Yup, I'm just going to take notes right here on my blog, because I can. 🤣
Just in case anyone happens to randomly come across this, let me take a moment to explain the following: these are the notes of someone watching The Untamed for the second time (third time for somewhere between half and two thirds of the episodes) and who has read the original novel (Mo Dao Zu Shi, or The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) twice. They are the disjointed notes of someone who has written a stupidly long fanfic based on the drama's continuity, and is now carefully and closely watching the drama, looking for details and to fix any places I messed up because of differences between the drama and the novel. Since search engines will totally grab bits of text from anywhere in a document, I'll try to avoid the heaviest spoilers (like the identity of the mysterious man, lol), but all the text that follows is a) written for my own benefit, first and foremost, and b) largely expecting that anyone else who happens to read it has familiarity with the source material.
So proceed with due caution if you haven't read the novel or watched the show. 😉
So, I have to say that I really think they were clever about handling the opening. Having a story-teller narrating the tale of Wei Wuxian's death to the very same Lan Clan juniors who are about to (unwittingly) encounter his revived self was a great way to both ensure the characters knew who he originally was and to fill in the audience on just enough of the backstory. And the "mysterious" wealthy man who paid the story-teller to spend all that time talking about Wei Wuxian? Such a wonderful detail for people who already know the story! 😁 (One that totally flew over my head the first time I watched it, needless to say.)
That being said, there's also problems. Like, it talks about Jiang Cheng searching for years for Wei Wuxian's body at the bottom of the cliff.
Where there's all this lava.
I...
I don't know what they were thinking with all the lava stuff in Nightless City. It's...it's just way too "evil overlord" and not nearly "real human" enough. Also, everyone would have second degree heat burns all the time if their city was running with lava. 😅 (I covered for that in my fic by saying it was actually an illusion spell put up by the Wen Clan so they'd seem more scary and impressive. 😅 Still problematic, but at least no one's dying of second degree burns.)
Anyway. I want to keep some running tallies here as I go. And the first one...no, actually, gotta start a different one before I start the one I thought of that made me pause the show to write this.
The first running tally is....
Things Added to Highlight the Romance They Were Forbidden from Mentioning!
(Okay, the title needs work. But you get the idea.)
And this tally is already at a two count just from the scene of Wei Wuxian's death:
1) Lan Wangji rushing to catch him and save him from falling off the cliff
2) The look on Lan Wangji's face as Wei Wuxian is falling anyway, as though his entire world has been shattered. 😭
Now, as to the other running tally, the one that made me decide to pause at 15 minutes into episode one...it is....
Crazy Wei Wuxian Powers!
1) Snapping his fingers to paralyze a person. He's being attacked by Mo Ziyuan (or is that a-Tong?) and he just snaps his fingers and bam! Dude can't move a muscle. Accompanied by a hilarious (if somewhat inappropriate given the circumstances) look on Wei Wuxian's face as he then proceeds to steal the guy's snack...which he promptly rejects for not being as tasty as it was sixteen years ago. 😅
Wei Wuxian is just such an adorable gremlin.
Oop, Crazy Wei Wuxian Powers time again already!
2) He just moved at super-speed(?) to punch Mo Ziyuan all over in the middle of him throwing a bottle at Wei Wuxian. OMG, how? And none of the Lan juniors could see him or anything? LOL, as over-powered as he is in the novel, and he's even more over-powered in the drama! What's really weird about most of these crazy powers is that I'm pretty sure none of them get used more than once! 😅
Ah. "Stygian Lure Flag." Really? Who thought it was a good idea to randomly insert a term from Greek mythology into something set in ancient China? The official translation of the novel called them "Spirit-Attracting Flags," which makes perfect sense and doesn't require dipping into anyone else's mythological lingo. (No clue if it's accurate, since I don't speak the language, but...gotta be more accurate than anything involving the River Styx.) I mean, I know they already mentioned "Stygian Tiger Tally" right at the start in the flashback, but my brain is so used to auto-correcting that to Yin Tiger Tally that it didn't register, not like this did.
And another Things They Added to Highlight the Unspoken Romance! has arrived:
3) While Lan Sizhui is talking to Wei Wuxian, the sight of his uniform gives Wei Wuxian a flashback to Lan Wangji walking towards him, accompanied by a sad, wistful look and mournful piano music. (At this point in the novel, Wei Wuxian's few thoughts about Lan Wangji essentially boiled down to "he's my enemy." Which is actually pretty inconsistent with how Wei Wuxian felt about Lan Wangji when he died, but maybe some of his mind needed a while to reconfigure itself as he got used to being in a new body?)
4) In the interim before the fierce corpses arrive, Wei Wuxian is playing Wangxian on a...uh...I don't know what he's playing it on. A leaf? I mean, I know you can use a leaf or a blade of grass to do sort of half-way to being a woodwind instrument, but...maybe that needs to be added to the Crazy Wei Wuxian Powers tally, too? (Yeah, it's a blade of grass. I think I won't add it to the crazy powers list, because we're obviously not hearing the same music that the characters are, considering Lan Jingyi says it's played terribly. Also considering there's more than one instrument in what we're hearing.) It's a particularly sad rendition of the theme, like he's expressing his loneliness without Lan Wangji. And at the end of the pieces, we get a repeat of the flashback of Lan Wangji walking towards the camera, and Wei Wuxian sadly says his name. 💕
New tally list!
Cultivator Powers (above and beyond what's in the book)
1) Firing immortal-binding ropes out of their sleeves that wrap around the target like intelligent snakes. And this was just done by Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi! (Though if I recall correctly from my partial rewatch before I wrote the fic in question, it's later done by more accomplished cultivators. Specifically, I seem to recall the same trick being used against Xue Yang, either by Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan or by Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji in backing them up. (Poor Jiang Cheng wasn't permitted to take part at all! 😰))
2) Air seals. This is probably something that's done in other works in the genre, but it's not in the novel. (That being said, it's a lot more visually interesting than taking the time to draw a talisman on paper or whatever.) This might also be a sideline Wei Wuxian power, since he probably still shouldn't be able to do that in Mo Xuanyu's body. (Well, not that he's even in Mo Xuanyu's body, since for the drama they had Mo Xuanyu's Sacrifice Array just recreate Wei Wuxian's body in the place of (or out of?) Mo Xuanyu's body. So they wouldn't need to replace their gorgeous lead actor.) Actually, the more I think about it, the more I suspect this one is a standard for visual media, but not as commonly used in text-based works.
3) Generating the emergency signal from within their body instead of using fireworks. Lan Jingyi's signal to specifically summon Lan Wangji (even though they don't know where he is 😰) is just a ball of blue light that gathers at the tip of his finger and then he fires it off into the air.
Oh crap. I used the fireworks-style signal repeatedly in my fic. They better not all be bursts of spiritual energy instead of fireworks, or I'm either gonna be forced to rewrite or to put an author's note on the relevant chapters and say "yeah, I followed the book on this because." But actually, at least some of them pretty much have to still be fireworks, because Wang Lingjiao doesn't have the spiritual strength to summon people with her own energy. At least, in the novel she sure doesn't.
On the other hand, the signal burst that Lan Wangji actually sees is definitely fireworks. Maybe it's just that Lan Jingyi's ball of energy transported the fireworks to his location? Enh, as long as they use ordinary fireworks at other times (particularly during the fall of Lotus Pier) I'm fine.
Another Crazy Wei Wuxian Power is revealed!
3) Flicking an air seal through the air so that it pops up whole in another location, in order to protect Lan Jingyi from the possessed Mo-furen. Although, actually, maybe this is more of a Cultivator Power, really? It's not so far off from something Lan Sizhui did earlier. (Aside from being red instead of blue, lol.)
I wonder if I should also have a tally of Crazy Lan Wangji powers? 'Cause the way he dealt with those three was pretty nuts. But then again he's always supposed to be more OP than anyone else, including Wei Wuxian, so...I guess I won't. Though I'll need to jot down any in the flashback arc that seem like he ought to have had them in my fic.
All right, so concluding thoughts.
Even though the incident at Mo Manor is pretty faithfully recreated in the drama, there are still various changes, some for reasons that were likely logistical, and others that certainly were not. So, the whole "left arm" thing. In the novel, Wei Wuxian threatens to cut off people's arms, and then what happens but their left arms go missing? Because what's attacking them all is a disembodied left arm, which devours (sort of) the victim's own left arm, taking its place, etc. But in the drama, he threatens to break their arm, and lo and behold all the victims have a broken left arm after the spirit has made a home in them. And also while they're possessed for some reason their arm grows claws and stuff. 😅
Obviously, this was largely a logistical change. It's much easier for an actor playing a corpse to hold their arm at an awkward angle so people can say the arm is broken than it is for them to hide their arm inside the torso of their clothes so their sleeve is empty to replicate the "arm gone" thing. Also this way they could make it a "sword spirit" instead of a disembodied arm that can still move on its own, because that requires considerably more complicated special effects. And this thing already obviously had quite the budget as it is. (Though not really enough for one particular creature effect, but I'll complain about that when I get to it.) So I don't blame them for wanting to avoid the disembodied arm thing. That could have gotten quite gory. (Or not. Depending on how it's done.)
Also largely logistical is that now Mo Xuanyu's body is just gone and/or converted into Wei Wuxian's, because you don't want to have a different lead actor in the present as in the past (especially since the past in this case is like 30 out of 50 episodes). They could have done a Quantum Leap type thing here, so that we still see Xiao Zhan, but whenever we see his reflection we see some other guy's face as Mo Xuanyu, thus implying that everyone around him also sees Mo Xuanyu instead of Wei Wuxian, but...I think the main reason they didn't want to have to do that is that there would be the risk of people forgetting about it (especially since the flashback starts midway through episode 2 and doesn't end until episode 33) and...also, tbh, it also kinda sucks for Lan Wangji, only getting back half of the man he fell in love with. (Though from the way he's described in the novel, it sounds like Mo Xuanyu is, if anything, even prettier than Wei Wuxian was. Which would be a tall order indeed!)
Then there's the fact that the Mo family are being called "puppets" instead of fierce corpses.
Because for whatever reason they decided not to use the undead. At all. In adapting a novel about a necromancer.
Because of course.
I'm not sure if there was specifically a reason for that in terms of China's policy about entertainment media, but I suspect there probably wasn't? I don't even know how I would go about looking that up, but I don't think there's any media block on the undead as such: certainly, if there is it doesn't apply to animated works, given that like half the cast of Heaven Official's Blessing is made up of ghosts. (Well, maybe only a third.) More likely, that change was made to clean up Wei Wuxian and make him a little more "presentable" as a leading man. Having a necromancer as your hero is a little questionable, after all. And they did various other things throughout the adaptation to keep his hands much cleaner than they are in the novel, like reducing his role in the Sunshot Campaign from "massive powerhouse" to "barely even put in an appearance." 😰 But I should wait to talk about that until I get to it.
Instead, I want to address the biggest internal problem with the first episode, a problem that is inherently a problem with the episode, even setting aside knowledge of the book and most of the knowledge of the rest of the show.
And that problem is "why would Wei Wuxian run away from Lan Wangji?"
In the novel, it makes sense. He still thinks of Lan Wangji as opposed to him. (Particularly since he has no way of guessing how Lan Wangji would think of him all these years after his death.)
But when we see his death in the show, Lan Wangji leaps to try to save him, grabbing his hand with his own injured arm, ignoring the way he's profusely bleeding, thus risking his own life for Wei Wuxian's. And Wei Wuxian's memories of Lan Wangji--as presented to the audience in that episode--are fond, wistful and longing. So why would he run away from him? Why wouldn't he just find a place to meet him alone so nothing would be said in front of the juniors?
It's just the first of many places where it's frustrating that the drama wasn't free to act on its alterations to the characters and the plot. Though admittedly in most cases that would mean a radically altered--and in some cases perhaps entirely unrecognizable--plot. So maybe the real problem is that the drama introduced those changes knowing they couldn't act on them.
Someday it would be interesting to write a fanfic following up on those changes. (Particularly a certain change to Jiang Cheng's attitude towards Wen Qing. What if he actually acted on the feelings the drama gave him and thus supported Wei Wuxian at the Burial Mounds instead of distancing himself from him to protect the clan? That could lead to some very interesting changes, even if in the end it didn't prevent all of the tragedies from striking.)
Final tallies for the first episode:
Things Added to Highlight the Romance: 4
Crazy Wei Wuxian Powers: 3
Cultivator Powers: 3
Looking forward to tomorrow and the arrival of the flashback! 😆
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