The aforementioned shapeshifting is the Huli Jing’s bread and butter. In that way, the Huli Jing are not dissimilar to Europe’s fairy folk – when treated well, they are often benevolent, but when they are mistreated they can turn violent. There are multiple legends in Chinese mythology that show Huli Jing helping people or themselves being the victims of humanity’s cruelty. A Huli Jing can have various motivations to do something like that but the main one is rather malevolent – to drain the victim’s life essence, usually in the middle of a sexual act.Īt the same time, the Huli Jing can be perfectly nice and amicable. They are most famous for their shapeshifting prowess, however, as well as their habit of seducing young men while transformed as beautiful maidens. Usually portrayed as beautiful foxes with nine fluffy tails, the Huli Jing are magical creatures with a vast array of abilities. Like many other Chinese mythological creatures and like the fairies in European mythologies, the Huli Jing have a rather mixed relationship with the world of men. Liu - who in addition to penning his own award-winning works has translated Liu Cixin‘s widely-praised Three Body Problem and put together the Invisible Planets anthology of Chinese sci-fi - recently wrote on his site that he thought “the adaptation looks fantastic”.Huli Jing literally translates as fox spirit. …And, of course, of the Ken Liu short story “Good Hunting”, which inspired Netflix’s animated episode of the same name. Hu Xian has been the subject of many great stories in Chinese literature, such as the Jin Dynasty collection of supernatural phenomena by Gan Bao (286-336), the Soushen Ji and Pu Songling’s 19 th -century compilation Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Whether benign or hostile, fox spirits have been popping up in Chinese storytelling for centuries, as Ni points out. The benign spirits of animals such as weasels, foxes and raccoons (sometimes referred to as Wu Xian, the Five Spirits) were venerated in many places around China. These are friendly ghosts, and not to be confused with fox demons. They like to reside in plates, bowls and other domestic objects. This Netflix incarnation looks pretty fierce, but as Xueting Christine Ni explained in our round-up of Chinese ghosts and ghouls, fox spirits and the related Hu Gui 狐鬼 or Hu Xian 狐仙 can be friendly:īelieved to be spirits of deceased foxes that lie unburied. The Huli Jing also appears in Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese mythology, and is often depicted with nine tails. That fox spirit, is known in Chinese as Huli Jing 狐狸精. In listing it as the fourth-best episode in the collection, Vulture wrote that “Good Hunting” uses “aspects of both traditional folklore and the steampunk genre to unfold the tale of a young inventor’s lifelong friendship with a fox spirit, and the alliance that makes them both into forces whose oppressors should fear them.” That, plus the fact that one of the episodes that’s largely being deemed a hit is “Good Hunting”, which is based on a short story by three-time Hugo Award winner Ken Liu and is set in mainland China and Hong Kong. Forbes dubbed it “hit, miss, and extremely NSFW”, for example, which immediately had us intrigued. Netflix’s new experimental animated sci-fi series Love, Death + Robots has critics both purring and perplexed.
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