Why A Will Eternal Is the Funniest Xianxia Ever Made

There is a scene early in A Will Eternal where the protagonist, Bai Xiaochun, is asked by his sect elders to demonstrate a new cultivation technique he has been working on. The elders are expecting something powerful. Something that will bring honor to the sect. Something that will strike fear into their enemies. Bai Xiaochun — trembling, earnest, absolutely certain this is his moment — proudly unveils a pill that makes your farts smell like flowers. The elders stare. The scene holds. And then, somehow, this becomes a plot-critical item that saves lives in a later arc.

This is A Will Eternal in microcosm. It is a xianxia — a Chinese cultivation fantasy, complete with immortal sects, qi condensation, nascent souls, and heaven-defying treasures. And it is also, unambiguously and joyfully, a comedy. Not a parody. Not a deconstruction. A genuine, laugh-out-loud, pause-the-episode-because-you-cannot-breathe comedy that happens to take place inside a cultivation universe. If you have ever watched a xianxia and thought "this would be better if the protagonist was less brooding and more of a disaster," A Will Eternal is the show you have been waiting for.

The Protagonist Problem — and How Er Gen Solved It

Xianxia protagonists have a type. They are determined. They are serious. They face impossible odds with grit and resolve. They say things like "I will defy the heavens" and mean it with every fiber of their being. This is not a bad thing. Wang Lin from Renegade Immortal — written by the same author, Er Gen — is one of the most compelling protagonists in all of donghua precisely because his determination is so absolute it becomes almost terrifying. But the type was getting stale. By 2020, when A Will Eternal premiered, the xianxia protagonist had become a template. Fill in the name. Fill in the tragic backstory. Insert training montage. Repeat.

Er Gen's solution was Bai Xiaochun — and Bai Xiaochun is not a subversion of the type so much as a complete rejection of it. He does not want to defy the heavens. He wants the heavens to leave him alone. He does not seek power for its own sake. He seeks power because he is absolutely terrified of dying and has concluded, rationally, that the only way to avoid death permanently is to become immortal. Every decision Bai Xiaochun makes flows from this single, simple, deeply relatable desire: he does not want to die. Not heroically. Not tragically. Not at all. Ever.

This makes him, paradoxically, the most ambitious character in the genre. Other protagonists train to become strong. Bai Xiaochun trains to become unkillable — and he will use any method, no matter how absurd, to get there. He develops a technique that lets him hold his breath for impossibly long periods because he figures if he can't breathe, he can't be poisoned by airborne toxins. He calls it "Turtle Breathing" with complete sincerity. It becomes one of his signature moves. He is not joking. He is just like this.

Comedy That Works Because the Stakes Are Real

This is the most important thing to understand about A Will Eternal's humor: it works because the world around Bai Xiaochun is not funny. People die. Sects fall. Betrayals cut deep. The cultivation world is dangerous, and the danger is never played for laughs. What is played for laughs is Bai Xiaochun's response to the danger — which is always, unfailingly, to try to cheat his way out of it.

The classic xianxia scene: the protagonist is cornered by a stronger opponent. He grits his teeth. He summons his final reserves of power. He prepares to fight to the death. The A Will Eternal version: Bai Xiaochun is cornered by a stronger opponent. He immediately drops to his knees. He calls the opponent "big brother." He offers him money. He offers him pills. He offers to join the opponent's sect. He offers to name his firstborn child after the opponent. He is not being ironic. He genuinely means every word. And the opponent — confused, disarmed, unsure what to do with a cultivator who refuses to act like a cultivator — hesitates just long enough for Bai Xiaochun to escape.

This is comedy, but it is also character work. Bai Xiaochun's shamelessness is not a gag. It is a survival strategy — and the show lets you see, in the quieter moments, how much it costs him. The bravado is real. The fear is real. The fact that he can make you laugh while also making you root for him is the single hardest trick in fiction, and A Will Eternal pulls it off for 106 episodes straight.

The Pill Economy: How Food Obsession Became a Power System

One of the most delightful running threads in A Will Eternal is Bai Xiaochun's relationship with pills. In most xianxia, pills are utilitarian — consume this, gain 500 years of cultivation, move on. Bai Xiaochun treats pill refinement the way a Michelin-star chef treats a tasting menu. He experiments with flavors. He obsesses over texture. He invents pills not because they are powerful but because they are delicious — and then discovers, usually by accident, that they are also powerful.

The flower-scented fart pill is the most famous example, but it is far from the only one. There is a pill that makes your skin glow (he invents it because he wants to look good; it accidentally becomes a highly sought-after cultivation booster). There is a pill that makes food taste better (he invents it because the sect food is bland; it becomes the foundation of an entirely new branch of alchemy). Bai Xiaochun approaches cultivation the way a food blogger approaches a new restaurant — with enthusiasm, with curiosity, and with absolutely no sense of proportion. The result is a power system that feels organic and earned, because every breakthrough comes from character, not from plot necessity.

Er Gen's Secret: He's Actually a Comedy Writer

Er Gen is best known in the West for Renegade Immortal — a dark, philosophical xianxia that treats immortality as a curse as much as a goal. It is the novel that established his reputation, and it is a masterpiece of the genre. But Er Gen's bibliography contains multitudes. A Will Eternal is, by his own admission in author's notes, the novel he had the most fun writing. You can feel it on every page. The prose is looser. The pacing is brisker. The jokes land because Er Gen is not trying to be funny — he is just writing a protagonist who sees the world differently from every other cultivation hero, and letting the humor emerge naturally from that gap.

This is what separates A Will Eternal from other "comedy xianxia" attempts. Most of those try to be funny by making the world absurd. A Will Eternal is funny because the protagonist is absurd — and the world around him is deadly serious. The contrast is the joke. The longer the show runs, the better this contrast gets, because Bai Xiaochun's power level rises while his personality stays exactly the same. By the end of Season 2, he is one of the most powerful beings in existence — and he still reacts to danger by trying to bribe his way out of it. The gap between his abilities and his self-perception never closes, and that gap is where all the comedy lives.

Why It Matters for Donghua

A Will Eternal proved something that was not obvious before 2020: donghua can do comedy at scale. Chinese animation has produced excellent comedies before — The Legend of Hei, The Daily Life of the Immortal King — but those were shorter series, one season each, self-contained. A Will Eternal ran for 106 episodes across four years. It sustained its comic voice without becoming repetitive. It built emotional stakes without betraying its tone. It proved that a xianxia does not have to be grim to be taken seriously.

For Western audiences specifically, A Will Eternal is one of the best entry points into donghua. The humor translates. The protagonist is instantly likable. The cultivation system is explained clearly enough that you do not need prior knowledge of xianxia tropes to follow the story. And at 106 complete episodes, it is a finished product — no waiting for the next season, no cliffhanger anxiety. You press play, you laugh, you occasionally tear up when the show decides to remind you that comedy and tragedy are neighbors, and 106 episodes later you emerge a different person. Specifically, a person who has seen a grown man invent a pill that makes his farts smell like flowers — and somehow made it meaningful.