Mo Dao Zu Shi: Xian Yun Pian

Capitalism lives on and I paid a membership to finish this season (8eps in total) early, here comes the review you're looking for that is not a 10.

Mo Dao Zu Shi did not become popular over a night, since the beginning in 2015, it has gained popularity day by day with the BL fans. The growth of the online novel gained a large following which resulted in an audio drama, a manhua, anime, live action drama, and now a second season to the anime. Not to mention a handful of original doujin music.

Out of curiosity, I decided to give it a try. To keep the ... review sharp, the success of Mo Dao Zu Shi isn’t purely living off the energy of horny fujoshis but rather, the story, is, quite, interesting.

The novel in relation to the anime:

The world in which the vast amount of characters’ lives in is a complicated well thought out map. The sheer amount of important characters is insane, and to keep all of them somewhat relevant is no easy job. They all have a place in the plot. Mo Dao Zu Shi have manged to break itself out into a homophobic China demonstrates that even when the gay element is removed, the story still holds up, now that says something. If you rethink all the hetero anime, dramas and books you have encountered, if the romantic bit was removed, does the story still hold up?

Mo Dao is a mystery, supernatural story that follows the growth of our characters, allowing you to grow an attachment to the loveable(hateable) boys. Personally, I felt season 1 was rushed and missed out a few details. The beginning wasn’t explained very well and the switch over from the past and present is a bit blurry, if you blink you may have missed it, plus, the beginning of the story was already a bit messy in my opinion since you get introduced to a lot of characters you do not know, but it’s introduced in a way as if you knew them for twenty odd years. Chinese Xianxia shows are a whole new genre, if you are not very familiar with the concepts, it may be a little difficult to digest at first. I recommend to re-watch the first few episodes of season 1 of the ‘present’ timeline again after the memoires before season two – that is, if you decide to watch on.

The drama in relation to the anime:

Recent airing of The Untamed drama based on the same novel has received extremely well feedback from the public, from the ladies and gentlemens. Without the gay agenda and reading between the lines for hidden gay interactions, the general response from the public is that – they cannot tell the original source was based on a BL novel. Alas, that’s not the point…

The elephant in the room:

I have a few major issues with the anime, it seems like most people, including me, is being clouded by too many positive comments to the point where we can’t objectively point out the flaws of the anime, especially when all the reviews are 10s. For me, watching the drama has swayed my opinion on all its offspring – including the anime as I watched it simultaneously.

First and foremost, the art is quite the ‘bang’. The anime made a what I would call a Shinkai Makoto mistakes, meaning the landscapes and backgrounds look beautiful while character designs are shite. Other than the clothes, I can’t pinpoint the characters, everyone else is just a blur, Sizhui and Jingyi is just one design. Individually, the characters appear quite slick, but all of them in a single anime? It really does not hold up.

Which lead to the next point, the messy story doesn’t help the large amount of characters that are unidentifiable. The anime missed out a lot of details, including the sworn brotherhood between Mingjue, Xichen and Guangyao and suddenly you hear them calling each other brother in the second season, and no, a narrator saying a 5000 word essay does not count as good story telling in an animated show.

If we were to speak from the perspective of a newbie for Mo Dao, the anime is going to be confusing, the reason why I don’t particularly feel that way is because my head automatically filled in the gaps with the novel and drama knowledge. When in reality, if you just watched the anime, there are too many gaps, difficult to follow the story, the events do not flow together and it jumps back and forth on the timeline too much, you kind of have to take the snippets of the past and piece it together in your head to make a flowing story. On top, it can be difficult to identify whether it’s a snippet of the past or an imagination, eg. the scene where Wei Wuxian is talking to what seems like a 3/4 year old Jinling, when really Wei Wuxian never meet Jinling until the present timeline but that was attached to the flashback - unless the anime implied that actually happened, because they also added a scene where apparently Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji meet as kids, cute, but what the fuck is going on.

In fact, I think watching the live action drama is a better option, it acts out even the smaller details the novel didn’t have (I know, crazy, how is that even possible). It had dedicated scenes to how the Jiang family was wiped out, Shijie’s relationship with Zixuan and bits and pieces that was glanced over in the novel. Plus, you can tell the characters apart because the actors look different. While the drama tells the story slightly differently with some new content due to Chinese censorship, I still think it tells the story better than the anime.

Oh for fuck sake how did this turn into a drama review, they did not pay me to say this.

Bottom line, by the progression of the show up until now, I don’t have much hope for the writing to suddenly improve, maybe in season 3 the Yicheng arc will shock me, but until then this adaption up to season 2 is a meh.

I can't fathom why this season is rated as high as it is, giving it a 5 feels overly generous already. I have never seen a show as rushed as this, to the point where literally nothing makes sense unless you've read the source material. Watching it feels like sticking eight bookmarks randomly into a book you haven't read and then ONLY reading the eight pages you landed on with zero context.

The story wildly jumps through time by huge increments, often without ANY indication that time has passed, nothing is ever explained, characters and things just show up and immediately are forgotten for the rest ... of the story.
I don't know why they only got eight episodes to work with instead of fifteen like the first season, but the creators seemed determined to squeeze fifteen episodes worth of story into eight anyways (and then add their own fanfiction on top of it which takes up another 2+ episodes, which is MAYBE not such a great idea when you are seriously pressed for time already...).

The result of that is a jumbled mess of unrelated scenes just vaguely strung together without rhyme or reason. A few episodes in I gave up and read the novel instead. Armed with that knowledge, I could finally understand what was going on, but even then, it was a rather unsatisfactory experience because they combined several scenes from the novel into one to save time more than once, regardless of the scenes fitting well together or not and absolutely shredding any natural character interaction in the process (for example, one character goes from hating and accusing a girl of fraud to shouting at her to awkwardly being in love to having a baby with her and getting murdered in like 30 seconds flat, without the fraud case ever getting resolved, without us ever seeing how/why they fall in love, NO TIME, GOTTA MOVE ON TO THE NEXT SCENE).
It's frustrating to watch even if you do know about everything that was cut out in between, because it leaves the characters as empty husks that just stumble through the vauge resemblance of a plot, with no time to actually show character traits or relations that make them unique.

From an adaption standpoint, there's also the issue that core concepts of the plot were completely changed, and at least in my opinion, for the worse.
SPOILER NEXT.
A big part of what makes the characters in MDZS so intriguing is that many of them aren't just shining perfect heroes. They struggle and fail and do terrible, unforgivable things, especially the protagonist, but the reader can hardly hate them for it because the circumstances they do these things in are relateable.
The animation takes these interesting, multifaceted characters and declares "Nope! Anything bad they ever did was because they were the victim of an evil conspiracy!" Not because they gave in to their anger and grief. Not because they used a power that they had always been warned they would lose control of. It's because someone secretly fed them evil energy or some bs like that. Turns out, the heroes were always perfect and never did anything risky or wrong, immediately stripping them of that entire interesting aspect of their character. Demonic cultivation is in the title, for god's sake, but I guess the writers for this animation thought it was better if it is just the same as normal cultivation, lol.
SPOILER OVER.

The only thing elevating this season is the art and music, which are once again absolutely stellar, though they did reuse quite a few shots from the first season, which does make it feel a bit lazy in comparison.

Summary:
A beautiful show that got absolutely RUINED by the abysmal pacing and massive cuts to the story. Watchable only if you've read or seen the source material or another adaption already, and even then you have to be okay with detrimental changes to the core narrative. If you enjoyed season 1, don't ruin that enjoyment by watching this.