Thought-provoking piece! :) I enjoy both LitRPG and wuxia/xianxia, and I wanted to comment on this specifically:
"Men are more aggressive than women and, perhaps, more likely to look up to aggressive behavior. The reason why is beyond my understanding of human psychology; it could be because there's currently a suppression of aggressive traits and men feel the need to vicariously express it in the violent behavior of books."
As a male, I have an answer that at least satisfies me, and I find it helps to consider the question from the perspective of Nature. In short, Nature implemented a sex to reproduce in parallel, and a sex to reproduce serially, and the survival advantage is that the parallel sex is expendable.
In hard times, nine out of ten parallels may die, yet the remaining parallel can reproduce with ten serials, thus the reproductive rate doesn't diminish. To put it plainly, Nature designed men to do the dangerous jobs, the dirty jobs, the jobs that get people killed, to stand between Entropy and Civilization.
But, it's no good having a sex that's supposed to do those things if they're not interested, so Nature gave men both the instinct to charge into danger to protect women and children, and the desire to reproduce as much as possible. (The first instinct is Nature's balance to the second, because the first thing a man protects a woman from is himself.)
Aggression is thus a tool that Nature gave men, to enable them to face death on behalf of civilization, and like any tool, it can be misused. I think men's aggression is most constructively channeled to the edges of civilization, to open up more frontiers for the human race. (I note that while men open a frontier, it's women who consolidate it. In American history, for example, the Wild West wasn't civilized until the Eastern women came.)
In the absence of such channeling, however, games and web serials seem a better alternative than war! :)
Anyhow, Nature didn't stop with the above. If we consider the IQ distribution bell curve, we find that the average IQ of men and women is roughly the same, but male distribution is more erratic, both high and low, while women cluster around the average. That leads to the following effects:
- More male dunces exist than female
- More women are smarter than men, then men are smarter than women (to run that to the extreme, all women would be smarter than half of men, and half of men would be smarter than all women)
- More male geniuses exist than female
Coupled with male expendability, it seems evident that Nature expects the small cohort of extremely intelligent men to be the likely survivors, to be the one out of ten who live, and much of history has been written by that small cohort. (Conversely, Nature expects women to live longer than men, and so selected their IQ distribution to be more stable.)
Within that frame of reference, Eastern wuxia and xianxia focus on the lone strong man who overcomes, and the harem is a natural corollary. The Great Man gets the women, and in history, for every man who had ten wives, there were nine dead (or gelded) men. (Interestingly, Marco Polo observed in his travels that the East's population advantage over the West was due to the East's acceptance of polygamy, and the Christian West's rejection of it.)
LitRPG focuses more on the intelligence aspect of survival. RPG mechanics tend to be "crunchy", mathematically substantial, and the main characters of LitRPG tend to be competent at problem-solving, even if they're not as overpowered as Eastern heroes.
Christianity, conversely, focuses on self-sacrifice ("Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends"), and thus Christianity honors the nine out of ten men who died, the men who sacrificed themselves so that civilization might survive. I can't speak to the East, but in the West, we honor our fallen, and consider them heroes.
Anyhow, thanks for the article; that was interesting! :)
Thought-provoking piece! :) I enjoy both LitRPG and wuxia/xianxia, and I wanted to comment on this specifically:
"Men are more aggressive than women and, perhaps, more likely to look up to aggressive behavior. The reason why is beyond my understanding of human psychology; it could be because there's currently a suppression of aggressive traits and men feel the need to vicariously express it in the violent behavior of books."
As a male, I have an answer that at least satisfies me, and I find it helps to consider the question from the perspective of Nature. In short, Nature implemented a sex to reproduce in parallel, and a sex to reproduce serially, and the survival advantage is that the parallel sex is expendable.
In hard times, nine out of ten parallels may die, yet the remaining parallel can reproduce with ten serials, thus the reproductive rate doesn't diminish. To put it plainly, Nature designed men to do the dangerous jobs, the dirty jobs, the jobs that get people killed, to stand between Entropy and Civilization.
But, it's no good having a sex that's supposed to do those things if they're not interested, so Nature gave men both the instinct to charge into danger to protect women and children, and the desire to reproduce as much as possible. (The first instinct is Nature's balance to the second, because the first thing a man protects a woman from is himself.)
Aggression is thus a tool that Nature gave men, to enable them to face death on behalf of civilization, and like any tool, it can be misused. I think men's aggression is most constructively channeled to the edges of civilization, to open up more frontiers for the human race. (I note that while men open a frontier, it's women who consolidate it. In American history, for example, the Wild West wasn't civilized until the Eastern women came.)
In the absence of such channeling, however, games and web serials seem a better alternative than war! :)
Anyhow, Nature didn't stop with the above. If we consider the IQ distribution bell curve, we find that the average IQ of men and women is roughly the same, but male distribution is more erratic, both high and low, while women cluster around the average. That leads to the following effects:
- More male dunces exist than female
- More women are smarter than men, then men are smarter than women (to run that to the extreme, all women would be smarter than half of men, and half of men would be smarter than all women)
- More male geniuses exist than female
Coupled with male expendability, it seems evident that Nature expects the small cohort of extremely intelligent men to be the likely survivors, to be the one out of ten who live, and much of history has been written by that small cohort. (Conversely, Nature expects women to live longer than men, and so selected their IQ distribution to be more stable.)
Within that frame of reference, Eastern wuxia and xianxia focus on the lone strong man who overcomes, and the harem is a natural corollary. The Great Man gets the women, and in history, for every man who had ten wives, there were nine dead (or gelded) men. (Interestingly, Marco Polo observed in his travels that the East's population advantage over the West was due to the East's acceptance of polygamy, and the Christian West's rejection of it.)
LitRPG focuses more on the intelligence aspect of survival. RPG mechanics tend to be "crunchy", mathematically substantial, and the main characters of LitRPG tend to be competent at problem-solving, even if they're not as overpowered as Eastern heroes.
Christianity, conversely, focuses on self-sacrifice ("Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends"), and thus Christianity honors the nine out of ten men who died, the men who sacrificed themselves so that civilization might survive. I can't speak to the East, but in the West, we honor our fallen, and consider them heroes.
Anyhow, thanks for the article; that was interesting! :)