Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation

Hands down my favourite story (in any format) of 2023.

I am grateful to everyone on this site who has discussed the translation issues. I went into it fully warned, and I also believe that this edition would have greatly benefited from more proofreading/editing from the publisher.

If I go into the story itself, it is absolutely brilliant. I experienced it first with the live-action adaptation, and I'm now finally delving into the books... let's just say that this story both broke me and healed me at the same time. I currently don't have the words to express how much I love each and everyone of these characters, their arc, their development, how they get close to one another, and eventually how they learn to trust and open up. In both the adaptation and this book, emotional, impactful and even heartwrenching scenes are brilliantly intermingled with funny, goofy and cute moments. The story does us a good one: it gets us, the readers, to open up and trust these characters (as they do themselves as the story progresses), only to have our hearts broken if anything at all happens to them.

Why I love it so much, book 1 edition:
- We start off with a punch, a little bit lost in the setting and the numerous characters, but the pacing is solid enough to get us through the initial confusion.
- The characters: As we meet them at first, they are intriguing, we do get the sense that they all have a past and a history with one another. Especially at the beginning, this feeling is strong enough that I wanted to stick around to know more about them. But hear me out: the characters in this book/story are everything. The events themselves are impactful, but it's how the characters react and adapt that sticks. Their emotional journey is both heartbreaking and heartwarming, in the best possible way. When we meet Lan Wangji, we get the feeling that something terrible happened to him, and it MUST have something to do with Wei Wuxian. He tolerates every antics that wwx throws his way without faltering, so the real mystery here is to understand why. What did he have to go through to change this much? For Wei Wuxian, it's about understanding his past, and why he was so hated by everyone when he was alive thirteen years ago. And, more importantly, how did their relationship evolve through time? We'll get there, of course...... Our main cast of Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian is wonderfully funny, awkward, cute, chaotic, but also deeply emotional and very comforting. Our secondary cast (looking at you Lan Xichen and Jiang Cheng) are slowly being introduced, and at this point I'm looking forward to getting to know their book version!
- Mandatory relationship gushing: The longing... oh the longing is intense and I'm here for every moment of it! Wangxian, simply put, warms my heart
- All the little hidden details. As a first read, but having seen the adaptation, I can already spot a few that have me in awe at the foreshadowing and the future developments I know are probably coming. At a reread it would most likely be even better.

I know I still have a lot to learn about the genre, the context and other strong works in this space, and I am very excited to continue this journey. MDZS is already very dear to me, and I can't wait to get more of it with the next books.

The plot is well crafted, so are the characters and their interactions, and this is an overall easy, entertaining read. 
I don't know how faithful the translation is to the original novel, so I cannot give a fair assessment on the writing, beside the fact that it's pretty average and does it's job. 
The translation unfortunately doesn't do this book any favours. It's rife with modern day anglicisms that really break immersion in a novel set in a fantasy version of ancient China; when the characters use less formal registers they sound like American teenagers, and overall there are sudden, inexplicable tone shifts with archaic words used next to slang words. The result is at times very jarring. I would have to learn Chinese and read the original to fully appreciate this book. 
4 stars for the plot and characters; 2 for the translation, rounded up the final score to 3.5 because of the story potential. 

I know this story inside out. I may have read the fan translation of the book only once but I've seen The Untamed numerous times, the donghua a couple times, have been reading MDZS fanfics for around 18 months now with no signs of stopping. But when this book released, there was no question that I would buy and read it again.

I don't think I can give an objective or articulate review, so I'll just mention things that stood out. Firstly, the artwork is gorgeous. Any fan should buy this book just for those. The first thing I did after I got the book was look at all the art and admire it for a while. The references and character lists at the end of the book are also pretty good and useful for anyone coming into these books without much prior knowledge of wuxia or cultivation stories. I especially loved the humor in describing the characters in these lists - it's quite cheeky and felt like a nod to all the existing fans. The translation itself is pretty good. I like that the Chinese words for titles and some other common terms were used instead of their English counterparts. I did have some minor quips when I felt that the language used was slang but I can't comment on why that choice was made. But overall it was a good read and I'm just delighted we have an official version.

I'd rather not comment on the story or characters because even though I read this version of the book for the first time, this whole world is all muddled in my head with information across all adaptations and I can't separate out my feelings about each one of them. All I know is that this story can make me sob at the drop of a hat, wangxian are one of my all time favorite couples, and MDZS is what helped me survive some of the worst days of the pandemic in 2020 and it still continues to do so.

In the end, I don't know what to say to convince anyone to pick this up. If you haven't already but want something intense but with very flawed and human characters who are very powerful, give this a try. You can start with any version of this story, I promise you that you won't be able to resist watching and reading all of them one after the other. Even the little chibi version is an absolute delight. I'm thankful for the day I decided to watch Untamed and fell in love with this world. And I should probably thank my favorite authors Tasha Suri and Tara Sim for gushing about this epic love story on my Twitter timeline relentlessly so that I couldn't resist watching it myself. And I've never looked back since.

I was peripherally aware of the xianxia/danmei boom some years ago, which was led by this series in particular. I remember the hype and excitement when the animated series came out, then when the live action version came out on Netflix. But despite all the hype, I wasn???t that interested; I had other things on my mind then.

Recently, though, one of my close friends managed to talk me into giving xianxia a shot, and after attempting to sell me on a handful of series, I decided to try this one. It was the one that appealed to me most when she started selling me on the genre, and what better place to start than the series that catapulted an entire genre to popularity, right?

And I have to say: I am HOOKED. Not so much on the pairing, though I can see why the entire fandom???s latched onto them and is very invested in them. Wei Wuxian is pretty entertaining, not least because he loves to stir up trouble, while Lan Wangji makes such a wonderful foil for him that the two of them are pretty fun to read about. I wouldn???t say their characterization is very deep, at least not yet, given that this is just the first volume in a series of five, but even if their characterization isn???t all that complex they are still fun to read about, and capable of holding the reader???s attention. 

But what really made me latch onto this series were the world-building, and the plot. I am INTRIGUED by the world in which this is set, which is familiar to me from watching historical wuxia movies, but the fantasy-related touches connected to cultivation make it stand out in a different way compared to, say, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (though technically they belong to two different genres, and not just because one???s a book and the other???s a movie). And the plot is VERY engaging: it???s basically a series of supernatural mysteries, with the resolution of one mystery leading into another, with two or three overarching mysteries that will likely stretch across the entirety of the series. I am a SUCKER for that kind of story, and this book structures them in a way that is basically like candy for my brain, and makes me want to keep going.

Which is what I???ll be doing: I???m hopping right into the second volume as soon as I???ve gotten my mitts on it (which won???t be long, thankfully - this is why I got into ebooks!), and I???m going to keep on rolling with this momentum because I REALLY want to find out where this whole thing???s going!