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.
I’ve looked up what the ending of the books is and it sounds like the main conflict is resolved via deus ex machina and then everyone dies anyway so nothing that happened mattered at all
Yup. And the only reason any of the plot can even happen is totally bogus space magic that’s so silly you can’t even call it soft sci-fi. I gave up after the first book, and I really have nothing good to say about it. I’ve heard people opine that it was a lot of people’s first science fiction book the same way Harry Potter was a lot of kids first fantasy adventure book, and that’s why it had such an impact.
Yeah I hear it’s about collapsing spatial dimensions as if reality itself is a perfect 1:1 copy of our simplified understanding of it (math) and it’s done with technology that’s super advanced so it never has to actually be described or follow conservation of energy or anything
Plus the entire premise seems to be a nihilistic parable about how fascism is right and you need to wipe out rival civilizations before they even know you exist, or they’ll do the same to you
I see this take all the time here, and then when I (a person who read the book) counter that it’s a Sci-Fi parable about Chinese foreign policy from the perspective of the Chinese (you need to keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself or the evil
TrisolaransAmerican Empire will come get you, humanity is the China stand in in the novel) white people yell at me for being some kind of asian chauvinist.