word of honor + text posts 

bonus: 

I just found out about Word of Honor, and I enjoy watching it. Glad found your blog...I see that you already finished the novel, can I ask about the characterization of wen kexing, zhou zishu and scorpion king (my 3 fav characters) between the novel and drama? I know there must be a bit of change (for adaptaions), but is it the change really big between book and drama? Which one that you prefer?

So! This is a really interesting question. I just finished gluing together a bunch of books, so forgive me if I’m really loopy, but this whole thing fascinates me right now and I was thinking about it all while I was playing with glue, so let me answer it and queue it up for a reasonable hour.

The easy one is the scorpion king. He is completely different between novel and show, as in that he’s a whole nother character. In the book, there’s no xie’er, just some mercenary dude. I do definitely favor the show here, because I’m a sucker for a beautiful alarmingly murder-happy boy who is being exploited via his emotional needs, and like, that boy is gorgeous. In the book, that character does not exist. What we have as the scorpion king is some dude with a hell of a voyeurism kink and a gambling addiction. He leads a group of mercenaries and gets involved in similar aspects of the plot, but there’s no emotional entanglement between him and the rest of the story. 

Now, I don’t dislike him, Zhou Zishu (and Wen Kexing) show up to crash his place, looking for information, and he’s like cool cool cool, so, let’s make this interesting, why don’t we gamble on it? If you win, you get info, and if I win, you two put on a sexy show for me (wen kexing is like oh no we could never but i mean if you INSIST--), and then the contest is to see who can... eat more needles. But he’s ultimately a much flatter character than Xie’er is, and he doesn’t come packaged with piles of daddy issues, so I’m way more into the show version.

Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing... I want to say that characterization is very consistent between the show and the book, and the main differences stem from the different constraints of the two mediums. Like, the easy one is that in the show, they have to hold back on the gay romance. In the book, Wen Kexing is very up front about his sexual/romantic interest from the start, and Zhou Zishu knows it. There’s also no shixiong/shidi dynamic. In both stories, Zhou Zishu is used to keeping people at arm’s length and has a thin face, and gradually softens up with Wen Kexing as the story progresses. In the show, you get a sharp boost to intimacy when the shixiong/shidi reveal happens, but in the book, he unfurls more slowly over time. 

There’s a while where he basically allows Wen Kexing to take liberties, without either pushing him away or reciprocating, and I’m not all the way through the show yet, but I don’t think there’s a stiff, awkward, uncertain period like that in there (and it’s resolved when he asks Wen Kexing how sincere he is about Wanting him, and they almost have sex before weird scorpion man interrupts them, so I have no idea if the show will even try to adapt that scene)

And like happened when I first watched The Untamed, I’m frequently awed by how much a good actor can add to a story through body language and microexpressions that a book just can’t capture, and it’s an especially lovely story element for a plot where so much revolves around that central relationship. I can’t necessarily differentiate between book characterization and show characterization when it comes to this, because they’ve just fused into a seamless whole in my head, but I really am a huge proponent of consuming both forms of media for this exact reason. They don’t clash, and each enhances the other.

OH, the other thing I made note of while I was working. I can’t confirm, because i’m still mid-show, but I’m almost positive that the nature of Wen Kexing’s damage is a notable point of difference (to me, at least?) between the two plots. In both, he had parents, who (I assume) died horribly, with him finding their bodies very directly, leaving him traumatized and alone at a young age. In the book, he was just alone until he took in Gu Xiang (when they were both terribly young)

“I was a child too, and stumbled many times over the course of raising her. I burnt her mouth the first time I fed her congee— For Ah-Xiang to survive until now, it wasn’t easy on me, but in truth... it wasn’t easy on her too.”

Now, I’m not super sure how the show will do this exactly, but no matter how his parents die, even if he finds them like he did in the book (very gruesome, so i kinda doubt the show will go there too explicitly), he still had a shifu and a shixiong somewhere out there, and the gifsets I’ve seen tell me that he cherishes that memory, even if he thinks that he’s stained/corrupted/etc and would only be a disappointment to them. I’m pretty positive I’m in fanon territory here, unless the show gives me some conversations I’m not really expecting, but I think it is a notable change to go from ‘everyone in the world who ever loved me is dead’ to ‘my parents are dead, and even if my shifu and shixiong would hate me now, they loved me once.’ It informs... the nature of how he becomes emotionally dependent on Zhou Zishu and vice versa. Adding that relationship changes a lot of subtle things about how they relate to the world and each other, and I’m not mad about it, it’s just Different (and i narrowly prefer the book).

So! For the scorpion king, the character has been remade entirely, and the novel one is fun enough, but the show version is an incomparable DELIGHT. Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing have pretty consistent characterization, I think, but the different plots mean that slightly different parts of their personalities are revealed. I think both the actors put a ton of work into trying to be faithful to the original characters while they were acting, and it shows. I narrowly prefer the book, but that’s more about plot than the characters themselves. My recommended way to read the book is with at least some clips/gifs of the major characters in action, which is what I did for both mdzs and tyk, and it’s working out for me REAL well so far. So I definitely recommend it! It was a book I enjoyed a whole lot.