China Bans The Genre Of Time-Travel

Sometimes, journalists use their headlines to exaggerate. And we would be lying if we said that we didn’t sometimes give in to the temptation to create a headline that’s only 90% true from a certain angle, and when we do we try to use the Misleading Headline of the Day category.

But this time, that headline appears to actually be true. The General Bureau of Radio, Film and Television has announced that it will no longer allow people to make a genre of time-travel based shows and movies that have recently become popular in China. The Bureau is apparently tired of the numerous historical inaccuracies that can occur when your time travel show features famous historical figures, and considers them disrespectful.

According to ChinaHush, the trending genre kicked off with Shen Hua (The Myth), which features a modern young man traveling back in time two millennia, assimilating to ancient Chinese culture, eventually befriending Xiang Yu and Liu Bang, the first emperor of the Han Dynasty, and becoming an army general. This, and the shows that have sprung up in imitation of it, are grating on China’s General Bureau of Radio, Film and Television:

The time-travel drama is becoming a hot theme for TV and films. But its content and the exaggerated performance style are questionable. Many stories are totally made-up and are made to strain for an effect of novelty. The producers and writers are treating the serious history in a frivolous way, which should by no means be encouraged anymore.

In other news, I know exactly where I want the next season of Doctor Who to take place…

Oh, and if the above picture isn’t actually from Shen Hua, please let me know. I don’t read a lick of Chinese.

(via Blastr.)

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Susana Polo

Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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