A New Era of Wuxia: the Female Writers

With swirling, supernatural sword fights, flying hair and flowing robes, rituals of resurrection and revenge, and two androgynous and romantically intertwined leading men, the Chinese historical fantasy television show The Untamed has, since its release in 2019, captured millions of international viewers, with ten billion views on Tencent alone during the first two years. Based on the 2016 novel Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, by female author Moxiang Tongxiu (MXTX), the story features warring Daoist magician clans battling supernatural threats to the human world. The popularity of the show opened doors for collaborations between Western and Chinese streaming platforms, as both realised the profitability of releasing Chinese dramas like Word of Honour (2021) and Love Between Fairy and Devil (2022) collaboratively, on platforms such as Netflix or Prime, and Tencent, IQiyi or Youku. Such successes may also have precipitated large Western publishing groups like Simon & Schuster in its recent acquisitions of contemporary Chinese fiction, while from 2021, manga and light-novel publisher Seven Seas started licensing several works by MXTX.

One acquisition that found a large audience on Netflix was Who Rules the World (Qie Shi Tianxia, 2022), adapted from the novel of the same name by Qing Ling Yue. Set in an alternative dynastic universe of competing nations, Who Rules the World revolves around a debate about power – who is worthy of wielding it and how it is wielded – that lies at the heart of traditional wuxia fiction, a genre that encapsulates many of these works of historical fantasy. Working within these parameters, Qing Ling Yue, like MXTX, represents a new generation of female wuxia writers, and disproves a popular conception among wuxia’s ‘old school fans’ that women only write romance, which, to them, is not ‘real’ wuxia.

Read the full article on Art Review.


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