Historical Dramas Club

 fiflydramalover:

My fellow historians and lovers of mythology!!! Please lend a hand! 

.... does Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms take place around the same time as Legend of Shen Li in mythology? I just realized the settings, political make up, and state of the gods is very similar.

- both have only one ancient god left who does not actually rule the heavens
- most ancient gods have become formless to reconnect with nature
- there are only a few official realms (shenli: extranatural heavens, heavenly realm, immortal realm, mortal realm. tmopb: dragon tribe (heavenly realm), pheonix tribe, and nin-tailed fox tribe, mortal realm

If anyone could point me out to good reading material about this period in the chronology of chinese mythology, id be really interested!! I really want to understand the foundational material for these two dramas if there is any. 

Please don't take me as an expert, but I don't think there's a chronology to the mythology in cdramas (speaking of xianxia, not of dramas (mainly) set in the mortal realm). I think it's about how the writers build their worlds. They might be inspired by each other's works or by a certain mythological thread, but I don't think it can be organised into a timeline. It's different from Western fantasy (which I grew up with) because Western fantasy worlds are less similar to each other while the Chinese fantasy settings often operate by very similar basic sets of rules and also settings.

(Btw how many millions of years would have passed for all those different gods of war and heavenly crown princes to fit in? And how old, exactly, is Si Ming? I know that's not your point, but has anyone ever calculated that? Thinking about it, a hypothetical timeline might be quite interesting!)

Of course, everyone who knows better or just disagrees is welcome to enlighten me ;)

Sadly, the only reading material I can refer to is a book of Chinese fairy tales and folk tales I bought a few years ago, the tales of which I suspect to have been edited by well-meaning Western publishers. Apart from that, I definitely don't know more than the wikipedia bibliography for Chinese creation myths (if you want to take an academic approach)...