It's like someone asked ChatGPT to turn the book into a dumb anglo sitcom.

-Every character is emotionally immature, spiteful, and sassy. None of the 'friends' act like friends. None of the characters talk like real people. They're constantly insulting or hitting each other. It's just embarrassing. The actors have nothing to work with.

-All the major twists/reveals are shown in the first two episodes. No suspense, no build-up, no pay-off. Rushed is an understatement.

-Single characters from the book have been unnecessarily split into multiple new characters adding nothing to the story.

-The story is a cosmic horror but comedy and romance have been forced in for no reason whatsoever except as filler, which is even more mind-boggling because they've essentially rushed all of the good stuff in the book to make room for unfunny jokes.

-Apparently they could barely afford any sets and extras, so scenes and locations that are supposed to be bristling with sights and people just feel oddly empty. Even the special effects feel muted. The budget is just weirdly limited, and the show looks much cheaper than the Tencent series.

-Almost all of the science (which is the interesting stuff) has been gutted from this science fiction.

I hate anglo slop. Where is the kino. Tencent pls adapt The Dark Forest.

  • CriticalOtaku [he/him]
    ·
    8 months ago

    but the first book was written in the early 2000s, in the wake of the worst US-China relations that followed the 1999 Chinese embassy bombing in Yugoslavia and the 2001 Hainan Island incident, which nearly sparked a war between both countries (people old enough will remember how close we were at war back then, not to mention that China was far weaker than it is today) only to be averted by 9/11 attack later that year,

    Yeah, I had vague recollections about this, along with Deng's foreign policy which is what I based my reading of the book on.

    It’s fiction at the end of the day and I don’t know why people are trying so hard to see a 1:1 reference to the real world, rather than extracting the meanings and exploring the questions the story itself provokes in relation to the real world.

    Yeah, in this thread I was trying to simplify and make the analogies as obvious as possible but what you said is true, we should be focusing on the questions the books provoke.