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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> I'm in a few communities that like to read novels from China / Korea. Claude Sonnet translates is able Mandarin to English almost perfectly.

What novels are you reading?

This is fascinating to me, because the world is quickly becoming a place where we have to choose which information from the unlimited information stream to consume. It feels like unlimited opportunity cost. I, for one, don't think I'll ever have enough time to watch every Academy Award nominated film (let alone all of the winners). And that's just one type of information.

You're going after some obscure (?) stuff. What brought about the interest?

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Xianxia I expect. Distinctly Chinese fantasy webnovels set around Cultivators seeking immortality that go for 6000 chapters and start with the main character being the weakest guy in the weakest part of a world to them being a god like being who pinches galaxies between their finger tips.

As for why do people read it? Well.. there's lots of it, it's free and it's inherently progression fantasy most of the time which can often be addictive.

One must simply be careful they do not read forbidden scriptures.... and develop the Dao of Brainrot, it's sadly an ever present danger.

I like Xianxia because there is actual power progression. Compared to many of the new mangas where characters go to max power in about half a chapter...

Also it is often quite different fantasy and sometimes world building can be truly imaginative and different. Where as lot of others are rather too formulaic.

Yeah, I'm one of those readers who adore world building, I can honestly have cardboard cutout characters so long as the world building is great. Coupled with good progression and honestly I could read for a month solid, I have read for a month solid, it was glorious!

The novels I like the most right now are "Mysteries of the Immortal Puppet Master" and "Eternal tale" which are both just fun Chinese fantasy novels.

> What brought about the interest?

They are very unique coming from the perspective of an American that has mostly read books published by Western authors. There are all these unique fantasy tropes based on Chinese history that are like a parallel branch to Tolkein based fantasy. Also, you can clearly see that they have completely different value systems and ironically you can tell they are comparatively less censored.

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