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<blockquote data-quote="nightwyrm" data-source="post: 5494629" data-attributes="member: 75542">Since wuxia and anime has been brought up, let's take a look at a how eastern fantasy genre handles this. I think a major difference between east and west fantasy is the lack of a sharp division between supernatural and non-supernatural in eastern fantasy. &nbsp;Take martial arts for instance, certain works will have martial arts that's more or less doable by real people. In more fantastic works, martial arts will start incorporating chi and quivering palm type stuff. And in truly fantastic works, martial artists can fly or gain prolonged youth and immortality. But all three works will call it martial arts. There's no &quot;mundane&quot; or &quot;supernatural&quot; martial arts label.&nbsp;From an eastern fantasy POV, supernatural and mundane are a continuum, not two separate categories. &quot;Supernatural&quot; abilities is obtainable by taking a &quot;mundane&quot; skillset to the extreme (normal people can jump, martial artists can jump to the top of trees) or is treated as just another learnable skillset like swordfighting. This is where the common &quot;train real hard and you too can fly&quot; anime trope comes from. An underlying philosophy or assumption in most eastern works is that everything is learnable and doable if you put in the effort and/or have a teacher. There is no magic/mundane boundary that is uncrossable if you aren't born with magic (in general of course, specific works may have specific restrictions).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="nightwyrm, post: 5494629, member: 75542"] Since wuxia and anime has been brought up, let's take a look at a how eastern fantasy genre handles this. I think a major difference between east and west fantasy is the lack of a sharp division between supernatural and non-supernatural in eastern fantasy. Take martial arts for instance, certain works will have martial arts that's more or less doable by real people. In more fantastic works, martial arts will start incorporating chi and quivering palm type stuff. And in truly fantastic works, martial artists can fly or gain prolonged youth and immortality. But all three works will call it martial arts. There's no "mundane" or "supernatural" martial arts label. From an eastern fantasy POV, supernatural and mundane are a continuum, not two separate categories. "Supernatural" abilities is obtainable by taking a "mundane" skillset to the extreme (normal people can jump, martial artists can jump to the top of trees) or is treated as just another learnable skillset like swordfighting. This is where the common "train real hard and you too can fly" anime trope comes from. An underlying philosophy or assumption in most eastern works is that everything is learnable and doable if you put in the effort and/or have a teacher. There is no magic/mundane boundary that is uncrossable if you aren't born with magic (in general of course, specific works may have specific restrictions). [/QUOTE]

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