Something that made SPW different from all the rest of the Jin Yong canon.
Anyone who knows the story of SMILING PROUD WANDERER knows that it has a very different character from the rest of Jin Yong's major novels. SPW doesn't seem to fit well in a single continuity with the CONDOR HEROES TRILOGY, DGSD (its closest kissing cousin, but still quite different from it), let alone the Qing Dynasty-era stories.
I attribute this to the fact that among Jin Yong's long stories, SPW was the only *purely* wulin story. Most of the other Jin Yong stories also played at being historical fiction: they were set against foreign invasion/occupation, and resisting the foreigners was a major motif of the other works. SPW, being completely free of even the slightest hint of foreign invasion/occupation, focuses much more on wulin (without any ties to national/international politics or war), including the more mystical aspects of it.
In this sense, SPW is the antithesis of the Qing Dynasty stories, which are deeply set in history/politics and grounded in a grittier realism (which I'll get to in the next thread).
A possible solution for the continuity problems between SPW and the rest of JY canon?
THE SMILING PROUD WANDERER, despite being one of Jin Yong's most popular wuxia novels, has always been a sort of odd duck when trying to fit it with the other stories in the Jin Yong canon. On the one hand, SPW does feature allusions to martial arts techniques and organizations from other Jin Yong novels (e.g. Fa Gung Dai Fat, Yik Gun Ging, Dook Goo Kau Bai, etc.). On the other hand, what was written in SPW doesn't always fit comfortably with what Jin Yong wrote in the other stories.
Sometimes, we have discussed the possibility that SPW takes place in an alternate universe apart from such novels as DGSD and THE CONDOR HEROES TRILOGY. I just read something in Jin Yong's Wikipedia entry, however, that might shed light on what's actually going on in SPW:
From Wikipedia: "The time frame of The Smiling, Proud Wanderer is unspecified; Cha states that it is intentionally left ambiguous because the novel is allegorical in nature."
This statement is telling: if SPW is indeed allegorical in a way that the other novels are not, then perhaps SPW operates on a "loose" continuity with the other novels whereas the others work on a "tight" continuity with each other. In other words, while DGSD, LOCH, ROCH, HSDS, SSwRB, DOMD, B&S: G&R, and FFoSM must be consistent with each other in plot elements, SPW is allowed to drift in and out of it to tell its own story. In other words, SPW borrows from the main continuity when convenient for Jin Yong, but departs from it when not so. By comparison, the other novels must respect each other's canon much more strictly.
How does that sound?