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! 😁)
So, obviously, the biggest difference between the novel and the live-action show is that the show self-censored and removed the entire romance between the two leading men, Wei Wuxian (WWX) and Lan Wangji (LWJ), due to the Chinese government's anti-LGBTQ policies. Which is a real pity, because I would have loved to see some of the more romantic moments performed by the incredibly hot actors playing the roles. 😍 (Then again, if the show had given me the romance, I might not have ended up reading the book, so perhaps it evens out?) This didn't actually change much of the story itself--because even without any words acknowledging that fact, a large chunk of LWJ's actions in the show were still plainly motivated by his intense, almost obsessive love for WWX--so the base story, a tale of war, power and murder, made it through from page to screen with minimal alterations, all things considered. Which is not to claim that there weren't a lot of changes beyond the removal of the gay romance element, just that most of them didn't have too large an impact on the overall plot. (Some of them were definitely for technical reasons: the scene where WWX brings paper effigies to life to fight against vicious ambulatory corpses, for example, was obviously cut due to how incredibly expensive that would have been to do those animated effigies with CG, esp. if one wanted to make it look even halfway decent, and likewise another scene where a fierce corpse whacked two men's heads together so hard that both skulls burst was naturally changed because that is way too disgusting!)
The largest changes after the removal of the romance were changes in the lengthy flashback portion of the story. Both novel and show begin with WWX's death, and then immediately after depict his resurrection thirteen years later. (The subtitles on The Untamed say sixteen years later, though I'm not sure if that's a translation error in the subtitles or if it was part of the adaptation process, an excuse to use slightly older actors for the teenage characters in the tale's present.) After the initial events surrounding his resurrection, both versions leap into the past to the time when WWX and LWJ first met, when WWX went to LWJ's home, Cloud Recesses, in order to study there. In the novel, once the events at Cloud Recesses have run their course, the story moves back to the present, and the flashbacks continue piecemeal (but always moving forwards) until they catch up to WWX's death. On the show, once the flashbacks start, they continue for some 25 or so episodes, all the way up to WWX's death (meaning that by the time you get back to the present, you've totally forgotten what was going on before the flashbacks started!) at which time the show remains in the present for the duration, aside from a few very brief further flashbacks. This can have an impact on how you respond to the supporting characters, because you're seeing their events out of the intended order, even though it's the chronological order. (I found that the character of Meng Yao/Jin Guangyao was the most strongly impacted by the difference, personally; I was actually more charitably inclined towards him in the book than in the show. Though that's probably a YMMV type of situation...) It can also change how you respond to them just because you've spent so much more time with them than you did in the novel; this is especially the case for WWX's adoptive sister, Jiang Yanli, who has probably twice as much screen time in the show than she had in the novel. (Which isn't to say one wouldn't grow attached to her character in the novel, too, but not as much as in the show.)
More than the way you respond to the supporting cast, though, is the fact that there's actually a lot more flashback material in the show than in the novel. Several characters were added to the Cloud Recesses sequence in order to beef up their parts (necessary in Wen Ning's case, since the sequence in which he and WWX met in the novel was omitted from the show, as aside from it being the introduction of past-Wen Ning, its only purpose was for the romance storyline), and some events were shown on screen that in the novel we only learned about by rumor or aftermath, as the novel mostly stayed glued to WWX's side. (And when we're not with him, then we're with LWJ. But the show had scenes with neither of them...) This actually made some of the tragedies in the flashback sequence much more devastating in the show than they were in the novel. At least, it did for me, since I mostly react more to seeing the survivors mourning the dead than to the killing of the characters themselves. (Though there are exceptions to that, of course!) Of course, having seen the show, I was still crying heavily when I got to those parts of the novel because I remembered how hard they hit me in the show...in fact, in some cases I was already crying before the tragic events even started 'cause I could see they were about to start!
Another big change was to WWX's behavior and actions in the flashback, after a certain point in the plot; basically, the actions that led directly to his death. In the novel, his downward trajectory is pretty consistent, and turns into something of a spiral towards the end, so that it really feels like his death was inevitable. (Which is not to say that I don't have a bunch of fanfic plots in mind to prevent it...) On the show, there's one stark moment where he acts almost terrifyingly evil, and then he's more or less back to normal for the rest of the flashback. (In the novel, that one moment, the start of his darkening, was every bit as shocking in its suddenness, and it was followed by a certain amount of reversal, but not as much as in the show, and he did sink back down again...) Maybe not quite as light and bubbly as before, but as I recall it (it has by this point been, what, maybe four months? since I watched the show) there isn't really much sense of a darkening of his spirit, nor of any great inevitability of his impending demise. (There is a greater propensity towards violence, esp. lethal violence towards his enemies, though.) In reading the novel and seeing his behavior there, I got the distinct impression that for the show they had lessened his dark side to make him a more palatable hero.
All of the above are what I view as the typical decisions that are going to be made in adapting a lengthy novel into an even more lengthy television series. (It's 50 episodes long, each episode running about 45 minutes, so basically if broadcast on TV it would have an hour-long slot. I gather that it was never aired on TV as such, but a Web-based series, but that's neither here nor there...) Well, okay, the removal of the romance is anything but typical--especially given the heavy focus on the romance in the novel (to the extent that some of the bonus chapters are basically just excuses to write about the two leads having sex)--but...well, actually, it sadly is typical in China, and there was a time when it would have been typical in the US, too. But there were also decisions made in the adaptation process that were a little less straight-forward. Some of these decisions were evidently made late enough in the script-writing process that they actually led to contradictory dialog! (I can't go into details due to the fact that they'd be heavy spoilers, but I can say that there was a battle in the novel that was cut from the show...but ended up being referenced at one point even though it hadn't happened!)
I want to talk about a couple of these really odd decisions, because they just strike me so strongly, both as a writer and as someone with training in screenwriting. (Don't even get me started on how they decided where to end the episodes, though. The screenwriter in me was kind of screaming at them about that. Repeatedly. And the same stuff was happening in Word of Honor, too, so I suspect that's just the current convention in writing a drama in China right now?) Both of the odd decisions in question are connected to the flashback sequence (which was, after all, where most of the major changes took place), specifically to the earlier section of it, the section about the war I mentioned earlier.
The war is one between the Wen Clan--headed by the evil Wen Ruohan (WRH), who never really managed to be a character in either novel or show, which made some sense in the novel, since WWX never met him--and the...well, all the other clans rising up against his tyranny. Sounds straight-forward enough, right? In the novel, WRH's tyranny was largely established by his clan attacking a couple of the other clans' homes, and also by the Wens demanding the youth of all the other clans be sent to them for "education" which was a grueling process that nearly got several of them (esp. WWX and LWJ) killed. This was plenty to show that WRH was a tyrant and his clan was drunk on power. But for whatever reason in the adaptation process, they decided to turn WRH into Sauron. Like, seriously. They made his home, the Nightless City, look like it belonged in Mordor, to the extent that it was even surrounded by a river of freakin' lava. This lava, in fact, was one of the two decisions I wanted to talk about, because it was apparently a decision made in post: in the first episode, when we see (part of) WWX's death scene, he falls off a cliff, headed towards said lava...but in later episodes, we learn that two characters had both spent years searching at the bottom of the cliff, looking for his body! Which obviously they couldn't do if he fell into freakin' lava! 🤣🌋💀 I mean, maybe they just have asbestos underwear? 🤣 Considering it meant they had to spend extra money in post, that just strikes me as such a weird decision. Admittedly, it made a very striking visual, but...weird. Especially since it was right off the bat a huge change from the novel (all the more so since that wasn't how WWX died in the novel) so anyone who had already read the original when they started watching the show would be going "wait, what?" I think what really gets me about the decision to make Nightless City perched on a cliff above a river of lava is the video game logic of it, you know? It's just not a place where people would ever decide to build a city; it's where the demon lord at the end of the old-school JRPG builds his castle, it's not where a normal kingdom places its capital. Unlike MXTX's other novels, MDZS is set in a world that's very much supposed to be "real" ancient China (you know, aside from the magic, monsters, and various anachronisms), but it's hard to take it seriously as something that could really have happened if you have the villain of the war sitting there going "yup, I'm evil, so what?"
Even more than the "evil lair" look of Nightless City in the show, there's the fact that the show adds something that's kind of the One Ring, but also kind of not? In the early portion of the show, WWX and LWJ end up leaving Cloud Recesses together to go on a journey hunting for the pieces of "the Yin Iron." Which is set up as being this, like, ancient artifact that was broken into four pieces after a previous Wen tried to use it to rule the world (or something?), and WRH has one piece, and if he gets all the pieces then he could...do something horrible? If it was clear at the time, I've forgotten, to be honest. 😅 Certainly, with the piece(s) he has, he does manage to do all kinds of terrible things, mostly in the nature of turning people into meat puppets, and also later on basically making them into urukhai? 😰 In one way, I understand the decision. They needed an excuse to set WWX and LWJ traveling together in their youth, to give them more time together in the past (without using the incidents from the novel, which were shorter and more romantic, even if only one-sidedly so) and to let them take part in one particular event they had nothing to do with in the novel (an event which had actually happened after WWX's death, in fact), and of course it makes sense to make that excuse also a way to set up WRH as a villain, to make the war seem even more justified. All that I get. What bothers me about the decision is that it makes most of WWX's actions in the latter half of the flashback become weirdly precedented. The English translation of the novel's title is Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, right? So, cultivation is hard to explain, and I don't have the best grasp on it, so I won't really try, but I can at least say that at its core it's a form of magic rooted mostly in Daoism, and all the clans in the novel are cultivation clans. Demonic cultivation is cultivation along a darker path. (Feel free to make all the Dark Side of the Force jokes you like; you won't be the first or the last to do so.) In WWX's case, it's largely necromancy. (Not sure if that's always what demonic cultivation boils down to or not, as I'm sort of lacking in points of reference.) So why did the show decide to make the unabashedly evil WRH also practice a form of necromancy? (Admittedly, it's sort of necromancy used on people who are still alive at the start, but they end up in a state identical to the corpses WWX reanimates, right down to the make-up effects on their necks, so...the differences are pretty minor.) The subtitles try to distance WWX from copying WRH a little bit by renaming his unique magical tool, so they're calling it the Stygian Tiger Tally instead of the Yin Tiger Tally, but you can hear them saying "Yin" so it's like yeah, not buying that. (Not that I would have bought it anyway! Why would people in ancient China be referencing something by way of Greek mythology? Absurd!) Thing is, in the novel, "yin iron" is just iron that's absorbed a lot of yin energy from the dead; it's not unique or special, and it's certainly not an ancient artifact that WRH was trying to collect the pieces of. (The Yin Tiger Tally was, of course, made from yin iron, but that's sort of obvious from the name?) There is literally no decision made in the entire adaptation process that has me more befuddled than this "Yin Iron as the One Ring" subplot.
I feel like I probably have more to say than that, but at this point I've been working on this post for a couple of hours, and I still have stuff I want to do this afternoon, so I'll just close the post with one last thing. In an earlier post, I expressed my concern about what the sex scenes (particularly the bonus ones) were going to be like in this one, based on what they were like in MXTX's first novel, The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, and I'm glad to say that while there's one of the bonus stories that I will absolutely be skipping over (well, most of it, anyway) when I reread the book, due to its sex being a little on the creepy side, there's nothing anywhere near as awful as that one SVSSS bonus chapter with the wine. 😰 (That being said, there is still the one story I'll be skipping rereading most of, in which we learn that while the self-styled bad boy WWX routinely has dreams about living a quaint, quiet, pastoral life as a married couple with LWJ, on the other hand the insanely virtuous LWJ routinely has dreams about his teenage self raping WWX's teenage self...and for some reason WWX was turned on by that knowledge...which it's like "dude, do not be turned on by that! You should be worried by your boyfriend dreaming about violating your teenage self!" Admittedly, WWX also has some creepily horny impulses, but at least he only has them when he's awake...)
EDIT: I forgot one more thing I'd wanted to say, but I've decided to make it a separate (but still largely spoiler-free) post. You can find it here.
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