Hello,
Over the past few weeks I've been interested in the 16th century novel, Journey to The West by Wu Cheng'en. This novel has inspired many other forms of media that you may not even know about. In this blog post I would like to talk about my favorite character from this novel, Sun Wukong and how his character has influenced so much media despite being created over 500 years ago.
Sun Wukong originally started out as a normal monkey that was strangely birthed from a stone in the ground. He became the monkey king because he had the courage to leap through a waterfall and find a secret cave for his people to live in. His arrogant trickster personality led him to find his way into heaven and through a series of actions that were not to favored by the gods, he became immortal. Not once, not twice, but 7 times. He gets a magical staff from a dragon in the ocean that can change it's size at will. He also has a flying cloud that he can use to move incredibly fast. These defining traits of the character will become budling blocks for many more characters to come
Perhaps the most known character that was inspired by Sun Wukong is Goku from Dragon Ball. He has a magical size changing staff, flying cloud and a tail that is very similar to a monkey tail. Heck, he can even turn into a gigantic money when there's a full moon. The similarities seem almost identical to Wukong except for one glaring difference. Their personalities. Sun Wukong's trickster, thieving, and arrogant personality are in complete contrast to Goku's Helpful, kind, and naive character traits. Despite these changes, the inspiration to the 16th century novel even 500 years later are still very apparent.
Very recently; around a month ago, A game was released titled Black Myth Wukong. This book almost entirely follows the story of Journey To The West. You play as a monkey with all the same traits as Sun Wukong. The game is very fun and the story had me in a chokehold for hours upon hours of playing. This game shows that the almost ancient story still holds up to this day well enough to capture our TikTok brains with 30 second attention spans.
In conclusion, The story Journey To The West still holds up phenomenally in today's world. The characters, story, world building, you name it and this story does it well. One downside to this story is the fact that it has over 2,000 pages and no official English translation. With the story being difficult to access and longer than a standard Bible, many people won't ever get to experience such a wonderful story. I encourage you to go out and see how some of your favorite characters have been inspired by Sun Wukong. There are so many out there that I didn't cover such as Luffy from One Piece and Infernape from Pokémon.
Thanks from reading,
Madden
Hi, great post. I think it's really interesting how different the characters based off of Sun Wukong can be from one another. Black Myth: Wukong seems really cool, and I think that the mythology aspect is interesting in the game. Good job.
ReplyDeleteI like how you talk about the real mythology of wukong as well of as the game. I have hear that the game is pretty good and insane in many ways, such as it incredible graphics with such and open world. really cool blog madden.
ReplyDeleteHi Madden, I thought it was really interesting that many famous characters like Goku were inspired from Sun Wukong, even though most people have never heard of him. I doubt that I would check out Journey to the West since it's not in English and my attention span can't handle 2,000 pages, but it still seems pretty interesting.
ReplyDeleteIt's very interesting to me that lots of well-known characters were inspired by Sun Wukong, a character who most are unfamiliar with. I remember reading the book "American Born Chinese" once, but I never realized that it was based on Sun Wukong. Journey to the West sounds very interesting, and I'd definitely read it if it was in English and shorter. It's surprising that lots of pop culture is inspired by a book that's likely quite a challenging read, even without all the translating you'd have to do to figure out what the book was about.
ReplyDeleteThere are many un-official english translations which each having minor differences because of how old the book is and the author never writing the book in english. I had to resort to reading english translations online coupled with audio books and recaps just to understand some of the plot points.
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