The masters in the heavens are not only singles, but also many combinations, such as the Seven Heroes of Wudang, the Four Great Dharma Kings, the Eight Heroes of the Divine Arrow, the Four Great Divine Monks, and so on.
A large number of people means that the workload of shaping the character increases. Of course, a situation like the Seven Heroes of Wudang and the Five Scattered People, which really has its own people in history, is the most convenient, and it is just a matter of copying it directly. But those original character combinations of Jin Yong will take a lot of brains.
I remember that when the Seven Monsters of Jiangnan appeared for the first time in the archery, Jin Yong spent a large amount of ink to make a text sketch for each person, and it can be said that everyone has their own characteristics and is different. Therefore, the Seven Monsters of Jiangnan are very successful from the perspective of character shaping.
But this combination of successes is not too much. Most of the time, the combo is just a gimmick to play with one person, some people just have an extraordinary name, and the rest of the elements are vague. For example, peach valley six immortals, can you tell what is the essential difference in personality between peach root immortals and peach leaf immortals?
Specific to the Yitian era, like the Shaolin Four Voids and the Four Great Kings, they are all very successful combinations. Take the Shaolin Four Voids as an example, the Master of Emptiness is compassionate, and the Void Hearing is hypocritical and worldly, the Void Wisdom is grumpy, and the empty mind is simple. We don't have the inability to distinguish the four people because they are similar; on the contrary, the image of each of them is clear and recognizable.
However, some combinations of Jin Yong are not so attentive, such as Sandu, there is not much difference in personality, sometimes it is difficult for us to distinguish between crossing and crossing, often confusing them. But to say that the most unconcerned, perhaps it belongs to the five elders of Kun Tong.
Of course, the five elders of Kun Tong are supporting roles in supporting roles, there is no important role, and naturally there is no need to carefully portray them. But the key is that there is a detail to prove that Jin Yong not only did not carefully write these five brothers, but also gave people a strange feeling - the five elders of Kun Tong were designed to be 5 people, which was a bit much.
This detail is very simple - one of the five elders of Kun Tong has no name.
It doesn't matter if the portrayal of the combination is not serious, but at least, since five people are designed, they always give the names to the people complete, right? But Jin Yong obviously didn't have time to do so.
The fifth elder of KunTong, the oldest Guanneng, the second Zong Weixia, the third Tang Wenliang, the fourth Chang Jingzhi, the old fifth? I don't know.
If you don't believe that you can turn the whole book of Yi tian over and over again, you will definitely not find the name of the fifth elder.
And the embarrassing thing is that as the leader of the Kun Gong Sect, one of the five elders lacks a name. However, there were still three ordinary Kun Gong Sect disciples in Yi Tianzhong, and Jin Yong actually arranged names for them--The Sacred Hand Jia Lan Jian Jie, the Monument Opener Hu Bao, and Feng Yuansheng.
To tell a joke, these three people, casually take out one to install on the head of the fifth, is not impossible, right?
In fact, it is very simple, the scale of the five people of the five elders is a bit too large, originally these five people have no great ability, nor do they have any important status and drama, so four people or even three people are enough. And Jin Yong has made up 5 hard, so he has less energy to think about the details. Don't say the old five, the other four old, how many can you remember? In addition to Tang Wenliang's still some backbone, do the other people have any personality highlights? As the boss, Guan Neng didn't even have a tough line; Zong Weixia and Chang Jingzhi were just old and stale old men, without any impressive memory points.
Therefore, the reason why the five elders are the five elders may only be because the five elders are good and pompous, as for who the five elders are, whether they are powerful or not, it does not matter. Even if five olds become four old and three old, there is no sense of violation.