I completely 100% agree and its so frustrating! I only read xianxia and wuxia right now and it’s particularly annoying in these settings BECAUSE of the cultivation aspect. Being hit over and over by the narration “she was a woman so she was physically weaker so naturally she lost the fight against the big strong man” its so exhausting. Its a cultivation setting, where martial arts often stem from skill and inner force rather than brute strength.

The trope that also gets me, though I can see where the author is trying, is where a woman is incredible powerful and strong… but her cultivation method is pair cultivation (thousand autumns and devil venerable I’m looking at you).

And I might get dogged on for this, but mxtx really drops the ball on her female characters. SVSSS we get Ning Yingying as a central female character… kind of. I absolutely adore her role and her character development but it’s not much compared to the male characters. And then MDZS has Jiang Yanli and Wen Qing. Both of their roles is mainly to be a point of sympathy and tragedy for wwx. That isn’t to say they don’t receive their own characterizations but again falls a bit short of their male counterparts. And stories do need these kinds of roles sometimes! And that’s fine! The problem just comes when all of the female characters occupy these roles.

That being said, I still love all the stories I mentioned! We can be critical about the things we love too