Political drama/Nirvana in Fire
PostPosted:Wed Apr 14, 2021 12:46 pm
I started watching Nirvana in Fire again, which is about a guy in a fictional historical era who was betrayed by the imperial court and came back to seek his revenge against everyone that betrayed him including the Emperor. Now, I realize it's probably hard to make a convincing plot that overthrows the government since if it's that believable someone would've already tried it, but I've seen stuff like 24 or West Wing or whatever and they're at least somewhat plausible if you allow convenient super weapons or convenient crisis (e.g. random guy with a nuke, random nation declares war on USA for no reason), so I'm not sure if it's just me or the bar for political drama is set this low for Chinese Drama or I'm just unaware that it's generally that low to begin with.
The biggest problem, and an ironic one, is that Nirvana in Fire is way too democratic, especially since it came out of China. All this time you've the protagonist trying to replace government officials with his loyal guys so he can take the Emperor to court and force him to admit his mistakes. However, if you know anything about how any sort of government with an Emperor works, you know that the Emperor is always free to say 'let me just replace everyone who disagreed with me', so all the political maneuver is pretty much useless. It'd have been difficult to remove Trump with the 25th Amendment even if everyone involved agreed on doing it, and in Nirvana in Fire they're basically trying that on a guy who actually does have absolute power. This isn't talking about improbable turn of events. You simply cannot do the equivalent of attempting to impeach an Emperor unless you already captured him and forced him to cooperate, but if you did that then you of course could do anything you want.
This brings to the next issue where the power level disparity is insane. Since this is Chinese Drama you know there are always guys who know Kung Fu that can take on an entire army. Problem is that everyone who are awesome is on the protagonist's side, and the power scaling is roughly like the protagonist have a lot of Neos and the opposing side has like an Agent and a lot of fodder guys. So for example there's a scene where the bad guys setup a trap in a highly guarded prison, and the protagonist just send like 2 random guys to go in and kill everyone and rescue the prisoner. Of course, since the protagonist has literally scores of Neo like entities at his disposal, that means he could've captured the Emperor as soon as he entered and force him to admit his wrongs. It's one of those things where you start feeling bad for the bad guys when they send 20 assassins and the good guy's 5th string backup still easily wipes the floor with them. You might not even notice that the Captain of the Imperial Guard, who is also the protagonist's best buddy, is something like 3 instant kill tiers above anybody the other side has since the bad guys are so sad there's almost no reason for someone like him to ever get involved fighting. In fact, it'd have been interesting if the captain was on the other side or at least neutral, since he seems to be more powerful than rest of the entire cast put together which would have made the whole legal maneuver necessary since they would never be able to persuade the Emperor by force in that case.
I think Chinese authors are even more attracted to the Mary Sue type story, and this one it's like not only is the main character a Mary Sue but probably everyone else under his command is a qualified one as they suffer literally no believable setback in the entire story. Now, it's not that you have to have setbacks to have a good story. I don't think anyone believes Goku and friends will ever lose in Dragonball but it's still a good story, though I'll point out that even guys as powerful as Goku works from a position of weakness. Nirvana in Fire has been compared to The Count of Monte Cristo, but a revenge where nobody on the other side has a chance isn't much of a drama. If anything that's closer to a zombie horror.
The biggest problem, and an ironic one, is that Nirvana in Fire is way too democratic, especially since it came out of China. All this time you've the protagonist trying to replace government officials with his loyal guys so he can take the Emperor to court and force him to admit his mistakes. However, if you know anything about how any sort of government with an Emperor works, you know that the Emperor is always free to say 'let me just replace everyone who disagreed with me', so all the political maneuver is pretty much useless. It'd have been difficult to remove Trump with the 25th Amendment even if everyone involved agreed on doing it, and in Nirvana in Fire they're basically trying that on a guy who actually does have absolute power. This isn't talking about improbable turn of events. You simply cannot do the equivalent of attempting to impeach an Emperor unless you already captured him and forced him to cooperate, but if you did that then you of course could do anything you want.
This brings to the next issue where the power level disparity is insane. Since this is Chinese Drama you know there are always guys who know Kung Fu that can take on an entire army. Problem is that everyone who are awesome is on the protagonist's side, and the power scaling is roughly like the protagonist have a lot of Neos and the opposing side has like an Agent and a lot of fodder guys. So for example there's a scene where the bad guys setup a trap in a highly guarded prison, and the protagonist just send like 2 random guys to go in and kill everyone and rescue the prisoner. Of course, since the protagonist has literally scores of Neo like entities at his disposal, that means he could've captured the Emperor as soon as he entered and force him to admit his wrongs. It's one of those things where you start feeling bad for the bad guys when they send 20 assassins and the good guy's 5th string backup still easily wipes the floor with them. You might not even notice that the Captain of the Imperial Guard, who is also the protagonist's best buddy, is something like 3 instant kill tiers above anybody the other side has since the bad guys are so sad there's almost no reason for someone like him to ever get involved fighting. In fact, it'd have been interesting if the captain was on the other side or at least neutral, since he seems to be more powerful than rest of the entire cast put together which would have made the whole legal maneuver necessary since they would never be able to persuade the Emperor by force in that case.
I think Chinese authors are even more attracted to the Mary Sue type story, and this one it's like not only is the main character a Mary Sue but probably everyone else under his command is a qualified one as they suffer literally no believable setback in the entire story. Now, it's not that you have to have setbacks to have a good story. I don't think anyone believes Goku and friends will ever lose in Dragonball but it's still a good story, though I'll point out that even guys as powerful as Goku works from a position of weakness. Nirvana in Fire has been compared to The Count of Monte Cristo, but a revenge where nobody on the other side has a chance isn't much of a drama. If anything that's closer to a zombie horror.