Looks like after the success of The Untamed (陈情令), the new trend is adapting more boy-love novels into dramas. Up next here is a novel written by Priest (Legend of Fei) called Faraway Wanderers/Tian Ya Ke (天涯客). It has confirmed the two male leads to be Zhang Zhe Han and Gong Jun, followed by Zhou Ye, Ma Wen Yuan, Guo Jia Hao and Zhao Qian. The story follows our two male leads. One of them is Zhou Zi Shu to be played by Zhang Zhe Han. He’s the leader of Tian Chuang, an intelligence gatherers and assassins who served only the Emperor. It’s hard to get in and harder to get out; through a punishment leaving you either disabled or dead, but our leader yearns for a different life and does successfully get out. Our other male lead is Wen Ke Xing, played by Gong Jun. Very similar life trajectory to his other half; he’s the Master of Ghost Pavilion, a hush-hush place known to jianghu as containing the most cruel and evil of humans. Our temperamental Master of the Ghost Pavillion is also tired of this life and wishes to get out. They get entangled in jianghu’s latest chaos when a teenage boy is out for revenge and attaches himself to the unwilling Zi Shu and calls him Shifu. Lol. And that’s all I have gotten to.
You can read the novel here.
6 thoughts on “Faraway Wanderers: Priest’s novel-to-drama adaptation confirms Zhang Zhe Han and Gong Jun”
Weibo posts mentioned there were 50 BL-based dramas in the development pipeline.
MDZS novel fans raised serious heck to successfully revert The Untamed production’s major unfaithful revisions.
Forward Forever turned one male lead into female and demoted him/her for its own originally created female lead. Detectives of Ming seems to have somewhat feminized a male lead. 二哈和他的白毛师尊 drama adaptation turned a very important 2nd male lead into female.
When it comes to making peace with a BL-based drama, maybe not reading the original material is the way to go. Too late for me.
6 thoughts on “Faraway Wanderers: Priest’s novel-to-drama adaptation confirms Zhang Zhe Han and Gong Jun”
Sorry 二哈和他的白猫师尊
6 thoughts on “Faraway Wanderers: Priest’s novel-to-drama adaptation confirms Zhang Zhe Han and Gong Jun”
Reading the original has never turned out well for me. xD So I have stopped ~
6 thoughts on “Faraway Wanderers: Priest’s novel-to-drama adaptation confirms Zhang Zhe Han and Gong Jun”
Nooooo I LOVE Priest and I have absolutely no faith in BL adaptations. The Untamed (and to some degree, Guardian purely because of the chemistry) was an exception to the rule — that BL adaptations honestly often sucks ass. I’m really high key not looking forward to the slew of BL adaptations in the works bc a LOT of them are ones I really like (the novel for) and some of them are REALLY really well written. As of now, the BL adaptation drama genre is treated as a “hot, rising trend” without consideration of the fact that a lot of the really popular ones (not all, there are some addicting but trashy reads out there) are often also well written and no worse in quality that other BG novels productions may take more seriously. I really hope productions start taking BL adaptations seriously if this is going to be a whole thing — and I don’t mean styling and visuals and production value or even play-by-play loyalty to the plot; I mean decent script writing and treatment of directing and characters.
I’m going to…hurriedly read this one (its been on my reading list for forever) before it comes out. I actually enjoy starting a novel because of the drama (and dropping the drama) or reading the novel first. I like the experience of imagining everything and taking in the words without being influenced by the drama.
6 thoughts on “Faraway Wanderers: Priest’s novel-to-drama adaptation confirms Zhang Zhe Han and Gong Jun”
* I know decent script writing and good directing and character treatment is a hard ask even for non-BL dramas and adaptations. But because of the sheer number of those that come out, the chance of a BG drama with decent script and director is a lot higher than for BL. So by comparison, BL adaptations often feel like extra hit-or-miss uncertainty bc you’re putting expectations on just the 1-2 that come out a year. Which, maybe mitigated by this incoming influx of BL adaptations in the coming years, but usually production attitudes (and paranoia) take several filming cycles to adjust and as we stand now, I honestly am paranoid that all the ones filming this year broadcasting prob next year will be bad. Maybe too pessimistic, just going to lower my expectations and wait with lots of trepidation and little anticipation.
6 thoughts on “Faraway Wanderers: Priest’s novel-to-drama adaptation confirms Zhang Zhe Han and Gong Jun”
I’m up to my ears in BL novels due to their audio drama adaptations – old, new, free and/or paid. Come to think of it, Love is More Than a Word is the only BL adapted drama that I finished. Does Go Princess Go count as BL?
I read that 凤于九天 drama production is ongoing. The novel is practically soft pron. There might be enough Warring States type of material for a decent drama but…