So, in an earlier post, I briefly mentioned the importance of connecting tissue. I think that's something that's really striking me in the comic adaptation of Mo Dao Zu Shi. The chapters tend to feel disjointed from each other, often skipping the connecting tissue of how they get from place to place, and even important things that happen en route.
For example: when they head from Qinghe to the "Man-Eating Ridge," we just see them in town in one chapter, ready to pursue the rumor, and then we're with them in the woods as Wei Wuxian panics over hearing Fairy barking. (Erm...wait, there may have been a page or so in the forest before Fairy showed up.) We don't see anything they had to go through in getting that far, so later on when they talk about how the truth of the saber tombs explains the walking corpses and maze array, it's coming out of nowhere, because the adaptation skipped over the walking corpses and maze array, without so much as mentioning them in passing.
Equally jarring are incidents where the visuals and the words don't match up. The waiter in Yueyang, for example. The dialog with him is about the same as in the novel (didn't go in to actually compare, mind you, but the main points are all covered, at least), but it's like the visuals were drawn without proper reference to the text they would accompany. At the end of the conversation, in the novel, the waiter puts his arm around Wei Wuxian in a friendly way as they're talking, in a kind of "let's keep this between ourselves" manner as he's spreading gossip. This leads Lan Wangji to glare jealousy at the waiter, because duh, he had the gall to touch his Wei Ying! The perplexed waiter asks Wei Wuxian what's eating his friend, and comments that he's glaring as though the waiter had just put his arm around his wife. (And yet Wei Wuxian does not figure out why that is... 😅) In the adaptation, it's Wei Wuxian who puts his arm around the waiter, at the beginning of the conversation, and in the panel where the waiter asks what his friend is so mad about, Lan Wangji is already walking away, so not only not currently glaring at him (and the dialog does describe it in the present tense) but also never having been shown glaring at him at any prior point in the conversation.
It very much feels like they just had highlights they knew they needed to hit and weren't too worried about whether or not the connecting tissue was present enough for it to make sense. Which is fine for me, since I know the story so well, but I do wonder how much sense it will make for anyone who decided to skip the novel and read the graphic novel adaptation instead. (Especially given how hard it is to tell the Lan juniors apart in the adaptation!) The final page teasing the next volume struck me as pretty funny, though, asking all these "what will happen when" kinds of questions, and I'm just looking at it and wondering if anyone is reading those questions who doesn't already know the answers.
Don't get me wrong, though. I'm not saying it's bad as an adaptation, just that it could stand to be a bit more thorough with the material. And the faces need to be more distinct from each other. (Though they do seem more distinct than the ones I've seen in the promo art for the animated version, at least.)
Also, I have to say that this image is one of the all-time cutest:
(It's not something actually happening, btw: it's Wei Wuxian's imagination. But it is super-adorable. Though I was a little weirded out in the flashback part to him bringing in the first two rabbits, and one of them is the black one with the white forehead. It's like, that's your animal-self, so why are you suggesting eating it? (Auto-cannibalism?))
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In other news, in the fanfic I'm working on, since it's an AU from CQL canon, I followed CQL's lead and had various events take place in Nightless City following the end of the Sunshot Campaign, right? These events actually got stretched much further in my fic because the political jockeying for power has already started, and so there was all this stuff going on about the Wen Clan prisoners. (I mean, there was in CQL, too, but that was more one-sided stuff of WWX and LWJ witnessing and barely managing to intervene at all as the Jin Clan just wholesale slaughtered them. Mine is not quite so bald-faced in its "the Jin Clan is evil!" and also the leads manage to accomplish more.) Anyway, I lost a whole day of writing because upon finishing up with that Nightless City sequence, I realized I didn't have a full idea of exactly what was going to happen next, other than JGS trying to stir up the whole cultivation world against the Jiang Clan, and therefore I had to stop and brainstorm and write up a new partial outline. (Like any outline of mine, it starts to get weak towards the end, but...)
So, before I started working on writing the stuff from that new outline bit, I went and checked how long the Nightless City sequence was, from the scene immediately after WRH's death to the scene where they leave again at the end of the sequence. It was just over 42k words long. I really have no idea what happened. This story is so freaking bloated. 😰 And yet I don't feel like there's a lot that can be easily trimmed away, either. Once it's done, I'll have to see what happens with the second draft, I guess. (That will be a long way off, ofc, because I like to let things sit for a couple of months after finishing them before I start editing.)
Also, at this point it is categorically impossible for me to finish this fic before November, so I guess continuing it will be my NaNoWriMo rebel project. 😰 I can't believe how long I've been working on this thing...oh, but I did have an idea about how to name it, though I don't know if it'll pan out because I typically only think of it at times when I can't get up to consult the book. But I'm hoping that I can come up with a title that's a play on the meanings of the names of the fic's lead and his love interest. [EDIT: just looked it up, and it totally won't work. I mean, the meanings of their names could be combined to form any number of titles, but none of them would work for this story. Ironically, some of them might work for the one-shot sidestory (to this fic) I've written that was a pitiful attempt at writing PWP for Wangxian, but...there it wouldn't even make sense!]
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