First, to give some context: I’ve seen some wuxia series, but I’m still fairly new in the genre. I’ve read my fair share of BL, but rarely do I actually like any of it. And lastly, this is one of the first Chinese novels I’ve read. Yes, this is going to be relevant.
Now, an attempt to explain the reasons for my disenjoyment: you see, the three main aspects of this novel are all that aren’t exactly friendly to readers that aren’t already fan of the categories, and two of them make the work straight out confusing if you aren’t. First, the two confusing ones – Chinese novel, and wuxia. The writing style is just… weird. Maybe it’s just a style of a different culture that I’m not much familiar with, but it’s quite hard to keep track of not just the story but even the sentences itself. If feels like it’s written in a style that is both overly complicated and somehow lacking the artistic poetry value of good writing. Imagine something like a young adult novel but the author attempts to emulate speech pattern from the original Beowulf. And apparently that’s normal for Chinese fantasy novels, or so I’ve been told.
Now, wuxia. If the language wasn’t already reader unfriendly, the wuxia tropes would make the text such anyway. I know, I know, the original audience is assumed to be familiar with concepts such as cultivation, Confucianism etc., but again, I’m writing about my personal experience and despite some familiarity with Eastern philosophies I still felt like the novel made almost no attempt to explain its worldbuilding, as it too common with wuxia stories. Stuff just… happens. Sure, I guess it might be weird if a western work would set aside some time to explain what are zombies, dragons, fireball etc., but when almost every sentence in the novel reads like “Grand Wiseman Xiung-Zhe ascended the Mountain of Three Grievances to cultivate a Cheese Tree Spirit that would end the patriarchs of Seventh Day Advent Hoppist sect so that Smol Dik Xian may reign again” (with it being the first time the reader sees most of the names mentioned), it’s very hard to pay attention and almost impossible to develop any care for the story. Maybe there are some interesting plotpoints under all that buzzword spam, but I’m surely not one to spend the time trying to find them. I like books that I can lose myself in, that transport me inside of them, not books that make me stop after each sentence.
And finally, the BL aspects. I’m not saying that BL can’t be good, but the standard of what passes as a story can be… quite low. However, Mo Dao Zu Shi is surprisingly fine in this regard. Which is to say, there would be a story even if you took the yaoi out of it, which is more than I can say about the average boy love title. Well, sometimes it does feel like the author can’t decide whether to focus on the story or on the pretty boys. This difference is most seen in the side stories where after the pretentiously high-sounding main plot, once you get to the sexual side of things the dialogue changes to style that sounds like the author just found out about the existence of the word “fuck” (or maybe I should blame the translator for that, honestly it sounds plausible for either of them being at fault). But well, it is the genre.
To summarize: if you like BL and wuxia, you will likely like this. If you like just one of those, it might still work out. However if you don’t care about neither BL nor wuxia, I really can’t recommend this one. But hey, try it out for yourself and see, maybe I’m the only one who feels this way.
