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BoldFace posted:Sure, you could easily switch China to Soviet Union without affecting the story much. I think changing it to the United States could honestly be a lot easier. The main point of the Cultural Revolution part of the story is to establish that this was a time of major political upheaval with horribly bleak implications. Hell, the original text already implies this was a worldwide problem because of the way Silent Spring is namedropped. In some ways such a change could be more logical, since a political discontent in sixties and seventies era United States wouldn't intuitively be blacklisted from scientific work just because they're upset about the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. deported to Canada posted:My take is that it was a person who did this as they were unhappy with the present state of society/mankind, who just happened to be Chinese. I don't think this can be misconstrued as an attack on the Chinese people or that they as a people were the cause. I agree with you about the first part because the Silent Spring stuff is in there specifically to emphasize that this was a worldwide issue, even if Ye Wenjie's personal problems are mainly adjacent to the Cultural Revolution. I disagree about it not being construable as an attack on China directly, because the Netflix show absolutely gives that implication by reducing the Silent Spring stuff to just being a cool Western book her boyfriend used to get into her pants and not discussing what the book is actually about, like, at all. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Mar 22, 2024 |
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Mar 22, 2024 21:34
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LinkesAuge posted:It is also weird to cast so many asian characters only to strip them of any cultural differences and have everyone be "westernized" to such a degree. It completely eliminates the "clash of cultures" aspect and the fact that the whole world has to work together, including cultures/ideologies that don't see eye to eye on many things. The line about how Auggie needed to be a team player for the corporation because she's a filthy New Zealander with no right to be in England at all is the closest anyone gets to even acknowledging other cultures exist. And it was so weirdly irrelevant on top of that. It just sets up that she's a strong individualist who considers herself entitled to make major moral decisions by fiat. A better show might have acknowledged the irony of this since Ye Wenjie sets the entire plot in motion via the same ethos. But I'm not sure what's going on with her story. The Netflix version seems to view her sympathetically, which was a huge contrast from the Tencent version depicting her as having sincere doubt and regret even as she continues to double down on decisions she realizes can't be undone.
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Mar 24, 2024 02:37
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Oh, I don't think anyone's mentioned this here yet, but there's a six hour fan edit of the TenCent version of Three Body Problem for anyone who's curious how the story's portrayed differently but not so curious you want to dedicate a full twenty two hours to finding out.
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Mar 24, 2024 03:37
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Steve Yun posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zsNCbFD5_Y FPyat posted:Man, it seems a lot of people are totally befuddled as to why the Chinese censors would approve a work that depicts the Cultural Revolution negatively. Funny to see these one after another, since the reviewer explicitly calls out the removal of the struggle session in the TenCent version as being an act of Chinese censorship. I was surprised the reviewer thinks the struggle session was an important element of Ye Wenjie's character that needed to be seen on-screen, but that changing the identity of her daughter's father was no big deal. To me, the culmination of Ye Wenjie's arc is the roller coaster of her changing relationships, both to other individuals as well as to humanity as a whole. Everything that happens with her husband and daughter is really key to that, and establishes her as a fundamentally tragic figure for being stuck with the consequences of choices that seemed more reasonable, or at least unavoidable, when she first made them rather than after the fact. Netflix changing that so Ye Wenjie just had sex with the first white guy she ever met seems really gross by comparison. It adds nothing to the story, and it coming up at all is very much a blink and miss moment. I think a more casual viewer not familiar with the book might be surprised to learn that one character was even supposed to be Ye Wenjie's daughter at all because it really just doesn't have anything to do with anything alongside the other changes made to the story.
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Mar 25, 2024 03:50
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Steve Yun posted:More gems from my friend that made me laugh Serious answer? Because in Western culture explicit sexual identity is coded as a strong character trait. It establishes that a character is attractive enough that a person wants to have sex with them, and independent enough to openly defy authority figures by doing so. You can also see it at play elsewhere in this adaptation. The scene at the bar where the the karaoke guy hits on the lady scientists. Saul being a man whore in general. Ironically this was probably put in to push back on the idea that Liu Cixin's work is sexist, although it's never been super clear to me why people think that.
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Mar 25, 2024 15:10
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Why Oxford was something that bugged me too, not because I had a bee in my bonnet about the setting not being China, but because I couldn't really think of any obvious reason why London specifically was supposed to be this big hub of cutting edge technology. Do they do a lot more sciency stuff there than I realized, or is this more a matter of the showrunners just thought the characters would sound smarter if they had British accents?
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Mar 25, 2024 18:35
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Tarnop posted:Nope. In the book, Mike Evans is talking to them about language and they bring up the subject of synonyms. They tell him that they first thought "think" and "say" were synonyms but have realised from context they're not. He asks them some questions about how they communicate and as he starts to realise what's going on he tells them the story of Red Riding Hood as an experiment to test his hypothesis. So that's basically it, think and say are the same thing to them. Nothing about not understanding metaphors. They can't lie to each other because they would also communicate the fact that they were lying at the same time as the lie itself. The important realisation is the same, that they can no longer trust anything humans have told them, but the extra cruft is all D&D This all sounds way better than him telling them fairy tales for no apparent reason. It also encapsulates the broader critique that can be made of the Netflix version, that it fetishizes science but doesn't actually value the scientific process. No one in the Netflix version is even especially curious except for Jack, who's also very counterintuitively coded as the token dumb guy of the Oxford group.
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Mar 26, 2024 06:54
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Flesh Forge posted:In the show version, I took this mostly that Evans feels guilty for not spending any effort or time raising Vera, his own child, and so he tries to channel that and his parenting instincts into raising the human children on the Judgement Day as well as trying to educate the San Ti in understanding humanity, because he recognizes they have some blind spots to our culture. I liked this better than the book version tbh - I disliked practically everything to do with characters in the book because they all seemed so un-relatable except for Da Shi. I think you're right, and this really begs the question for me if a lot of scenes with Ye Wenjie and Robert Evans were cut because their whole relationship was a big departure from the book despite having almost no real exposition in the Netflix show. Again, in the original story, the circumstances behind how and why Ye Wenjie was raising Vera alone were a pretty significant aspect of her arc, so it's really odd to see that reduced here to a one-off line that's just "yes Robert Evans was my secret baby daddy no nobody cared and also you're a lovely father Benedict Wong." Tarnop posted:In the book (minor book 1 spoilers) the aliens are confident that knowledge of their existence will magnify existing divisions between human cultures. The book seeds this idea during the Red Coast project, referencing sociological studies that were done after various SETI type programs began that reached a similar conclusion. And don't forget that they know that the pacifist who received the first message has already contacted earth so they know that some number of humans know they exist. Their initial plan, once they receive a response from Ye Wenjie, is to use human separatists to foment anti-science sentiment. Meanwhile, they work on the sophons but that takes them a decade to complete and it's bleeding edge science for them so they don't know if it will work. What they do know is that, should the sophon plan fail, their human separatist plan needs to get underway as early as possible because they've seen both the overall rate and unpredictable nature of human scientific progress I think the original story also better explains why this is a reasonable thing for them to believe given that we actually see ideological arguments within the ETO, who are already a microcosm of the world scientific community, and if even they bicker with each other over minutae like this just imagine how bad it would get if every scientist on the planet were involved with an even broader cross-section of potential responses. A good poster posted:!LATER BOOK SPOILERS! It's kind of funny that the Netflix show "solves" this problem by making Saul a commitment phobic man whore. I don't think it really occurred to them that this isn't really less sexist, it's just a completely different kind of sexist. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Mar 27, 2024 |
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Mar 27, 2024 21:16
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GigaPeon posted:Delicious in Dungeon is like that, but maybe that's one they've licensed, rather than financed/produced? Netflix has lots of weekly dramas and they're all like this, licensed rather than produced, usually from foreign markets that air them weekly on local television. It's the main tell that they don't actually own a series, even if they use the phrase "Netflix exclusive" for marketing purposes regardless of whether they financed it directly.
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Mar 27, 2024 22:26
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Lampsacus posted:I love this book series because the author clearly thought of some dumb and cool sci fi ideas and then proceeded to string them together into a novel series that blew up. It reminds me of golden age sci fi where the author clearly has pasted together a bunch of previously published short stories into a novel. But god drat I cannot remember the terminology for doing that. 3bp is like that the whole way through. And I unironically enjoy that sort of sci fi. Have you seen Pantheon? I think you'd like it.
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Apr 2, 2024 19:59
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