Scenes #1-6 Updated to Free Fic Tormenting A Second Kiss!
Posting tired, as usual, so I’m not sure what I want to say about this fanfic atm. Let’s see… I was frustrated these characters don’t get together until one is reincarnated. This is going off the books, not the show. Like, this is too long a story for that shit. They have this cute but cartoony dynamic where Wei Wuxian says everything without meaning, while Lan Wangji says nothing while meaning everything. This is supposed to be them at 20, and the original book has them communicating as children while also slaughtering ancient baddies, going to war, and saving Clans and upholding civilizations. So I thought, what if instead of blaming Wei Wuxian for being “oblivious”, maybe Lan Wangji could grow the fuck up and open his mouth and say what he means? And sex, because why wait until dead? Oh, and give them lube! (Asses aren’t vaginas. They don’t self lubricate, and kindly, not all vaginas are great at that either, so give your characters lube. Ugh.)
Saw The Untamed on Netflix, learned it was a Chinese censored gay romance (censored as in gay people are completely erased. It’s a terrible type of homophobia because it’s insidious, not suggesting violence or rejection, but that one doesn’t exist at all, zero place in society and the world. Completely erased). The entire original story is a romance, yet they insist on making a 50 episode story pretending it’s not, trying to insist long glances are the same as representation of existing. Might as well be some rare, magical being instead of an ordinary queer for how it’s treated, and I found it fucking offensive. This isn’t special shit. It wasn’t a very sexual or blatant love story. If you read the books you’ll see nothing sexual even happens until the last book. But the very identity of these characters had to be stolen away for the censors, ruining the ending completely. Like, wtf was it all for? The main couple wander off separate. They did nothing to represent them being gay and still made sure they couldn’t be happy at the end to punish them and anyone watching who might be gay and hoping they’d be allowed to have love. Fucking homophobic.
Another thing that doesn’t exist in the censored version is the agency of the dead. Apparently they’re fighting fears of superstition, which for whatever reason means that you will see negative depictions of the dead where they are controlled to commit atrocities, but all the examples of the dead saving, helping, being allowed to get revenge on their own for being wronged? Completely erased. You can’t have a hope that balance might happen if you’re wronged. No glimmer of an afterlife. It’s all erased because fear of thoughts. They have to create a nightmare or nothing at all. Lose your parent and hope they’re watching after you? Not in this place, but a zombie might kill you.
The main character Wei Wuxian gets help from the dead and controls their resentment to use as his own magic. That’s erased from the censored version. I seriously don’t fucking understand why they even adapted it for the screen since everything seemed to offend. They instead have him only controlling those who are still alive but missing their spiritual cognition (something like the soul being stolen. You can have a soul but you can’t be gay?). The show adds in an extra element called the Yin Iron that is used to take something complex and realistic such as a group of people going to war against their peers, and turning it into the 2 dimensional idea that one man is obsessed and corrupted by this evil object and everyone else is tainted by it and guilty by association. Good and evil are connected to an object, not choices or actions. The show was hard to get through, gonna be real. I’m not a fan of epic war dramas, and they pace it as the past being this huge block of episodes until I forgot wtf happened in the current time at the beginning. It was arduous. It picked up once they got back into current time, but the novel paced things much better and didn’t need to pad with pointless scenes.
I think the biggest theme change that raised my eyebrow was how in the show, events that the main character observes is now something he is directly involved in. They stop pacing it as a mystery and instead turn it into more action adventure. It would be like adapting the Great Gatsby and having Nick Carraway taking over Gatsby’s role, stealing the girl, etc. I’d like to think it was to make it feel more active, but I think it’s something to do with that censoring again, or maybe just cultural. The show seems to want to drill in the idea that being bold, different, brave, and doing what is morally correct when society is against you will be punished. By death. Without supernatural balance or vengeance after death. What happened to others is now Wei Wuxian’s fault instead of being an observer. He holds it all on his shoulders, and it’s suggested that his actions, and being corrupted by the evil object, are why he must suffer and be killed. Like, it’s a weird ass change. They take the grays of clans of power-hungry people who make their living off resentment of the dead through fighting the ghouls created by it, and therefore are, at a systematic social level, encouraged not to change the world to prevent such resentment, and say, nah, evil object made them do bad. Don’t question the system that needs inequality to feed the monsters so we have a purpose in life. Just fight the baddies who have the evil object.
This problem of the “good guys” feeding a cycle of violence is a pretty common trap for writers in those genres. When they build civilization around fighting a foe, you have a power imbalance demanding things stay the same. Somebody has to die for the good guys to prove they’re heroes. It’s not the rarest problem, but the adaption made it worse by introducing an evil object, and claiming it was reason for evil actions, and anything against said object is good. Slaughter of surviving innocents justified instead of, you know, questioning a shitty hierarchy where shitty people do shitty things and society doesn’t want to deal with conflict so looks the other way, being extra shitty. I don’t mind the people behaving badly, the conflict with society. I mind that it was flattened, exaggerated, and there’s no way to know if the problem was understood, or if it was changed because of the censoring. Like, did they need Wei Wuxian to be his own demise because the excessive homophobia needed him to suffer even after erasing that part of his identity? Who the fuck knows. It’s so scrambled by the censoring of the adaption that anything and nothing of these intentions could be true.
If I seem too critical, I assure you, I think about all shows and reading like this. I want to understand how it works, the world and minds that created it, and what it’s saying even when one might not know they’re saying something at all. This show just had two sources to see changes from, making it extra interesting.
Anyways, stayed up too late rambling. Got a new set of glasses that seem to be solving the eye strain… maybe. It’s my first day using the monitor instead of writing on my phone. I’ll know more by the end of the week. I’m doing okay with short things like this on the phone, but I don’t think I could write a novel like this. I organize things visually, including complex plot lines. Maybe I could go back to the sticky note method if I need to…
