This should be a very enjoyable story, albeit one with a little more fanon than some people seem comfortable with. And yet, for some reason, it is uncommonly hard to read. The starting premise is that Wei Wuxian invents a means to go back in time and live his life over. Ok. So he decides to fix the problems in the Yunmeng ruling family by... not upstaging Jiang Cheng.
This was probably the first time I said something wasn't right, because the problems were already present before he was brought home. But I can go with a gimmick for the plot. But the more I read, the less I could hang on to or remember at all, and the subtle interactions between characters were harder and harder to believe in. The later entries in the series are just the same, in one direction or another. And ultimately, I simply can't accept a Wei Wuxian who stifles himself to make other people happy. The man I met in the novel is defined by refusing to cut himself down just to prop others up.
Aside from all that, though, it seemed like things were too easy. Mo Dao Zu Shi is such a tangle of plot threads and people with agendas and grudges of their own. but here there's this lack of stakes. It reads like a story where the heroes easily win all the time and suffer no losses, and villains who were formidable in canon are handled with extreme ease. Even when it isn't actually written to be one of those, it manages to come off that way. Those problems have been there from the very beginning, but I could go with it for a while. But as the story progressed, the sense of catharsis began to wear off, and I started to notice that the story is too good to the heroes and that there are almost no villainous characters either alive or active to stir up some conflict. And most conflict that does manage to stir itself up gets handled in ways i have trouble believing in.
The alternate continuity to this story where Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng go back in time instead, and make sure to coddle him so he never grows into the person they loved and respected is just as frustrating in a slightly different way. If the original suffered from a lack of stakes because it had one time traveler armed with the future, this one has two and makes things feel flat out easy, with just about every problem that arises getting swatted aside to the point where I had trouble believing that anyone was actually worried about anything, even when the narrative said they were.
By the installment where Jiang Fengmian was murdered to start a war, and the only real narrative consequence was that his wife could now live a happy lesbian life with Lan Wangji's mother, I just didn't care anymore. At all.
FanficRecs Oddly Mediocre, Oddly Forgetable
This should be a very enjoyable story, albeit one with a little more fanon than some people seem comfortable with. And yet, for some reason, it is uncommonly hard to read. The starting premise is that Wei Wuxian invents a means to go back in time and live his life over. Ok. So he decides to fix the problems in the Yunmeng ruling family by... not upstaging Jiang Cheng.
This was probably the first time I said something wasn't right, because the problems were already present before he was brought home. But I can go with a gimmick for the plot. But the more I read, the less I could hang on to or remember at all, and the subtle interactions between characters were harder and harder to believe in. The later entries in the series are just the same, in one direction or another. And ultimately, I simply can't accept a Wei Wuxian who stifles himself to make other people happy. The man I met in the novel is defined by refusing to cut himself down just to prop others up.
Aside from all that, though, it seemed like things were too easy. Mo Dao Zu Shi is such a tangle of plot threads and people with agendas and grudges of their own. but here there's this lack of stakes. It reads like a story where the heroes easily win all the time and suffer no losses, and villains who were formidable in canon are handled with extreme ease. Even when it isn't actually written to be one of those, it manages to come off that way. Those problems have been there from the very beginning, but I could go with it for a while. But as the story progressed, the sense of catharsis began to wear off, and I started to notice that the story is too good to the heroes and that there are almost no villainous characters either alive or active to stir up some conflict. And most conflict that does manage to stir itself up gets handled in ways i have trouble believing in.
The alternate continuity to this story where Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng go back in time instead, and make sure to coddle him so he never grows into the person they loved and respected is just as frustrating in a slightly different way. If the original suffered from a lack of stakes because it had one time traveler armed with the future, this one has two and makes things feel flat out easy, with just about every problem that arises getting swatted aside to the point where I had trouble believing that anyone was actually worried about anything, even when the narrative said they were.
By the installment where Jiang Fengmian was murdered to start a war, and the only real narrative consequence was that his wife could now live a happy lesbian life with Lan Wangji's mother, I just didn't care anymore. At all.