Bai Xiaochun: How a Coward Became the Most Beloved Protagonist in Donghua

Let me tell you about the first time Bai Xiaochun nearly died. He was a child — an orphan scraping by in a village that barely noticed him — when he got sick. Not dramatically sick. Not "coughing blood while swearing vengeance" sick. Just… sick. A fever that wouldn't break. And lying there, burning up on a straw mat in a hut that belonged to no one in particular, Bai Xiaochun had a thought that most xianxia protagonists never have: I do not want this. I do not want the heroic death. I do not want the tragic sacrifice. I want to live. Not for a cause. Not for glory. Just… live.

This is not a small thing. It is the entire thing. Every decision Bai Xiaochun makes for the next 106 episodes flows from this single, simple, devastatingly human realization: he is afraid of dying, and he will do absolutely anything to avoid it. Lie. Cheat. Bribe. Beg. Invent pills that make his farts smell like flowers. Whatever it takes. The fact that this makes him the funniest protagonist in donghua is almost incidental. The real achievement — Er Gen's real achievement — is that it also makes him the most relatable.

The Anti-Wang Lin

To understand Bai Xiaochun, you have to understand Wang Lin. Er Gen's first protagonist — the hero of Renegade Immortal — is the platonic ideal of a xianxia protagonist. He is stoic. He is determined. He faces impossible odds with grit and resolve. When his family is murdered, he dedicates his life to revenge. When the heavens themselves oppose him, he vows to defy them. Wang Lin is not a person you relate to. He is a person you admire from a safe distance, like a thunderstorm or a mountain range.

Bai Xiaochun is what happens when Er Gen — having written Wang Lin, having perfected the archetype, having proven he can do the thing everyone expects — asks himself a different question: what if the protagonist was just some guy?

Not a chosen one. Not a genius. Not a man with a destiny. Just a guy. A guy who is scared. A guy who likes food. A guy who, when faced with a life-or-death cultivation trial, will absolutely try to negotiate his way out of it. "Surely there is another way," Bai Xiaochun will say, with complete sincerity, to an elder who has just explained that there is no other way. "What if I just… trained very hard… but at home? Where it's safe?"

The genius of the character is that Er Gen never lets you forget that the fear is real. Bai Xiaochun is not a coward in the literary sense — his fear is not a character flaw to be overcome. It is a trauma response, rooted in that childhood fever, reinforced by every near-death experience that follows. He has looked at mortality from inches away, and he has concluded, rationally and irrevocably, that the only acceptable outcome is to never experience it again. The comedy comes from the gap between that conclusion and the world he lives in — a world where death is everywhere, where cultivation is inherently dangerous, where the path to immortality is paved with the bodies of everyone who tried and failed. Bai Xiaochun wants to walk that path without ever being in danger. This is impossible. He tries anyway.

The Pill That Explains Everything

There is a moment early in A Will Eternal that I keep coming back to because it is, in microcosm, everything this character is about. Bai Xiaochun is in the pill refinement division of his sect. He has been tasked with creating something useful. Something that will demonstrate his cultivation progress. Something impressive. He creates a pill that makes your farts smell like flowers.

A lesser writer would play this for a single joke and move on. Er Gen does something much more interesting: he makes it matter. The pill becomes a plot-critical item. It saves lives. It opens doors that were closed. It is simultaneously the dumbest thing anyone has ever invented and a genuinely clever piece of alchemy. Bai Xiaochun does not see the contradiction because, for him, there is no contradiction. A pill that makes farts smell like flowers is useful. A pill that makes you stronger is also useful. Why would you only make one kind? This is Bai Xiaochun's mind in operation: utterly pragmatic, completely devoid of the ego that drives other cultivators, and relentlessly focused on outcomes rather than appearances.

It is also — and this is the part that sneaks up on you — a genuinely kind invention. Other cultivators invent weapons. Bai Xiaochun invents something that makes people's lives slightly more pleasant. The flower-scented fart pill is a joke, yes. But it is also a gesture of care, from a character who understands suffering because he has spent his entire life trying to avoid it.

Fear as a Superpower

One of the most subversive things A Will Eternal does is treat Bai Xiaochun's fear not as a weakness to be overcome but as the source of his strength. Other protagonists train because they want power. Bai Xiaochun trains because he wants to be unkillable — and the distinction matters. Wanting power leads you to take risks. Wanting to be unkillable leads you to be very, very careful. Bai Xiaochun's cultivation speed is not driven by ambition. It is driven by terror. Every breakthrough is motivated by the thought: if I am stronger, I am harder to kill. Every technique he develops is a survival strategy. "Turtle Breathing" — the ability to hold his breath for absurdly long periods — was invented because he was worried about airborne poison. Most cultivators would solve this by finding an antidote pill. Bai Xiaochun solved it by deciding he would simply stop breathing. This is, objectively, insane. It also works.

The show never mocks him for this. This is crucial. A Will Eternal is a comedy, but it is not a parody. Bai Xiaochun is not the butt of the joke — he is the hero, and the show takes his fear seriously even as it mines it for humor. When he trembles before a stronger opponent, the show lets you feel the fear with him. When he finds a way out — through cleverness, through preparation, through sheer shameless refusal to accept the situation — the triumph is real. You are not laughing at him. You are laughing with the sheer audacity of his survival instincts, and then you are cheering because those instincts worked again.

Why This Matters for Donghua

Bai Xiaochun is not the first comedic protagonist in Chinese animation. He is not even the first comedic protagonist in xianxia. But he is, by some distance, the most successful — and his success changes what is possible for the genre.

For decades, the default xianxia protagonist was a Wang Lin variant: stoic, determined, emotionally constipated, driven by revenge or destiny or both. These characters work. Audiences love them. But they also limit the kinds of stories xianxia can tell. When every protagonist is a mountain, you stop noticing the mountains. Bai Xiaochun proved that a protagonist could be a puddle — a warm, chaotic, surprisingly deep puddle — and audiences would not only accept it, they would prefer it. The viewership numbers and audience scores speak for themselves: Bai Xiaochun's version of cultivation is not a compromise. It is an improvement.

You can see his influence in the donghua that have followed. Protagonists are allowed to be funny now. They are allowed to be scared. They are allowed to fail upward rather than grinding through endless training arcs. Bai Xiaochun opened a door, and a generation of writers walked through it. Not every xianxia needs to be a comedy. But every xianxia now has permission to have a protagonist who feels like a person, rather than a statue of a person. That is Bai Xiaochun's legacy. That, and the flower-scented fart pill. Both are equally real. Both are equally him.