MDZS vs The Untamed

    Since I've finally finished reading The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (Mo Dao Zu Shi)*, I thought I'd make the first of two posts comparing and contrasting the novel with its live-action adaptation, which was given the English title The Untamed, which I suspect is not an accurate translation of its Chinese title, Chen Qing Ling, but I don't know that for sure.  There's also an animated adaptation, but I haven't gone looking for a place to watch that yet, so I can't make any comparisons at this time.  I do plan on doing so in the future, though!  I say "the first of two posts" because this post is meant to be if not fully spoiler-free at least spoiler-light, while I want to make a more detailed post later that will have heavier spoilers.  (That second post may wait until I've reread the novel and/or rewatched the show, however.)

    * I should admit that "finished" may be something of a relative term here, and that there are some issues with how I finished reading it at the moment.  You see, I've been reading the official translations of all three of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's novels, the editions printed for the American market by Seven Seas.  But I was growing very annoyed at how long I was having to wait to get to the one thing that The Untamed denied me:  seeing the two leads get together romantically.  So, after reading volume 4 (of 5), I went ahead and read the contents of the fifth volume on WebNovel.  (My plan remains as it always was, to reread the first four volumes leading into the publication of the final volume, of course.  So yes, I will still be buying that one.  In case you were curious/worried.)  When I first learned that there was a translation on WebNovel, I looked up a little bit about the site (service?) to see if it was legit.  And the basic info I found--which was largely geared at writers contemplating publish their work there--said that it was, so I assumed that meant the version on there was also "official," and that the author would be getting a share of any profits that translation garnered.  This was stupidly naïve of me, as it turned out.  There were at least three full translations on the site, plus some others that hadn't finished.  Of those three, one only had the novel and none of the bonus content, while the others had differing amounts of the bonus content.  (I suspect there's at least one more bonus chapter, as there's an awful lot of official merch of the two leads in wedding clothes, but there wasn't a chapter with a wedding in either translation, so...either there's another bonus chapter neither included, or maybe the animated version had a wedding at the end?)  Both of the full versions with bonus chapters turned out to have copy-pasted the text from the same fan translation site.  🤬  So, as unofficial as you can get!  😖  I don't like anything about that being the case, but at least it was only one volume I read that way.  (Though I am now in quite a conundrum regarding Heaven Official's Blessing, which I had hoped to do the same thing with so I won't have to wait until September to find out how the story ends!  But I'm reluctant to even start reading any translations of it that might be on WebNovel now that I know they'd be unauthorized translations (and almost undoubtedly posted there by someone other than the translator!), so I don't know what to do about that. 😭  Fan translation sites are no good for that, though, because they pretty much always take down their translations once someone's licensed the property to do an official translation, meaning that any fan translations that are still available for Heaven Official's Blessing are likely ones that have been copy-pasted like those MDZS translations.)

    Okay, so the real post starts from here!  (If you haven't read or watched any of it and don't want to risk even light spoilers, leave now! 😁)

IWSG: I had something I wanted to say, but...

 

    Frustratingly, over the past week I came up with two or three things I wanted to say in this month's post.  Then I had a little health kerfuffle on Monday morning (slept on my arm wrong and cut off all the flow of blood to my hand for long enough that until I massaged the blood back into it I literally couldn't move my fingers 😱) and that kinda drove most of the thoughts right out of my head.

    I do remember one of the topics, though:

    I've been concerned lately about how one-dimensional and shallow the characters turn out when I try to write a villain, particularly of the grandiose "I'm going to conquer/destroy the world" variety that some of my fantasy plots require.  Admittedly, the absurdly over-the-top goals of such a villain are already rather far removed from any sense of realism, but doesn't that just make it more important to make their characterization less absurd?

    I came up with an idea to write a fairly simple game where you're actually playing such a villain (well, a villain-to-be, really), but I'm not sure if I'm actually going to get it off the ground.  It's at that planning stage where I know the basic elements of the story, but haven't defined any of the other characters beyond the fact that they have to exist.  😰  Sometimes I never manage to get plots past that point, because I just can't come up with any interesting characters who work in those particular story slots.

    Hmm.

    Now that I think about it, I've picked up some various character creation aids over the years.  Maybe I should use one of those to flesh out those ideas...not that they've ever worked before, but maybe there's a first time for everything...

    Overall, though, I really do have trouble making villains--and even non-villain jerks--into real, believable, breathing characters, rather than simple caricatures.  I need to work on that, but it's hard to know where to start.  (I mean, if you look at real-world villains and extreme jerks, the majority of them really do seem to be nothing but flat caricatures rather than fully rounded actual people...)

    Maybe what I need to do is write something that's sort of a mystery, where you know that one person out of a group is secretly doing this, that or the other terrible thing, but they all act like nice, sweet people, so you have to piece together the clues and find the one who's actually evil.  Except that doesn't really feel like it would accomplish the goal?  Maybe a mystery where they're all jerks, but one of them  is also evil, and you have to figure out which one.

    Hmm.