What can I say – Youku loves Priest. After the online popularity of Guardian and Word of Honor, the streaming platform will be adapting two more of the author’s novels.
Crime drama Light the Darkness 深渊 is an adaption of Priest’s Silent Reading and stars Zhang Xincheng as Fei Du, a nouveau riche with low morals who is found to be involved with the serial murder cases in the most unexpected ways. Fu Xinbo costars as police inspector Luo Wenzhou, while Chen Zhuoxuan plays detective Lang Qiao. The 35 episode crime thriller comes from the producer of The Untamed, and began filming a few days ago.
Fantasy drama Guardians of the Lands 山河表里 stars Chen Xingxu as Chu Huan, a former agent who falls off a cliff after assassinating powerful drug lord “Ghost”. He stumbles into a mysterious town, and discovers that there’s more to it than meets the eye. New actor Chen Muchi (set to star in fantasy trilogy Fengshen) plays his good friend Nanshan.
The 30 episode drama is directed by Ju Jueliang (Ice Fantasy, General and I), written by Ma Jia (part of Ashes of Love, Skate into Love) and began filming a couple of weeks ago.
In Silent Reading, majority of the evil are committed by kids in their early to mid teens. Those who weren’t caught early continued down this path for decades. A parent and/or horrible environment molded them. Fei Du could’ve one of them. The crimes, events and characters are intertwined and complex. Chinese regulators seemed to have banned portrayal of heinous acts done to and done by children in dramas. A faithful-to-the-novel drama adaptation sounds tricky.
Bad Kids another crime drama portrayed morally ambiguous kids who commit murder, theft, blackmail and assault quite fairly, but yes sexual crimes will probably be censored due to the CCP’s regulations on morally ambiguous subject matter.
Yeah, Detective Chinatown also has a kid as the main antagonist who commits murder (though in general movie regulations are more lax). Either way, they can easily change the kids in Silent Reading to older teens if they need to, and I think most of the impact will still be there.
I think a 12-13 year-old girl gleefully committing heinous acts is more shocking than someone doing so in their late teens.
It might be easier to just remove pretty much everything related to children as well as whether psychopaths/sociopaths might be born or created. Conspiracy within law enforcement, adult crime syndicates and an “any means” vengeance group should be enough to make a crime drama.
I quite agree that there should be some regulations in place. They say that art imitates life; but the other way is true too; life imitates art too. Just look at the spate of imitation killings or suicides. What might be unthinkable before, becomes doable.
Just came to me. Tencent is producing a donghua/anime based on Silent Reading.
Most of the recent Chinese donghua adaptations from BL source material have been pretty good in terms of scripts. These are all first seasons though. Chinese donghua quality often declines after season 1.