3 posts tagged with "Manhua"

This article is reprinted with permission from "Donghua Xueshu Pa"

Author / Banqiao

Editor / Pel

Layout / Rinz

In China, original comic artists have become a rare species, and webcomics are no longer at the forefront of the times.

In recent years, however, within traditional print book publishing, we have seen a batch of "author-driven comics" that feature novel themes and styles and promising commercial value.

- What noteworthy works are there beneath this wave?

- In the current environment, how do comic artists "save themselves" to gain exposure and opportunities?

- And what niche does manga occupy within the publishing industry?

This article attempts to explore two recent waves in China: the concentrated emergence of "author-driven comic collections" and "SNS hit publications".

01​

Concentrated emergence of "author-driven comic" collections: a spring of mushrooms or a flash in the pan?​

From 2023 to 2025, a small but noteworthy wave quietly emerged in China's original comic industry: the concentrated publication of author-driven comic collections.

In chronological order, the cases I observed include: DanRead's "Small Place", Postwave's "SC: Private Experience", Manbian Studio's "Manbian Selection: Nine Stories", Motie Youhu's "Lost Character Intersection", and Manhua Upward Comicup's "Past · Future · Link: Original Short Story Black-and-White Comic Collection", all physical print publications. In addition, the Comic Experimental Field project launched the online collection "Wheat Plan" on Bilibili Comics, filling the gap for digital distribution.

In mid-2023, under the joint planning of DanRead and the "author-driven comics" team papayep (Zheng Yi, Cheng Hua), "Small Place · DanRead PLUS · Mang Xiang Ji" was officially published. This book contains works by 16 authors from China, France, and Spain, based on the long experience of papayep's two founders working in France and DanRead's international perspective.

Its theme revolves around individuals' emotional connection to "hometown" and "place" under the impact of modernization. With the acceleration of urbanization, personal drifting and the search for local identity have become universal feelings. "Small Place" truly sees the big from the small.

In early 2024, "SC: Private Experience" was published, marking a milestone collection in the development of Chinese "alternative comics" over more than two decades, bringing together most of the key authors in the field since the new century. The magazine collection "SC" was founded in 2004 and won the "Alternative Comic Award" at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2010. Its official publication provided a long-awaited opportunity for this "underground" incubation of twenty years to step into the spotlight, allowing once-fringe creations to connect with the market.

Naturally, such an extremely idiosyncratic comic collection, always keeping distance from the market, did not come for the sake of the market; it seemed more like a long-accumulating effort to document the life history of a creator community.

Subsequently, "Nine Stories", "Lost Character Intersection", and "Past · Future · Link: Original Short Story Black-and-White Comic Collection" presented a different editorial logic: they did not set a unified theme but instead used "authorial quality" as a link, bringing together works that reflect contemporary narratives.

Notably, these three collections show overlapping authors, reflecting the limited scale of the independent comic creation circle. For market considerations, "Lost Character Intersection" tended to select authors who already had awards or exhibition endorsements; "Nine Stories" had a relatively broad selection range; while "Past · Future · Link" paid more attention to creators who remained active on social platforms like Weibo, whose works also tended to be closer to mainstream commercial comics in style.

The rise of this wave of collection publishing is rooted in two realities of the publishing industry:

First, the publishing opportunities for original Chinese long-form comics are extremely scarce.

Each year, the market's hot spots are mostly imported Japanese manga. In an industry environment lacking systematic support, local authors find it difficult to bear the costs and risks of polishing a long-form work. The seemingly vast blue ocean is actually hard to nurture sustainable creation. Faced with a gap in original works, editors naturally turned their gaze to wild, self-cultivated "author-driven comics" that have reached a certain stage.

Second, after years of visual narrative exposure, readers' needs are increasingly segmented. They are tired of formulaic stories and crave fresher, more immediate content. This gave even marginal "author-driven comics" a chance to step into the spotlight.

However, in practice, book editors often find it difficult to provide substantive support throughout the entire creative process for authors. Not to mention the editors' own level of expertise; even if they want to give comic creators opportunities and advice, an editor often juggles multiple roles, and limited by workload and energy, cannot offer long-term support. In most cases, they are like hungry giraffes — the low-hanging "fruit" (works already validated by the market) is fiercely competitive and scarce, so they have to look to higher "fruit". When editors see "unripe fruit" (i.e., new independent creators) ripening in the wild, they try to pick it.

The mentality of publishing houses or imprints is even more contradictory. On one hand, they understand they cannot rely solely on imported works and must develop originals; on the other, when proactive editors bring these unripe but novel proposals to meetings, the company often rejects them with reasons like "the topic is too niche", "the author is too new", "sales expectations are too low", preferring to wait for these authors to mature on their own elsewhere, grow into bigger, easier-to-pick "fruit".

This creates a vicious cycle: the more depressed the industry, the more publishers crave innovation; but once the risk of innovation becomes apparent, possibly failing to recoup costs, they immediately fall back onto conservative safety patterns, preferring books with proven market performance and guaranteed sales.

If no one takes on the responsibility of providing exposure channels for newcomers, and everyone is busy poaching successful authors, new authors will find it even harder to enter the professional market.

Over time, creators and publishers may fall into a fragmented state of "each doing their own thing": creators survive or die outside the system, while publishers passively wait for a hit, like "snipers waiting by a stump".

This also shows that, at least in the comic field, with the evolution of media ecology, the discourse power of comics has largely shifted to online platforms, social media, and fan-made content. The publishing industry has largely become a downstream "physicalization" link that harvests existing results and continuously absorbs smaller niche circles, partially losing the cultural function that books should have, such as leading topics and inspiring new trends.

"Partially losing" does not mean total failure; niche circles themselves may incubate future mainstream culture.

In fact, the small trend of author-driven comic publishing we can see in recent years heavily relies on individual editors' industry insight and desire for change, while the publishing platforms that dare to try often have relatively stable comic divisions or forward-looking layouts, and even flexible independent publishing brands like "Dream Potion" dedicated to original comics.

Despite the generally unsatisfactory sales of these collections, by 2026, few new collection publishing plans have been heard. This tug-of-war between individual enthusiasm and institutional conservatism makes the model of nurturing new talent through collections hard to sustain, often falling silent after a round of market testing.

Compared to the animation collection "Yao-Chinese Folktales", which also has authorial and experimental qualities but sparked a social sensation and subsequent commercial development of "The Langlang Mountain's Little Monster", short comic collections face far greater difficulty in generating discussions of a similar scale: their information density is limited, and the reach of the book medium is far inferior to animation or social media.

The advantage of "author-driven comic" collections lies in their short-story format, bypassing the dependence on long-form authors, spreading the risk of publishing newcomers, and allowing readers to enjoy diverse styles in one book while avoiding competition with mainstream commercial works through different creative concepts. However, this is also where they are criticized: the lack of connection between pieces and their varied styles and concepts give a mixed, unsatisfying reading experience.

02​

From SNS authors to blockbuster books: is it still an era for creators to shine?​

After the "collective charge" of collection publishing cooled down, another path more dependent on individual creators — connecting directly with readers via social media (SNS) — has shown greater resilience and possibilities.

As the market expands and segments further, unmet new demands emerge. "Author-driven comics" are difficult to categorize and often treated with a love-it-or-hate-it attitude precisely because they are born from keen creators spontaneously wanting to fill unmet gaps in the market, yet their original intent is not purely market-driven.

This kind of creation hovers between self-expression and serving readers, making its motives mixed. In form, "author-driven comics" have not yet differentiated into mature genres; they are akin to stem cells — full of vitality and infinite possibilities, fuzzy and朦胧 — that exist before the birth of genre works.

Now, rather than banding together, self-media authors publishing complete stories in their own name may be more likely to achieve rapid spread and response.

The prerequisite is that you are willing to bear all the risks.

With the development of SNS, it can be said that this is a "golden age for author creation": the market validation of works is greatly brought forward, allowing them to be published first without relying on traditional print media or comic platforms. Readers and algorithms vote for them through browsing and filtering. In this process, editors, directors, and investors are also closely watching those that have shown potential.

At the same time, almost all choices and risks are returned to the individual.

Here, we summarize three paths using three recent successful cases of moving from SNS author to blockbuster book:

1. "The Oyster Shell Is an Adult's Heart": from internet sensation to bestseller

This path is characterized by the author building initial popularity through short stories — being noticed by an editor — undergoing careful planning, editing, and close collaboration between author and editor — leading to a qualitative change in dissemination during the publication process.

Nini graduated from the China Academy of Art. With delicate and gentle art style and highly emotionally resonant expression, she quickly became popular among young readers. Her representative work "The Oyster Shell Is an Adult's Heart" has cumulatively sold over one million copies, with a long-standing Douban rating around 9.5, becoming one of the most representative healings comics in recent years.

Initially, Nini treated drawing as an emotional outlet, using simple words and quiet images to record the exhaustion, fragility, and self-repair of growing up. Although highly personal, her work accumulated a stable and loyal readership during its online serialization phase.

The key turning point came from the initiative of planning editor Catbro. Catbro sought to get this project approved. When the original company declined, she succeeded in gaining strong support from Liu Ping, deputy editor-in-chief of Times Chinese Media. They were deeply moved by the "softness beneath the adult shell" in the work and quickly judged that it responded to the strong emotional needs of young people today.

Thus, the team clearly positioned the work as "emotional healing literary comics". From the title, binding, to visual imagery, everything revolved around the core quality of "tender but not escapist".

From dust jacket design to character actions, from marketing rhythm to reader communication, to nationwide healing exhibitions, a series of seemingly trivial editorial tasks helped the work move from niche to mainstream.

Nini's experience also shows that in the current comic publishing environment, the sincere expression of a creator and the professional judgment and systematic operation of an editor can indeed create a perfect synergy, amplifying the work's influence a hundredfold or thousandfold.

2. "Little Fox Takes Human Form": a native online hit short story

Yangzhi's "Little Fox Takes Human Form" relies more heavily on the SNS platform mechanism, following a path of explosive one-time success.

Yangzhi graduated from Fudan University's Department of Cultural Heritage and Museology, then studied animation at UCLA, and has extensive experience in film storyboarding. This gives her webcomic a cinematic rhythm and visual density, making it highly impactful in the information feed.

After diving into comic creation, her work "Little Fox Takes Human Form" launched in the summer of 2024, reaching over 20 million clicks in just seven days, becoming a phenomenal work of the year.

"Little Fox Takes Human Form" starts with a naive little fox entering the human world for the first time. While foraging in the wilderness, it nearly falls into a trap but is rescued by a white fox sister.

Its core premise — the little fox uses transformation magic to "become the form others desire" — is not just about fantasy growth; it subtly points to the performative personality, identity anxiety, and self-discovery of contemporary people. This narrative, combining emotional resonance and real-world metaphor, has an all-age appeal like Disney animation yet with a Chinese story core, allowing it to spark discussions across different reader groups and making it naturally suitable for social media dissemination.

Early in its release, the work won praise and recommendations from core comic enthusiast circles through word-of-mouth, then continuously broke through bubbles. Readers' empathy and sharing actually became the driving force behind the work's spread.

As popularity accumulated, the publishing and animation industries followed. The physical book was published in 2025, maintaining a Douban rating of 9.5. Meanwhile, an animation adaptation is also underway, extending the IP value.

The success of "Little Fox Takes Human Form" shows that creators' cross-disciplinary perspectives can often inject deeper layers into content, ultimately carving a sustained creative path among platforms, publishing, and animation.

3. Deep Sea Giant Dog and "The Lamp Genie: Unfulfilled Wishes": the victory of niche cultivation

The first two cases debuted with short works. But for long-form series, people nowadays only seem to think of webcomic platforms. Is there a way out for independent long-form writing?

Author Deep Sea Giant Dog is an excellent example. Rather than entering webcomic platforms where update frequency, traffic, and monthly tickets are core metrics, she kept the copyright of her work firmly in her own hands from the start, advancing the long-form creation at her own pace and cultivating her niche.

"The Lamp Genie: Unfulfilled Wishes" is a fantasy comic incorporating the tragic core of Greek mythology. Its subject matter is relatively niche, and the background details are too meticulous to cater to fast-paced mainstream reading. Yet, relying on a complete worldview, long-form narrative, and serious thematic treatment, it has accumulated high recognition within its niche.

During its serialization phase, "The Lamp Genie" was set to be entirely public; even without paying, readers could still read the full content. Subscriptions were more a voluntary way to support the author.

The work was primarily updated simultaneously on Weibo and Afdian. Deep Sea Giant Dog used Afdian as a "pure update space" with a simple interface showing only the comic itself, making it easy for readers to immerse and subscribe. On Weibo, she stayed active as a social platform, continuously updating progress, story discussions, research materials, and life snippets related to creation.

From conception to completion, the work took two years. After it ended, Deep Sea Giant Dog did not exit. Instead, in the two years before publication, she personally adapted the webcomic into page comics, filling narrative gaps, and deeply participated in the binding design, publication, and promotional processes.

Based on long-term reader validation, Zhejiang Photography Publishing House included the work in its "Manhua Upward" product line as a key release in 2024, and it officially debuted at the 30th COMICUP (CP), setting a sales record for fiction works in January 2024. The work has now been published in simplified Chinese and Taiwan editions.

When the work was nearing completion, many publishers approached the author for book deals. COMICUP (CP), which had first supported the author, had already reached a publishing agreement with her, offering a royalty rate ten times higher than average.

Deep Sea Giant Dog's case shows that, without relying on high-pressure updates and short-term traffic, creators can still complete their work, make it understood, and achieve longer-lasting vitality through copyright ownership, long-term creation, and deep community management.

Through these three paths, it is clear that currently, individual authors have far more freedom to decide "what to draw, how to draw, and for whom". Creators no longer have to wait for permission from a single institution to make their work truly seen.

Platforms, publishing, and industries are no longer the only starting points; they can become validators and amplifiers that join at any time. For the first time, readers can directly participate in shaping a work's destiny, helping it complete through companionship, discussion, and support.

But at the same time, we can also see the twists and risks beyond success: these works were not completed in well-prepared, risk-controlled environments. They are highly dependent on the creators' extraordinary talent and persistence.

Nini's work is a record of how to rebuild life after being forced to grow up. Family changes, economic pressure, and identity transformations gave her firsthand experience of "shattering" and "rebuilding", imbuing the work with genuine and sustained emotional power.

Deep Sea Giant Dog's "The Lamp Genie: Unfulfilled Wishes" was also not achieved overnight. After her long-form work was shelved, setbacks on platforms, life changes, and mental exhaustion, she chose to temporarily abandon "The Dawn Book", a work she had been creating for two years, to refine the script and continuously adjust the creative scale, just to finish the new story "The Lamp Genie".

The so-called "good era for individual authors" is not entirely an era of lowered thresholds — it is also an era where all pressures and risks related to emotions, time, economics, and life are simultaneously piled onto the creator's own head.

03​

Conclusion​

Based on practice and industry observation, I have also compiled several specific submission strategies for creators, hoping to provide some practical reference.

1. Do background research on publishing institutions, understand the "style" of the publisher.

Each imprint has different preferences and standards for selecting topics, so imprints also have "style".

Understand scale: Large publishing houses have high requirements for print run and market potential, generally favoring works with "blockbuster" potential; small or independent publishing brands are more flexible and often willing to accept new authors and unique topics. Therefore, being rejected by a large house does not mean the work is denied; it may even be that the editor likes the work, but the large house has higher operating costs and finds it harder to pass small-scale topics. Trying another imprint may instead go smoothly. Keep trying.

Judge tone: Use platforms like Douban to check the imprint's recent publication list, observe if they have a comic product line, and the style tendency of works (e.g., youth-oriented, niche topics, close to contemporary). Prioritize imprints that match your own work's temperament.

2. Make good use of public information, proactively contact key people.

Find editor information: The copyright page of the target book usually carries the responsible editor's information. You can try to contact them accordingly; even if the work is rejected, you may get practical advice.

Increase online exposure: Editors often browse social platforms heavily in search of new topics. Continuously posting works and showing the creative process on channels like Weibo and Xiaohongshu can increase the chance of being noticed by editors.

Good at tagging people: KOLs in the comic field, established authors, and core organizers of major comic festivals can be seen as "invisible editors". Sending work to them or exposing it via social media to gain their recognition and recommendation can sometimes deliver the work to the right publisher faster.

3. Adjust mindset, treat submission results rationally.

In short, publishing institutions have no unified criteria for selecting topics. Authors need not feel that being rejected once means being rejected by the entire publishing environment. Even for editors, having proposals repeatedly rejected is common. A good topic is often noticed by multiple editors simultaneously; even if one publisher rejects it, it may be favored elsewhere. Authors should not be discouraged by temporary setbacks; instead, they should continue to expose themselves and contact more imprints, which will bring more opportunities.

Finally, perhaps it goes without saying that author-driven comics are still a relatively marginal form of content. But being marginal does not mean destined to disappear, nor does it mean unprofitable. Compared with traditional genre commercial comics, I can see more potential and vitality for the budding new growth of Chinese comics in these works and authors.

The development of Chinese "author-driven comics" shows a distinctive feature of growing outside the system. It is neither the result of proactive planning by the traditional publishing industry nor a traffic product nurtured by webcomic platforms. It is a new ecology driven by individual creators, promoted through social media and specific publishers.

It should be noted that the rise of author-driven comics does not equal mature creative standards. For example, many stories that dig into personal past life experiences are highly similar in theme, lacking skill training and topic packaging, easily making valuable personal expression cliché. If one intends to make the work more popular, they need to problematize and universalize their story, connecting individual experience with broader emotions and reality.

Through the turbulent currents of commercialization, Chinese comic creation has now arrived at a gentle shoal. The focus of creation has shifted: from genre-oriented, mass-audience-driven to individual experience narratives and emotional resonance. This indeed marks the "stratification" of the Chinese comic market. Besides the mainstream track pursuing scale effects, a market layer serving segmented audiences, valuing author personality, and offering more diverse ways of realizing value is taking shape.

The future of comics does not depend on whether the next national blockbuster emerges, but on whether occasional individual successes can evolve into a sustainable ecosystem. This requires publishing institutions to reform evaluation systems and establish production and marketing processes better suited to small-scale, stylized works. The middle layer of the industry (editors, planners, comic festivals) needs to more actively play the roles of "talent scout" and "nurturer", systematically reducing the cognitive cost and risk for new creators entering the professional field. Creators themselves, while strengthening personal expression, should consciously transform SNS traffic into a long-term, sustainable reader community and learn basic copyright and project management knowledge to prepare for a long-term career.

The road to comic salvation is long. Whether by huddling together for warmth or working hard in solitude, the works and authors mentioned in this article have become an unignorable tributary of Chinese comics.

“Readers hoped to see richer, more dimensional character development, while the creators were more focused on fleshing out a complex and diverse IP worldview.”

After eight years of serialization, Lanxi Zhen, written by MTJJ and primarily illustrated by Sun Gua, has finally come to an end.

As one of the rare original commercial serialized comics in China that still enjoys a high level of discussion, the conclusion of Lanxi Zhen has drawn considerable attention. However, unlike the nearly unanimous acclaim for The Legend of Luo Xiaohei TV series and its first feature film, the comic's ending sparked enormous controversy — even triggering, in turn, criticism of the animated content.

Some complain the ending was rushed, some question whether the protagonist's characterization fell apart, while others insist this is an above-average work whose reputation slipped simply because audiences projected overly high expectations onto it.

Was this eight-year journey a regrettable “botched ending,” or is there something deeper at play?

Before labeling Lanxi Zhen, let us set aside our judgments of the characters for a moment, return to that world of spirits, and re-examine the positioning and mission of this work.

01 A Worldview Gradually Completed​

Unlike many works that present a complete setting from the moment of debut, the worldview of Luo Xiaohei was gradually filled in as the series developed. The entire series takes “the relationship between humans and spirits” as its main thread, with “the establishment of the Guild” and “The Gate of All Beings” as landmark milestones, exploring how the human-spirit relationship changed across different periods and how the two could coexist.

Looking back at the release timeline of the series, we can observe the whole process of construction of the Luo Xiaohei world:

From 2011 to 2017, the TV series The Legend of Luo Xiaohei daily-life arc (episodes 1-27) kept updating, moving readers with its warm, healing style. At this stage, the work focused on specific characters and compact, punchy storytelling; the building of the worldview took a back seat, conveyed only briefly through fragmentary narration — for example, in episode 13, “Psionic Power,” through Agen's words, it first introduced basic settings such as “spirits,” “yokai/spirits,” and “psionic spaces.”

What truly made the world grand and dimensional was the comic Lanxi Zhen, which began serialization in 2018. Although before the 2019 release of the feature film The Legend of Luo Xiaohei 1, the comic still centered on warm slice-of-life storytelling, the author was already consciously adding to the setting — e.g., the term “Six Major Disciplines” first appears in chapter 10, and chapter 18 establishes “when psionic essence dissipates, one returns to nature” and “there is no bringing the dead back to life.”

As the plot progressed, Lanxi Zhen gradually revealed its grand vision: with Laojun, master of all Six Disciplines, and Qingning, a prodigy of the healing discipline, as protagonists, the comic naturally introduced new concepts such as souls, death spirits, and spirit-seeking through their lessons and practice, filling in the background of the “Six Disciplines” and “Five Elements” that the TV series could not fully display, and systematically explaining the underlying setting of “spirits.”

At the same time, lines like “humans' ancestors were also spirits” and “spirits believe in the fixed-species doctrine... all living things today evolved and diversified from the ancient spirit race” pushed the connection between humans and spirits back to a more remote primordial era, strengthening the world's credibility.

Perhaps because the comic had laid the groundwork, in the subsequently updated TV series The Gate of All Beings arc (episodes 28-40) and the 2025 feature film The Legend of Luo Xiaohei 2, the creators no longer explained the underlying logic of spirits and yokai, but directly presented how the world operates.

Unlike the TV series and films, which focus on current events, Lanxi Zhen places greater emphasis on building the worldview. Its core mission has two parts: one is to systematically output the world's settings, and the other is to complete a timeline spanning a hundred years. This includes introducing the origin of the spirits' Guild and its social background, and explaining the reasons behind important TV-series events such as Laojun refusing to leave his mountain and Fairy Qingning's passing. One could say that Lanxi Zhen's worldview groundwork laid the foundation for the animated storyline to fully flex its muscles.

On the other hand, Lanxi Zhen's main storyline spans a full 392 years, and such an enormous time span means an extremely heavy narrative burden — its feel was destined not to be as light and breezy as the animation. To accomplish the ambition of “building a world” within limited space, the author sacrificed, to a certain degree, the delicate carving of characters at the micro level.

The particularity of Lanxi Zhen is thus evident: if you only enjoy Xiaohei's slice-of-life storytelling, beautiful fight scenes, and animation, the TV series and feature films are more than enough; but if you want a systematic understanding of the worldview, Lanxi Zhen is a must-read. And a complete, detailed, and credible worldview is also of great significance to the development of the entire Luo Xiaohei series.

02 Why Do Modern People Love Luo Xiaohei?​

The prevalence of fan-made derivative works makes it clear that the construction of the Luo Xiaohei world is a success. As the Luo Xiaohei IP's worldview has been continuously built and refined, the ways audiences consume it have also changed.

Before the TV series and the first feature film were released, Luo Xiaohei was still in the IP development stage. Referring to Hiroki Azuma's classification of anime consumption modes in Otaku: Japan's Database Animals (Animalized Postmodernity), the audience at that stage was in the transition from consuming small narratives to consuming grand narratives — that is, they were moved by the adorable Xiaohei, the stoic Wuxian, and the warm, healing stories. At that time, fan works were mostly fan art and fan comics of the main cast, and the objects of consumption were still the specific characters and storylines created by the author.

As Lanxi Zhen filled in the worldview, the audience's attention began to extend from the surface-level “story” and “character design” to the “worldview” behind the story, showing a tendency toward “worldview consumption.” In the era of the second film, a series of OC posters set against the Luo Xiaohei worldview appeared in fan communities; by then the Luo Xiaohei IP had been built into a relatively internally consistent world, and audiences were no longer satisfied with merely watching Xiaohei's story — they tried to construct their own identities within that psionic system.

At the same time, The Gate of All Beings arc and the second film also showed a tendency toward “database consumption.” A large number of exquisitely designed characters flash by without their stories or backgrounds being explained, yet they provide the audience with a “database” that can be searched and mined.

But unlike the database consumption described by Hiroki Azuma, which purely pursues combinations of “moe elements,” the character database in the Luo Xiaohei series often serves to supplement the worldview, aiming to prove the authenticity and vastness of this world where humans and spirits coexist.

This may be related to the production team's unique aesthetic orientation and creative habits: rather than precise control over narrative and script, they are more immersed in the design of visual language — creating rich character designs, polishing scenes with a strong sense of everyday life, and designing a logically self-consistent system of civilization. In this process, the priorities of creation shifted as well: the self-consistency of the worldview took precedence, to a certain extent, over the shaping of specific characters, resulting in a large and diverse cast and a narrative approach that resembles “decentralization.”

As a result, some viewers jokingly called the TV series “The Legend of Agen,” the first film “The Legend of Wuxian,” and the second film “The Legend of Luye,” while the protagonist Xiaohei seemed more like a point-of-view character used to string together the various characters with no or only shallow connections under the grand worldview.

On one hand, this narrative strategy makes key information overly scattered, burdening newcomers and casual viewers. To fully understand a character's story, one has to dig through the creators' Weibo, art books, the TV series, and the comic. On the other hand, it has also made the work's reputation mixed: supporters love this “everyone has a story” sense of aliveness; detractors feel the characters appear too chaotically and abruptly, weakening the narrative tension.

Setting aside visual factors like art style and design, why does this fictional world of spirits hold such powerful appeal?

From an IP perspective, the charm of the Luo Xiaohei worldview comes from its clearly layered, rigorously logical “psionic” settings. Through the explicit Six Disciplines of abilities, the promotion path of “becoming an immortal, attaining godhood,” and organizations of spirit forces such as the Guild, the creators have provided fans with a clear, easy-to-identify-with set of rules, making it easier for fans to project themselves into it.

Luo Xiaohei's breakout popularity lies even more in its gentle, understated narrative style. As one netizen joked about Luo Xiaohei's characters, “so utterly unremarkable, and so reassuring” — this series has constructed a warm, mutually respectful, almost zero-social-burden spirit society that fits modern people's pursuit of and longing for freedom and equality, becoming a spiritual utopia where some people rest their hearts.

How does spirit society differ from human society?

Borrowing Fei Xiaotong's view in The Institution of Reproduction: in human society, the family, as the smallest social unit, was fundamentally established to satisfy the need for the human species to continue (i.e., the need for reproduction). To ensure newborn individuals could survive smoothly within the social system, society established the institution of marriage, helping human infants complete the long process of “socialization” through “dual-parent nurturing,” while introducing inheritance systems to ensure the effective transfer of resources and power across generations.

Although these institutions guaranteed the stability of the social structure, over the course of history they gradually merged with economic and power orders, forming the present social system dominated by male and patriarchal power. Gender discrimination, generational divides, and class oppression are often rationalized in the name of “family responsibility” or “social expectations,” becoming structural burdens modern people find hard to shake off.

In spirit society, by contrast, the setting that spirits gather psionic essence to live and cannot reproduce fundamentally deconstructs the responsibilities and burdens brought by family. Without the need for reproduction, there is no gendered division of labor or inheritance pressure arising from it. Spirits can even freely choose their gender according to individual will, confining gender difference to the visual level, no longer carrying substantive biological or sociological distinctions.

Moreover, since spirits have extremely long lifespans and powerful abilities, they do not rely on class or strong organizations to obtain resources for survival. The way spirits get along resembles Laozi's “small state, few people,” where “people grow old and die without visiting one another.” Spirit organizations form mainly through geographic ties and master-disciple lineages.

But even when born in the same region, spirits do not form guardianship responsibilities or nurturing obligations based on order of birth; instead, like siblings, they treat each other as equals. Taking a master is usually a voluntary act as well — one may form deep bonds over shared interests, or, like Xuanli, simply take a master for the sake of cultivation, without needing to form overly deep emotional ties.

​“Spirits are infinitely varied and can only be judged as individuals”(chapter 48) — this immense degree of choice and autonomy, compared with the unchosen bonds of blood, better fits modern people's desire for freedom and self-determination.

Such a worldview also more easily gives rise to “big heroine characters” like Luye. In realist narratives, a female character's charm often comes from her difficult breakout through the cracks of patriarchy and male power; but in spirit society, the systemic resistance faced by female spirits is minimized.

So when the screenwriter shapes these characters, she need not consider the reproductive anxieties and family responsibilities human women so often face, staying far from the resulting gender stereotypes of being considerate, gentle and cute, or selflessly devoted, allowing the character to explore the world and establish her self purely according to individual will.

This is also part of why some readers placed such high hopes on Qingning. In such a relatively equal world, Qingning could have broken through gender stereotypes and achieved complete personal independence, answering the audience's expectations of an ideal self, an ideal woman — but the work failed to show Qingning's complexity, reducing her to a perfect yet stereotyped “Saint” and “Fairy.”

03 Why Did Lanxi Zhen Spark Controversy?​

In this author's view, the polarization of Lanxi Zhen's reputation is not only because the creative team's shaping abilities were limited, but even more because readers and the author held different expectations and positioning for this work: readers hoped to see more dimensional character development, while the creators focused more on how to flesh out a complex and diverse IP worldview.

From MTJJ's response, we can see the misalignment between the two. This article will mainly use Qingning as an example.

The creative team seems to believe that Qingning's growth was already complete when she followed Naga to the Northern Territories, and that the three hundred years there were merely a deepening of “repetitive and lonely” emotions; but from the readers' perspective, those three hundred years were the process of Qingning transforming from “human” to “immortal” — they should not be glossed over so simply, and deserved to be elaborated in ink.

The readers' doubts are not unfounded. Due to the shift of narrative focus, although Qingning's character arc had taken embryonic form before she left for the Northern Territories, it lacked force. This author will select three key events along Qingning's growth as examples for analysis:

First, traveling alone (chapters 49-60). After taking Laojun as her master, Qingning left Lanxi Town and Laojun's side for the first time, stepping into wider society, initially realizing the complexity of human-spirit relations and pondering the question of her stance on healing. At that time, her understanding of human-spirit relations mostly remained at the emotional level.

Second, attending the hairpin ceremony (chapters 80-84). “When a woman is promised in marriage, she may undergo the hairpin ceremony” — in ancient Han society, women generally underwent the hairpin ceremony before engagement and marriage, symbolizing adulthood. For Qingning, this should have been the turning point where she participated in social decision-making as an independent individual.

Earlier, the creators had designed two small plot points to show the “internal and external troubles” facing Lanxi Town after the war ended — Wuxian seeking Laojun's help on how to govern the calamity (the spirit calamity), and Mr. Zheng wanting to leave Lanxi Town in search of freedom. Qingning's decision at this moment to attend the hairpin ceremony showed her awareness and determination to formally participate in handling these complex conflicts. Yet in the narration, the work simplified the deeper impact of these social changes on Qingning, and by having her reaffirm her feelings for Laojun, contracted the conflict down to the dimension of “love” — the character development had already gone wrong here.

Third, heading to the Northern Territories (chapters 97-105). Yet between the hairpin ceremony and Naga forcing Laojun to hand over Qingning, there is a lack of plot involving Qingning making decisions on her own. Under these circumstances, Qingning suddenly stepping forward to ask Naga for a one-day reprieve, and persuading Laojun to let her go to the Northern Territories, in fact lacks the necessary psychological tempering and accumulation of ability. The qualities she displays — intelligence, strength and resolve, consideration for the greater good — seem innate rather than gradually formed through growth. There is a certain rupture in the character development here as well.

Good plot design should drive the arc of all core characters. During the three hundred years in the Northern Territories, Laojun goes from knowing nothing of love to understanding emotion, and Xuanli goes from impetuous rashness to learning restraint — both overcome their own flaws under the guidance of their goals and achieve clearer self-knowledge.

Qingning alone, apart from the increase in her physical age and cultivation, does not overcome her flaws or improve her self-knowledge in response to the changed environment — the character's growth is missing. This is precisely why readers accuse Qingning of being marginalized and comment that Lanxi Zhen is really “The Legend of Laojun.”

In fact, in this author's view, Qingning should have used her growth in power to break free from the fate of the “healing discipline's” passive sacrifice; she needed to reshape the standards of healing, display her uniqueness and subjectivity, and thereby complete her character arc.

But this process was simplified in the narration. As Laojun's disciple and a born healer, her acts of healing were not merely personal choices — they represented Laojun's stance and were enough to influence the direction of human-spirit relations. Early Qingning could save people through emotional kindness, but the later “Fairy Qingning” ought to have displayed a more rational process of deliberation and weighing, more befitting her identity.

The problem with Qingning's characterization lies partly in the production team's insufficient exploration of Qingning's social identity, and partly in the idealistic tone that permeates the work.

Yet looking across the entire Luo Xiaohei series, the creators seem afraid to give their protagonists “flaws” and “fears,” leaving character growth without internal resistance. Most characters also lack strong desires and goals, presenting a calm, “detached from all four elements” serenity and divinity. While this makes the work warm, it also renders the characters similar and lacking depth, making it hard for readers to resonate deeply.

According to the theory in 45 Master Characters, although Laojun and Qingning both belong to the “Savior” archetype, Laojun still has a transformation from “Hermit” to “Messiah,” whereas Qingning's positioning wavers among “Maiden, Savior, and Nurturer”: she combines the strengths of these archetypes (optimistic, powerful, and innately altruistic) but loses the predicaments these archetypes must face:

As a “Maiden,” she lacks the process of moving from naive dependence to strong independence; as a “Nurturer,” her devotion seems effortless — she is neither hurt by over-giving, nor shaken in her personality or values by choosing not to heal someone.

Even if a character's core is kindness and resilience, when facing certain losses of control they should still go through the shift from “wavering in the loss of control” to “establishing values.” Qingning lacks such a transformation, and thus lacks the process of metamorphosis from “maiden” to “immortal,” seeming more like a “sage” born with all knowledge and in no need of growth.

In building character relationships, characters should establish multidimensional personalities through mutual attraction and repulsion. The thinness and absence of Qingning's social relationships render her personality one-dimensional. By comparison, the most fully realized character in the entire series should be Fengxi from the first film: he has tenderness and kindness toward his own kind, and also cruelty in disregarding human lives;

he has the boldness and decisiveness of a leader of the exiled island group, yet hesitates and agonizes when seizing Xiaohei's domain; he has the calm and meticulousness of a planner, and also the madness and finality of scattering his spirit.

Perhaps precisely because Fengxi is a villain, the creators dared to give him intense flaws and conflicts. By contrast, positive characters like Wuxian and Xiaohei inevitably become caricatured due to the lack of internal antagonistic design.

The problem of characterization is also related to medium. The production team is better at shaping characters through audiovisual language, but comics can only convey information and emotion through static panels and dialogue; if the relationship between image and text is not handled well, emotion easily loses force in transmission. Films, with their tight pacing, emphasize narrative and character development, requiring characters to have clear desires and obstacles. The comic and TV series, with their slower pace and positioning leaning toward warmth and memes, tend to prioritize worldbuilding over deep exploration of characters.

04 Lanxi Zhen: A Dignified Farewell​

Returning to the IP universe: as a prequel, Lanxi Zhen has indeed completed its mission for this stage. It not only outlines the Guild's development, but also explains the distribution of spirit forces in the Guild's founding period, essentially completing the construction of the worldview and the connection of the timeline, providing background support for the feature films and the TV series.

While systematically outputting the “psionic settings,” it also constructed a utopian spirit society free of blood ties and kinship ethics, offering a spiritual haven for modern people yearning for freedom and equality.

The many controversies Lanxi Zhen faced also expose the creative team's shortcomings in long-form work: scattered narrative focus, incomplete character arcs, and insufficient character complexity. This may be related to the team's creative habits: they seem better at everyday storytelling than at grand, complex narratives.

Considering the toll that eight years of serialization took on the creators' energy, ending here is already a sincere and dignified account.

But judging from The Gate of All Beings arc, Hanmuchunhua clearly wants to explore the deeper proposition of “human-spirit coexistence.” Deepening the theme inevitably raises higher demands for character development. According to official announcements, the pre-school arc of The Legend of Luo Xiaohei will be serialized in the second half of this year, and the comic Sword Saint Wuxian will meet readers in a few years.

We look forward to Hanmuchunhua continuing to improve and bringing more excellent works in the future.

“There will always be dreamers roaming the world with sword in hand, always little kids draping bed sheets over their shoulders and wielding brooms as knights-errant, and always newcomers yearning for new legends of the jianghu.”

Among this year’s Spring Festival films, Blades of the Guardians—adapted from the manhua Blades of the Guardians—stands out as something different.

It is one of the rare purely domestic live-action manhua adaptations (note: meaning the original comic is Chinese and the film is made by a Chinese team), and the first domestic live-action manhua adaptation to brave the Spring Festival box office. What’s more, it is an uncommonly seen hardcore wuxia production.

Looking at the cast, the film not only has “the world’s greatest action choreographer” Yuen Woo-ping at the helm, but also gathers Wu Jing, Nicholas Tse, Jet Li, as well as Yu Shi, Cisha, Liang Biying, Lin Qiunan and other action stars spanning five generations.

Looking at the texture—desert, yellow sand, flashes of blades and swords—it easily evokes classic wuxia films like New Dragon Gate Inn, Ashes of Time, and Flying Swords of Dragon Gate.

However, the thick “dimensional wall” between manhua and live action, an increasingly niche wuxia theme, a dazzling array of casting choices, the original’s complex narrative versus the film’s limited runtime—these all make one anxious about the final product.

Is the Blades of the Guardians movie worth watching? Can this “hardcore” wuxia blockbuster, as it claims, revive the glory of Chinese-language wuxia and break the curse that “domestic manhua adaptations always flop”?

01 Purely domestic live-action manhua adaptations always flop​

Counting them up, there have actually only been a handful of domestic live-action films adapted from Chinese manhua.

The earliest domestic live-action manhua adaptation dates back to Mr. Wang, created by Ye Qianyu during the Republican era.

In 1928, inspired by the American humor comic Bringing Up Father, Ye Qianyu wanted to create a humorous, satirical comic focused on the lives of ordinary Chinese people. And so the skinny, comical, henpecked Shanghai everyman “Mr. Wang” was born.

The work was first serialized in Shanghai Manhua until 1937 and was well received. Starting in 1934, the Mr. Wang comics were successively adapted into films, with more than twenty entries released up through the latest one, Mr. Wang: Consumed by Desire, in 1993.

Then came the childhood memory shared by generations: the “Sanmao” comic series created by Zhang Leping. The series was adapted into films four times, in 1949, 1992, 1996, and 2003. Among these, The Wanderings of Sanmao, shot and screened in 1949, was the first domestic feature film publicly released after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Both of the above comics took shape during the turbulent Republican era and bear distinct marks of their times. The “Sanmao” series in particular, through the eyes of the street orphan Sanmao, exposes the bitter lives of those at the bottom of society. Though published in commercial magazines, the theme of “national salvation” was always the main thread of comic creation in this period.

The first contemporary live-action film adapted from a domestic manhua was Go Away Mr. Tumor, released in 2015. Its author, Xiong Dun, depicted her own real experience battling cancer in comic form, publishing it simultaneously on Tianya and Weibo; her positive, optimistic spirit moved countless netizens.

In 2012, Xiong Dun passed away from illness. Three years later, the film Go Away Mr. Tumor, adapted from her comic, was released. It ultimately earned 510 million yuan at the box office with a Douban score of 7.4.

Afterward, Take My Brother Away, created by the comic duo You & Ling, was twice adapted into live-action films: Take My Brother Away released in 2018, and What Happened to Big Brother? in 2021. The former earned 375 million yuan at the box office with a Douban score of 6.8—decent results—while the latter grossed only 30 million yuan with a Douban score dropping to 4.2, a truly dismal showing.

In 2023, the film Under the Light of the Underworld, adapted from the popular manhua The Outcast and directed by acclaimed director Wuershan, was released.

Yet this much-anticipated “dream collaboration” of a manhua-adapted live-action blockbuster saw its reputation plummet after release. Criticisms from audiences included, but were not limited to: drastically altered plot, broken characterizations, vulgar content, shoddy special effects, and miscasting; some angrily condemned the work for “completely failing to grasp the spirit of the original comic.”

In the end, Under the Light of the Underworld earned only 118 million yuan at the box office with a Douban score of 5.1—a crushing defeat.

In addition, there are the manhua-adapted live-action web films Baimen Wujia and Chunhui, which never saw theatrical release.

Baimen Wujia was adapted from the wuxia manhua of the same name that began serialization in 2013, and premiered in 2018. The original comic won first prize for Most Promising Comic at the 4th Xingman Awards, but the Baimen Wujia film scored only 3.9 on Douban, ranking dead last among the domestic manhua adaptations listed above.

Chunhui was adapted from Ruan Yunting’s semi-autobiographical manhua of the same name. Seen through the eyes of a young art teacher named Xiaochun, the work strings together one warm, healing little story after another, attending to students’ psychology while also voicing the teacher’s own confusion. Gently telling readers that “it’s okay to fall behind,” the work soothes readers’ anxieties like a spring breeze.

The film version is a single-episode short, shot on a phone and only 24 minutes long, released in early 2026. But whether it’s Baimen Wujia or Chunhui, judging by results or scale, neither managed effective reach among the general public.

It’s fair to say that the domestic market hasn’t seen a manhua-adapted film with broad reach, impressive results, and outstanding reputation in a long time.

Can Blades of the Guardians break through this time?

02 The most promising adaptation contender?​

The story of Blades of the Guardians takes place in the final years of the Sui dynasty.

The male lead, Daoma, is an armed escort. Carrying a child named Xiao Qi and bearing several blades of varying shapes on his back, he doesn’t do heroic deeds—he just takes escort jobs for money.

One day, his old acquaintance Lao Mo refers a special job to Daoma: escorting the court’s wanted criminal Zhishilang to Chang’an.

Along the way, all manner of jianghu figures—Ayu, Shu, Madam Yanzi, Pei Xingyan—take the stage in turn, each with their own schemes and their own codes of honor. At court, Emperor Yang of Sui, the Yuwen clan, and the various Western Regions tribes each plot their own moves; undercurrents surge in and around Chang’an as a great battle is about to break out along the Hexi Corridor.

Blades of the Guardians combines the seriousness of historical fiction with the romance of wuxia, weaving major historical events and portrayals of famous historical figures into its semi-fictional narrative, giving the story a more authentic texture.

The author, Xu Xianzhe, drew on primary historical sources such as the Book of Sui and the Zizhi Tongjian in creating the work, striving to “write in the blank spaces of history” so the story doesn’t stray from basic historical facts. His research includes boldly imagined and reasonably inferred plot elements, constructing a solid and credible world for Blades of the Guardians.

The various historical buildings, clothing, weapons, and props that appear in the comic also mostly have historical prototypes, subconsciously leading readers to believe such a legend really happened in the final years of the Sui dynasty.

But what draws readers in at first glance is its heavy art style and intensely dynamic battle drawings.

The comic’s lines are rough and forceful, fully conveying the speed, power, and impact of martial arts action, getting readers’ blood pumping; the refined paneling controls the pacing of reading, so that merely looking at the static comic, one can imagine the dynamic moves—like “watching” a movie through the page. The “heavy-industry”-grade art style carries an inherent weathered quality, further highlighting the aesthetics of violence and the cruel era in which the story is set.

The fight scenes are also a major selling point of the Blades of the Guardians film.

Director Yuen Woo-ping is known as “the world’s greatest action choreographer,” and his own résumé is a living history of film action design: Drunken Master, Once Upon a Time in China II, The Matrix, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Kung Fu Hustle, The Grandmaster… Classic action sequences from many Chinese and foreign films are his masterworks.

Lead actor Wu Jing is famous for being able to fight and fighting for real. He once trained with the Beijing Wushu Team, won multiple national wushu competitions, and his signature works are essentially all wuxia or action films. Setting aside his controversial remarks, looking purely at his résumé as an action actor, he genuinely lives up to audiences’ expectations for the fight scenes.

Nicholas Tse, Max Zhang, Kara Wai, Jet Li are regulars of wuxia and action films; the moment their names come up, one classic scene after another automatically surfaces in wuxia fans’ minds.

And the several new-generation actors also mostly have martial arts or opera training. Among them, Yu Shi has won awards multiple times in national mounted-archery competitions; the fighting prowess of Cisha, Lin Qiunan, Wen Junhui and others was already proven in last year’s hit film Catch the Shadow; Chen Lijun, who plays Ayu, and Li Yunxiao, who plays Madam Yanzi, are Yue opera performers who rose to fame with their joint performance of the Yue opera New Dragon Gate Inn.

Coincidentally, the prototype for Blades of the Guardians’ male lead Daoma was precisely Zhou Huai’an, played by Tony Leung Ka-fai in the film New Dragon Gate Inn—and Tony Leung himself has taken on the important role of “Lao Mo” in Blades of the Guardians.

Half of Chinese cinema’s action-film “pillars,” and the old and new “flag-bearers” of wuxia film, all gather here—this truly is a spectacle unseen for many years, and perhaps unlikely to be seen again.

Judging from the trailers already released, the action scenes take up a large portion of the film, and all are well executed. The long-missed on-location desert shooting, real actors on real horses, real blades against real steel—these make audiences feel as if they’ve dreamed their way back to the golden age of wuxia cinema, eager to regain that satisfying, “fists landing on flesh” sensation.

03 A maximally compressed jianghu, a narrative fraught with peril​

However, what determines a film’s reputation isn’t just the action scenes—it’s also the story.

Unfortunately, Yuen Woo-ping’s track record as a director and screenwriter Yu Baimei’s past results don’t seem able to reassure audiences…

The Blades of the Guardians manhua has two main plotlines, overt and hidden: the overt one, centered on Daoma and his companions, is the jianghu line recounting the conflicts along the road from the Western Regions to Chang’an; the hidden one, centered on real historical figures with alternating narration, is the court line revolving around official history and political struggle.

The film appears to have cut the court line entirely, focusing its lens solely on the jianghu. Given the film’s limited runtime and the story’s sweeping setting, dual-line narration would risk dropping one thread while catching the other, so this choice is understandable.

But the film’s script also spans a very long period of time. Judging from the trailers, the film may cover most of the important jianghu-line plot from chapter 1 to chapter 168—and bear in mind that Blades of the Guardians has only 172 chapters total since it began serialization in 2015 (per Bilibili Comics), and these are interspersed with a great deal of side stories, ensemble narratives, and flashbacks.

One of the charms of Blades of the Guardians’ story lies in how it cares about every microscopic life caught in the tides of the era. Even villains, supporting characters, and extras are shaped with depth and realism. Consequently, the main plot of Blades of the Guardians advances slowly, while the side stories branch out lush and abundant; countless vividly drawn characters populate the stage, together composing a wuxia world that is vast yet richly detailed.

Compressing everyone’s story into a single film inevitably means simplifying character motivations and “label-ifying” complex characters so audiences can quickly remember them. In that case, the depth of characterization is bound to suffer.

And the removal of the court line leaves the original’s brilliant portrayals of historical figures with nowhere to go, inevitably weakening the work’s sense of historical weight. The vivid gallery of characters and the heroic struggles of larger-than-life heroes so dazzling in the comic may never be seen in the film—or at least not in this film.

Moreover, that “dimensional wall” from comic to live action isn’t so easily crossed either.

The Blades of the Guardians manhua skillfully alternates literal and figurative depiction to create an intense sense of atmosphere. What readers see on the page isn’t necessarily “objectively happening”—it may be a character’s inner thoughts made external, or an intentional symbolic, impressionistic technique by the author.

The comic techniques used in past live-action films mostly appeared in exaggerated, comedic, non-serious narrative contexts, but Blades of the Guardians clearly doesn’t suit that path. If the handling of seriousness misses the mark, the solemn plot can easily turn into a chuunibyou flare-up, breaking the immersive viewing experience.

In addition, there are certain traits unique to comic characters that can easily achieve stunning effects in the original but are hard to replicate in reality.

Take Pei Xingyan for example. In the comic, Pei Xingyan is tall and imposing, with deep-set features and a bold manner; his very entrance carries an air of menace, the very image of a great general who could take an enemy’s head amid an army of ten thousand. But ask about his age—he’s only 17!

The extreme contrast between his ferocious appearance and his youthful age adds a layer of cuteness to the character’s ferocity, enriching his persona.

However, perhaps because a suitable “max-level teenager” is too hard to find in reality, this contrast was unfortunately flattened in the film version, and Pei Xingyan became a generic “dashing young general,” diluting the character’s anchor point.

Similar casting regrets are also visible in characters like Ani and Di Ting. Voices of dissatisfaction with the casting appeared early in the film’s promotion and remain loud to this day. Even if you’re not a fan of the original, you might still avoid this film because you feel some actor doesn’t fit their role.

04 Manhua, cinema, and wuxia—a three-in-one self-rescue​

While I have regrets about some of the adaptations, I don’t believe audiences are obligated to read the original manhua in advance before watching the film.

When a work undergoes cross-media adaptation, trade-offs are inevitable, and works that “drastically adapt” the original and still win acclaim are hardly rare. For example, Brigitte Lin’s Dongfang Bubai in Swordsman II, though never endorsed by original author Jin Yong, became a generation-defining classic in the hearts of many viewers.

But this raises a question: even if the film succeeds, to what extent can its glory flow back to the manhua?

The plight of domestic manhua is a well-worn topic—after the bubble burst, the once-flourishing comic platforms have dwindled to three mainstream players: Kuaikan Comics, Tencent Comics, and Bilibili Comics.

The living space for domestic comic creators is far from rosy: some comics can only occupy the downstream derivative niche of web novels already validated by the market, while riskier original comics struggle along, axed mid-run or abandoned by their authors as a matter of routine.

Even among domestic original comics, Blades of the Guardians is an outlier: page-format, black-and-white, read right-to-left—running contrary to the current mainstream trends of domestic comics and invisibly raising the barrier to entry. Despite its excellent reputation, the Blades of the Guardians manhua has yet to demonstrate a matching ability to monetize.

Even if the film succeeds, it doesn’t mean success for the Blades of the Guardians IP as a whole. The general audiences who make up the bulk of ticket sales don’t care whether it’s a manhua adaptation—many may not even know it has a comic original. Whether the casting is faithful or the plot changed—things the original fans care about—mean nothing to general audiences; for them, the first Blades of the Guardians they encounter is the film, and Daoma is simply the Daoma played by Wu Jing. Those willing to seek out the comic after watching the film are, after all, a minority.

What’s more, the film industry itself isn’t doing so well either.

After Ne Zha 2 became a smash hit at the start of last year, none of the several key holiday windows that followed produced a hit film to carry the torch; not until Zootopia 2 was released at year’s end did the overall box office warm up somewhat, though overall it remained bleak.

On the other hand, short videos, micro-dramas, AI comic-dramas, and other cheaper cultural products with faster feedback are stealing people’s attention. According to QuestMobile’s video content industry report, in 2025 the supply of films on online video platforms rose somewhat, yet their share of views declined slightly, accounting for only 2.2% of total views across the four platforms—iQIYI, Youku, Tencent Video, and Mango TV.

In other words, even on streaming platforms with lower barriers to consumption, people are increasingly unwilling to watch movies.

As it stands, the 2026 Spring Festival slate has no obvious super-headline film, and overall expectations are lower than in previous years. And how many viewers the wuxia genre can still attract is itself an uncertain factor.

Think back: what was the last theatrical wuxia film that sparked nationwide buzz, earning both acclaim and box-office success? Brotherhood of Blades? The Grandmaster? The Final Master? Or something else? Whichever it was, it’s already a work from over a decade ago.

Good wuxia doesn’t rely on piling up visual spectacles with special effects; it relies on solid, grounded moves, placing extremely high demands on choreographers, directors, and actors alike. This is a genre where, without real kung fu, you can’t take the stage. “Lack of good scripts,” “a generational gap among action actors,” “special effects flying everywhere,” “no chivalric spirit”—these are audiences’ most common complaints about current wuxia films.

Wuxia animation is caught in a similar bind. Compared with purely physical combat, animation is naturally better suited to—and better at realizing—more fantastical genres like magic circles and immortal arts. Pure wuxia animation faces not only technical challenges but also an emotional-threshold crisis of “not thrilling enough, not hype enough.”

When investment and return are out of proportion and satisfying wuxia works grow ever scarcer, it seems to seal the fact that “wuxia is dead.”

And yet, whenever a big production claiming to be “orthodox wuxia” launches, good or bad, it draws widespread attention; also in recent years, several wuxia-themed games have been enthusiastically embraced, with some sparking massive discussion before even officially releasing.

Some non-wuxia IPs have also launched wuxia-themed events to much acclaim, such as Wuthering Waves, Love and Deepspace, and Path to Nowhere. And the twelfth-anniversary installment of the Spring Festival stalwart Boonie Bears series likewise carries a strong wuxia flavor (the kung fu bear theory, that is).

Perhaps it isn’t that audiences have abandoned wuxia, but that the market has overdrawn audiences’ trust in wuxia-type works—audiences still crave quality wuxia that looks good and fights well.

And right at this moment, Blades of the Guardians arrives.

A well-funded production team, an original of proven quality, a cast with formidable “combat power”—these make Blades of the Guardians the meeting point of manhua, cinema, and wuxia as they explore the road to self-rescue.

As a second-generation anime fan who yearned for the wuxia world since childhood, I sincerely hope Blades of the Guardians can deliver a good story, bring a jianghu legend of gratitude and vengeance settled with a sword, and make a few new ripples on the jianghu.

The age of cold weapons is long gone, and wuxia may well become a niche genre in the end. But there will always be dreamers roaming the world with sword in hand, always little kids draping bed sheets over their shoulders and wielding brooms as knights-errant, and always newcomers yearning for new legends of the jianghu.

This may be an opportunity, or it may be flowers in a mirror and the moon in water—illusions all. As for how much it’s really worth, we’ll only find out on the first day of the Lunar New Year.

​References: The Beijing News: “Blades of the Guardians” Season 1 wraps with a score of 8.8—interview with original creator Xu Xianzhe on history and imagination