All right, so I have some strange fandom stuff I want to say, but it will involve heavy spoilers for Mo Dao Zu Shi...and also for Hamlet, in case anyone happens to stumble across this blog after having arrived from another planet and/or the distant past and therefore doesn't know the plot of Hamlet. (If any such aliens/reverse-isekai-protags are reading this, give it a read! Widely regarded as one of the greatest works in Western literature, and also very short, as it's a play and therefore can be performed in about...well, I think the runtime on the movie of the entire play was something like three and a half hours?)
Anyway, my point is just that I'm going to put my NotNaNo update at the start of the post today instead of the end. Because spoilers.
So, in terms of my writing today, it was actually pretty disappointing. I really wanted to hit 50k today. It's the 15th, the halfway mark, so I have no excuse not to have written that much already! But somehow I never seem to manage it quickly in NotNaNo, unlike real NaNo. 🤷🏻♀️ But I've been having trouble finding a comfortable sitting position for writing for the past few days (that was one of the contributing factors to my low total the last two days), so I've had to be working at a makeshift standing desk and it's pain-inducing for my back, plus the table shifts sometimes and I have to catch it before my laptop can fall, and generally I have more trouble forcing myself to write in this position, but sitting just wasn't going to happen, so combined with a really unpleasant next scene, it was just a "yeah, no" situation.
Total words in the work: 298,674
Words written today: 3,660
Words written in November to date: 48,674
Pretty version:
Anyway, now, the other thing I wanted to talk about, which I decided to put after my word count because it gets into MDZS fandom stuff and involves heavy spoilers.
I think I've figured out a way to do the "read more" line like I used to be able to do on Wordpress, so I'll put that below here...
Okay, so I had the realization--if that's even the right word--that part of why MDZS hits and sticks with the audience so much more strongly than MXTX's other two novels is that the core of the story beyond the romance is tied into so many primal elements that are deeply, powerfully familiar to people worldwide. Hopefully not from their own experience (considering what those elements are) but from literature, of their own or any other culture.
Case in point, I can draw strong connections between members of the MDZS cast and the cast of Hamlet, and be pretty well on track for a lot of them. (It gets weaker when you move on to smaller characters...) To wit:
- Hamlet: Nie Huaisang
- Hamlet, Sr. (aka ghost of Hamlet's father): Nie Mingjue
- Claudius: Jin Guangyao
- Gertrude: Qin Su (I guess?)
- Ophelia: Jiang Yanli
- Laertes: Jiang Cheng
- Polonius: 🤷🏻♀️
- Horatio: 🤷🏻♀️
- Rosencrantz: Mo Xuanyu...maybe?
- Guildenstern: uh...Lan Xichen...sorta, maybe, kinda?
- The Player: Wei Wuxian (kinda?)
- The Grave Diggers: random dudes on the street 😅
Obviously, that fell apart in places. Particularly the lack of any equivalent for Horatio or Polonius. (Also, I left out some other minor characters (eg Fortinbras) because they don't really work for this.) Some characters move the plot and others move in service to it. The ones who have a smooth equivalent (and some who don't (eg Gertrude)) are the ones who move the plot, whereas characters like the night guards or the grave diggers or even Fortinbras are the pawns of the plot, appearing to allow the story to progress but having no true will of their own. Technically, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and the Player are all also just the pawns of the plot, but having seen Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, it's hard to think of them that way. (Super-recommend the movie, btw. Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, Richard Dreyfuss. Masterwork of cinema. Not sure if it's streaming anywhere, though...indie films from 1990 are probably pretty low on most streaming sites' priorities...)
Anyway, to explain/defend some of my other comparisons. Well, actually, some need very little defending. Laertes is a devoted brother who would do anything for his sister, including being willing to use underhanded tactics to avenge her death; Jiang Cheng is a devoted brother who would do anything for his sister, including killing anyone and everyone he deems responsible for her death. (Now, the comparison falls apart a lot when you slot Nie Huaisang in as Hamlet, since he may not have even met Jiang Yanli in the novel, and certainly played no role in her death, nor was he in any way the target of Jiang Cheng's desire for revenge.) You may be wondering why I didn't just assign Jiang Fengmian to the role of Polonius, since both of them are the fathers of the dead sister and her sister-complex-having brother, but the thing is that that comparison simply does not fly: Polonius is an idiot and almost a comic relief character (which must have made his death quite a shock to the original audiences in Shakespeare's day), and while Jiang Fengmian has his faults (and his detractors), he's not an idiot and certainly not a comic relief character. Their roles in the story are radically different: Polonius is both a dupe and a facilitator of the enemy, whereas Jiang Fengmian is more the dead mentor than anything else, when you come down to it.
My Hamlet, Hamlet and Claudius comparisons also feel like they need little explanation or defense: Nie Mingjue is the murdered man, Nie Huaisang is his devoted relation determined to avenge him no matter who else must suffer and/or die, and Jin Guangyao is the killer...who is even the victim's brother, even if only by oath. Now, there are obviously also major differences: NMJ and NHS are brothers, not father and son, if NHS felt any guilt about what he was doing we never saw it, and likewise if JGY felt any guilt about what he had done to NMJ, it was long over with by the time we caught up to events in the present. Given that he had at one time respected and admired NMJ, it's at least possible that he did at some point feel some guilt...but he also might not have, given the way he adapted to constant persecution by becoming twisted up inside in layers and layers of intense hate. Additionally, JGY's wife was never married to anyone other than him, which only makes her fate that much more tragic, what with actually being his half-sister. She does end up dead because of NHS's revenge plot, and as with Gertrude's death, it's likely not what NHS intended. (Though I don't know if he cared one way or the other what happened to her, honestly. Given that she had the reputation of being a devoted wife to the enemy who killed his precious brother, pity was probably low on the list of feelings he had about her.)
The other three need a bit of explanation. So, in Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are duped first by Claudius and then by Hamlet himself, leading to their deaths. In MDZS, Mo Xuanyu is...um...well, we don't really know all the details? But he was in a position where he trusted/admired his half-brother JGY (to the point of romantically/sexually desiring him, evidently), but was betrayed either by him or their father, and sent back to his family home, where he was perpetually abused. Given that the first chapter talks about how he returned mad, having apparently been scared out of his wits, I'd say there's good odds that what left him insane was not being betrayed and kicked out of Golden Carp Tower, but witnessing his beloved half-brother killing someone, possibly one of their other half-brothers, since JGY did in fact murder pretty much all of his half-siblings other than MXY (and Qin Su). MXY then of course ends up dead (at least his soul does) when NHS convinces him to summon Wei Wuxian's soul as a vengeful spirit to take vengeance on the Mo family for the way they treat MXY. The elements of betrayal and death hold the same in both cases, since it was Hamlet's betrayal that caused the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (they are essentially one person in the play, sadly, so which is which in this comparison is a moot point), and yet also not quite, because I doubt NHS ever said or did anything to make MXY think he would survive summoning WWX. So MXY's death was less a betrayal and more just urging him towards the ultimate self-harm in pursuit of NHS's vengeance.
As to Lan Xichen, the comparison both works better and worse at the same time. Worse in that he doesn't die, and JGY never betrays him (well, he never does anything to hurt him, anyway, and if his plan at the final confrontation had gone off without a hitch, he would have allowed LXC to leave unharmed), and yet LXC felt betrayed by JGY, because he had been lying to him for all these years, and he had murdered NMJ, who was so precious to LXC. NHS does betray LXC in the final confrontation, sort of. Again, it's almost more that LXC feels betrayed than that he actually is betrayed: NHS tricks him into thinking JGY is about to attack, and thus LXC stabs him, which continues to hurt LXC long after JGY has died and become a fierce corpse fighting with NMJ's fierce corpse as they will for centuries (according to a "voice of god" comment from the author, anyway). So the sting of double-betrayal is more true for LXC than MXY, but without the certain death part.
Now, Wei Wuxian, on the other hand, I feel is a really pretty strong comparison to the Player. The Player is someone that Hamlet depends on to frighten Claudius into making a mistake and exposing himself as the murderer, in order to justify his death, at least to Hamlet, if not to the whole Danish court. He's an instrument of Hamlet's revenge, even if he's not expected to personally raise a blade against the king. (OMG, imagine if he was! That would be crazy.) NHS works to bring Wei Wuxian back from the dead in order to get him to aid in exposing JGY's actions and avenging NMJ's murder. WWX is an instrument of NHS's revenge, though in his case he is expected to raise a blade (or rather a dizi) against the xiandu.
It's not a perfect comparison by any means, and I'm not trying to make one, but it does I think lend credence to what I was saying at the beginning about how MDZS taps into and connects with the basic human revenge drama in a way that MXTX's other two novels don't. (Uh, well, as far as I know Heaven Official's Blessing doesn't connect with any basic human drama on the same level. With one volume to go (and they delayed its release from next week to the week after!!! 😭😭😭😭) I admit that it could be that there's some amazing reveal in the conclusion that will make everything tie into something as primal as this revenge drama. (Most of the reveal about NHS's grand revenge against JGY was in the final volume, after all.) But based on everything in the first seven volumes, I don't think it will. Though I have some other stuff I want to say about it, based on something I learned recently in a brief dive into traditional Chinese folklore, but I'm going to wait until the final volume is out so I don't make an idiot of myself. 🤣)
(And, just in case anyone misinterprets, I'm not trying to say Hamlet in any way influenced Mo Dao Zu Shi. It's just a convenient and well-known (to me, anyway) example of the primal revenge drama writ large, and one with a lot of characters that equate well to MDZS characters. I have no idea how much Shakespeare is even taught outside of English-speaking countries. For that matter, I don't even know how much Shakespeare is taught in this country these days. As a discussion on literature and history in a game dev server taught me a few weeks ago, my own education (annoying as my school was) was a precious gem that I need to be grateful for, because dang are some schools awful about teaching such basic things as literature and 20th century history.)
(That being said, though, a MDZS AU fanfic adapting it into Hamlet could be really cool. Hard as heck to write, but cool.)
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