octoswan

[octoswan]

it's cool how these cost almost as much as my house

[octoswan]

Small thoughts on the Netflix Three Body Problem adaptation

"We are making it international" they say. They replaced all the international collaboration of world leaders that we see throughout the books with... two British dudes, deciding, alone.

They actually managed to make it less international than the book. They perverted the very themes Liu Cixin brings to his books, about group mentality & collaboration versus the individuals by completely removing all group mentality.

They made Ye Wenjie a unrecognizable shell of herself. Her back is not held up straight. See an old Ye Wenjie cursing, sloushing, moving to England. Is it really Ye Wenjie? It bothers me so much.

They "simplified" the science to a point where nothing is explained, nothing can make it through any kind of analysis of the logic of the things shown & the actions taken.

The futurist headsets we are shown imply that either

1° the Trisolarians are able to send sizable physical objects [which they can't, they can & have sent us two protons].

2° the Trisolarians shared schematics of advanced techs to the ETO for them to develop the headsets, but that's is the one thing they would never do, as their entire plan rely on humans having less advanced tech than they do & not being able to advance it any further.

I thought it was gonna be lesser than the Tencent show. I didn't expect it to be so utterly lacking on all front. "The" boat" scene, the one they spent a 25% of the budget on in the Tencent show, happened in episode 5 & because we know the budget difference between the Netflix show & the Tencent show, we know Netflix didn't use their budget right.

The misguided belief that somehow an American show could show the cultural revolution better to an American audience than a Chinese show can, because of the censorship in China (that though real they clearly do not understand the function & scope of), when they didn't feature a fifth of the storyline the Tencent show did, just in term of the events that took place. What they showed was midly violent & shocking to be sure, but not very accurate to the content of the book. The narration was all wrong. I'll just give small examples:

on the stage when they condemn Ye Wenjie's father (with microphones in front of a huge audience???) they keep saying "lies", which makes no sense, that's not the logic, the charge is propaging western propaganda, upholding Western values, capitalist way of thinking, not lying (I wrote a end of page note to explain that point).

they call Ye Wenjie comrade during her time at the Red Coast (in the book & in the Tencent show her status as a political dissident & therefore NOT a comrade is emphasized).

Ye Wenjie says, "how awesome would it be if China was the first [country to make contact with aliens]" unironically, not in front of the political commissioner asking for something, just enthousiastically. Before she sells out the planets to the Trisolarians.

The inconsistencies are not only baffling deviations from the source materials that display a complete lack of comprehension of Ye Wenjie as a character, as well as an astonishing disregard for the accuracy of the ideology of (Mao-area) communism & the history of Maoist China. They didn't show a lot of content, they could have avoided making such basis mistakes. Given that they kept saying they would not shy away from it, they could hav done a better job showing how it was. The Tencent show did a very good job showing how bad it was, in a accurate way & yet, for some reason I keep seeing press pieces saying that the Netflix version won't be censored like the Chinese one like it's such a plus.

Disclaimer, I'm not Chinese, it's not my culture, I don't know the history beyond what a French anarchist who had grounds to dislike French Maoist knows about Maoism, but you don't have to know much to know there is no viewing that time positively, I know how horrrible & damaging the Cultural Revolution was,

And the Tencent show showed that quite well! The political rhetoric fallacies, the bureaucracy, the hypocrisy, how miserable eveerything is, is shown very well: it's very close to the book.

Censorship does exist & what we know of the shadow-y rules of NRTA is that they wouldn't allow a lot of graphic violence, nudity, sex, ghosts (or BL since 2021...) et caetera, but it's dishonest to pretend that the topic of Cultural Revolution is a taboo that cannot be spoken about, as if the current administration has a positive view on it & would therefore not allow it to be criticized.

The politics of the Cultural Revolution are clearly presented negatively, at length, in the Tencent show, more broadly & accurately than whatever nonsense Netflix did, even if they didn't show one piece of it, a very graphic violent scence which is instead visually & auditorily implied in a short flashback.

NB: "Lies, all lies!". This was so weird to hear for me. Because in French activism we know the ideologies from communism to socialism, going to marxist-leninism & trotskysm to maoism. We still disagree & use the same rhetorics & the same arguments, the culture has changed very little. So my best guess it that "Lying is bad" is a cultural value that the creators cramed it without realizing that it's really not universal, becausee they don't understand communism on any level (they didn't have to make up anything, they just had to keep to the content of the book...)

I don't know if "lying" is a big deal in China, but I know it's not a big deal in my culture & in a Marxist/communist political context, lying is just not "a thing".

They are a lot of charges you can get in a political tribunal (the one I've been party were just verbal affairs). For example, indivualist behavior, liberalism/imperialistic thinking, deceiving the masses with xx propaganda [so they don't revolt when they would if they knew the truth], aspiring to bourgeois comfort [that can mean profiting of other people's labour, not doing enough or not wanting to sacrifice your life for the cause], the worse ones is obviously treason or being counterrevolutionary (working against the revolution). Maoism famously had the three principles one of which being lack of self-criticism (self-reflection so you can do better).

Lying, on this other hand, is not a political charge. It sounds ridiculous.

[octoswan]

Three-Body: Anniversary Edition (三体周年纪念版) will be released on March 20th, 2024!

This is just announced on multiple offical weibo accounts. What we know so far is that there will be new BTS scenes, and this edition has 26 episodes. Fans highly suspect that it is the director's cut because Yang Lei has been updating the fans casually about it. In late February, he said that the director's cut would probably be released in mid March.

Also as I said in a previous post (screencap below), fans have been hoping for this to happen, and it is freaking happening! I'm so used to being disappointed by cdramas and c-ent stuff, so this kind of things feel extremely unreal.

Oh yes, this is definitely a smart strategic release to go head to head with Netflix.You are very welcome to try out tencent's Three-Body if you don't like the other one. Let's also appreciate these beautiful posters featuring the Three-Body games in Chinese art style.

We'll see exactly what this edition is after it's released. I guess it's time to rewatch (and gif more) Three-Body!

UPDATE on Mar 21st: It's now confirmed that this is a director's cut. No new scenes are added (since new scenes will probably require censorship check). According to a fan who fastforwarded through the new edition along with the original version right after the release, the new edition is the result of the director listening to feedback from the audience:

Certain scenes are deleted to make it more fast paced (eg. a lot of Mu Xing's scenes, Sha Ruishan trying to repeat the universe flicker, and moving scientists to the safe house etc.)

Order of certain scenes are changed

Episodes now stop at better places to give more suspenseful feels

Visually, some scenes are lightened and the blue filter is toned down. Some fans also feel that the visual/movement of the Three-Body game seems to be clearer and smoother. Basically this is an improved version of the show without restrictions due to things like ads or TV run time.

[octoswan]

3 Body Problem

[octoswan]

@asiandramanet creator bingo - free choice

First 4 episodes of Three-Body (2023) | 三体 in 8 colors to celebrate the one year anniversary of the first airing day (2023/01/15) of episode 1 to 4 (Kun's 72/∞ Three-Body gifsets)

[octoswan]

me: talking about the chinese adaptation of the three-body problem as a better alternative to the anglicized netflix's version.

someone: the cdrama version is also bad because it treats its viewers as dumb!

me, who is dumb and grateful for the way they explain the science:

[octoswan]

Yu Hewei as Shi Qiang in Tencent's THREE-BODY | 三体 (2023) Episode 1.30 (Kun's 77/∞ Three-Body gifsets)

[octoswan]

just saw a bunch of posts about netflix's "3 body problem" reblogged on my dash, so a friendly reminder that the chinese adaptation, which has entered multiple lists of best c-dramas in 2023, is available for free on youtube with engsub & also on tencent/wetv app (where' i'm currently watching to spite d&d lol).

[octoswan]

cdrama ask meme ˋ°•*⁀➷ @baifengxis asked legend of fei or word of honor

"All the things of yesterday appear in front of my eyes. But everything feels like as if it happened a lifetime ago." ˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ Legend of Fei 有翡 (2020)

#legend of fei

[octoswan]

I started this as a whatever sketch, fell into a trance while listening to Danny Boy on repeat, and out this came

It's almost 3am

help

#🥹🥹🥹 #kh aqua #aqua kh #kingdom hearts #terraqua

[octoswan]

by 邂逅

[octoswan]

We should really not go along with the corporate lingo on these shifts to automation and AI. Always remember this: They don't want to pay people to do the work.

Companies aren't replacing cashiers with self-scan machines for the customer's convenience. They don't want to pay people to do the work.

Companies aren't using AI to produce a better product. The product produced by AI is notably inferior - they just don't want to pay people to do the work.

Corporate America is not hurting for money. It's not that they can't afford employees -- profits are soaring! They just don't want to pay people to do the work.

[octoswan]

[octoswan]

[octoswan]

Very large reaction to Aaron’s sacrifice yesterday in Yemen. Some are calling for the Yemeni government to install portraits of him in public areas.

[octoswan]

Different types of Uyghur dances

English added by me :)

[octoswan]

Every time I see my mutuals post in their native tongue that I don't understand I'm like yes 🥰 that's language babes 💖