Deeply deeply funny that chu wanning struggles to the point of tears with lust when seeing mo ran again after he comes back, freaking out because of his ascetic monk nature, gets so horny thinking about him that he has to pick up a book and by pure chance it happens to be a book of penis size rankings of the characters with mo ran NUMBER 1!! and then is haunted by images of his absurd yaoiseme protagonist schlong for the next 30 to 50 chapters
Before svsss, before 2ha, before danmei existed as a genre, there was Yang Guo and Xiaolongnü and there was wuxia shizun-fuckery.
One might even argue that you can't really separate shizun-fuckery from wuxia/xianxia at this point, because you can't really separate modern wuxia/xianxia from Jin Yong novels. If mainstream western fantasy can all be traced back to Tolkien, then most mainstream modern wuxia/xianxia are similarly descended from Jin Yong.
Among these Jin Yong novels, the 1959 wuxia romance 神雕侠侣, or Return of the Condor Heroes, has apparently received no less than 12 TV and film adaptations. I have no idea why the novel is called that in English; maybe because a more literal translation, "Divine Eagle Hero Lovers/Couple," sounds too dumb.
Said lovers are, of course, a master/disciple pair. (The divine eagle refers to both the male lead and an actual magical eagle.) Before we get into the shizun-fucking, I should probably clarify what a shizun is. The word "shizun" itself is basically a fancier and more respectful form of "shifu", and is rarely used outside of fiction these days.
Shifu itself also has two spellings that are often but not always interchangeable. One of the forms, 师父, is made up of the characters Shi, teacher, and Fu, father. Then there's the popular saying: 一日为师终生为父, or "shifu for a day, father for a lifetime," which is meant to highlight the filial love and respect a disciple owes their master.
The reason I bring this up is that compared to the western image of a teacher, the Confucian ideal specifically emphasizes hierarchy and filial piety. A master/disciple romance is in many ways distinct from the western teacher/student romance, in that it's not only taboo but anti-Confucian, with Confucianism being the very foundation of the old social order. The overarching love story in Return of the Condor Heroes is at its core a story about transgression, and the enduring popularity of shizun-fuckery in historical fantasy reflects a continued interest in the tension between love and traditional notions of propriety. The typical issues surrounding teacher/student relationships are still present, but are usually not the focal point of this type of master/disciple portrayal.
Not to out myself as an Old, but I would argue that the most genre defining version of Condor Heroes remains the 1995 TV adaptation, in which HK actress Carman Lee's Xiaolongnü soul-blasted the entire sinosphere and left a milf-shaped cultural crater visible from space. You might recognize Carman Lee as the guest-starring Lan ancestor in that info dump episode of The Untamed where the main pair fall into the underwater(?) cave, but even now she's still known first and foremost as Xiaolongnu, the white-clad shifu from Condor Heroes.
If her whole Energy feels oddly familiar, it's because Xiaolongnu's influence is such that there are now an innumerable number of milf-coded (gender neutral) shizuns cast in the same general mold.
To give a quick rundown of Xiaolongnu, here are some of her notable features:
Grew up isolated and extremely sheltered
Prodigious talent
Cold, otherworldly beauty
Master qin player, has some sort of music-based power
Values celibacy (until the whole shizun-fucking situation)
Lives somewhere called the Tomb of the Living Dead (Incidentally, 2ha's Sisheng Peak can be more directly translated as "Summit of Life and Death.")
And to give ranwan shippers more deja vu, I found a cut of Xiaolongnu in action.
It's now time for me to admit that I don't remember much about the male lead Yang Guo, the shizun-fucker from my clickbait title, other than that he's a shizun-fucker. I mentally refer to him as Pigeon Boy, because half his lines are "Gugu, Gugu," which also happens to be the sound pigeons make in Chinese.
The "gugu" thing came about because Yang Guo doesn't like calling Xiaolongnu "shifu", which is just a Bit Much for this particular shizun-fucker. ("Gugu," or "aunt/auntie", is far less incestuous than it might sound, since it's very common to address people by familial terms in Chinese.) But even in his fervent pursuit of shizun-fuckery, Yang Guo has not abandoned all sense of propriety, which is why even though they are only ~5 yrs apart, he still acknowledges her generational rank as his master, and uses "gugu" instead of something like "jiejie".
This is notably different from works like svsss and 2ha, where the constant bombardment of "shizun" specifically zeroes in on the shizun-fucking itself. Lbh in particular continues to be babied long after the author very pointedly draws a line between lbh the boy and lbh the man for obvious reasons, in a way Yang Guo can't be without undermining his culturally presumed idea of masculinity.
At the end of the day, despite Condor's very cursory exploration of some vanilla version of power exchange, it ultimately does not meaningfully confront nor subvert the inherent assumptions behind mainstream heterosexual romance. Their eventual marriage then seems to serve as some sort of equalizer, wherein their master/disciple relationship is largely superseded by their conventional husband/wife relationship.
Still, there appears to be another adaptation of Condor Heroes in the works. The master/disciple trope clearly isn't going anywhere, so go forth, brave shizun-fuckers, and sprinkle some new nuance in the narrative while you're at it.
