Cowboy Grak 5 pt2

One Comment

1. 

   The_Butcher

   June 7, 2025 at 2:14 pm

   Pai Shep is a thematic pun. He is a Cultivator. Like from the Chinese Xianxia Martial Arts novels.

   Explanation of Xianxia:
   There’s a thousand of those novels. They try to recapture Dragonball. Except Dragonball made fun of Quantifying Spiritual growth and enlightenment with it’s “Powerlevels”, which in canon are NEVER in ANY WAY useful.

   In Xianxia powerlevels are everything. You ‘cultivate’ your Qi(Life Force), sometimes with training and meditation, but usually through finding Spiritual plants and (often sapient)animals and making them into pills that give you Qi. The more Qi, the slower you age until you’re immortal.

   (You can skip this, but it’s the plot of all of those novels:

   Usually the protagonist starts as the weakest in his village, there’s a nepo baby called a “young Master” who wants his girl and he cultivates until he can beat them. Then they are a Cultivator and might makes right. Then they get discovered by a “sect” which is a cultivation dojo/club/cult in a city. They are the weakest there, there’s a new nepobaby/Young Master and love interest, they cultivate and beat them, but their sect is the weakest in the city, so they join another and it starts over, their city is the weakest in the region, that is the weakest in the province, that is the weakest in the kingdom that is the weakest in the empire that is the weakest in the world. Often these sects also have three parts, an outer sect of servants, a trusted inner sect and a core sect of leaders.

   The “End Goal” is that the higher your power level and Qi, the longer your lifespan and eventually you can trancend mortality and ascend to the heavens, where you’re the weakest of the Heavenly Cultivators.)

   THE IMPORTANT BIT:

   Because it’s primarily flavored by Chinese Mythology and it’s culture, as well as the “there’s too many people, life is cheap” sentiment, everyone in those novels, to a western audience is a TOTAL DICK. Often the protagonist too. From humiliating people to killing whole families because of a percieved insult of a single member.

   Pai Shep’s assholery is “Cultivator” behaviour. He is a cultivator, in the sense of a farmer.
   Xianxia Tropes explain all his behaviour. Because Xianxia is all about it’s power levels, which even when in super complicated progression schemas can usually be reduced to a single floating point number, of course he would spend his after life on similar “Number go Up.” exercises. Because he NEEDS a number that goes UP, he needs someone else to compete against. He needs a benchmark, so that “Second Place’s PB divided by my PB” can go UP.

   (Alexander Wales isn’t the first one to make that pun. The CANON Pai Shep was probably an allusion to Rou Jin from the Xianxia Parody “Beware of Chicken”. Where the Isekai’d Xianxia Protagonist is Canadian, realizes they are in a Xianxia novel, knows that all Cultivators are Assholes and thinks to himself:”Nope, I’m out!” and goes to the weakest village in the weakest Province ON PURPOSE to be a medium Fish in a tiny pond and become a literal farmer.

   Because he is as strong as ten men, the hard work of farming is fun. Because he has fun working hard and doing anime bullshit like carrying a huge rock on his back, just because he can, while being a good and nice person, he reaches Zen. He is completely in tune with Nature and reaches actual enlightenment by accident, farming so hard that the people he interacts with, when he sells his ULTIMATE VEGGIES AND RICE, lose their shit.

   (Except that all his protagonist energy still needs an outlet. But he’s all alone. So his protagonist energy latches onto his Rooster named Big D, who, because of it, becomes sapient and starts his Xianxia cultivation path. Except even that is derailed, because his “Great Master” is a Canadian, so he teaches his Disciple the overpowered techniques of Common-Sense, Make-Friends and Listen-Politely.))

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