Lord of (the) Mysteries
Chinese animated series based on the popular web novel by the same name, written by an author going under the pseudonym "Cuttlefish that loves diving" which I'm sure has to be a lot catchier in mandarin.
So, the book this series is adapted from is, for all intents on purposes, the closest there is to a Chinese Harry Potter. Let me stress this. Lord of the Mysteries is absolutely huge in Asia. The story follows a young adult from China being transported into a fantastical world based on Victorian England after performing a ritual meant to bring good fortune sold to him by a mysterious merchant. He takes the place of a recently graduated history student named Klein Moretti on the night he decided to commit suicide. The original Klein seems to have found some terrible secret in the old notebook of an ancient family dynasty connected to a lost civilization. Lord of the Mysteries deals with Klein attempting to uncover the mystery behind his transmigration, find a way back home and learn what the deal behind the mysterious pocket dimension is that he can access to communicate with specific people across the world which evolves into his own little secret society.The first book in the series sees him joining a secret police force that deals with the supernatural called the Nighthawks and becoming a Beyonder, this setting's version of a person with super powers. Him starting off as a Seer, as the name suggests, a clairvoyant.
Let me be real here for a moment, Lord of the Mysteries, the book series, is a really dang good read. I'm a guy who's been reading fantasy for most of his life and if there's one thing to be said about the Asian side if the genre, it's that once Asian fantasy authors start writing, they don't stop until they filled in every last detaiI suppose if you are familiar with more mainstream works like One Piece, you get what I mean: They really get down into the weeds of building their worlds and mythologies and they will do their best to keep all of it revelant somehow. What makes Lord of the Mysteries such a compelling read is the fact that Cuttlefish really knows how to leverage all that detail.
LotM has basically elevated foreshadowing to an artform where things you learn early on will be paid off hundreds of pages later and scenes that you were sure were filler get suddenly recontextualized when you least expect it. I suppose that's another way my comparison with Harry Potter is apt, much like Rowling, Cuttlefish has the sensibility of a mystery writer. He keeps the reader engaged by getting him to ask questions and then using the answers to expand their understanding of the world he created. That, along with this gothic victorian aesthethics and long term character development of what's a large but for the most part very memorable cast makes LotM an incredibly compelling piece of fantasy fiction that is as readable as it is sprawling.
So, expectations for the animated adaptation were obviously high, which the producers of the donghua were clearly aware of. So, suffice to say, production values on the series are through the roof. Every frame is absolutely dripping with lush detail, the animation is very fluid and it's one of the very few occasions where I felt that CGI animated objects in a 2D animated series looked... well, let's not get ahead of ourselves and say "good". But they look fine, which is an accomplishment I'm not going to disparage. The character designs are likewise all very lush and detailed and just about everyone looks how you'd expect them to look. So, taking the fact that it looks, sounds and moves wonderfully, it leaves the question of whether it actually executes the plot well. Amd here the answer is a resounding "It's complicated".
The show isn't concluded yet, it's 8 episodes into a 13 episode run but let me be straight here. The first volume this adapts is very well north of 1000 pages long (My E-Book reader places it closer to 2000, actually) and the series is working with a season length of 13 episodes. Now, mind, we aren't talking 20 minute episodes here like in an average anime series, they're individually around 35 minutes long, but that's still leaving them with a lot of ground to cover. So, put bluntly, a lot of compromises have been made for the sake of efficiency. Some of which make perfect sense. Way too much of the earlier couple hundred pages is spent on relatively trivial stuff like Klein shopping for groceries or having dinner with his siblings which, frankly, should have been edited down in the books as well. That's fine, I don't blame the first two episodes for effectively fast forwarding through it, although I do wonder if that'll leave those who haven't read the source material more confused than it needs (and it doesn't help that the English subtitles that the official translation on Crunchyroll provides are painfully awkward. The actual english dub seems to be better)
The decision that weighs much heavier is the fact that the adaptation does something rather weird with the actual individual plotlines. See, the book spaces them out throughout the volume. Something related to subplot 1 happens, then, for a pretty long time, nothing does and while subplot 2 and 3 continue and then, after subplot 2 is concluded and subplot 3 has faded into the background, subplot 1 suddenly comes back into focus. That's kind of what I alluded to earlier, the books have a way to keep the audience waiting for its mysteries to unravel. The animated series basically takes the subplots and then just adapts them in one piece before moving on to another one. To the point that a lot of stuff doesn't even quite happen in the same order as it does in the books. To give you an example, without getting into the specifics, the events of episode 5, in the books, are set up, but don't actually play out after the events of episode 7.
Now, considering the nature of the story, this doesn't actually hurt the overarching plot all that much but it takes away from that satisfying feeling the book gives off when a plotline they had left simmering in the background for a longer stretch finally gets its big conclusion. That delay between setup and payoff that's such major part of book is much less of a factor in the series. In its defense, I'm also not quite sure if in a series, much less one that has to cover a lot of ground in a relatively short time, that could have been done the way it was in the book. I don't think the decision to tighten up the plot the way it does was made out of disregard for the source material but out of awareness that the means to adapt it to a 13 episode series were limited.
Which is way, overall, I'm still rather positive on the series. It's a ridiculously lush and visually stunning fantasy series that, despite the compromises it makes, really brings the world and characters of Lord of the Mysteries to life and does serve as a good entry point to a sprawling and fascinating fantasy series that doesn't deserve to be as obscure in the west as it is. Like, let me stress one thing, this genuinely is the good shit and if you like fantasy, it does deserve your consideration. The animated series, while having somewhat less satisfying pacing, brings it to life with gorgeous art direction and gorgeous sound direction and lavish animation and action setpieces. And if you're not up for committing to tens of thousands of pages it's still a fine way to experience it.
So, aside from everything else, just let me end on my usual aesop: Don't sleep on foreign stuff, you're missing out immensely.
