MatHaz
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Writing Blog - The Long Prologue
🕑 Added 2020-07-01 12:00:06 +0000 UTCI am pretty sure there are plenty of mixed feelings about the last few chapters. I expect even more mixed reactions once those chapters become available for everyone.
For that and many other reasons, I was nervous about writing them.
I was also really excited about doing so.
I wonder how many of my readers are familiar with xianxia and how many are experiencing the genre for the first time through Ave Xia Rem Y. I know there are plenty of both, but sometimes I wonder about the exact split. Anyway, what I am trying to get at here is that one of the things you have to understand about xianxia is that shit happens in the prologue.
Sometimes, the protagonist has been treated like trash his whole life. Others, he suddenly loses his cultivation, causing people to turn on him. His fiancee might get stolen or abandon him. His family or hometown might meet an untimely end due to the machinations of the antagonists. The list goes on and on.
Like I said, shit happens.
I remember seeing a comment about this in a forum once. We all talk a lot about how brutal xianxia protagonists are, but really, most people are just one xianxia prologue away from rolling up their sleeves and getting down to business. It was something like that.
So naturally, from the beginning, the destruction of Eastern Port City had already been decided.
However, I wanted to take my time with it. I didn’t want a situation where Eastern Port City only existed for five or ten chapters before being destroyed. I wanted Eastern Port City to feel like an actual place with people in it. I wanted Eastern Port City to be Liu Jin’s home and for him to have relationships with the people living there. That way, when the time came, the loss would be more painful.
Whether I succeeded in that or not, I cannot say. All I can say is that I tried.
I didn’t expect things to take as long as they did. I looked at my outline and thought for sure the city would be destroyed by chapter 40 or so. Turns out, it took almost twice that number of chapters.
Another aspect that I wanted to stress with this is that the world Liu Jin lives in is very cruel. It has been said a lot of times, but this was me hitting my readers in the face with it.
This is a situation in which Liu Jin’s kindness, born out of a desire to not see more people die that day, is repaid in the worst possible way. It is not something Liu Jin could have conceivably foreseen even if he had been thinking clearly at that time. Someone like Murong Bang was simply outside his frame of reference, and that’s why it was so important for it to happen.
Liu Jin has ideas, thoughts, and beliefs, and those need to be tested. It’s easy to say, “I’m not going to be ass” when doing good brings you good. But what if it doesn’t? What if virtue brings punishment and vice is rewarded? People in xianxia are the way they are because, when you get down to it, xianxia worlds are very shitty places to live in.
That’s something Liu Jin is going to have to think about in the coming chapters.
Comments
burning_the_paper
I have no mixed feelings concerning the writing. I've loved this prologue and the way it ended, loved (in a twisted way) what it did and will do to the protagonist and love that the core beliefs of the protagonist have been put to the test and he has to live with their catastrophic consequences. There are no easy answers for the protagonist here, and nobody older and wiser to guide him through his turmoil now, so I am really curious to see where the adventure will take Liu Jin next.
MasterofNova
As veteran xianxia reader I must say you are quite right in most of your points and this prologue is almost as legendary as the Golden Age arc of Berserk or the Prologue arc of Vinland saga. As I believe ur trying to stray Liu Jin from the typical path of vengeance that his father followed im quite interested how his character will develop since there’s only two other archetypes a revenge plot protag spawns. Hopefully you shall continue to exceed my expectations and keep up the good work.
Geese
This is the first xianxia I've read and I enjoy the pace and direction so far. The settings been interesting and I have no issues picturing each character you've introduced.
