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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.
( TWO CAKES, or: Ari really loves these ancient gay Chinese wizards, time for some yelling. )
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.
( TWO CAKES, or: Ari really loves these ancient gay Chinese wizards, time for some yelling. )
