A Methodology to an Untitled Martial Fantasy (Patreon)

Right up until the final weeks of the project, I was undecided on whether submitting an Eastern Fantasy as my final piece was a good idea at all. I have many first chapters of a deluge of ideas, many of which will never see the light of day. But out of all of them, I picked this one, despite my hesitation. Much of that hesitation came from how comparatively niche the genre remains within Western literary spaces, despite its growing popularity online during and after the COVID-19 lockdowns. I knew I’d have to do a lot of onboarding in this methodological essay, which should be interesting to read. My own exposure to Eastern Fantasy came through online translated fiction during this period, and from there I became increasingly interested in the martial arts fantasy tradition that underpins many of these stories. “Eastern Fantasy” itself is a broad umbrella term commonly used online to group several adjacent genres. I will use both it and martial fantasy interchangeably.

Most notably: wuxia, xianxia, and the Korean murim genre. While each differs in tone, scale, and thematic focus, they share several foundational conventions. The closest comparison I could make is to Westerns or the Knights of the Round Table. Martial fantasy stories, despite their base in exaggerated historical fiction, are stories about people on the fringes of society, wandering martial artists, sects and clans, systems of martial hierarchy, internal energy cultivation, and protagonists who seek strength, transcendence, revenge, or mastery. Often all of the above, wrapped up in webnovels with chapters numbering in the thousands. They are often set within fictionalised versions of historical China or Korea, at least in terms of the wuxia and murim genres, blending martial arts traditions with mythological and fantastical elements.

Of these genres, wuxia is perhaps the most foundational in shaping the way Eastern Fantasies stand today. Originating from Chinese historical fiction over centuries and folklore, wuxia centres upon itinerant martial artists operating outside conventional societal structures. The Four Great Classics influenced this martial fantasy genre quite a lot, especially Water Margin by Shi Nai’an. It is a story that follows a group of 108 outlaws who take over a mountain and rebel against the unjust government of the Northern Song Dynasty. However, one of the genre’s most influential modern writers was Jin Yong, whose The Legend of the Condor Heroes series, first published in 1957, helped codify many of the conventions now associated with martial arts fantasy. From there, the genre evolved further into xianxia, which takes a truly fantastical bent. It is no longer set in the real-world, and so is not historical fiction. Similarly, it places greater emphasis on immortality and spiritual cultivation, with fantastical creatures and multiple realms that the protagonists venture through in search of apotheosis. Murim fiction, on the other hand, is the Korean interpretation of the martial arts fantasy tradition and is much closer to wuxia. Though, because it’s a genre that’s only become popular abroad fairly recently—that is to say, lockdown and beyond—it carries some similarity with xianxia. Murim stories frequently retain the sect structures and martial hierarchies of wuxia, but often don’t place much stock in the historical fiction side of things. Murim stories themselves are modern wuxia, I reckon, even if they evolved as a response to the astronomical popularity of xianxia stories online, particularly webnovels.

As mentioned above, much of modern Eastern Fantasy has flourished online through web serialisation and fan translation communities. Because of both the language barrier and the fragmented nature of online translation culture, there is likely a substantial amount of the genre’s literary history and development that remains inaccessible to Western audiences such as myself. However, this partial distance from the genre also became creatively productive. Rather than attempting to perfectly emulate traditional wuxia or murim storytelling, I became more interested in interrogating the romanticism often attached to martial artists and sect culture. My project, therefore, draws heavily upon murim conventions whilst simultaneously attempting to deconstruct them. Traditional protagonists within the genre are frequently driven by ambition, revenge, or, more commonly these days, time travel. There’s an interesting sub-genre in these martial arts fantasies, where the main character ends up going back in time to their youth, after either A) living a powerless life they regret, B) being betrayed by people they trusted dearly, or C) dying in some cataclysmic factional war between the Orthodox, Unorthodox, and Demonic factions. More often than not, it’s all of the above. I shied away from all the lovely bells and whistles, mainly in favour of simplicity. I expect my niche interest itself is already obscure enough. There was no need to mystify an already mysterious genre even more.

My protagonist, Yeom Taejin, is a former sect disciple whom we meet not while he’s a child, as is commonly done, but well into adulthood. Reality has worn down his boyish ambition of “being strong” or living a heroic life. Being twenty-two, he desires stability above all else and is resigned to finding somewhere peaceful to settle down. Rather than viewing martial artists as heroic figures, Taejin understands martial power as something capable of creating fear, hierarchy, and violence wherever it accumulates. Mostly due to his own experience in the Jianghu, first as an outer disciple of the Stillwater Sword Sect, and later as a wandering martial artist. In keeping with the origins of the genre, I use the familiar murim structures—sects, martial artists, internal energy, and tournaments, etc.—not simply as fantasy spectacle, but as vehicles through which social inequality and institutional hypocrisy can be explored. I wrote more in response to the social commentary origins of the genre than anything else… though it’s a far cry from historical fiction. In that sense, my story is a purely modern take on the Eastern Fantasy genre.

Specific to my own work is murim fiction, the most recent of the Eastern Fantasy sub-genres, the one I like the most, and thus the one I’m most familiar with. In many ways, my opening chapter can be described as both a homage and a criticism of the genre. Murim fiction, like wuxia, has its roots in a more “grounded” kind of story. There is no immortality or world-hopping. It is simply an evolution of wuxia that tends to forego the historical aspect of the genre in favour of origin worldbuilding and a focus on the martial arts society, for good and for ill. These days, it’s increasingly moved toward genre deconstruction, particularly regarding the moral legitimacy of so-called righteous or Orthodox sects and clans. Earlier martial fantasy often presented sects as institutions that preserved order and morality against external threats, with opposing factions such as the Demonic Cult functioning as straightforward antagonists. However, modern webnovels and webnovel adaptations, such as manhwa (Korean webcomics, called webtoons abroad), frequently complicate this binary by portraying righteous sects as politically corrupt or obsessed with maintaining power and status. Likewise, traditionally villainous groups are often humanised, with stories emphasising the artificiality of moral labels imposed by institutions. I was particularly interested in this shift because it reflects one of the genre’s oldest thematic concerns: the disconnect between martial ideals and lived reality. At the same time, I also found myself increasingly critical of what might be described as “fast-food” martial fantasy. Murim stories focused almost exclusively upon wish fulfilment, power accumulation, revenge, and rapid progression systems at the expense of the genre’s social and philosophical undercurrents.

Not always, and stories in that vein are growing more unpopular as time goes on, but I’ve read enough to influence my own writings. Those kinds of stories can be entertaining, but many reduce the martial world into a vehicle for empowerment fantasy, where strength naturally grants moral authority. Success in these stories is framed as a product of individual merit alone. In doing so, themes historically central to wuxia-adjacent stories—corruption, class disparity, institutional violence, and social instability—are often flattened or ignored entirely. Joo Jinho was partially written as a response to this trend. He embodies the romanticised understanding of the martial world common to many contemporary protagonists and readers. He believes martial strength naturally aligns with righteousness and imagines heroism in simplistic moral terms. Like some readers I’ve encountered thanks to the online form of these stories, Jinho approaches violence through the logic of stories and protagonist-centred morality rather than material reality. His desire to “slay evil” and become a wandering hero mirrors these tendencies. However, Taejin’s perspective repeatedly undermines these assumptions. The starving bandits in Bonemeal Forest, for instance, are desperate men trapped within another exploitative hierarchy. By no means are they good men, but they’re also not moustache-twirlingly evil. Their lives, but more importantly, their deaths are treated as preventable tragedies produced by systemic violence and social collapse. In this sense, Jinho functions as a character within the story, but also as a reflection of the expectations many readers bring into martial fantasy itself.

Taejin, meanwhile, represents the aftermath of those fantasies. Having already lived through sect life and years of wandering the Jianghu, he no longer perceives martial artists as romantic figures. Through his lived experience, the lack of actual meritocracy to carry out those fantasies combines with the reality of life in a world where might makes right, even for the so-called righteous Orthodox martial artists. For instance, Bora stops one of her henchmen from coercing a waitress because she’s stronger than he is. Without her, Taejin would have stopped him, but without him, who’s to say what would’ve happened? I wanted martial ability to feel less like superheroism, despite the branding, and more like an uneven distribution of force within society. Ordinary civilians are constantly forced to navigate around individuals capable of extreme violence. But I didn’t want to fully invert traditional wuxia morality by simply presenting righteous sects as evil and their enemies as secretly virtuous. The Orthodox faction is comparatively decent compared to the Unorthodox and Demonic factions (depending on their depictions), but that doesn’t mean that individuals within it, or even the adherence to might makes right, render them incapable of wrongdoing. Similarly, their beliefs in chivalry and honour do little to hide that those ideals are enforced through power and violence. Rather, I became more interested in how systems of power distort behaviour regardless of factional alignment. Characters such as Kang Bora complicate the critique further. Although she is aggressive, confrontational, and openly battle-hungry, she is also more emotionally honest and socially aware than many supposedly righteous martial artists. By contrast, the Azure Cloud Sect willingly risks the physical well-being of its own disciples for institutional prestige during the tournament arc. The issue, therefore, is not martial strength in isolation. Power is wielded in the real world, too, if to a less insane degree. The hierarchical systems and ideologies built around it are what I wanted to explore.

Ultimately, I draw heavily from murim conventions—sects, tournaments, internal energy systems, wandering swordsmen, and martial rivalries. Contrary to his inward disillusionment, I make it abundantly clear that Taejin himself isn’t entirely done with the Jianghu. Even he feels a kind of lingering resentment and regret over not being able to realise his dreams of growing strong. But he’s also well-weathered by the world thanks to eight years of observation. His mind proved to be the perfect lens through which to interrogate the romantic assumptions embedded within many contemporary martial fantasy narratives. I aimed to portray it as simultaneously alluring and deeply corrosive: a society where extraordinary power exists alongside exploitation, fear, and institutional hypocrisy. Its aspirational quality and so-called innate goodness are a given in many stories today to the point where I’d grown sick of it. And thus was the genesis of this nameless story whose first arc I outlined in its entirety thanks to this assessment.

Final Wordcount: 1962

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Here's the companion essay to this martial fantasy idea. My main goal here was to deconstruct this generally niche genre for my examiner. I'd imagine outside of our niche realm of the internet, it probably isn't all that popular, and so a lot of it is spent laying the groundwork before I analyse the themes of my own story. For those of you who enjoy this kind of thing, I'd be open to writing essays on my own writing process and reflecting on my goals once I close out the arcs of my stories.

Only if that's something you'd all be interested in, though.