Kung Fu Action

Question: Is it just me or do many of Nezha's stories sound like something out of a manga? I know that the basis for manga and anime are the legends from china and japan, but Nezha's exploits seem like something straight out of a modern day kung-fu movie or manga, even more so than gods like Son Wokong. They just don't seem to have the ancient feel that the other stories and gods have.

Nezha really does seem like the kind of batshit insane person you would find in a modern kung fu movie or wuxia novel. There's a very simple reason for that: he really is a wuxia character.

The greater part of the stories of Nezha being alternately a total badass and an unredeemable jackass come from Fengshen Yanyi (Investiture of the Gods), an ancient Chinese novel from which many of our myths about the area come. Except that "ancient" is an inaccurate label; just like Journey to the West, the other major source for stories about Nezha, Fengshen Yanyi dates from the sixteenth century, extremely recent in terms of mythology. For comparison, around the same time in the west, Queen Elizabeth took power in England, William Shakespeare was born, Protestantism was becoming a force to contend with Catholicism and several Native American cultures had already been eradicated in the Americas. In historical terms, it actually wasn't that long ago.

That doesn't mean that Chinese mythology isn't very old; on the contrary, these novels are telling very old stories and just happen to be some of the earliest places we have real mythical narratives written down instead of preserved as oral retellings or blurbs in history texts. The reason this is important is that wuxia literature, what we tend to think of as martial arts stories from China, was also being born at this time. For many scholars, Journey to the West is considered one of the first wuxia novels, while portions of Fengshen Yanyi merit the same label. The genre of stories about a martial artist or swordsman who operates outside the rules and follows his own moral code instead of the law was taking off, and Nezha (and Sun Wukong) were part of its beginning. Wuxia has stayed incredibly popular to this day, spawning hundreds of Hong Kong action films and manga adaptations.

So it's not actually all that odd that Nezha sounds like a textbook crazy martial arts manga character; it's because crazy martial arts manga characters are, in a generalized sort of way, based on Nezha. Tons of modern manga characters owe their existence directly to him or to Sun Wukong (and not just the obvious ones like Nataku or Son Goku).