Holy shit can't believe what has happened to this franchise after the phenomenal season 1.
The manga has more animation than the fucking anime. It's crazy out there.
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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It's interesting. The internationalism of our project causes us to respond the way nationalists do to certain things within socialist states, but we do so in an extraterritorial way.
Content that people like is going to do this more effectively though. The treatlerites respond better to the treat machine than they do to this content. They won't want their favourite Chinese videogame being disrupted by the US going to war with China. Look at how much attacking Tik Tok ultimately resulted in pro-China sentiment. Produce a vast amount of culture product under a "Cool China" policy mirroring the approach of Japan and RoK but with the vast resources of China and it would become culturally hegemonic by virtue of the sheer quantity of high quality content.
Well, my point in even mentioning the "nationalism" wording is that nationalism frequently ties into somewhat more specific ideas than that some arbitrarily defined geographic camp is good, specifically about the greatness of your nation, i.e. your ethnicity and culture (or clusters thereof), which in this context is often proven by them triumphing over other ethnicities and cultures and, well, you can see why I think it's inclined toward brainworms and I'd want to make the distinction. When the project is substantially extra-national, it mitigates the aforementioned character in favor of things like what I already mentioned about Soviets demonstrating Marxist philosophy in its competitive approach, though sometimes it might just be a slightly broader umbrella of ethnic chauvinism, depending on the context.
I think there's a limit to how well Cool Reaction can be made into Cool Communism because they have advantages with slop that we tend to not, but for the third or fourth time I do agree that China doing artistically-oriented soft power is a cool and good thing that it should multiply its efforts in substantially. I just hope it can avoid Cool Reaction slop, which it already sort of falls into with the fetishization of courtly dramas domestically.
I'm interested, not something I'm very aware of. What are you referring to?
The main thing I was thinking of was the Palace Drama subgenre. Here are some examples: https://www.newhanfu.com/30448.html
If you know the anime Apothecary Diaries, they're a lot like that. There are other courtly dramas, especially recently, but I really don't care for the genre in general (though I did like Apothecary Diaries), no matter which set of aristocrats are being represented (British, Korean, etc.), so I don't know all that much about Chinese dramas specifically, having mostly watched British ones before getting sick of it.
In my head, they share a common lineage with the worn-out rhetoric about "national rejuvenation" as though the country isn't more powerful than ever and, more importantly, the people are better off than ever. Looking at a lot of the aforementioned works, you'd think that less than 85% of the population of Imperial China was a brutally exploited peasantry.
Heading off an obvious objection, I really think these shows are different from other sorts of escapist fantasies. What bugs me about them is that, while we might metaphorically call them fantastical, more literally they are meant to be "historical fiction," and then have this zoomed in view of people bathing in the fruits of the workers' labor with no interest at all in the workers and the blood the palace is continually washed in, beyond usually the attendants and such within the palace itself. That grounding makes such works often have a very reactionary content not because they tell you that the peasants should be trampled, but because they don't even bother to address that question while uncritically enjoying the outcome of the trampling, which itself becomes an answer (and obviously I'd also apply this to more modern courtly dramas, like the ones centered on Queen Victoria, just with the proletariat being ignored along with the colonized populations, where applicable (oh, and also to corporate dramas, which are just capitalist courtly dramas)).
What I'm whining about is not universal to Chinese courtly dramas, and there are other drama subgenres that are a little less popular in China but still very popular that deal with all sorts of topics and often have a much more progressive character. I've seen it remarked multiple times that the popularity of courtly drama is due to them being a way to criticize The Regime without being Censored (insert Parenti quote), but there are actually "anti-corruption dramas" that take place in the PRC and are principally about fighting extensive corruption within the CPC, like "In the Name of the People," which was apparently a big popularizer of the subgenre. Obviously, that's not the full scope of what critics might want to say, but I think it's hard to argue that it's historically the main source of public backlash against the CPC, and you can wake me up when an American studio produces a film or show where the moral of the story is openly that America should be overthrown. Come to think of it, Star Wars is actually kind of a good example of how the aforementioned western commentators characterize those C-dramas and does end with the America stand-in being destroyed by a bombing campaign and the killing of the head of state.
Sorry about the volume of overly long replies I've subjected you to recently. I mean, I guess I'm not that sorry because I only cut this one down a little, but yeah . . .