Initially, trying to watch “King’s Avatar” (it was on a list of recommended dramas, on Netflix, and I had a migraine) was a struggle. I could not get over how little I cared about watching someone play his level 40 paladin. By episode 3, however, the show serves up the inherent capitalist black comedy of every time someone who’s really good at a specific thing has to work a tangentially related day job because the economy sucks. (‘China’s not capitalist—‘ Xi Jinping, you have a Dreamwidth??) This aspect fades out as the team pivots to position the show as a straight up sports anime, but it does prove fairly good at being one. “King’s Avatar” becomes an exploration of the sheer power of the generic formula, even detached from anything I could ever care about. I ended up bopping along, only occasionally getting thrown out of the rhythm by something along the lines of “do you really think he can win Fake World of Warcraft?!?”
Me: Wait. Waaaaait. I don’t care at all?
It’s reminiscent of the anime that asks you to take volleyball seriously. Volleyball. Easily the least of the balls.
I found it formally interesting how much the gaming scene herein and the competition based around it borrowed from wuxia and/or xianxia. I’d never thought about this before, but the way these games discuss and conceptualise attacks probably entered global gaming via Asia, and specifically via wuxia, right? That sense of a move set, named moves, combos—it’s all fairly Jin Yong. In this show, there’s also a real push to sect style language and relationships between team members. There are disciple lineages, and a general sense of the emergent esports scene as a Jianghu. The esports television genre, then, enables you to stage identity porn and to interlace fantasy scenes with modern elements or characters, as with a transmigrator narrative. The price of access to these layers, however, is the loss of any narrative authentically anchored in or driven by the fantasy world, and with it a big source of potential plot weight. Nothing in the game world properly matters, except as an illustration of simultaneous RL choices. The other material thing this does, of course, is enable the production team to make extensive use of relatively cheap donghua-quality CGI for story relevant reasons. Mazels on the savings, lads.
Dealing with modern Chinese popular culture also involves us in shit like inspirational speeches about the meaning of idols. The show itself seems ambivalent on idol culture, in kind of an unproductive way. It both positions itself against the intense commodification of players and hesitantly acknowledges it as a personal boon for fans and a necessity for the field—which I’m really not sure it is, in either case. Idol culture in its current forms isn’t actually universal or historically inevitable. It’s a fairly new phenomenon, at least in terms of the degree to which it currently dominates art and sport economies.
The top esports guild has a female player, but the rest of the teams in the league seem far more Oktoberfest affairs, in that they are sausage-oriented. Given that the top team’s female uniform consists of a skirt that splits into booty shorts in the back for no reason, I can see why more girls don’t join up. Buzzfeed Solved. Remember the skort? Because evidently, China never forgot.
It’s nice to watch a show without an unappealing but over-determined romance arc. I suppose that eventually the aforementioned prisoner of the booty skort might hook up with the protagonist, but during the portion of their lives covered herein they’re busy with other concerns (and their relationship could be more of a sibling bond). This friendship is nice as it is. There’s a fun moment where the protagonist is bent out of shape and this female childhood bestie asks him what’s up. He grumbles that she knows him too well; if he shares his concerns they’ll only weigh on her, too. She draws a fake moustache on herself and is says ‘you seem troubled, young stranger—tell this old man your story!’ Cute.
In terms of female characters more generally, the new team’s manager does answer the question ‘where do aunties come from? What is an auntie like before she comes into full middle-aged Auntie Bloom?’ In this case, it goes something along the lines of: ‘I learned the words Team Building Exercise, and my Vision was that we’d all collectively go out to eat and ruin the life of a man who is rude to the waiter. And then you’d pay for everyone’s dinner, Protagonist.’ Fair.
In general, though, the characterisation of the team members could have been slightly stronger. Team Happy’s eleventh hour team ‘break up and make up’ also doesn’t entirely work, either. You can’t just have everyone say something in unison—which they all know to do even if it’s a complicated phrase because in a cdrama, this knowledge simply comes to you—and call it Unity and Arc-Closure. Also, in one of the final episodes, one team member has a big pimple on his upper lip. Make-up department, where are you? Please help this man!
I did like the designated hamster man/2IC from Blue Brook, though I have never heard a human speak that fast before.
Me: Is the captain of Blue Brook the actor for Feng Xu from the cdrama Hikaru no Go?
Katy: After a close examination, I can confirm that this is an attractive, youngish Chinese man in a blazer.
Me:
Katy:
So jury’s out on that one, I guess.
The show’s settings have a glossy, futuristic aesthetic throughout. “King’s Avatar” wants you to believe that all these esports teams have classy HQs they also live in. These have marked and distinct aesthetics, all thoroughly carried through. It’s a ‘different cultivation schools’ vibe, via Star Trek 2009. Now, you know for a fucking fact that these teams are run out of some office building, a Concrete Location that has a nice backdrop for some photos. It’s not the communal houses I question, it’s the fact that said houses have big collections of antique vases and rooms that open via huge pod bay doors. The real fantasy here is that all these straight men have managed to arrive at varying but solid forms of Taste.
Team aside, every domestic environment in this show looks a little ‘what year is this?’ It is, I suppose, roughly as unrealistic as the vast New York apartments in an American sitcom, but these interiors are generally richer, and cleaner and more styled. Almost every environment looks cutting-edge (with the exception of a ‘poor’ family apartment that looks older but still suspiciously nice, and a loft one character runs a business out of that is styled messy but is actually quite nice. Even the internet cafe the protagonist washes up at in his darkest hour is luxe. There’s so much space therein that later, the protagonist and the manager run an additional large-scale business out of the upper story.
The show’s more quotidian gestures at urbanism proved differently weird. Do Chinese people in big cities really have to book a basketball hoop? Are there truly none in parks? Booking a basketball hoop! The notion! Additionally, people seem to have done the local graffiti with really crisp, elaborate Chinese characters. I applaud their efforts, because that looks way harder to do than just ‘Dizzy wuz here’ in fat bubbles. …seriously though, are they selling super fine nozzle tips for the Chinese market to enable this shit? It’s just not the level of fine control I associate with a random tag.
It’s not a show I have a ton to say about, really. I had a pleasant time, but it’s not one I highly recommend if you haven’t already seen “NIF”, “Hikaru no Go”, “Untamed”, hell even the less solid, more vibes-based “Word of Honour”.
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