So.
I went on YouTube last night for the first time in like a month. (What can I say, I'm not a big "watcher." I prefer writing, reading and gaming.) And in the tier of suggested videos on the topic of Mo Dao Zu Shi there were two videos announcing Season Two of the animated adaptation of Heaven Official's Blessing. (This feels a little like the world laughing at me, since I put up a post barely more than a month ago that, towards the end of the post, said how I was sure they would never continue adapting it.)
One of those videos had the Crunchyroll logo on it.
As in, the same people whose subtitles were so awful that they rendered the US Blu-ray release of Season One entirely unwatchable.
I have to hope and pray that they're merely saying "yes, we'll be simulcasting this" and not "hey, we have exclusive international rights to this" because I cannot watch the rest if they continue the garbage they pulled in the subtitles on the first season. Admittedly, it shouldn't even be possible to continue trying to pretend there are no ghosts in adapting a novel wherein about a third of the characters are ghosts (and we actually see, in flashback, the progression of one of the characters from child to young adult to ghost flame to powerful ghost) but I don't trust these idiots to have the sense to realize that it's impossible. It's certainly obvious that whoever was in charge of the subtitles had not read the novel. (Are they going to keep on trying to pretend that Qi Rong is an epithet rather than a name? What will they do when he shows up and becomes a major character? I don't know how much of the novel will be included in Season Two (and don't actually recall precisely when Qi Rong first showed up in the ghostflesh anyway) but chances seem high that he'll be in it, whether in the present as a ghost or in a flashback to while he was still alive...though I think he did show up in the present first, then get shown in the past.)
Honestly, rather than being excited about a second season, I'm depressed, even a little distraught. I don't want to see it only released in the US in a butchered form. In this day and age, why is butchery on that level even still a thing? Who would think it was a good idea to hand over the rights to their show to a company who would rather invent the word "immor" than admit that a ghost is, in fact, a ghost? (What is even up with that, anyway? I mean, did the translation team at Crunchyroll look at the changes that were made to MDZS in the live-action adaptation and decide that meant that Chinese TV didn't like having the undead exist? If so, they were being morons, because that was obviously done because whoever made the decisions about the live-action adaptation didn't want a hero who was a necromancer.)
In further mockery of, like, everything, this morning, while this is all still fresh and stewing in my brain, I go to the VN dev server I'm part of on Discord, and see that someone has posted a Twitter thing about how Crunchyroll (allegedly) sold the private information of its subscribers, and has agreed to a class action lawsuit payment to all American customers. Which will probably be about $30 each. About half of what I wasted on that Heaven Official's Blessing Blu-ray. 😒
Now, the flip side of "I may not be able to watch it due to ghastly subtitles" is that I might not want to watch it. I know it's coming from the same animation studio that did the animated adaptation of Mo Dao Zu Shi, and from what I've learned of that adaptation (mostly by reading a fanfic set in the animated canon) I would likely hate it. Especially because that adaptation has a real hate-on for Jiang Cheng (who I'm very fond of (admittedly in part because I watched The Untamed before reading the novel)), and makes all kinds of changes to make him worse (e.g. changing their mock duel to a real one) while simultaneously doing I don't even know what with the novel's actual villain (on top of entirely removing his time undercover in the Wen Clan, it seems they changed the sworn brothers oath to sometime during or even before the Sunshot Campaign?) on top of which it has "everyone has the same face" syndrome. (Admittedly, that's a problem in the adaptation of Heaven Official's Blessing, too: Nan Feng and Fu Yao are literally just palette swaps of each other, but the different coloration helps to tell them apart a little, and their behavior most of the time does likewise...but when you get into the heat of the final confrontation in the ruins of the Banyue Kingdom, it's almost impossible to tell them apart because they're both concentrated on the business in hand and when they're all business they're virtually identical in behavior, plus it's at night so the low lighting makes their color schemes harder to tell apart. But that's nothing compared to the notion of trying to figure out the difference between the members of the Lan Clan, who all dress identically! That's the advantage of the live-action adaptation: no one can look at the live-action Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi and get them confused, despite their identical garb. Whereas in the comic, I have to flip back to an earlier page that specifies which is which and compare their slight differences in hairstyle to figure out which one is talking. (Uh, sometimes. Other times Lan Jingyi is obvious by his behavior because he's such a feisty little guy. 😆 ))
Uh...okay, that paragraph just sort of took a side thought and ran with it until it died in a nest of parentheses. Sorry about that.
My attempted point was that there's every chance that, moving forward, they might make similarly devastating changes to the story and/or characters in Heaven Official's Blessing. I can't know that they will, but it's a possibility. Though admittedly I can't even think exactly what changes they could make that would be comparable to the ones they made to Mo Dao Zu Shi: the closest equivalent to Jiang Cheng in Heaven Official's Blessing would probably be both Feng Xin and Mu Qing, I guess? (Certainly, they've both got a bit of his tsundere vibe of "pretending not to care about the hero.") But I don't even want to say anything about either of them right now, because as of the end of Volume 7, they're the two characters I'm most unsure about in terms of...well, everything. I don't even want to say how I feel right now about them or what I hope will happen because what if that changes when the final volume comes out? (I want so desperately to do what I did with MDZS and find a fan translation for the rest of the story so I can find out how it ends, only at some point Seven Seas stopped putting the online chapter numbers on the table of contents, so even if I did find one, I'd be at some difficulty figuring out what chapter to start with! So I have no choice but to wait until late November! 😭) As to the story, it's not as straightforward as the story in MDZS, so it's a little hard to know what changes would be most egregious to me. (Also because I don't know the story as well, what with having only read 7/8 of it, as opposed to MDZS, where I've read the whole novel twice, watched the live-action adaptation once (and rewatched about 2/3 of it), and read the first half of the comic adaptation, too. (Which reminds me, I wanted to do a post about the latest volume of that...) Plus obsessively thinking about it an unhealthy amount of the time, because that is how my broken brain operates.)
I feel like there's more to say here, but...I've run out of steam and lost my train of thought. (What little train of thought I had to begin with, that is.)
I guess, in conclusion, all I can say is to hope that the second season of Heaven Official's Blessing is as accurate as the first one, and that it's given better subtitles than the official Blu-ray of the first season got. (Or, contrariwise, to hope that if the subtitles are every bit as bad, then that the adaptation is as awful as the subtitles.)
I have to say, though, if the subtitles do turn out to be that bad, I may cancel my Crunchyroll subscription in protest.
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