Divine Dragon Cult - the last of the "old school" wulin sects?

[Ken Cheng]

By the time we get to the Qing Dynasty era in Jin Yong's stories, wulin in general had degraded considerably from what it had been during the Sung, Yuan, and Ming eras. Old school sects such as Shaolin, Mo Dong, and Ngor Mei were still around (and probably so was Kunlun and a few other venerable old sects), but didn't seem as active or as influential as they had been in earlier times. In fact, the entire infrastructure of old wulin seemed to already be giving way to more modern societies and organizations.

The Divine Dragon Cult really stands out in DOMD because it's the closest thing we see in the story to an old school wulin sect, with its intrigue, rituals, hierarchy, etc. The Divine Dragon Cult would not appear out of place in a story such as DGSD, LOCH, ROCH, HSDS, or SPW, but does seem oddly out of place in the story in which it actually appears, DOMD. In DOMD, the Divine Dragon Cult almost felt like an anachronism compared to more "modern" organizations such as the Heaven and Earth Society, which resembled modern day Triad type underworld organizations than it did old school wulin sects.

[shortsight]

I wasn't sure if the wulin sects really went outdated/extinct but it seems DOMD focus more on the political scene rather than wulin in general. Consequently, less wulin sects were interested and featured in the story. Example, the oddity of someone outside wulin interfered when LHC impersonated a general in helping out HengShan school.

[Ken Cheng]

I wasn't sure if the wulin sects really went outdated/extinct but it seems DOMD focus more on the political scene rather than wulin in general. Consequently, less wulin sects were interested and featured in the story. Example, the oddity of someone outside wulin interfered when LHC impersonated a general in helping out HengShan school.

Wulin wasn't extinct during the period of DOMD, or even a hundred years later during the time of B&S: G&R and FFoSM, but it was evolving. I feel that as the Jin Yong timeline moved closer to the modern era, wulin itself evolved to become more "modern." At a certain point, however, modernity and the norms of wulin became entirely incompatible, and probably by the 19th Century, wulin in the classic sense had ceased to exist.