sophia_sol | The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (aka Mo Dao Zu Shi), by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

Entry tags:

The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (aka Mo Dao Zu Shi), by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

When I watched The Untamed (hereafter CQL) in 2021, my immediate thought upon finishing was that I HAD to read the book (hereafter MDZS) that it was based on. Now, more than two years later, I have finally done that.

And it's so good you guys!

And also, really very different from CQL.

I knew that already, because on top of the way that inevitably at least some things get changed in any adaptation process, I understand that the complex system of chinese censorship has standards for a wide variety of different things not being allowed to be shown on tv. And several of those things are integral to the version of the story in MDZS.

Being now familiar with the versions of the story told in both tv and book, I think the difference that's the biggest is the moral universe being presented by the themes of each story. CQL is the story of a person who always tries his best to do what's right, and is treated poorly by society because of it, but eventually is able to triumph. MDZS is the story of a person who makes some huge mistakes and then has to (gets to?) learn how to live with them.

Both are wonderful stories worth telling! And they have a lot in common. But they are not, in the end, the same story. Going forward I will definitely be paying more attention to which version is being tagged as the fandom when I open fic!

I do feel like I'm not quite up to writing a coherent review of the book right now though. I read the first two-thirds or so back in April, and then accidentally took a multi-month break from reading it, and then read through the remainder over the course of the last few weeks. So the beginning portions of the book are fuzzy in my head and easy to confuse with everything else I have read about CQL/MDZS and the fanfic of both, and it's hard to hold the shape of the entire narrative in my head.

But I do have a few more notes! Most of which are varyingly spoilery for either or both of CQL & MDZS

One is how the Jin Guangyao storyline in MDZS more closely adheres to the theme of "making choices, experiencing consequences" imo. In CQL, JGY is kicked out from the Nie sect because of killing the supervisor who treated him poorly, but in the book he leaves the Nie on good terms, and the incidents which make Nie Mingjue distrust and dislike him happen after he's already gone. JGY really could have just stuck around the Nie sect comfortably and with respect if he chose! But he wanted the things he could get from seeking his dad's approval even more. It's about what you decide to prioritize and go after.

I enjoy how MDZS goes more back and forth with the timelines, and you can see current Wei Wuxian having opinions about the past. And I love how WWX just sees his past self as super cringe, rather than like condemning himself or anything!

There are several really excellent female characters in MDZS, but they do not get a lot of page time, so I appreciate CQL's efforts to increase the presence and narrative relevance of the female characters.

The way everyone just calls the Wens Wen-dogs as a standard term is so uncomfortable to me. Dehumanizing your enemy is a classic strategy in war, for understandable reasons, and it does definitely serve to remind me regularly just how much all the main characters are in a war mindset! Which is why it's so uncomfortable lol. But that's like. a good thing. Nobody in this story is morally pure!

Speaking of not morally pure, I was fascinated to see that the distinction CQL makes between the Dafan Wen as pacifist doctors and the Qishan Wen as supporting Wen Ruohan is straight up not present in MDZS. Wens are Wens, and Wen Qing and Wen Ning are important close members of Wen Ruohan's family, and the Wen remnants include cultivators. I appreciate this too! You cannot separate people into "these ones are evil and deserve to die" and "these ones are completely blameless and have never done anything wrong ever." Love to reject a binary.

But then as well, when Wei Wuxian rescues Wen Ning and the others from the work camp, as far as I can tell from what the narrative tells us, he doesn't actually take all the prisoners, only those who are connected with Wen Ning and Wen Qing in some way - which makes it come across less as "I am taking a moral stand about the treatment of prisoners" and more "I owe a debt to the Wen siblings and must repay it."

I also appreciated the bit of context about what work specifically the Wens were being made to do at Qionqi path - remove aggrandizing stonework depictions of Wen accomplishments to replace it with similar ones but for the Jin. It's clear it's meant as, like, something humiliating for the Wens to have to do.

Lan Wangji is described in both MDZS and CQL in the post-sunshot era as someone who "goes where the chaos is" and I had always understood that previously to mean that he seeks out the biggest chaos. But MDZS makes it clear that what it means by the term is that he's willing to go deal with any situation that needs addressing even if it's small-scale and would be considered beneath him and won't enhance his reputation in the high echelons of cultivator society he was raised in. Love this for him. I wonder if this is what CQL also meant, and I just failed to read it correctly?

And then of course there are things like the absence of a second flautist, which I did already know about from fandom discussions, which is kind of emblematic of the difference between the two narratives.

(oh also. This is very personally motivated but I'm grateful CQL was not able to include more depiction of cannibalism and reanimated corpses because that would be a LOT for me to watch in the more visceral medium of television! and there are so many corpses in MDZS! I think it's very good and appropriate in the book, and I'm glad it stayed in the book.)

idk I feel like I'm spending most of this review talking about MDZS only as relates to CQL which feels a bit unfair to MDZS as the originator, like I'm not respecting it as its own thing! But it's hard for me to talk about it in any other way after having spent the last two years so much in the fandom. If I'd come to MDZS before I ever knew anything about CQL this would be reading very differently!

At some point I do want to do a closer reading of MDZS to appreciate it better for what it specifically is doing, like the way I'm currently doing a TGCF close read on mastodon. There's so much fruitful stuff to pay attention to in any work by MXTX.

Anyway please rec me fic that is particularly good at being based in MDZS canon! I want to spend more time exploring it!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

imho it's always interesting to see what changes (and what stays the same) when stuff gets adapted.

It really is!

The novel is interesting because it depicts pretty much everyone as morally grey. The drama is, due to censorship reasons, very black and white: if you're a good guy, you're a good guy who can only be blamed for being misunderstood and trying too hard (WWX). Of if you're a bad guy, you're totally evil (see, JGY). And I do love both versions!

My characters wear CQL faces but it was the novel that made me fall in love and write fic even though I think I'm closer to CQL characterization-wise.

yes the black and white morality is very stark in contrast to the source material!

I think it's pretty common to write with some kind of combination of things picked up from both MDZS and CQL. And their faces in CQL are SO GOOD.

I think it's interesting how fanon makes 'Dafan Wen' to be much more of a distinction than I ever got from CQL, because for me, it just seemed like Wen Qing, Wen Ning and their parents and retainers were living on Dafanshan, but that they were still Qishan Wen. I suppose in the show everyone all lives in the same place a lot more explicitly, whereas in the book all the sects have territories they are responsible for and therefore logically don't all live in the main complex all the time (and also this makes the watchtowers thing more reasonable, because if they're already spread out then this is just making it an official responsibility to look after people further out from your base.) IDK! But this to say! I don't think 'Dafan Wen' is ever an explicit distinction made in the show! Or that Wen Qing and Wen Ning's parents are shown to be doctors!

One thing I really like about the book is how there's just a bunch of tiny little sects all over the place, it feels a lot more inhabited, and allows for more background characters to just float about.

I do feel like I remember there being at least something of a distinction in CQL about WQ & WN's folks being the Good Wens, but then I watched the show so long ago at this point and my memory is not strong so I might be misremembering! Kind of makes me want to rewatch the show to analyze this more closely but I watch so little tv that it's kind of a miracle I made it all the way through once.

yes I LOVE how many other sects there are in the book, it really makes the place feel more interestingly crowded with a wide variety of people doing their own things

I mean, Wen Ning and Wen Qing are definitely positioned in the show as being sort of, unwilling participants in the Wen Clan fun family conquest scheme, but like, never explicitly as a whole separate Sect to that of the Qishan Wen as a whole, in my opinion at least (I consider Wen Qing being sent to Cloud Recesses as a Wen Sect representative to be evidence of the exact opposite)! I think people took the fact that a lot of the background characters who lived on Dafanshan during the Road Trip sequence ended up in the Burial Mounds as evidence they were like, their own thing, but it was never explicitly stated they were a separate sect. But! To be fair, this is partly a personal preference thing, I think it becomes a much more poorly constructed story if they're only there by accident, because of all the other narrative threads about choices and the lack thereof.

oh yeah absolutely, I think the story makes a lot more sense if they aren't a separate group!

I was reminded recently by a gifset on tumblr that there's a point in cql where Wen Qing references that her family has been doctors for generations, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's part of where fandom has taken the idea of them being a separate subgroup of the wen from

But it's hard for me to talk about it in any other way after having spent the last two years so much in the fandom. If I'd come to MDZS before I ever knew anything about CQL this would be reading very differently!

I come to it from the scenario of not having read MDZS, having watched the beginning of CQL but never getting very far (which is for the best, it prevented me from ragequitting at "the good guys target shooting involving prisoners of war"), but having been in this fandom since before CQL, and I see that shift in the fics themselves. WWX was always going to be woobiefied by some, but having the show come down so hard on He Did Nothing Wrong really influenced a lot of fics. And meanwhile bookcanon fics are more willing to see that, yeah, he did.

Speaking of which, I found out about the second flautist thing from a fic note saying there is no second flautist in this fic. And I was all "....?????" WWX is a mass murderer in one canon but not, I guess, in the other.

oh hey guess what! the good guys target shooting involving prisoners of war DOES NOT happen in the novel, despite it being otherwise willing to have protagonists do bad things! yes that scene in cql is ENRAGING tbh and I just kind of mentally edit it out of my personal canon. but not watching the show is a valid choice also.

I can't remember where I first found out about the second flautist/no second flautist thing tbh! actually it might have been via tumblr meta dissecting the whole thing. but at this point who knows.

seeing the changes via the trickle-down effect in the fics must have been so interesting! I kind of wish I'd been there to see it happen myself! I love learning about canons via fanfic. but woobification of wwx was already baked in when I got here.

Yep! That's one of the enraging changes that CQL made. It's just so cartoonishly evil on the JGY side, and makes all the good guys look bad.

Plus my impression is that the show actually committed to the idea that NHS was the chessmaster behind it all. Whereas with MDZS, or at least with the fic side of things, the whole "NHS is the chessmaster who arranged it all" was a fan theory. There were definitely folks who didn't think there was a mastermind, that stuff just happened.

Oh also one BIG change post-CQL is the Yi City arc stuff got meshed in with the rest of it in fic. I never cared much about the Yi City folks and would just avoid stuff that had it in there, but there was definitely a separation. There's much less of one post CQL, what with the de-aging of all of those participants.

oh wow the nhs stuff is new to me, the knowledge from the show and from fandom about nhs being a master manipulator behind a lot of it is so engrained in my knowledge that I read the book through that as a matter of course! It didn't occur to me that in the book it was a question left up in the air, but now that I think about it, it was awfully light-handed on that, so I can absolutely see what you mean about it being a fan theory that's not necessarily canon.

I skipped over much of the Yi city content in both the book and the show because I struggle with aspects of that storyline, so that part of the changes means a lot less to me personally, but that's understandable that that would be a major change for a lot of people!

Reading this is making me realize I tend to operate in a hybrid universe with some of the moral universe of MDZS and some of the characterization of CQL. The actors contributed so much to those characters, that even if I try to hew only to the events of MDZS, I think Wang Zuocheng's Jiang Cheng is always going to be there, and the vulnerability he really brought to that character is now impossible for me to take out of my reading. But also I'm always into more complicit Wen Qing and the idea that the burial mound settlement was composed of innocents is probably not ever something I'm interested in. But it makes it hard to rec MDZS fic!

yeah I get you! there are good things in both versions of the story and sometimes you just want to pick and choose and moosh them together into a hybrid Ideal Version for yourself! and the actors in the show were SO good that it's a little bit inevitable that they affect how we see the characters.

Yeah, it's the same for me -- at this point there are things about both versions that I distinctly prefer (and also it's been so long since I read + watched that sometimes I don't remember which bit came from which, which becomes its own kind of confusing). But I do the Wei Wuxians I find in fic that feel more like the book as a rare and precious species, because the narrative voice of book!WWX was what drew me into the canon in the first place, and I do think Xiao Zhan does a really good job playing that guy, but the way the CQL narrative changes events makes it much easier for fandom to transform him into a much less complex and less interesting guy ....

This is a very cool post-canon casefic in which wangxian mentor a gaggle of juniors. Good worldbuilding, tasty characterization.

The envy of the world by vulnerable_bead

ooh thank you! I gather from my pinboard notes that I read this in the very early days of being in cql fandom and I don't think I knew anything about the ways mdzs was different, so I noted in my bookmark that I was slightly conflicted over some of the characterisation choices, lol. I'm looking forward to seeing how differently it reads to me now!

Having still read only a gazillion fics/meta without actually consuming any of the canons, this was very interesting to read, thank you for writing it up.
I tend to be frustrated by fics whose thesis is clearly "WWX is entirely blameless and totally victimized" (especially in modern AUs, for some reason), and it's interesting to consider whether they're based in excess fondness for WWX or specifically in CQL characterization.

the theme of "making choices, experiencing consequences"
this is really neat and I would love to see a fic rec list, for instance, specifically focused on this.

(Also I can never take the "second flautist" discussions seriously because in my context the second flautist is the one who sits to the right of the first flautist, plays the same thing a third lower, and doesn't get any of the solos ;) )

I think it is very possible to read CQL from a perspective of "WWX is entirely blameless and victimized," but I think it's also possible to read a bit more complexity into it -- but not nearly as much complexity as is in the book. But CQL really opens the door to blameless wwx being a major prevailing trend in fandom!

this is really neat and I would love to see a fic rec list, for instance, specifically focused on this.

ooh that's a great rec list idea, and also, I have no idea how I'd begin putting together a rec list like that because it's not a theme that I tend to indicate in my bookmarks so I'd have to put a lot more effort into finding relevant fics!

the second flautist is the one who sits to the right of the first flautist

hahahaha I love this! When I was a band kid in high school we would refer to that position as first/second flute, rather than flautist, so I didn't make the connection!

I just Could Not with the translation (or maybe it's the orignial prose I hate? Anyway, I found it unreadable), and also I don't think I would like book!LWJ very much (whereas I totally adore CQL!LWJ), so I do not think I will ever read the book but instead will just enjoy the show.

BUT! I love reading your thoughts and I am really happy for you that you love both in different ways!

yeah that's fair! not every version of a story is for everyone! (though I will say that if the translation you tried for cql was the official published translation, there have been many critiques of it, and the version I read was a fan translation instead which reads much more smoothly to me. but no pressure to try again in a different translation if you don't want to!)

Oh, I hadn't realized that the fan translation was complete. The one I saw was a VERY rough version and the one that was supposed to be the "good" fan translation was still only half done when I heard about it, so I just tried the published version. But I actually might try the fan translation if you have a link--I don't know if I'll stick with it, but it's definitely worth a try!

emailed you! :)

Always fun to read comparisons of adaptations and originals! I honestly respect an adaptation that chooses to be very different -- although I understand that the makers of CQL didn't necessarily choose a lot of those changes -- more than an adaptation that is only slightly different. The creator's(/s') confidence and the ~integrity of artistic choice~ just seems to shine through more.

Edited 2023-08-11 17:01 (UTC)

yeah adaptation is such an interesting art form and sometimes the right choice IS to change things! Humans have been retelling stories in different ways for all of human history pretty much and I think it's a cool thing we do. Endlessly fascinated by everything I hear about the Howl's Moving Castle movie, for example. used the book as a jumping off point to examine a totally different set of themes and did it well, from what I hear

I do wish the creators of CQL had more space to only make the changes they wanted to make, rather than being constrained by censorship, but they still did a magnificent job of telling a good and coherent and interesting story

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (aka Mo Dao Zu Shi), by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject