The new series, named Ice Fantasy.
I was among the first batch of people to read Guo Jingming’s City of Fantasy (《幻城》) back in 2003, when I was in high school. To my younger self, the story was *heart-rending, and Guo’s language was mind-blowingly beautiful. I amused myself by imagining the novel as a TV series and building a cast in my head, matching every character with the actor who I thought could portray them best.
But the day never came when I saw my fantasy show realized – until now, over a decade later.
The new series, named Ice Fantasy, premiered online on July 24. It mostly follows the plotline of the novel, which tells the story of two half-brothers, Ka Suo – the prince and later king of the Ice Tribe – and Ying Kongshi. The drama of their lives unfolds against the backdrop of an everlasting feud, between the Ice Tribe and the Fire Tribe.
Unfortunately, the show came a bit too late – at least for me – since I have long outgrown the taste for *sloppy sentiment, which is all that Ice Fantasy is. I have also grown a new taste for *impeccably lifelike computer-generated images, which is everything that Ice Fantasy is not.
There is very little left in the show for me to enjoy, except for revisiting my decade-old *pastime by comparing the cast with the original characters. Some choices are *passable, including Feng Shaofeng as Ka Suo and Ma Tianyu as Ying Kongshi. But not every casting decision is satisfactory.
For example, Li Luo (Victoria Song, 宋茜), Ka’s lover, is described in the book as an elegant and serene half-goddess. Yet in the show, she is A) a human being, and B) a tomboy who fights and *banters with men all the time.
Browsing through comments online, I found out that I was not the only one to feel this way. Many readers of City of Fantasy are talking about how awkwardly the new show has made changes to the characters and the plotline.
Shen Zhining, the screenwriter of Ice Fantasy, explained that to *adapt a novel onto the screen is like translating from one language into another – instead of interpreting the text word-by-word, some items need to be added or *omitted from the original in order to make the adaptation flow smoothly.
Despite its flaws, the new show is attracting a mass following: Only one day after its premiere, the first four episodes of Ice Fantasy were viewed over 300 million times, according to Shanghai-based media data company Vlinkage. Perhaps the audience was truly intrigued by the story, or simply watched it for the sake of *nostalgia. Either way, the numbers prove that the show is popular, and that’s probably all the show-runners ever asked for.
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