aria | a normal number of fandom feelings

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a normal number of fandom feelings

Hello from pseudo-quarantine! My life has changed less drastically than it could have because I do a lot of working from home anyway, and most of that work is reading, so I have alas not tripped upon a heretofore undiscovered bounty of time to catch up on shows or my tbr pile. I have still been doing my normal rate of media consumption, though, and my current Thing along with so much of the rest of the internet is The Untamed (obviously, obviously, I made a Lan Wangji vid in two days, I'm here for this).

So one of my hobbies is reading the source material for media I enjoy. (Ask me how many Thomas Harris novels I've read! Those were a trip and a half, oh boy.) I am, I think, someone who doesn't really care about the sanctity of original source, and I'm fascinated by adaptations in conversation with their sources or with each other, whether or not those adaptations end up feeling transformative. Obviously once I realized that The Untamed is firmly my current Thing, I had to read Mo Dao Zu Shi! And it was a really cool experience: usually I will come down fairly firmly on either "I loved the source and the adaptation did x interesting things or made x mistakes, the source is where my affection lies" or "the source was a fascinating experience in seeing what the adaptation pulled to hugely elevate the original ideas" but with this ... I love the show so much! It made some really good and smart adaptation choices, and also made some kind of lazy choices that undermined things the book did a lot better! I've had so much fun with both of them! Two cakes!!

(Three cakes, technically, there's also the donghua, which I am watching at intervals with a housemate; it seems to be sticking fairly closely to MDZS up to the point I've seen, how fucking gay is it going to be, I just don't KNOW and I'm staring at it in puzzled fascination.)

Anyway, I had a whole lot of feelings about things The Untamed and Mo Dao Zu Shi each did better/more effectively/more to my personal enjoyment with the same story, and yelling about it is exactly what longform blogging is for! Obviously the following is very much about my own personal taste, especially re: romance tropes and what I enjoy thematically.

THINGS MDZS DID THAT I LOVED:

+ The banality of evil is so fucking good! The parallels are so good! I mean in specific that the Wen Clan just doing a straight up power grab that went badly, no evil zombie-raising MacGuffin in sight, was so narratively satisfying. They got above themselves and annexed everyone and eventually went too far, and the past Wen Clan : current Jin Clan parallels are excellent and a lot more clear and coherent than the show managed. The scene where everyone abruptly turns on Jin Guangyao without real proof and Wei Wuxian is sitting there feeling really weird about hearing the same things that were said about him said about someone else now was just *chef's kiss* -- it's something the show also did, in that the scene also exists in CQL, but MDZS was so interested in actually sitting with that parallel and making explicit and I loved it.

+ Okay I'm going to be yelling about how much I love Wei Wuxian both times, but CQL kind of passed the buck on how much Wei Wuxian was ... hemmed in by the MacGuffin of the Yin Iron, I guess? In a story without the Yin Iron, he's not pushing back against a Wen Ruohan who was already raising the dead and using his dead enemies to increase his own army -- MDZS Wei Wuxian just does that on his own. He's an absolute nightmare teenage edgelord! He possibly does the MOST war crimes! Absolutely everyone* gets to be a morally grey disaster! When Wen Ning murders Jin Zixuan, it's because Wei Wuxian couldn't control his own feelings about his shijie's terrible husband, not because someone hijacked Wen Ning! When Wen Qing and Wen Ning turn themselves in and Wei Wuxian snaps, he just straight up murders so many people! THERE IS NO SECOND FLUTIST! I do love everything CQL is saying about propaganda (more on that in a bit) but also the cultivation world's grievances with Wei Wuxian are just ... not baseless! Basically, I love that the book does allow Wei Wuxian to just be an absolute disaster gremlin of a person. (I understand why CQL didn't, you want your lead to be likeable, but I'm absolutely sure that if they'd leaned in more on Wei Wuxian being genuinely horrible sometimes, Xiao Zhan would have been capable of still making him incredibly likeable; oh well!) Love me a dark lord and MDZS delivered.

*statement possibly does not apply to Lan Wangji

+ Ah god the second siege of the Burial Mounds and the Wen Clan remnants crawling out of their pool of blood to defend Wei Wuxian one last time! Granny's spirit getting to see Lan Sizhui all grown up! This was maybe my favorite scene that was totally excised from CQL.

+ Perhaps the most personal taste thing of all: the book made me laugh so much! CQL certainly has funny moments, but it didn't cause me to bark with surprised laughter even a quarter as much as the book did. I'm especially impressed by that given that I assume humor in translation is a tricky thing to convey, but wow the incredibly dry comedic timing was on point.

+ Honestly so many things made more sense/were more thoroughly explained/had much better pacing. Obviously the opening was, like, basically coherent! Yi City went so fast and had so many hilarious bits, both from the juniors and also from Xiao Xingchen, the latter of which I was not expecting! Jiang Yanli's death was ... staged better? like oh my god it was still so stupid for her to run onto a fucking battlefield, JUSTICE FOR YANLI, but I was tearing my hair out a lot less than CQL makes me do. A lot of the better explanation stuff is I think just the nature of the beast, in that a visual adaptation has so much to juggle that a book doesn't, but having all the additional context and information was delightful.

+ For like 80% of the book, the transposition choices CQL made for the relationship scenes were great (ie replacing the blindfolded kiss in the woods with their conversation about what they mean to each other) but oh my god one of my very favorite moments is the point at which everyone stumbles into the climactic hostage situation and Lan Xichen, losing his temper for the only time in the entire story, tells Wei Wuxian how Lan Wangji feels about him, at which point the entire action plot grinds to a halt so that Wei Wuxian can make the world's most awkward and dramatic love confession. That was phenomenal and frankly I'm disappointed that the show didn't commit to at least one Ambiguously Queer Dramatic Feelings Confession at that juncture.

+ Single best book detail: Lan Xichen paints intricate landscapes and gives them to Jin Guangyao as gifts!! Heck I loved that.

+ This is not really ... a content comparison, just a thing I enjoyed about the book as a medium: shoutout to the translator(s?), whose ending notes were honestly one of the best parts. The translation notes were such a great combination of genuinely wonderful elucidations about turns of phrase or literary references, explanations of idioms that actually do transcend culture but that I appreciated they still didn't assume were cross-culturally obvious, and great little asides. MVP was the note saying that LWJ & WWX are the only canonically queer characters but giving the reader permission to ship Lan Xichen/Jin Guangyao or indeed whoever we want: thank you, translator, I assure you that I do very much ship LXC/JGY and your support is appreciated. Also, particular shoutout to Jin Guangyao wrapping a guqin string around Wei Wuxian's neck and telling Lan Wangji "Your life is in my hands" followed by a translator note assuring us that this is not a typo, as Wei Wuxian is Lan Wangji's life. NICE.

THINGS THE UNTAMED DID THAT I LOVED:

+ The mild sanitizing of gremlin Wei Wuxian gives us the gift of what CQL has to say about intentions and perceived actions and propaganda and society! MDZS is also saying all of those things, but the fact that show Wei Wuxian is so fiercely trying to follow his own morals the whole time and in the end everything collapses and he gets painted as a villain is so, so great. (In an ideal world I would have loved to see him be a horrible dark lord who still has very clear lines that are at odds with everyone else's, but that sounds like a really difficult brief and I'm so delighted that MDZS and CQL each give me a different version of a story that is thematic catnip to me.)

+ This is probably also due to the nature of the medium, in that I get the impression that MDZS was sort of posted as it was written, vs the show being able to take a bird's-eye view of the plot and seed things appropriately, but I love how much earlier we get a lot of the characters, especially Wen Qing and Wen Ning! I do wish the show had thought of another plotline than the Yin Iron, and thus a different reason for the Wen sibs to be at the Cloud Recesses, but frontloading their friendship with Wei Wuxian was such a good idea.

+ Relatedly: I'm so happy that CQL decided to give the screen time they did to Wen Qing and Jiang Yanli and Mianmian! Honestly MDZS is ... not great ... about giving the women anything to do, and actually having them be present and active at many different points during the narrative was an excellent call. I love them!! I wish any of them got to interact with each other more! (Also, always and forever, JUSTICE FOR YANLI, goddamn.)

+ Another one that might be purely down to the advantage of the medium: bless Wang Yibo's turn as Lan Wangji. It's a fairly straightforward book-to-screen transference, but being able to watch someone actually inhabit Lan Wangji does so much for that character. I actually have no idea what the experience of reading the book before watching the show would have been like, but I'm not sure I would have ... liked Lan Wangji at all? "Strong and coldly stoic, has lots of feelings for you but no real ability to express them" is another one of those romance tropes that I have very little time for or interest in; having someone embody it, with all the attendant desperate yearning, makes all the difference for me.

+ This one is 100% a personal taste thing but the romance trope bundle that includes "character A is totally oblivious to character B's feelings for them, possibly stretching this obliviousness past any reasonable suspension of disbelief because they're just So Bad At Feelings" is ... a thing I kind of hate? I'm willing to give it a bit of a pass when character B is Lan Wangji, who has never knowingly evinced a single emotion on his face in his life, but that doesn't mean I like it. I don't enjoy emotional obtuseness in a narrative generally. So massive kudos to the show, which is interested in having Wei Wuxian be perfectly aware of the fact that Lan Wangji has feelings for him (although probably not the ENDLESS DEPTH AND BREADTH of those feelings) by ehhh the mid-20s, episode-wise. A much more satisfying romantic narrative for me!

+ Ok buckle up here's probably the most controversial one: by and large I like the romance better in the show. See above re: tropes I tend not to like! In some ways, by excising the more explicitly gay things, the show also excised a lot of the things I disliked; I mean, I guess they could still have had explicitly queer Mo Xuanyu and written Wei Wuxian as attempting to flirt with Lan Wangji to get him to go away without actually committing to textual queerness later (the donghua is doing that! although again I have no idea where the donghua is going) but I'm so glad they didn't. I love that the show looked at its source, considered what it could get away with, and then fully leaned into every bit of subtext it could get away with, while not doing [a] the weird sexual harassment plotline or [b] very much "Wei Wuxian is unaware of Lan Wangji's feelings." It kept many of the things I liked! It got rid of a lot I didn't! It committed to the forehead-ribbon touching and the library porn and all the rabbits and LWJ literally giving up everything to stay at WWX's side and their lowkey marriage at the Jiang family shrine and the drunken chicken gifting and LWJ composing a fucking love song and oh my god they have a son. It added a whole magical rabbit shrine handfasting and several conversations about how much they mean to one another! I'm sad we didn't get Wei Wuxian doing a trust fall out of a tree into Lan Wangji's arms, or the aforementioned dramatic feelings confession in the temple at the end, and obviously in a better world where queer kisses are allowed on Chinese tv I would have loved to see them kiss, but ... wow I just loved the show romance so, so much.

Anyway I have a lot of feelings! This canon has been consuming my life for several months! I seem to be writing sad post-canon Lan Xichen fic and another one about always-a-girl Jiang Cheng being a useless lesbian, and I've been slowly making a Wei Wuxian vid to Dessa's 5 out of 6! Come yell with me in the comments if you want!

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I have been.....slowly entering this fandom fic-first, just dipping my toes in, and it's interesting to hear about the differences in the things the two mediums do! I enjoyed reading all your thoughts even though I think I maybe understand half of what you're saying

MDZS was in fact posted as it was written - which is why LWJ didn't tell WWX about Sizhui until the end. MXTX forgot that she meant to put it in earlier lol.

Anyway, your thoughts were interesting to read, thanks for sharing! I totally understand people liking the romance better in the show. I SHOULD like it better in the show. But like, idk if you can read a formative text in your 30s for the first time, but if you can, it was that for me. Oh also! I think because the book was SO focused on the plot for the vast majority of its length, the obliviousness only got frustrating towards the end for me? And in the meantime it brought such amazing moments as "if he catches me, I'll--" which is like my FAVORITE thing and I wish they had kept in the show. Like if I could choose to keep one thing from the book it wouldn't even be kisses or an explicit confession - it would be WWX in a tree, taking a leap of faith into LWJ's arms. Fuck.

Wow sorry for rambling o__o

Lol oh no I cannot imagine attempting to parse this post without being thoroughly familiar without at least one of either the book or the show! I'm very curious what the fandom experience has been like -- on the one hand there are SO MANY CHARACTERS and all of them have a MINIMUM of two names, but on the other hand, a lot of it is just Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji fic, which has to be ... in some way followable?? Yeah I'm deeply fascinated by what kind of Not My Fandom experience this would be.

I'm cackling, I love that the late Sizhui reveal was because MXTX FORGOT, thank you so much for this trivia.

Oh you can absolutely read a formative text in your 30s, I don't see why not! And I imagine that reading before watching would have been a really different experience -- like, with no road map for where it was going, I probably would have had more patience for WWX not realizing LWJ was into him, as I couldn't have gone in knowing the extent of the obliviousness. Also YES YES THE LEAP OF FAITH FROM THE TREE, hands-down my favorite romance moment that didn't make it into the show.

lollll yes this has been one of the harder fandoms to get into fic-first, I agree, although I maintain Due South was worse because of the horrible confusion of Rays.

Keeping track of names is a nightmare and thus far I am indeed mostly sticking to Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji fic, in the hopes that if I read enough of it I will pick up on sufficient of the secondary characters to understand who the heck any of them are as well. For example, I think Jiang Yanli is......Wei Wuxian's adoptive sister, if I'm understanding correctly. Except I only know that version of her name so if she's ever called anything else then I'm lost and everyone has at LEAST two names. Also people keep getting called by terms that are not names which does not help!! (And who in heck is Mo Xuanyu? Beyond, like, a body that Wei Wuxian steals????)

Also any fandom that is based on multiple variations of a source material is always more challenging because it becomes much harder to extrapolate backwards to what happened in canon because there are MULTIPLE answers to that and so fics are not always consistent. Like the question of how villainous Wei Wuxian is or isn't! Your post was helpfully illuminating on the subject! (I'm also delighted to discover that A-Yuan is actually genuinely the son of Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, not just something fandom has decided would be cute)

Also any fic that is actually significantly, like, focused on the plot of what happened in canon (whichever version of canon) is immediately 10000x less comprehensible. AUs where they're modern college lesbians or whatever are much easier to follow. But that's usually the case when I get into a fandom fic-first, AUs are the easiest because they allow you to pick up the important characterization details without getting distracted by plot, and then once you understand the characters you can read more canon-based fics because you've got some basis of knowledge to work from.

ahahaha I almost DO want to ask you how many Thomas Harris novels you've read, because my answer is "half of one, and only after becoming obsessed with Hannibal, and let's be honest that's probably the most I'll ever read" :P

THREE, I legitimately read Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal because all of them turned up as $1 paperbacks at my local Goodwill. I ... do not recommend them, although I found Red Dragon especially to be a fascinating read purely on a treasure hunting for all the text that Bryan Fuller took for the show level.

You are actually doing VERY WELL. Jiang Yanli is indeed Wei Wuxian's adopted sister! She has no other names, of course there are some exceptions to the multiple names rule, although Wei Wuxian does call her "shijie" most of the time.

And people do get called by terms that are not their names! Some fancy cultivators also have fancy titles, so you end up with Lan Wangji also getting called variously Lan Zhan or Hanguang-Jun/Light-Bearing Lord (depending on whether you want to translate or transliterate his title -- some of them translate well, like that or Nie Mingjue's title that gets rendered as Red Blade Master; meanwhile Lan Xichen's title translates as something approximately like Brilliance Overgrowth Lord, which is ... very weird in English, so he mostly gets called Zewu-Jun and from there it makes sense to just transliterate everyone, except that of course the Netflix translations aren't interested in consistency so you get some of both ... anyway.)

Mo Xuanyu! He's a sad goth teen who wants to get revenge on his shitty family, so he willingly sacrifices his body to Wei Wuxian's spirit! So yes: mostly he's just a body Wei Wuxian possesses (although technically does not steal; it's given willingly so Wei Wuxian can't be exorcised, convenient).

A-YUAN IS THEIR SON!! More specifically A-Yuan is a kid that Wei Wuxian helps communally raise when he's hiding out with the remnants of the Wen Clan being a dark lord, and then when he and the Wen Clan get killed, Lan Wangji rescues A-Yuan and brings him back home and raises him as Lan Sizhui! It's all very lovely.

Anyway I ... would not really recommend the show to you, iirc you have some faceblindness and while everyone in the show is color-coded for your convenience they're also all wearing exactly the same ridiculous wig, but I do really love it and am excited for any level of engagement you end up having :D

In fact there WAS new-to-me content in this post and it's the SECOND SIEGE OF THE BURIAL MOUNDS, I can't believe we didn't already scream about this, I was SO SAD not to see the Return of Granny Wen in the show! ;__;

(I also do really love the scene where turning on Meng Yao is one hundred percent the exact same 'find a scapegoat' action that it was when Wei Wuxian was public enemy number one sixteen years ago, and it all might be true but it just makes Wei Wuxian so tired -- like, one of the reasons I love that WWX and LWJ are really not the protagonists of the present-story narrative is the fact that this helps drive in the fact that all the actual plot of the present-narrative is just a return to a cycle they don't want to be a part of.)

Yeah, that would pretty much be my only interest in them. I tried Red Dragon and SotL and both times found myself really put off by... idk, the distance of the narration? There's something really removed about it, which is... a style, which is fine, but it's so far away from what I loved about the show and all of the showverse fic that it was really jarring.

(Also, I have never gotten over the fact that he writes Clarice as sleeping in an FBI nightgown. AN. FBI. NIGHTGOWN. Clearly that must be what FBI Ladies wear to bed.)

What does "shijie" mean in the context Wei Wuxian uses it? Googling it comes up with nothing that seems at all relevant?

I have gotten the hang of Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian's variety of names and titles and other forms of address, but everyone else's are basically like "welp who knows" to me. Too much to keep track of. "Hanguang-jun" did take a little while for me to catch on to though. "Brilliance Overgrowth Lord" is amazing though!

I'm glad Mo Xuanyu gave over his body voluntarily, at least! Even if the whole situation seems.......not ideal...........

Yeah I had come to the conclusion already that I can never watch the show, and when I tried to read the novel I got bogged down early, so this seems to me to be the kind of thing I can only access through the fandom side. So it goes! We'll see how far down the rabbit hole I end up going.

As I understand it, it's a respectful/affectionate term for one's older sister!

A lot of people only use one name for most of the show! And then sometimes partway in they suddenly get a new name! A wild ride for everyone. "Brilliance Overgrowth Lord" is absolutely incredible; I assume it's probably something that would be better translated as a longer poetic phrase about, y'know, how he overflows with radiance or something, but there's no good succinct way of putting it in English.

Yeah Mo Xuanyu's whole situation is .... not great ...

Well thank you for coming on this journey with me as much as you're doing, I'm delighted :D

I thought jiejie was older sister? is this just a transliteration thing?? doing fandoms cross-language is hard sometimes! WAIT googling the two terms together got me more useful info than either alone, apparently jiejie is older sister and shijie is older co-student, in this context! (shijie also means world, and body, and other things, which is where I was getting confused before) Interesting that Wei Wuxian calls his sister the more...distantly-related word

AHA you have done more in-depth googling than I have! I was extrapolating from context/from the fact that the translations that bother to render "shijie" as anything (vs Netflix, which unhelpfully translates every instance as "Yanli") translate it as "senior sister." But Wei Wuxian calling Jiang Yanli older co-student does make sense: they're adopted siblings, so giving her a title that has some extra respectful distance tracks.

THE RETURN OF GRANNY WEN!! Honestly I teared up ;___;

(Yes YES these poor dudes, they're so tired and they just want to be out of this cycle of blame! I appreciate that CQL looked at the political ramifications of the mess the end of the plot makes and very reasonably decided to nominate Lan Wangji as new chief cultivator, but WWX and LWJ's book decision to just peace the fuck out and go on a honeymoon was LEGIT.)

I hadn't gotten the impression from the fics I've read that Wei Wuxian would ever be deliberately more respectful than necessary, but I will bow to your superior knowledge!

I'm cackling, this is 100% true about literally every other interaction Wei Wuxian has, and then there's his sister who he respects and adores and will be as lovingly polite to as possible (while also constantly demanding soup and affection from her).

that is delightful! Do you know of any fics that focus on Wei Wuxian's relationship with his sister?

Alas no! I'm still sort of scratching the surface of fic, and I want DESPERATELY to read a bunch of fic about Wei Wuxian's relationships with his siblings and nephew, but I haven't found that many yet. I'll come back to lob some recs your way if I do find anything good :)

Ooh, idk if you've seen it already, but I read this interesting fic recently about WWX's relationship with Jiang Cheng! Of course I have no context for why things between them are fraught and the fic doesn't bother clarifying that for me so I have no idea whether or not it makes sense, but I really enjoyed it: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1660390

With the disclaimer that I do not speak Chinese and unfortunately no longer know where I saw this written about, but shijie is specifically something that WWX calls her because she's not actually his older sister, in the family structure, because he's adopted. So he calls her something even more formal and distant, as a sign of respect, but also to signal to everyone else that he understands his role within their family. JC, notably, never calls her that, because he never would - he has a different relationship to her, even though they both think of her as being their older sister.

Anyway! This comment is a million years late but I happened to come across it while looking at this post again and figured I would chime in :)

Thanks for the additional details! However, I've always understood adoption to mean you really are family with your adopted family. I've vaguely gathered from fanfic that WWX's relationship with his adopted parents is....not ideal.....but I don't know any details. Is it something specific about the situation with WWX and the Jiangs that makes the relationship not count as family the way adoption usually does?

Yeah, I should have clarified that this explanation doesn't reflect my personal views on adoption in terms of being a "real" or full member of a family! I can't speak to whether or not this is an accurate depiction of how adoption is viewed (or how the language of adoption works) in contemporary (or ancient) Chinese culture, or whether it's merely specific to how WWX's relationship with the Jiangs works. But WWX's adoption is very disruptive to the Jiangs as a whole--his parents died and then Jiang Fengmian (JC and Yanli's father) brings him home after he has basically been a street urchin, and this is viewed very negatively by Madame Yu (JC and Yanli's mother). This is partly because Jiang Fengmian favors WWX and so people suspect he might be his illegitimate child, and that kind of gossip brings shame on the family, etc., but it's also partly just that WWX is extremely strong at cultivating and so diminishes JC by comparison. So it may be that WWX would just never call Yanli the same thing JC would call her, regardless of how his adoptive parents treat him, or it may be specific to how that family in particular functions, I'm not sure.

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a normal number of fandom feelings

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