Martial Arts novels of all time is “Return of the Condor Heroes.” A sequel to Condor Heroes, this time, the main character is the teenage son of one of the main characters from the first novel. It gets even more familiar from there.

“Return of the Condor Heroes” was about a martial arts couple who are also master and student, the same age but vastly different in experience and skill so one somehow seems “older,” and they fall in love because the circumstances of training together requires they spend lots of time together and become intimate. The training story and the love story are exactly the same in “Return of the Condor Heroes.” The dead giveaway one story inspired the other is that in both, the most significant training sequence is one where the master teaches the student how to fly (though Return used a chamber of sparrows for lightness Kung Fu).

There are some differences of course – obviously in Return of the Condor Heroes, the genders of teacher and student are flipped from Gohan and Videl (it’s the Little Dragon Maiden who is a powerful teacher, and the boy who is the student). It was the girl (Videl) who was a rebellious delinquent in Dragon Ball Z, when it was the opposite in the novel, true. But it was obvious this story was in the back of the creator’s mind as a way to combine Kung Fu with the love story, by making teacher and student lovers.

Addendum: hey, remember that awesome movie Kung Fu Hustle, the one Hong Kong movies normies have seen? Well, remember the landlord and landlady? The landlady was named Xiao Lung Nu, or Little Dragon Maiden, and her husband was named Yang Guo – the same as the main characters in Return of the Condor Heroes. It was a joke that went over the heads of Westerners, by giving these names of attractive and naïve young people in love with each other to a surly, bitter, arguing and chain smoking middle aged couple who don’t give a damn.

Going Super Saiyan comes from “Reincarnated” aka “Bastard Swordsman.”

Stop me if this sounds familiar: a terrifying warlord tyrant prone to killing underlings who displease him has achieved a level of skill and cultivation so tremendous nobody can stop him. But there is one, and only one, thing he fears and that can defeat him: a long-lost legendary skill that nobody has achieved in recent memory, that includes a supernatural combat power transformation that turns the hair light to indicate it worked.

This is “Silkworm Skill” from Reincarnated aka Bastard Swordsman, a novel and TV series from Hong Kong in the early 1980s. Of course, there are differences. To get the power boost and new hair color, the hero has to jump in a cocoon he weaves himself. In fact, the scene is so well known that they actually have it on the poster.

(To those saying “Super Saiyan turns your hair blonde, not white” my response is that it turns hair white, or uncolored, in the comic book.)

The idea of your hair turning white to indicate a new supernatural combat transformation or martial state wasn’t created by Bastard Swordsman, though – though it is the best example and probably the one most familiar to a 1980s audience due to the hugely popular books and TV series. For an older example, a famous Chinese movie based on a folktale is “Bride With the White Hair,” about a bride who’s hair turns white when she is betrayed, in her anger, she becomes less a woman and more a supernatural creature of vengeance (interesting that anger should be the means to unlock it).

#dragon ball z #china #kung fu #martial arts #anime

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ohnobjyx · 4 years

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To the snowy summit side by side

红尘中毁誉得失如何去量?

Part 7: And now... what?

This is a post long overdue. I must admit, this is the most difficult one, so I was putting it off, reading again and again what I had already written and browsing through the internet to try and get the most complete picture.

Disclaimer: in this case, almost all of the post is my personal opinion (I tried to keep the previous post objective). I’m biased because of the XZ friendly content I’m usually exposed to and by my own views of their situation. Open to discussion, but please make sure you’ve enough information to do so.

Let’s go back to anon’s original ask:

Hello could you give us an update on xz's situation? I know we*bo and his studio has taken some steps recently but how has this affected public opinion on xz? Has it improved/ are more people favoring him or has it gotten worse?

I think I have been answering your first question in the past posts. However, about the next two:

When I was compiling information and writing the previous posts, a song kept coming back again and again to my head, specifically, this part of the lyrics:

红尘中毁誉得失如何去量?

In the mortal world, how can praise or condemnation, success and failure be measured?

(Yes, it’s from WuJi-无羁)

Innocence

What happened to XZ was a combination of incredibly bad luck, strenuous social circumstances (the pandemic), high stress in the public and a set of underlying issues that had been festering for a long time.

From being a celebrity on the way up, he suddenly became a scapegoat for a conflict he hadn’t caused and the receiver of a lot of senseless hate. He didn’t do anything from start to finish in the 2/27, but ended up the most affected from it, as the consequences reverberated all the way from March to July.

Because XZ didn’t ask the author to write such a fanfic. He didn’t request for it to be taken down. He didn’t ask his fans to report anything. And he didn’t have anything to do with ao3 being banned in the country as a response. From start to finish, he didn’t participate in any of it.

Many of the analysis I’ve watched/read determine that the cause of the problem were his fans. One of the bloggers even said that “his fans are the ones that have hindered his career the most”.

But, from my point of view, the saying of “two people can’t have an argument if one of them doesn’t want to” also applies here. From start to finish, the issue was filled with overreactions and exaggerated responses from both XZ’s fans and the rest of the people that engaged in this ridiculous fan war with them.

However, let’s keep in mind that “XZ’s fans” is also a huge generalization. Most of the people don’t have the necessary time, resources and mental energy to engage in ridiculous crusades in the name of their favoured celebrity.

Part of the reasoning of the anti-XZ faction is that he should have taken measures and steps to make sure that his fans didn’t cross the line. However, even if the people leading all of this are only a small % of his fans, they are still a lot of people. Being the receiver of their fans’ love and admiration doesn’t make him and his team able to discern who is a reasonable, sensible fan, and who is a crazed troublemaker. And being famous and admired shouldn’t make him the responsible of all of his fans actions (in my opinion). I think this is also how Western society would view the situation.

I was surprised to discover that c-society did expect him to “guide” his fans, because he has a huge influence on them and he’s supposed to guide them towards more civilized behaviour. It’s not of course what everyone thinks, but the stance his studio has taken also points in recognizing that they should have done that (there are more reasons to their stance, of course, explained in the part 5+6).

However, people did realize (I think) that most of the people that follows him gives him support silently. There are of course ardent and fervent people who jump to defend him, but even that kind of behaviour is discouraged by XZ’s studio (applying that ignoring the antis is the greatest way to defeat them).

So here it came the lyrics from WuJi. It’s true that a fraction of his fans have caused him a lot of trouble. But this kind of fans (there is a fine line between very invested and obsessed) are also the ones who push forward a lot of events, who create things like “XZ’s fans Association” and who promote his works the most. His studio did call them out in the end, and said that everyone should relax in their support, but it’s also true that this fans also had a great hand in pushing him to the top of the charts. There’s a very fine line between gain and loss here, so how can one measure the value?

(But the antis who disguise as his fans and create trouble just for the sake of ruining his reputation are a whole other issue. No excuses for them).

Finally, the answers

To answer (I know we*bo and his studio has taken some steps recently but how has this affected public opinion on xz? Has it improved/ are more people favoring him or has it gotten worse?) more exactly:

When we are talking about public opinion, it can actually be divided into 3 factions: his fans, the antis, and the actual general public who is neutral by default.

1. His fans stayed the same, supporting him through the storm. The opinion of the fans isn’t so easily swayed (though he has lost some in this process, he has also gained new followers), and the main feeling they have towards him now can be summarized in 心疼 (”xin teng”, a feeling that, in this case, can be described as “I’m really sorry that all of this has happened to you because I know that you were innocent in this”). I’ll explain a little bit more about his fans support in the last part of the post.

2. The antis can also be divided into 2 groups: “regular” antis and “professional” antis. The 2/27 Great Union community still exists, but it’s a closed off community and to enter it, the new member has to be approved by a moderator. I’ve seen public comments with the 2/27 Great Union tag, that after his interviews have morphed into “I’m a commoner and I hate XZ”, but they are a lot less active these days. Even if they still have hate after everything that happened, the average anti has gone back to their usual life after quarantine was lifted, so it’s less active.

Some of the “regular” antis will stay active, but that’s to be expected. For example, some of WYB’s solo fans were all exploding over the new vlog XZ’s Studio updated three days ago. While it’s ridiculous for the rest of us, these people will continue their “XZ is using WYB to further his own fame” campaign.

However, it’s different with the “professional” anti. As we said in previous posts, people like “B” has a lot of time, energy and resources to invest in a smear campaign against XZ. Where does all of that come from? I don’t know. What I do know is that once XZ’s topic cools down enough and another scandal of another idol, no matter how small, appears, they’ll shift to hate content about the other idol. What matters to them is to produce content that people will engage with, so they get more views and followers, and profit with it.

3. And now, the “neutral-by-default general public”. There is a problem in how we, as netizens, manage the information. In the previous post, I talked about a hater who had written an assessment because “XZ’s fans” had insulted her parents. While the main objective of the document wasn’t to see how the general public views him, I took the data she had extracted.

The general public isn’t so neutral anymore. While it’s true that XZ keeps gaining fans (he’s still riding on CQL’s success train), what general public, the average passerby, has heard from him is:

A XZ fan has stolen a deceased person’s account to keep promoting him

“XZ’s fans” attack a user’s parents on Father’s Day.

A primary school teacher promotes her favourite idol in her class.

These are bound to create a bad image and reputation in people’s mind. We know (I explained all of those incidents in previous posts) that only the teacher incident was truly caused by a XZ fan. There’s no proof that the person who insulted that user’s parents was a XZ fan, and w/ibo has proved that the “stolen” account incident was a scheme from start to finish.

However, the headache in all of those incidents is that the initial issue (“a XZ fan stole a deceased person account to continue to promote him!”) is announced widely and loudly, attracting people’s attention to it. However, people won’t dig up more information. Less than half will actually read the article or investigate more about it. W/ibo actually investigating it and discovering that it was all a plot to frame XZ isn’t given importance, nor does it go on the hot search chart. People only know what happened at first, but don’t know how the story ended. And this is a huge problem for him, because people accuse him but don’t care to know if he was actually the culprit.

(Wow, just like WWX in CQL).

So I found this to describe it.

There are still neutral people: those who couldn’t care less about the tabloids, and that never read gossip sites. These are still a great part of the general public. Anon was asking about the public opinion: the fact is that previously neutral people have only heared bad things about him for half a year, so that’s bound to affect their image of someone they’re not invested in.

If XZ were defeated, and retired, I’m sure a lot of articles like “framing the innocent” would appear. We people just like to have something to talk about.

His fans’ support

XZ ended 2019 with his followers on w/ibo numbering on 21,690,000. The exact number of his w/ibo followers right now is 26,458,877 (26,459,350 two hours later, by the time I’m editing this to post it). He continues to be liked by more people, and antis may try to reduce his popularity, but it’s a fact that his talent and effort are appreciated by people with no hidden agenda.

XZ is also slowly coming back to work and to his endorsements, which are very good news. We saw him recently in the R/SEONLY add for Chinese Qixi, in the event for Cao Yu’s anniversary, the vlog the studio updated.

Less directly, Kai Xiao Zao, one of the brands that didn’t stop working with him even after 2/27 (they are a smaller brand, and they must have invested a lot in their endorser, so they can’t just put him aside like other bigger brands did), recently put up little stands in malls all over China to promote their new product. In every stand there was a wall for customers to write and a couple of XZ cardboard cutouts.

In his interview in Yunnan, XZ had been seen wearing his red cord bracelet, to ward off bad luck. So fans started to add their own amulets to ward off bad luck and offerings to the cutouts.

They started off like this...

Fans came...

And they ended up like this. The funny fact it’s that people started to add plush toys, hats and even food to the cutouts, so based on what “XZ” is wearing one can guess where was the photo taken.

This was a widespread phenomenon in all of KXZ stands. So to say that XZ has lost support from his fans would be certainly false.

His dramas are also expected to be aired soon and have been confirmed to. His patience is paying off little by little, and he’s coming back to work.

The moral of the story

I hope we can all learn something from this. If anything, it has changed my own attitude on the Internet. I used to be very quick to answer with extreme words if I felt strongly about a topic. Now I try to tone down my responses. I’m not saying that you’d all do the same, but it’s a lesson I extract from other people’s experiences. History should serve to avoid mistakes others have committed as much as possible.

In the technology and communications based world we live in, to believe that what we do on Internet doesn’t affect real people’s everyday lives is a huge lie. So, now that we can see that XZ is slowly coming back, let’s all remember that this once happened: let’s all be kind on the internet and avoid engaging with people who dedicate themselves to spread hate.

It has been hard on him. But he’s going to top the snowy summit. Let’s do our best to support him rationally.

Prev: Part 5 and 6: A snowy summit

#gg's situation #part 7 out of 7 #finally finished #my post #ask

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