anonynamja

Honestly, I'm kinda disappointed.

To have XPJ prevail by deus ex machina twice (Anru's suicide and the bracelet) just feels like lazy writing. It doesn't feel like he earned his victory, the way MCS did, it's more like he lucked out with XYQ's mistakes. And in the end, XPJ rides off into the sunset with a happy ending, whereas MCS pays the ultimate price to live according to his ideals.

Not really. As a protagonist, XPJ is far more overpowered than MCS. He is a genius strategist and commander, and as a swordsman he is unranked by Langya Hall merely as a formality. In any other context, we would surely call him a Gary Stu. As far as realism goes, FQCL has far more wuxia/jianghu elements. MCS was a far more interesting character to me, because he didn't solve problems by force even when he could have. As for inner conflicts, MCS had them aplenty.

As far as comparing the series, it's still only 42 episodes in, but I can safely say that FQCL is nowhere near the original in terms of focus and elegance.

If he was intended to be the anti-Mei Changsu, it's not done very well. He starts out with malice instead of falling from grace. He has no righteous cause of correcting an injustice. The 'moral victory' he seeks is incoherent and contradictory. We barely know anything about his journey, and never actually hear how he feels about the culmination of his plot other than "how interesting." Does he regret his actions? Do his subordinates, seeing how it all played out in the end? There's no character arc for them, they are effectively one-dimensional. It could have been done much better; XYQ's servant would have been the perfect opportunity for the writers to humanize the Yelinzi remnant.

Certainly, there are madmen and psychos aplenty in the real world. But that is mostly irrelevant. As Twain wrote, truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense. The goal is not verisimilitude but satisfaction.

Apart from being lazily written, I guess my sense is that what you refer to as the "cult" (which is a misnomer, its just using the baishen religion as cover) or "yelinzi remnant" is a very wuxia, very jianghu sort of thing (lifelong vengeance, absolute loyalty unto death etc), and this feels out of place to me because the original kept such tropes to a bare minimum.

I have similar concerns. In my opinion, the strength of the original was that there were no villains per se, just conflicts between factions. To the extent that some characters were evil, it was a more-or-less human sort of evil that one could relate to if not sympathize with. But here, the first arc's villain is a cartoon character. At first I thought the author was trying to make some kind of statement comparing him to Mei Changsu but clearly that wasn't the case.

does shin ramyun count?

As Michael Tang's review indicates, it has extreme pacing problems, lazy and repetitive overreliance on tropes, and absurd characters. It squandered all its potential. While it's better than most cdrama, that just shows that the bar is very low.

Well that was an utter disappointment. What a trainwreck.

回复 kopqi : "真正优秀的作品"

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If you are enjoying the show with the current translation, that's great.

I don't think anyone begrudges idol fans from enjoying whatever they enjoy. If you like it, great, you do you. But what critics are saying is, low expectations and low standards from idol fans are what got us to this situation. ZTJ was one of the better xianxia novels in terms of storytelling and characterization, and there was a lot of potential squandered by the clumsy screenwriters in order to cater to the idol fan audience.

I think the point is not to get hung up on the average rating, which gets distorted by fans and shuijun, but to look at the kinds of criticism that the more discerning viewership have in the longer discussion threads. Unfortunately, google translate will not help you here.

I had high expectations of this but unfortunately, it's not looking good. Douban average 5.0 with ~10k ratings after 4 episodes. It looks like book readers are unhappy with the adaptation so far. Here's an insightful review thread from a book reader: https://movie.douban.com/review/8484620/

Something that might assist your understanding of the drama is that it's essentially a loose "adaptation" of Fushigi Yuugi.

I think it would be wise to wait until the drama finishes airing and see what the consensus is when the dust settles. As far as I can tell from a brief scan of Douban reviews, the majority of complaints right now concern the quality of acting, the dubbing of dialog, and the CG, but very few discuss the writing itself and whether or not the changes made in adaptation are improvements.

Also, I wouldn't expect another LYB. It's just so unlikely.