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superborbtl;dr mixing and matching from CQL and novel canon is fun, but there really are significant differences in the emotional and moral lives of the characters so there is a limit to how much mixing can be done
I've been sitting on this post for a while, so I'm just going to kick it out the door. As always, anyone can do whatever they want and headcanon whatever they want.
To me, the biggest difference is the (potentially censorship driven) playing down of WWX's crimes. Actually, I am still thinking of the Qi Hun director discussing how they had to make changes to the Hikaru no Go characters so they'd seem more realistic in live action form. Even leaving aside any changes explicitly driven by censorship, I think the interiority of WWX's thoughts in the novel would be difficult to show in live action form.
In any case, in the novel, the story really goes, WWX loses control and kills tons of people through massive hubris; he then finally destroys half the Yin Tiger Tally and dies in the process. WWX really does perform true necromancy and defile dead bodies, which prevents them from moving on and is a huge cultural taboo.
WWX actually does the things he is accused of, even if at a smaller scale than the accusations. IMO, this makes the message against mob mentality stronger when everyone turns against JGY at the end, bc WWX is guilty and everyone forgets this, vs WWX is not actually guilty and is exonerated. (Though, CQL adds the human targets in Phoenix Mountain and WWX tossing the Yin Tiger Tally for people to fight over, both of which do not make anyone come out looking good.)
A major theme in CQL is how LWJ is right to love WWX bc WWX is morally correct, and LWJ recognizing this is how he knows they're soulmates. Contrast to novel canon, where LWJ is in an irrational, this-above-all love with WWX. This point is where I think mixing the canons becomes kind of strange in fic. You can't have the irrational love in a mostly CQL fic, bc that's /not/ the basis for their relationship. Conversely, WWX is /morally wrong/ in novel canon, so a mostly novel based fic has to acknowledge that.
Turning their relationship from text to subtext also means that picking up WWX's obliviousness to LWJ's feelings from the novel (where LWJ def acted like he hated him!!) and putting it into CQL makes no sense. In order to have it be subtext, their relationship is much more strongly developed from the beginning. In CQL, they call each other soulmates! They have a solid friendship at the least! They're pulled apart by outside circumstances, and putting the idea that WWX thinks LWJ hates him into CQL is a bit-- ill fitting.
I've been sitting on this post for a while, so I'm just going to kick it out the door. As always, anyone can do whatever they want and headcanon whatever they want.
To me, the biggest difference is the (potentially censorship driven) playing down of WWX's crimes. Actually, I am still thinking of the Qi Hun director discussing how they had to make changes to the Hikaru no Go characters so they'd seem more realistic in live action form. Even leaving aside any changes explicitly driven by censorship, I think the interiority of WWX's thoughts in the novel would be difficult to show in live action form.
In any case, in the novel, the story really goes, WWX loses control and kills tons of people through massive hubris; he then finally destroys half the Yin Tiger Tally and dies in the process. WWX really does perform true necromancy and defile dead bodies, which prevents them from moving on and is a huge cultural taboo.
WWX actually does the things he is accused of, even if at a smaller scale than the accusations. IMO, this makes the message against mob mentality stronger when everyone turns against JGY at the end, bc WWX is guilty and everyone forgets this, vs WWX is not actually guilty and is exonerated. (Though, CQL adds the human targets in Phoenix Mountain and WWX tossing the Yin Tiger Tally for people to fight over, both of which do not make anyone come out looking good.)
A major theme in CQL is how LWJ is right to love WWX bc WWX is morally correct, and LWJ recognizing this is how he knows they're soulmates. Contrast to novel canon, where LWJ is in an irrational, this-above-all love with WWX. This point is where I think mixing the canons becomes kind of strange in fic. You can't have the irrational love in a mostly CQL fic, bc that's /not/ the basis for their relationship. Conversely, WWX is /morally wrong/ in novel canon, so a mostly novel based fic has to acknowledge that.
Turning their relationship from text to subtext also means that picking up WWX's obliviousness to LWJ's feelings from the novel (where LWJ def acted like he hated him!!) and putting it into CQL makes no sense. In order to have it be subtext, their relationship is much more strongly developed from the beginning. In CQL, they call each other soulmates! They have a solid friendship at the least! They're pulled apart by outside circumstances, and putting the idea that WWX thinks LWJ hates him into CQL is a bit-- ill fitting.
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Date: 2021-03-11 05:46 (UTC)I agree that the most significant change is probably making wwx an innocent victim of other people's nefarious plotting as opposed to an arrogant mass-murdering necromancer whose redemption was destroying himself with the tiger seal. It's his character setting and the story is framed around him, so any change to his character will unavoidably have a rippling effect on everything else.
I personally find that easier to digest though, it's one big change and cause and effect can be kept track of a lot more easily than all the smaller changes they made. I think a lot of things that at first appear as surface-level changes really inform the characters a huge amount, like it's kind of amazing, and everything can be traced back to censorship in one way or another. For example, wwx has to constantly swoon in lwj's arms because it's the only censorship-passable excuse to rub their bodies together, but it makes his character come across as more dependent, less in control, more vulnerable, and he just has a weaker mental fortitude in cql than in the novel overall. I also feel like cql doesn't do a very good job of depicting lwj as a man of action, like of course he can't do the "action" that he does in the novel, but he spends so much time making googly eyes at wwx that if cql was an actual BL drama, his inaction doesn't make sense without an underlying cause in-narrative. I often see it get explained as a self-expression related shortcoming or an imprisoning wwx phobia on lwj's part and stupidity or self-esteem issues on wwx's part and it can be jarring reading cross-tagged fic sometimes because these clash with their novel characterisation. So I think people subconsciously notice these gaps and automatically fill them in with whatever's closest, whether it's a headcanon or bits of original canon.
(Also I'm especially fascinated with the episode 2 transition, even something as small as that, with wwx fainting (can he even stay upright without leaning on lwj anymore lol) and saying he wants to go back to Lotus Pier ends up being a huge difference just because of how much it informs the character, same for lwj taking him to the Cloud Recesses off-screen, it makes them so different from the novel already, it's amazing.)
Anyway, I'm very curious about what Qi Hun's said about Hikaru no Go cause I haven't come across it, but I'm not sure the cql production team approached it from a "How do we make these characters more realistic" perspective. I'm learning more towards just going with the flow of the censored setting (from what I've heard no BL, no reincarnation, no ghosts, no zombies, no violence, and yeah, probably no villainous mass-murdering main character too, since the same change has been made to the donghua) for half of it and flying by the seat of their pants for the rest. I think they wanted to play it extra safe and aimed for having their cake and eating it too with the whole best friends and here's fanservice thing, because there's a bts bit where they talk about how wangxian's relationship can be seen as romantic only by novel readers and would be seen as platonic by general audiences (I think this was in relation to wq/wwx). So this makes me think they didn't write the script with a plan for a coherent romantic through line for the characters, just the rivals to sticky best friends plot (at least until fans started making a fuss about the wq/wwx romance and then who knows). As an adaptation, I think Hikaru no Go does a better job as well, it's a bigger production and it doesn't need to make any of the censorship considerations cql does, so the core which is the hikaru-sai and hikaru-akira relationships is the same. I suppose it depends on what a person is looking for, like whether the overall plot and themes are conveyed, whether the major storybeats make it in and so on, but I've always been more interested in character-driven stories, so for cql I'd have preferred something more faithful to the original characters. That being said, I don't think the team set out to adapt the novel too faithfully either, I think their goals were 1) get the broad strokes on screen, 2) have wwx and lwj appear in as many shots as possible and 2.5) have reasons to smoosh them together.
Anyway, sorry, I think I went on a bit of a tangent, this looks really long in the preview. I hope my novel bias is not too obvious, I really like both, haha. But I think fics tend to follow the same formula as well. There's been a trend of authors focusing a lot more on getting their story on rather than being too concerned with canon since ao3 rebranded fanfics as transformative rather than derivative, so I don't think we'll see very many cross-canon fics accounting in the differences anytime soon.