Summary of views
The success of "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" has made Ma Boyong's novel an IP resource that the market has high hopes for, not only the "Antiques Bureau Central Bureau" and "Wind Rise Luoyang", but also a larger number of film and television works waiting to meet with the audience, even including variety shows, documentaries, online movies, animated films, theme hotels, immersive script killing and other multi-media in-depth development of Ma Boyong's universe construction. But the many problems of "Antiques Bureau" and "Wind Rise Luoyang" show us some of the crises facing Ma Boyong's formula.
At present, traditional culture has become a hot theme and selling point in the cultural market, which is closely related to the cultural demand for cultural identity and traditional value reconfirmation on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is also the product of capital's pursuit of profits. The popularity of Ma Boyong's novels and the boom in film and television adaptations, including the current ambitious cross-media Construction of Ma Boyong's universe, are the products of this background. However, the practical operation of the contemporary transformation of traditional culture is not easy, on the contrary, it is a very difficult task.
The successive films adapted from Ma Boyong's novels, "Antiques Bureau Central Bureau" and the web drama "Wind Rise Luoyang", the market response is not ideal, which makes us see the challenges faced in this process and deserve serious discussion.
Ma Boyong Formula: Suspense reasoning + historical materials + fantasy imagination
Compared with the traditional creation of historical themes, Ma Boyong's creation belongs to the new historical theme type that can only appear in the Internet era.
This is first of all because Ma Boyong's creation adopts a cross-time, cross-media Internet take-ism approach in drawing on and integrating different cultural resources. Through his brain-opening fantasy imagination, he freely integrates different cultural resources. Film and television, anime, games, literature, etc. can all be put into his own works, forming a mixed and patchwork form of work, and readers can get multi-faceted pleasure in it. For example, "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" borrows the plot structure of the anti-terrorism American drama "24 Hours", in which the image of the Prince of Persia is inspired by the classic video game "Prince of Persia"; "Antiques Bureau Central Bureau" is a study of Dan Brown's once-best-selling novel "The Da Vinci Code".
Secondly, the emphasis on excess information and historical materials in Ma Boyong's works is also a product of Internet thinking. In Internet thinking, the accumulation of all kinds of excess information and cold knowledge is no less than the plot and characters that traditional creation pays attention to, and may even become a unique identity of characters and plots, and can further attract readers' pursuit and discussion, becoming an important part of the charm of the work. With his good knowledge reserves, Ma Boyong provided a large number of "things" in his works. Jing Ansi in "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" and Lian Fang in "The Wind Rises in Luoyang" are both using big data to investigate cases. The dazzling antique relics and mysterious code settings in the "Antiques Bureau Central Bureau", the local beauty, food, handicraft works in "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" and "The Wind Rises in Luoyang", all provide readers with a lot of information and materials to enjoy and explore.
The third ingredient in Ma Boyong's formula is the suspenseful reasoning plot. It not only integrates historical materials and fantasy imagination into a logical and clear story structure, but also provides a large number of genre resources as a classic genre, bringing rich and diverse story changes. In Ma Boyong's work, historical materials and fantasy imaginations can enter the inner structure of suspenseful reasoning, not just as a partial decoration or commercial gimmick. From the perspective of historical materials, many historical materials in Ma Boyong's formula can find real counterparts in history, and the audience's reasoning about the case has an additional historical data dimension, bringing more reasoning fun and real and illusory aesthetic feelings. From the perspective of fantasy imagination, on the one hand, the various cultural resources borrowed by fantasy imagination can enrich the content of suspense reasoning, on the other hand, the truth of historical materials and the logic of suspense reasoning can also correct the excessive absurdity that fantasy imagination may bring. As a result, Ma Boyong's formula has built a suspenseful reasoning world that can withstand scrutiny between historical reality and fantasy imagination, and traditional culture has also silently found its own expression in Ma Boyong's formula. "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" is a more appropriate combination of these three ingredients, bringing the audience a novel and rich aesthetic experience, thus achieving great success.
Ma Boyong Universe: How long can the routine of "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" last?
The success of "Chang'an" has made Ma Boyong's novel an IP resource with high hopes in the market, not only the "Antiques Bureau Central Bureau" and "Wind Rise Luoyang", which have been released, but also a larger number of film and television works waiting to meet with the audience, and even including variety shows, documentaries, online movies, animated movies, theme hotels, immersive script killing and other multi-media in-depth development of Ma Boyong's universe construction. But the many problems of "Antiques Bureau" and "Wind Rise Luoyang" show us some of the crises facing Ma Boyong's formula.
Suspenseful reasoning, historical materials, and fantasy imagination actually have huge cultural differences and a sense of distance. If these heterogeneous elements are not well combined, they may become contradictory content, resulting in the failure of the work. In Ma Boyong's formula, the suspenseful reasoning plot is the most critical ingredient of the three ingredients. Because the story structure it provides is the foundation and soil of Ma Boyong's formula, if this foundation cannot stand, the soil is not fertile enough, and the historical materials and fantasy imagination have no place and space for development. From the perspective of Ma Boyong's personal ability, he has the strongest control over historical materials, and most of his fantasy imagination draws on mature and successful works, and can still maintain the standard, but suspense reasoning is his biggest weakness. After the novelty brought by "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" disappeared, the suspenseful reasoning in "Antiques Bureau Central Bureau" had a lot of hard wounds that could not withstand scrutiny, thus allowing the audience to completely lose the pleasure of reasoning, and the suspenseful reasoning ideas in "Wind Rise Luoyang" were very cheesy, giving people a feeling of being mysterious and tasteless.
The problem of character shaping is even greater. In the works that have come out so far, the character image has appeared to be routine and instrumental. For example, the structure of the two male protagonists is reused; the male protagonist and the main villain are almost all characters with superior ability and grievances, the aura is too strong, and the homogenization is serious; the female characters are completely vassals and admirers of the male protagonist, with no personality. "Wind Rises Luoyang" makes the audience unable to enter the play, because all the characters in the play have the characteristics of tools and people, serving the advancement of the plot, and none of the characters can get the audience's empathy. The character shaping is precisely the entrance for the audience to enter the film and television works, and the audience can only establish a bond with the work if they feel that the characters are credible and can form empathy with the characters.
Successful film and television works with traditional cultural elements are first of all based on a solid story structure and a character image that makes the audience credible and empathetic, and then consider properly placing the traditional cultural content in the work. For example, "Spirited Away" integrates Japanese folklore into Chihiro's adventure story, and "Nezha's Demon Child Descending" integrates Chinese mythological stories into Nezha's growth narrative. This also allows us to see that the key issue in the contemporary transformation of traditional culture is whether contemporary works carrying traditional cultural elements can have stable quality and quality.
The market's enthusiasm for traditional cultural themes is a double-edged sword. The market's popularity is likely to catalyze the increase in such works and produce excellent fine works from them. But the pursuit of capital profits may also over-consume some otherwise good resources, making it not only unable to grow up healthy, but may even be stifled. The currently hyped cross-media Ma Boyong universe construction is a concept created by commercial profit-seeking needs, and does not necessarily conform to the law of cross-media story world construction. Cross-media story world construction emphasizes providing the viewer with a broader, more free-flowing story field, in which multiple texts are more relevant and co-constructed than similar.
The construction of the cross-media story world has its own rules, such as the need for leading core works and related through-the-line content, and the establishment of intertextual relationships between different story texts. If "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" has the ability to assume the leading work of Ma Boyong's story world from the perspective of the quality and market heat of its works, how to form an intertextual relationship with it in the next works is an important issue in the construction of Ma Boyong's story world. For example, "The Wind Rises in Luoyang", which is more of a replica version of "Chang'an", in which the plot, characters, scenes, etc. are re-produced according to the formula of "Chang'an", but the quality is greatly reduced than "Chang'an". The advent of such works is not at all a construction idea of a cross-media story world, but in fact, it is still a traditional type operation thinking, that is, trying to copy the successful content of popular works to make a profit again. In this way, not only failed to bring fresh elements to the story world, but also consumed the audience heat accumulated by "Chang'an" and destroyed the audience influence of Ma Boyong's formula.
From the above analysis, it can be seen that if the next works of Ma Boyong's formula cannot solve the plot and character problems, the charm of this formula cannot be truly exerted. Moreover, at present, the pursuit of capital profits has over-consumed the audience influence of this IP, posing a threat to its healthy growth. This also brings a warning to other projects of contemporary transformation of traditional culture, the specific operation of contemporary transformation of traditional culture is a complex and arduous work, not only need to respect the many laws of artistic creation, but also to prevent the rush of capital to seek profits, in order to produce truly excellent works.
Author: Keirin (Professor, Faculty of Letters, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Source: Wen Wei Po