Starting with Wuxia Dramas

Starting with Wuxia Dramas is an urban-life novel by Heise De Danche, serialized on Qidian and concluded in September 2021 at about 2.04 million characters. The protagonist, Wang Yu, was a 2020 trollish video creator who made a habit of savaging wildly altered and shoddily made film and TV dramas. After an accident, he returns to mainland China in 1998 and becomes his younger self, still a student. It is an era when wuxia and costume dramas are at their peak and also being endlessly adapted and remade, with many classics grotesquely rewritten on screen. Fed up, Wang Yu picks up the pen himself, starting with writing and revising scripts, and brings a string of familiar wuxia and costume properties, including The Little Li Flying Dagger, back to the screen. The novel follows the shooting and broadcast of wuxia dramas, costume dramas and even sitcoms, tracing his path from an unknown screenwriter to the head of his own production team as he deals with casting, script changes, financing, ratings and public controversy while living out the belief that "the great knight serves the country and the people." Interwoven is a romantic thread involving his "adoptive sister" and the actress Feifei. Grounded in concrete period and production detail and steeped in nostalgia, it is a time-travel entertainment novel about returning to a golden age and remaking the classics by hand.