Chinese web fiction is a form of online storytelling that has recently exploded in popularity over the last couple of decades, with millions of published novels, and hundreds of millions of readers and writers combined. There are many genres under the umbrella of Chinese web fiction, but one of the most loved is cultivation (xianxia) fiction. Inspired by Daoist philosophy Chinese mythology, and ancient martial arts practices, cultivation novels follow protagonists, often ordinary people, on a journey to gain spiritual power to achieve spiritual harmony or enlightenment. Though rooted in traditional Chinese values, China’s online web fiction community has expanded and found a global audience through translations, fan adaptations, and other transformations of the content. We are a group of 5 college students taking a course on Chinese web fiction, who’ve assigned ourselves the task of introducing these cultivation novels to a Western audience with no prior knowledge of them via the creation of this website.

One thing we’ve often dicusssed as a group in the scope of our class about webnovels is the nature of cross-cultural communication and translation. Although we are a diverse group with differing levels of experience with webnovels, the majority of us were not the most familiar with the format and some of the staples of the genre. Thus, when it came to ideate for this website, we wanted to link the genre with another, in hopes of making webfiction more understandable to those who have limited experience with it. We also wanted to choose specific case studies as any genre comparison would be too broad to be digestible. Since Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (MXTX)’s Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (Mo Dao Zu Shi, MDZS) is one of the most read novels on the internet, we decided to use it as the basis for our comparison on the webnovel front, and the remaining question was what to compare it to. The three things we wanted out of a series were 1) of course enough similarities for it to be a comparison which made sense, 2) something from the Western literature world so that we could bring two seemingly disparate worlds of writing together, and 3) something which not only us as the authors of the site were familiar with, but something that a potential audience would be more familiar with. When thinking of a wide-reaching series that hit at least the second and third criteria, Harry Potter came to mind immediately, and we believe that it gives enough of a platform to make meaningful comparisons.

What comparisons can be made between these two works and are they enough of a basis to make these good case studies? At first glances the stories may be rather different, aiming at different audiences and having different formats. However, if we look beyond plot and story structure we see many points of comparison. Both of the worlds rely on their home mythology to set up magic and supernatural systems, both have an ensemble cast centered in particular around one main character, and both, in the vein of cultivation novels, are explorations of the main cast growing in their power throughout a series of novels. However, more than any similarities inside the stories themselves, we found value in comparing the roles in culture that both series have. They are both wide-ranging multimedia franchises, both provide interesting case studies in translation, and both have helped create wide-spread and deep online communities worldwide, uniting people across the world while also forming more localized communities. From all these points of comparison, we wanted to create compare and contrast articles, as well as articles about the intersections between the two series to bring Western and Eastern storytelling together and show the differences and similarities between cultures. As a diverse group of individuals, we hold experience seeing these two franchises from different perspectives, and wanted to share that with our audience. On this site you will find articles in the comparison section which directly compare MDZS and Harry Potter across many fronts, and articles in the editorial section which are more about our or other people’s experience with these stories, for better or for worse. We wanted one to be more founded in objective fact (comparisons) and the other more about how people relate to the stories and what hooks they may have (editorials).