Is there a western equivalent of wuxia?

THE EXPENDABLES

In all seriousness, fantasy novels are probably the closest western equivalent. That or sci fi novels.

"western wuxia" is absolutely real.
A great cinematic examples would be 300, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars (arguable, but would fall into this category), The Three Musketeers, and Zorro. Even Laurence of Arabia could fall into this genre.

Strangely The Legend of Zelda would be as well, even though it is Japanese in origin.

Three Musketeers, especially the more Erol Flynn'd interpretations, is the perfect analogue because it also deals with the social and honor issues that real Wuxia addresses. Three Musketeers is about society, order, and the personal qualities and failures of the musketeers. If someone would post the Wuxia Copypasta/Screenshot that chinese user did, it'll be easier to explain.

By replacing all the swords with guns?

Spaghetti Westerns, maybe?

This.
Samurais are to swords as Americans are to guns.

Westerns tend to have more in common with Samurai, which isn't Wuxia.

That's Woo-xia though. Still kinda Chinese.

I thought Wuxia was China's take, Samurai films Japan's, and Westerns America's.

Literal reddit normie image macro

It's the same shit thematically

That movie was such a treat.

I thought it was garbage

They are *nothing* alike. Samurai films are melancholic and focus on the fate of the individual in a society that is changing. Wuxia CAN be melancholic but is focused on the rectification of society.

I think you're garbage

No, it's pop culture garbage. It's the exact same

>D&Drones prove they still play basically a system that makes gurps seem simple and even then it is still fucking garbage fire on every level with no real advantage to play over ANY other system than meme value bought by popularity on the MSM-threads

What do you mean exactly OP?

In terms of setting it would be sword and sorcery pulps, or some of the more fantastical sword and sandal films.

In the sense of tone, the swashbucklers stuff like The Princess bride and three musketeers probably come to closest the sense of romantically high adventure.

It's a common trait of samurai films but I wouldn't say it's defining.

The classic samurai films Kurosawa (and westerns directly inspired by them ) might deal with the role of old warriors in a changing society. But they were written as introspective examinations on the old yarns of guts and glory that came before then.

its a bunch of movies where they fight stop trying to find some common deep meaning

...

ITT fa/tg/uys think they know film

Depends what you understand under "wuxia". It's like asking if there is Chinese equivalent of adventure genre.

Street level superheroes, exemplified by
>Season 1 and 2 of Arrow
>Daredevil
>Batman Begins
>John Wick
with all genuinely physics-breaking powers removed, or ignored

>with all genuinely physics-breaking powers removed, or ignored

Wuxia has some pretty heavy stuff on that front. I think you'll do fine.

well, yeah, but there's physics-bending Wuxia goodness, and then there's deciding to merge the series into a shared universe with the freaking Flash, but I get what you're saying bro.

>"I just watch for the 'splosions"

Back to /tv/ with you

>martial artists running around your old country setting
>swordsmen running around your old country setting
>gunmen running around your old country setting
>nothing similar between all three
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

don't bother with the sinaboo

>I have no fucking clue what wuxia is about, but since it's from Asia and I saw that samurai movie once, it must be the same
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

>>nothing similar between all three
Where did anyone say this?

I like all three and do think they have stuff in common on the surface, but often the "why's" are rather different.

does that mean Noir is the European?

I mean, the 'hows' are also pretty different. The toughest they ever get in Samurai flicks is Zatoichi, whose power is "he can fight about as good as a REALLY GOOD SWORDSMAN but he's blind, so everyone underestimates him at first."

Or perhaps The Sword of Doom. The hero in that one is absurdly strong, way stronger than any real person would be!

But in neither do characters actually defy the laws of physics and become transcendental and/or metaphorical figures who aren't intended to be treated as real life.

For that you'd have to go with something completely different, like Onmyoji.

What is that exactly, the Phantomas an other early 20th century stuff? That isn't just a Pulp variant?

Kung Fu hustle was so funny

I never thought warlord era China would make a good wuxia setting, but I was wrong

Film Noir? It's a thriller subgenre, which pulp also often is. It's Dashiell Hammett or Ray Chandler in literature. Or film, for that matter, because most of the famous ones are Chandler or Hammett adaptations.

>Seriously not knowing what noir is
Maltanese Falcon for classic noir
Trance for modern neo-noir

Conveniently, there's a Wuxia thread up at the moment, including a primer reposted in which explains some of the more unique elements of Wuxia, and why it's distinct from the japanese equivalent.

I'm familiar with the name but aside from acosiating it with black and white films from the first half of the 20th century, I don't know what really defines Noir as Noir. Does that make sense?

True, neither Japanese or American genres have blatantly supernatural levels of prowess like the Wuxia folks often do, just tend to be really, really good (and tough) at swords/guns.

>I don't know what really defines Noir as Noir
yep, going from wikipedia I don't think it's terribly clear even among experts.

but I was going for "pulp detectives" (i.e. private detective, down on his luck, fighting against city corruption)

Well, it's a black film. In themes, story-building, characters (including the stock ones) and so on. It's less about being pulp detectives (and most definitely not things listed in the parenthesis) and more about hardboiled detectives, cynical outlook on the world and criminals that not only are competent and can be main characters, but also having mitivations, faces and stories to tell. And everything is brooding, dark and with a sign of being overused, but without going for edgy shit.
In short - it's a black movie. Hence the name.

I think the best go-to example of noir is is watching Payback with Gibson, despite being neo-noir (so a modern take on all the cliches and stock characters). Especially the director's cut, since it greatly tons down all the "lovable rogue" elements of the story and makes it about flat out evil characters on all sides of the conflict doing their things to achieve their goals.
Seriously, go watch that movie. It's top 10 of Veeky Forums approved when it comes to crime stories.

I gotchu senpai

But wuxia isn't just another name for a kung fu movie.

What's your opinion on Altman's version of The Long Goodbye?

Were Mabuse der Spieler and "M" noir films then?

they're like proto-noir, a lot of the tone and style is from that era

Old Spice Commercials

You ever hear of King Arthur stories?

Irish Mythology

Whilst the knight errant type stories are somewhat different from typical wuxia fare, you do find stuff that wouldn't be out of a high powered wuxia campaign.

...

It's probably one of the most criminally overlooked movies of the 70s and the biggest testimony that New Hollywood had a potential to make commerial films for the mass audiences without going into blockbusters, focusing more on the story and characters than dazzling visuals, but without going into existentionalism and dull, overstretched scripts that are mostly considered as the hallmark of that period. So of course it barely recoupled its own production back, because hey, why not?
And by itself, dropping the mini-rage mode? It's a fucking great movie. I think like all movies of this type they truly start to shime some time later, when you realise their true value rather than instantly dismissing them as "yet another story about X". There are no movies like The Long Goodbye. The fact it picks up source material and takes it on a fresh spin without ending up with Shane Black-style parody only makes it better.

That's just Lang's German modernism. And like the other user said, it's more of a proto-noir.

Gonna second this. The Crouching Tiger guy even made a Musketeer movie. It's...not particularly good, but I enjoy it. It has some pretty good bad-guy lines from Febre.

>"But, I feel the need to harm someone."
>"That's the second time this evening I've been called mad, and I'm beginning to resent it."
>"No mercy. No heart."

Wasn't Seven Samurai actually just Kurosawa, being a big Western fan, him trying to make a Western for Japanese audiences?

Which is part of the reason why he dug The Magnificent Seven so much?

Yes and no. Jidai-geki by itself is very much like western, without westaboos in the equation

Westerns or Blaxploitation

>martials being on par with casters is unrealistic
Do these people just not give a single hot shit about our real-world mythologies? This whole caster supremacy thing started in the fucking 1970s or 1980s or whatever, and now it's so strongly ingrained in tabletop roleplaying that these faggots are ignoring thousands and thousands of years of mythological warriors.

Welcome to D&D. There's a reason people say it causes brain damage.

Kinda.

youtube.com/watch?v=t_3VZDb7pj4

I have been playing D&D since 1995 and whatever curse of retardation is affecting these people hasn't affected me. What makes me immune? What makes these fucking morons vulnerable to it? I need to know these things!

The closest equivalent would be medieval epics, I'd say. Keep in mind that Roland smashed his legendary sword Durendál into a mountain so hard, it created a kilometer wide pass through the Pyrenees. That's a pretty Wushia-tier feature. Now imagine fictional stories that take inspiration from how fucking ridiculous medieval epics could get.

The big difference is that the Chinese (despite the whole year 0 communist revolution bullshit) glorify their history (or even falsify it, to make it as if the Han had always been dominant in China, and to make it seem as if China was always a constant unified presence in history) whereas Europeans are at best indifferent towards and at worst ashamed of their history.

If we treated our historical heroes in the same way the Chinese treat theirs in Wuxia or the Nips in anime (hell, or how the Nips treat Western heroes in anime for that matter), it'd be deemed "cringeworthy" if not "nationalistic".

I suddenly realize that the Fate series is more accurate than I thought.

What about detective stories? Hired by some guy, discover murders or something, solves them, goes back to the office now that the job is done until next time. It's certainly not a wholesome change of society, but it becomes more of a personal journey for the protagonist to finding a justice in a crime that society might turn away from or ignore simply.

Generally it seems to be people for whom D&D was their primary source, rather than having prior knowledge of mythology or fantasy outside it.

Fuck off brainlet. Go find your tard wrangler and tell them they ought to supervise you better. You're a nuisance.

They're not even touching on some of the more crazy saints and Biblical beings, especially since several can be seen as adoptions of other mythological figures into either the Jewish mythology/theology or Christian theology.

Take Samson, he gets cucked, kills a few guys who helped cuck him, leads the Jews and kills a thousand more guys, gets blinded, then takes revenge by pulling the pillars down supporting a building killing everyone inside it including himself.

Ztupid, gay looking fighting done entirely with cheap CGI or wires?

No.

Wuxia is garbo.

Um... Green Arrow and the Flash are already from the same universe. So... point is?

"WE KNOW" was one of the few really good bits of writing in Skyrim.

dumb phone poster, shoo shoo, away with you

Your shitty livr action cartoons have nothing on a normal martial arts flick.

Yeah, while the actual story of Fate is hit or miss it is a fun vehicle to expose me to mythological heroes that I otherwise never would have heard of/had the reason to read up on further. Which gets even funnier when stuff I assumed was just anime bullshit actually isn't that different from what happened in the myths.

gun-fu

Shoo

I was going to write a reply, but then realised what am I doing, so pic related

Epics

80s action movies.

...

Why do all you filthy gweilo think Wuxia is so outlandish?

You're acting like Xianxia = Wuxia

>Is he gae or something

The story of Samson is crazy.didn't he kill, like, 100 random people to steal their coats to make a dowry?

No it was for a bet. He told a riddle to some party guests betting them 50 sets of clothes, and his guests cheated by asking his wife for the answer so he got so mad he went and killed 50 Philistines, stole their clothes, and brought those to his guests.
There's also the example of King David who, while not outright impossible, was pretty outlandish. At one point while on the run from Saul, he went to some priests and asked if they had a weapon he could borrow, and they said all they had was the sword of Goliath the Philistine.

So for that entire section of the Bible and possibly afterwards, David was hefting around a zweihander-tier buster sword.

If you mean all the "face" and "system of responsibility" then feudalism is the answer.

Skerples talks about it at length on his blog, coinandscrolls.

Don't forget the worst fetch quest in history, when David was made to bring a hundred Philistine foreskins. Then David proved that he was the first level grinder in history by grinding out 200 of them.

>feudalism
>China

Blockbuster action movies.
You know, the type in which the hero parkours all over the city being chased by the bad guys then falls from the 3rd floor of a building then gets into a car chase that ends with his car exploding while he jumps away from the explosion duel wielding shotguns so he can have a final showdown with the main bad guy and his mooks that kidnapped his girlfriend.

It's wuxia.

We took it and did it better.

It's ours now.

Fight us. We'll win.

>Skerples

the point is that season 1 and 2 of Arrow were going out of their way to create a RELATIVELY realistic street-level supers world that adhered to a certain power-level in which expert kung-fu training made you basically top of the heap, and it very much felt like American Urban Wuxia, and their first venture into shared-universe territory was with literally the most powerful super on DC's roster, and shattered that quite pleasant genre they were building for themselves.

The subject of the thread was western wuxia, and season 1 and 2 of the arrow, before it became a shared universe, was very much that, so I brought it up. Season 3 and after, the genre shifts starkly in a different direction, which isn't necessarily bad, but no longer applies to OP's question.

>Some schmuck fighting a monster
>Better
My fucking sides