u/Dinoflies

How should we handle submissions and character ratings for East Asian fantasy works?

Most East Asian fantasy works, especially those from China and South Korea, follow a linear power growth route for protagonists. They attach great importance to tier systems and character levelling, while side characters and villains are barely developed at all. Many are just like disposable stock characters that pop up quickly and get written off just as fast.

Characters also show huge disparities in capability before and after levelling up and power progression. Even Japanese series, which fare comparatively better in this regard, still lean heavily into growth and levelling. Modern Japanese manga and light novels in particular suffer from this exact same issue too.

This makes it really hard to compile character feats for posts on r/respectthreads . It’s tough to find five clear standalone feats for any single character. Their showings either fall short of five total, or their stat profiles are far too one-dimensional — limited to just raw strength or defence for example. In other cases their achievements aren’t direct feats at all, only inferred indirectly from their fights against others. Feats like these are nearly impossible to quantify and present clearly. You also end up having to explain how powerful their opponents are just to set the context.

On the flip side, the heavy emphasis on tier systems in East Asian fiction also makes their power hierarchy far more rigid. Each tier tends to have a fairly fixed range for all attributes.

On local East Asian debate forums, people usually reference feats from multiple characters of the same tier to define the overall power benchmark of that rank. A character doesn’t need their individual feats listed out. Simply stating their tier is enough, as the established power range of that rank is already well known. People can immediately get a solid sense of their overall combat prowess, as well as their baseline strength, speed and durability.

Now that more East Asian works have gained popularity in Western circles, should we adopt this same standard when evaluating East Asian characters here too?

Why is Social Darwinism defined as survival of the superior and elimination of the weak, the law of the jungle?

Based on Darwin’s own views on evolution, his theory focuses on passive evolution and survival of the fittest. He rejected Lamarck’s theory of active evolution via use and disuse.

When applying Darwin’s theories to sociology, the most logical interpretation is this. Every individual or human ethnic group evolves in social structure and personal worldview into the best possible form suited to their living environment. There is no ultimate goal of progress that individuals, groups or civilised nations must strive for. Instead, they evolve toward the optimal state allowed by geographical and other objective conditions. This evolution is not a voluntary pursuit of some ideal society. It is passively shaped by external objective circumstances.

Birds are no more superior than land animals. Likewise, a nation shaped by a certain social ideology or political system is not inherently better than another.

It’s clear the core connotations of Darwinism should be environmental adaptation, diversified development, passive evolution. It stands against ultimate destination, linear progress, subjective volition. It has nothing to do with survival of the superior and elimination of the weak, the law of the jungle.

Why then did Herbert Spencer and other scholars interpret it in that distorted way? Isn’t this just a typical case of serious misreading?

Don’t you think the imagination and setting of the human body in sci-fi / Science Fantasy works are way too "conservative"?

Even in modern military affairs, the fragility of the human body against contemporary weapons is a major constraint on military development. There’s a classic joke: the biggest bottleneck holding back the advancement of military aircraft is the pilot sitting in the cockpit. Human bodies simply can’t withstand higher G-force overloads or extreme combat manoeuvres. The same goes for ground forces. Infantry already have terrible survival odds, and the shockwave from high explosives alone can leave them critically wounded.

And yet in all those sci-fi and Science Fantasy stories filled with interstellar travel and galaxy-spanning civilisations, soldiers’ physical fitness is honestly ridiculous. These works have torpedoes that can blow up entire planets, star cannons capable of taking out a star with one shot, and powerful relics that control spacetime and twist causality. Even so, their regular infantry are barely any stronger than modern humans. Imperial Stormtroopers and Astra Militarum troops are only at the level of today’s special forces. Come on, even mass-produced soldiers all matching Delta Force standards would still be extremely fragile against space opera weaponry that’s many orders of magnitude more powerful. They’re simply not up to the task at all.

What about the super soldiers? Spartans? Astartes? Narratively they’re written as saviours and angelic beings, looking utterly unbeatable. But once you list out all their attribute stats one by one, they’re genuinely underwhelming. Even the top-tier super soldiers depicted across all sci-fi and Science Fantasy, the Primarchs, are portrayed as demigods and saviours in the story. Yet their actual power level only sits at building to street scale. Put them in One Piece, a fantasy work that never even gets beyond its own planet, they’d only rank around the Three Calamities level, nowhere near the absolute top tier.

I get that sci-fi and Science Fantasy at least throw in some loose scientific basis as a perfunctory excuse.
I get that these works prefer writing grand-scale massive battles over small-scale squad adventures.
I also get that the fantasy styles of Japan, China and South Korea don’t favour glass cannons or flawed mages. Instead, they lean into well-rounded, flawless all-rounders, which makes their physical prowess far stronger compared to Western fantasy.

But these are space operas after all. Their energy magnitude outstrips modern Earth by 10 or even 20 orders of magnitude. A single shell from their warships could carry more destructive power than the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. If modern military development is already troubled and restricted by the fragility of the human body, how can they still put up with such ordinary human physical limits when their energy level is 10 to 20 orders of magnitude higher?
Defence granted by equipment has a hard limit. Ultimately, the human body still has to endure the impact. Your armour might be incredibly tough, but the shockwave hitting you is enough to shatter your internal organs — there’s no need to break your armour at all. Not to mention all kinds of imaginative weaponry that could easily exist in space opera settings.