Back when I was watching cql but hadn't touched mdzs someone--(was this you @rhinefall?) said the show had really overemphasized the pseudo-familial, fraternal elements of the story, at the expense of wangxian.
(Which I found deeply off-putting ngl because it makes it sound like the show made up a lot of the meaty content there, which it did not. Its major invention in that area is jiang cheng's crush on wen qing.)
And it's like. Looking over them both. I can see where that statement is coming from, in that The Untamed frontloaded jiang cheng, gave jiang yanli extra appearances, and generally expanded the ratio of page/screen time for the backstory in order to let that carry more of the obvious narrative arc. Since the romance arc could not play out as in the novel, due to censorship.
But being able to compare them now, I honestly feel like what cql actually wound up exaggerating most was...wei wuxian's relationship with lan wangji???
Because. They had to take the romance out. But they also had to make them love each other or there's no point. Which means wangxian had to be friends.
Which in turn means that in the live action version teenage and young adult Wei Wuxian consistently pays attention to, focuses on, confides in, and routinely interacts with Lan Wangji very much on purpose, as part of a relationship he values, considers strong, and is making an effort to maintain.
None of which is true, in the novel.
In many ways, cql builds up the 'fraternal' element of his bond with Jiang Cheng specifically because Lan Wangji has stepped into the role of 'best friend.'
Book Wei Wuxian genuinely believed Lan Wangji disliked and did not particularly care about him, basically until he died. Between Lan Wangji's lack of social skills, their many points of conflict, and the weird behavior engendered by Lan Wangji's feelings about having an illicit crush on a difficult person, interfacing with Wei Wuxian's general flightiness and many non-lwj priorities, they barely had a relationship.
They were not discernibly 'friends.'
That one Burial Mounds visit was, from wwx's perspective, more bonding than lwj had allowed to happen in the entire time they'd known each other hitherto, including while they fought a war together (lwj deliberately assigned himself to wwx's theater of war but never said wwx was the reason he was in jiangnan, and spent most of that time arguing) for actual years.
Wwx was aware by the end that lwj didn't hate him, that as his relationships went by the end, things between them were 'not that bad.' But he didn't think that he liked him, or that they were at all close. He had no particular reason to believe that freezing him out would affect or had affected Lan Wangji on a personal level.
While, in fact, Lan Wangji was ferociously pining for his self-destructive ass.
Since the censored drama could not take that setup and invert it with the heavily foreshadowed surprise twist forgotten love confession etc, or milk the divide in perception for dramatic irony, because it wasn't allowed to be gay, the relationship arc with Lan Wangji becomes vastly more straightforward, and gels way earlier.
(Hence the insertion of the Yin Iron Fetchquest, to let them even spend enough time together for a strong friendship to make any sense.)
With attendant impacts on the characterization, and with the result that while Jiang Cheng gets more narrative space in terms of screen time and explicit sympathy, he also gets heavily crowded out in terms of 'importance of relationship' within what should be his time period.
In cql, Wei Wuxian intensely pair-bonds with Lan Wangji basically from day one. In mdzs, for all his genuine interest in and attachment to the guy, which might very well have had sexual and romantic undertones he wasn't noticing, he doesn't consider him that important. He failed to recognize him, the first time they met again after a year apart.
This is just a cool guy he knows and likes to tease, and would have liked to win over into friendship, had life not Happened and gotten in the way.
This is a "it's okay if he hates me, I don't hate him" kind of person, for Wei Wuxian.
He's not answerable on any level to Lan Wangji; having a private conversation after the Wen Chao murder showdown where he pleads for Lan Wangji's trust would make no sense whatsoever.
Structurally, within mdzs, pre-death!wwx was answerable to Jiang Cheng, and that was the central relationship his life was built around; he might have owed his debts directly to Jiang Fengmian and reserved his fiercest affection for Jiang Yanli, but Jiang Cheng was his person.
His entire career plan was looking after this guy, forever.
And he liked that plan! It was a good plan! It's really sad that it couldn't be like that, that that's something that was taken and sacrificed. There are obvious flaws with it, but that's life, nothing's perfect. It was a good future, that he doesn't get to have.
The fact that post-resurrection!wwx is absolutely not able to structure his life around Jiang Cheng anymore, that Jiang Cheng is not his person and never can be again, and that he's pair-bonding as we watch with Lan Wangji and toppling headfirst into gay love and going to be gay married and have his husband be His Person for the foreseeable future is like. The primary source of directional momentum in the whole narrative. All else is subplot and context.
And because they could not have the gay ending, the people who adapted the story for live drama slid the wangxian relationship backward in time, so that it becomes the spine of the story, instead. The one priceless thing that Wei Wuxian does not lose, that does not change in his hands and fall to dust on him.
Which is cool too, and really fun to expand into the Secret Gay Ending in fic. I love the results of that.
It's just that it's very different, as a relationship premise and narrative element, from what they had going on in the novel. And in a lot of ways happens at the expense of accurately depicting the state of Wei Wuxian's relationships, needs, and values in his adolescence and early adulthood, and of downplaying his attachment to the Jiang Sect and the Jiang clan.
Which seems somehow ironic, and has produced some weird knock-on effects in the fandom.
Editing after I read some of the notes but just to add to the co-op meta library a bit I do think the de-emphasis on wangxian's relationship in the books is, if not purposeful, a natural consequence of mxtx's conceptualization of writing. In a 2016 interview she talked a bit about why she didn't write mdzs from lwj's perspective, with the hosts asking her a few questions about what lwj's thought process is throughout the story and she's kind of just like. Idk he's too mysterious even for me. Figure it out yourself it's just the writer's job to narrate it's the readers job to interpret (LMFAO).
In a 2018 interview about whether she'd write another side couple, she mentions how even though people shipping side couples is totally fine (misinformation that she's completely against side ships still goes strong today unfortunately but this is her official statement), she thinks analyzing every character's relationships purely on a level of whether or not they felt romantic feelings towards someone "distorts" the nuances in character relationships by coloring them with a sort of ship or no ship binary opinion; she puts a lot of effort into complex and realistic character dynamics and in some ways I imagine fans trying to constrict those into binaries for shipping reasons must be pretty frustrating.
While this is mostly directed towards side ships/character analysis, I think the nuances in wangxians' non/pre-romantic interactions contribute a lot to their characters that falls to the wayside when, a la cql, "friendship" becomes a necessary substitute for "romance", so the "friendship" between the two characters has to take a big role from the very beginning as it becomes a conglomerate of a variety of complicated nuances that aren't able to come across quite as well in the format of an episodic TV show rather than a novel epic.
Thanks to @piosplayhouse for this substantive addition of content to this post! This is great.
Also mxtx is so real and so smart for that take on shipping goggles: they're a fun toy but ffs you-collective have to take them off sometimes, or you're doing the source text a huge disservice.
(If it made any effort with those characters and their relationships at all; if they're cardboard standees you ran off with then fuck it we ball lol.)
Other notes on this post have included:
cql-onlies explaining yes, this is why the book is bad
mdzs-onlies explaining yes, this is why the show is bad
cql-onlies saying this is, in fact, why the show is good
cql-onlies saying maybe they should read the book after all
cql-onlies saying they will now definitely not read the book
people who aren't in this fandom saying they now want to do one or both of these things
jiang cheng stans feeling the novel did him dirty
jiang cheng stans feeling the show did him dirty
people who like platonic relationships liking that the show caters to this (censored-platonic wangxian)
people who like tasteful, convention-following gay romance, as opposed to gay romance that is weird and confused and shameless and deliberately indifferent to the comfort of others with its expression, appreciating that the show caters to this (romantic-subtext censored wangxian)
people who like platonic relationships agreeing that the show did in fact have a net loss of respect for these, due to wangxian's romance-coded fated bromance eating up all the oxygen
people who think the book isn't even a romance story at all, and jiang cheng is a far more important character than lan wangji
people who think the show does emphasize the platonic relationships actually, but still think my take is solid
people with further thoughts about adaptation and fandom
people who like the Yin Iron quest
people who state they only like nhs meta, on their reblog of this nhs-lacking meta post
people who say 'fascinating' in what i interpret as a Spock voice (good)
people who think i am very clever (thank you!)
people complaining about the exact popular fandom takeaways resulting from this that frustrate me the most (fistbump)
people who accidentally wrote 'pesticide' instead of 'perspective' and made it sound like they want to exterminate cql-onlies like roaches when they were in fact being open-minded and thoughtful (i'm sorry this was so fucking funny to be bewildered by at 3AM)
almost everyone in the notes agrees with me, but very few of them with each other, and i want to fight almost everyone with an opinion.
not in an angry way at all, i love nearly everybody in this bar, it's just there's more to it you guys, you have to understaaaaaaaand, you're overlooking this part that's SO IMPORTANT. (i'm not sure whether you should picture me as Conspiracy Board meme or Kermit Flail gif; maybe a cut between.)
but more importantly thanks to everyone for being in the notes at all i love engagement it's so gratifying.
I haven't watched the entire cql - I think I got to the end of the 'school days' arc? (Not because I don't like it but just because watching shows is hard for me where reading is easy).... So this thought is not fully baked BUT - one thing I noticed that feels related to all of the above meta is how.... Layered mxtx novels are. None of her protagonists would ever straightforwardly admit to a thought or feeling they had without like at least 3 levels of obstruction via: their own opinions on what the people around them want/don't want to hear; or their opinion about what sort of self image they should be projecting for whatever reason; or complicated trauma about the inherent vulnerability of sincerity; or the limits of their perceptions of other people's internal states; or just that they have a shitty(hilarious) sense of humor........
I always read the narration in MXTX as fundementally unreliable, especially surrounding characters internal states - you have to interpret everything through the lense of the protagonists interiority and you have to construct your model of the protagonists internal state based on not just what the narration tells you their internal state is but also the gaps or contradictions between that and their actual actions. IE novel!wwx's whole set of feelings and actions regarding his debt to the Jiang clan and his relationship with Jiang cheng specifically.... The meat of those relationships is in the contradictions between how WWX talks/what he is stated to believe/how he acts (IMO!! Other folks can and do see it differently lol. For another example - the friendship between Shen Yuan and Shang Qinghua: imo they're pretty obviously friends who care a lot about each other.... They're just also weird dramatic dudes who could not behave sincerely if their lives depended on it)
In the show that's..... Not really feasible to do? Different medium means that you don't really have the same opportunity for a sort of unreliable third person narrator- what is or isn't 'true' is a lot more set in stone in film vs. a novel, so a lot of the nuance of characterization and relationships that relies on those places of tension and like.... Dialectics (two opposing realities which seem contradictory but are somehow both true) has to get smoothed out into more straightforward character/relationship arcs.
Tl;Dr: constraints of the medium force some of the changes in character, not just the censorship thing :D
Yeah, I agree with most of this. I think you can achieve that kind of layered subtlety of character and motive in film, but the technique is necessarily different enough that the adaptation would have basically needed to reinvent and re-encode most of the layers, on top of coding in the gay.
Which was not, with the practical constraints they had to contend with, feasible to do, and the intended audience mostly wouldn't even have enjoyed it. So of course it wasn't attempted.
I also think mdzs has some additional layering in that regard that svsss doesn't, because the narrative voice is very much not just Wei Wuxian's internal monologue run through a third person filter that occasionally obliquely makes fun of him, the way Scum Villain (extras aside) is for Shen Qingqiu.
The narrator for mdzs is an additional entity, that doesn't obtrude itself but is very much not the protagonist, or limited to his set of perceptions--it sometimes disagrees with him, often leaves out things he was definitely thinking but the audience isn't permitted to know about, and frequently reports to us Common Knowledge on a subject that Wei Wuxian may or may not possess, and if he does, may or may not additionally know to be untrue.
Periodically it head-hops; we get Jin Ling's internal state, for example, reported on several occasions in terms that are very clearly not mediated through Wei Wuxian's point of view. At one point he has already left the building.
So in some ways the narration in mdzs gives us a less limited field of view, but it also lies more, while very carefully not actually lying.
One bit I especially enjoy where it's fucking around like this is when Wei Wuxian is trying to sneak up and steal an exit token so he can get out of the Cloud Recesses early on, and he winds up seeing Lan Wangji naked in the cold spring.
The narrator, which is not Wei Wuxian but is at this point fairly closely wedded to his perspective, describes how hot Lan Wangji is, but says that of course Wei Wuxian isn't interested in men so it's not the bathing beauty that has arrested his attention, it's the scar.
And the trick is it really is the scar he's staring at, that he's paying so much attention to; the brand he had on his old body, but that there is no reason in the world he can imagine that it should be present on Lan Wangji.
That is not a lie; that is a fact; of course even if he looked initially because of the pretty, he forgot about it altogether when he saw something that bizarre and unaccountable.
Wei Wuxian not being interested in men is also not 'a lie' in that it's what he thinks is true, and the narration is allowed to say untrue things if it's reporting what someone, or the general public, believes.
Unreliable narrators only work if they operate under some rules of fair play--i.e. can lie to you outright about one or two specific subjects, but there must then be inconsistencies in the text to suggest the discrepancy, and so forth. Doesn't matter what the rules are exactly as long as they're consistent.
(Danmei narration is also allowed to tell you an MC is straight and be summarily ignored because of the genre conventions, in the same way a murder mystery opening with the statement that no one is going to die is, in context, an announcement that they will.)
But there do need to be rules, or the tool no longer functions. Writers who try to use unreliable narration as a cheap hack to make their work simpler always either put themselves in a hole or produce something unsatisfying.
Anyway yeah, the parts of the story that depend on the lacunae created by unreliable and non-omniscient narration are super excellent and absolutely my jam. And cql elected to be a vastly more straightforward story than mdzs for a number of perfectly good reasons that still make it strikingly different even in places where it seems basically the same.
