#like man just imagining the rosa discourse i'm furrowing my brow

[winepresswrath]

man while I do appreciate that the cql team was trying hard to stick to the novel a part of me really really wishes they’d said fuck it and done their own thing because then maybe more fans would understand that liking one over the other is literally just personal preference and not an indicator of, like, 1) being a shallow fan who’s only in it for the fun and not Real Media Analysis or 2) being an dirty mlm fetishizing freak. adaptation discourse was probably unavoidable in some form but there would be a lot less point in comparison if the two were less recognizable as versions of each other

I have a near infinite well of sympathy for novel fans because they are trapped in the unenviable position of having the fannish content they actually want to engage with drowned out by content for a related but distinct story while a bunch of teenagers call them monsters for the crime of liking a cheesy romance novel, and that legit sounds like a circle of nerd hell to me. Good on 'em for persisting and not letting the bastards (me) get them down. I am kind of baffled by the subset of those fans who get really invested in defending the cheesy romance novel as a brilliant work of art the cheesy drama could never live up to, but to each their own. It's pretty good! Definitely better than it needed to be to get the job done, and enjoyable to me, a person who actively disliked the romance. That is genuinely impressive in a romance novel and I think the only other time that's happened for me it was also MXTX.

Personally I love CQL in all its ridiculous glory, and I don't think I would enjoy it nearly as much if the producers had gone on their own merry way- I like Fatal Journey but I don't really love either of the spinoffs, and I think they're a pretty decent indication of what an "inspired by" CQL might have looked like. For me, the magic je-ne-sais-quoi that makes me wildly over invested and inclined to share my feelings with the internet apparently arises from that group of people adapting MXTX's story as best they can. I do really wish we had a better tagging system to separate out the different adaptations, ideally with a parent tag to indicate when we're hybridizing by taking our favourite bits of the assorted canons in a gleeful free for all, because that can be fun too and tbh i think everyone I know does that sometimes aside from the very strictest book onlys.

#caveat being that i cannot read the novel in Chinese and thus will never be able to read it as it was #intended to be read! and i'm very grateful for the time and work the translators put in #so that i can experience it at all but the prose is a bit of a barrier to enjoyment for me #in a way that awkward subtitles just aren't #anyway i guess if like #the house of the spirits #a novel i only know in translation! #got an untamed style drama and then an analogous fandom arose i'd be ready to set something on fire #like man just imagining the rosa discourse i'm furrowing my brow #so I'm sorry that this happened to you guys you've got my deepest sympathies #ok i will admit that if you are one of the people who argue that the novel adds complexity by making jiang cheng completely and #unambiguously evil with only the lowest motives #and the nuance comes from how #Wei Wuxian is one hundred percent in the right in terms of his relationship with Jiang Cheng and how his behaviour didn't impact that #relationship negatively at all because it couldn't as jiang cheng is simply the worst no matter what you do #you only get my second deepest sympathies