wow, just like in the old days of cinema. kinda impressive.
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Oh, it ws just the animated version of the 3 Bodies Problem…
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Yes, Chinese chauvinism is definitely a thing. But I actually agree with the criticisms about changing the main characters and the setting in this case.
The China-centrism of the books was one of the things I really loved about them. It’s what makes them stand out. Most scifi I’ve read and watched (especially pop scifi) is centered on western characters and a presumption of US (or maybe European) technological and military world leadership. It was refreshing to have such a different perspective, with decidedly Chinese characters (in the mold of western archetypes, from the nerdy scientist to the noirish detective, but with distinctively Chinese characteristics) trying to save the world, and in the later books even having the common language of future Earth explicitly be a mish-mash of Mandarin and English (mild spoiler).
Of course I understand why Netflix did it. The 21st century Godzilla movies wouldn’t have made nearly as much money if they were Japan-centric like the originals.
But making almost all the Netflix series heroes western (Jin Cheng is Chinese-born but culturally more Kiwi than Chinese, and even Ye Wenjie lives in London) deprives the audience of a chance to consider that different perspective, which I think is a shame. And I totally get how Chinese fans (even those who aren’t on the ultra-nationalist train) would feel like something was being taken away from them, too.
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But they can’t do it in China.
I watched “3 Body Problem”, and then went on to watch the Chinese produced TV series “3 Body”, and I found the latter to be exceptionally better than the Netflix one. I could imagine people looking at the inferior American version and thinking “why the fuck would you even?!?”
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That’s the thing that this op-ed completely misses. The TenCent Three-Body is fantastic. Like most Chinese dramas, it’s long (30 45-minute episodes) and adapts the novel extremely faithfully. Because of the length, it allows itself to spend time on stillness and mood, instead of attempting to make everything into a fast-paced action-romance story.
The Netflix version, on the other hand… It presents the first book in the trilogy, plus about half of the second (where the TenCent version solely adapted the first book), fitting them all into 8 one hour episodes. So already it’s trying to tell the story in 25% of the time (if you account for the number of pages and the number of minutes). Changing the ethnicity (and gender) of the characters is what it is, and I could see how it could be made to work, but the story itself had been so hacked up by the screenwriters that you just lose track of it. There are weird side-forays into romance and infidelity that weren’t in the novels (and feel like they were just added as a way of pandering to American audiences), while significant portions of the novels are simply MIA. Much of it feels like the novels were condensed into an outline of about 20 story beats, and then lines were drawn from beat to beat in an attempt to present the “important” parts of the story in a condensed way.
I don’t want to try to address censorship in China, or the closed media experience there. I just want to point out that there’s a very vigorous TV- and web-series industry in China with a history of making very long-form series that allow for character development arcs for pretty much every significant character in the show. Chinese viewers loving the TenCent adaptation (it ranked in the top 10 for months) and disliking the Netflix adaptation has more to do with the respective qualities of the two adaptations than it does anything else.
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I’m always amused by American media commenting about propaganda from China (I’m old enough to remember when it was the USSR that did propaganda).
A friend of mine says that fish don’t notice water.
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