THE WORLD’S DARKNESS VEILED UPON LOVE

: A review of Mo Dao Zu Shi

I.Introduction
Mo Dao Zu Shi is like A Song of Ice and Fire, if A Song of Ice and Fire were a gay romance novel. If you
caught up with the aforementioned novel and said to yourself, “wow, I really wish there were a book like
this, except complete, and also half the plot is a man hopelessly pining after The World’s most foolish
man who has spent the past decade failing to work out that he's in love,” then I think you will love Mo Dao
Zu Shi. Wei Wuxian, the main character of the story is the terrifying Yiling Patriarch, inventor of demonic
cultivation, which enables you to control fierce corpses (Medieval Chinese equivalent of zombies) instead
of laying them to rest like most cultivators (Medieval Chinese wizards and martial artists). Thirteen years
ago, he died. In the present day, Mo Xuanyu, an abused gay teenager permanently destroys his own
soul, exiling himself from the cycle of reincarnation, in order to allow Wei Wuxian to possess his body so
that Wei Wuxian could take revenge on his abusers.

II.Analysis
The story and the whole world of Mo Dao Zu Shi is as its name suggests, in Ancient China, wherein
cultivation or ‘Xianxia’ exists. As stated earlier, the story starts off with Wei Wuxian, the main character
getting his life destroyed due to a clan rivalry. He then decides to seek vengeance on the people who had
thrashed his life and loved ones, and in the process of doing so, Wei Wuxian runs into Lan Wangji, an
incorruptible paragon of purity and pureness. Lan Wangji has been in love with Wei Wuxian for twenty
years, but unfortunately Wei Wuxian is The World’s Very Stupidest Man, so he thinks that Lan Wangji
hates him. (In his defense, Lan Wangji doesn’t talk and all of his emotions happen in microexpressions.)
He decides to stay in disguise as Mo Xuanyu, the owner of the body just sacrificed to him, to cover the
story and his identity even more, he attempts to harass Lan Wangji constantly to be able to escape from
his line of sight. Little does he know that Lan Wangj saw through his cover about five minutes after
meeting him and now Lan Wangji suffers. Now Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian are going to run around
ancient China solving a murder mystery with the assistance of snarky teenagers. Meanwhile, in
flashbacks, it is explained how Wei Wuxian became a demonic cultivator and how he became the Yiling
Patriarch.
You might expect from this description that the story is rather light and funny. Unfortunately, there is none
of that in Mo Dao Zu Shi. The novel contains multiple themes that would require guidance such as,
multiple sexual assaults (one committed by a well known ‘heroic character’, although the narrative
disapproves of his behavior) multiple murders of hundreds or thousands of people, including children,
wars, arguably a couple of genocides, child abuse, in which it is often depicted fairly vividly, lots of body
horror and zombies, alcoholism and other very poor trauma coping mechanisms, and a detailed and
difficult to read, although very plot-relevant and not gratuitous, torture scene. These suggest the book’s
dark, yet fairly realistic themes.

III.Reflection
So why was this book worth a read? Two points: characters and themes.
The Mo Dao Zu Shi fandom tends to be obsessed with the two protagonists, which is a shame, because
every character in Mo Dao Zu Shi is great. It is one of a handful of books—the others I can think of off the
top of my head being Discworld and the Vorkosigan Saga—where it is hard to think of a major character
that couldn’t be loved by a reasonable person. I am personally not very into Jin Zixuan or Nie Mingjue, but
I get why someone would! Far too many books have secondary characters who are unlikable, boring,
stupid, or simply ciphers. Everyone in Mo Dao Zu Shi has a deep and rich inner life that you could write
thousands of words of meta about. This novel happens to be about Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji, but it’s
not at all hard to imagine it as the story of Jin Guangyao or Nie Huaisang or Wen Ning in which Wei
Wuxian plays a surprisingly minor part.
More specifically, Mo Dao Zu Shi has some of the best neurodivergence representation I’ve ever read.
Wei Wuxian has ADHD: he is hyper focused on things he’s interested in and is incapable of finishing
things he’s not; he makes all his decisions on impulse based on whatever issue he happens to be
interacting with at the time; he has trouble controlling his feelings; he talks constantly and goes on
random tangents. Even the little details are right—his messy room, his tendency to always leave his
wallet at home, his love of intense sensations like very spicy food.
And Lan Wangji is probably the best autistic character I’ve ever read. I assume he wasn’t meant to be, but
every one of his traits rings true. His sensory sensitivities and lack of tolerance of being touched, his
auditory stimming with his guqin, his love of rules and order and scripts, his difficulty understanding
people, his tendency to communicate in monosyllables and the sound “Mn,” his absolute stubbornness
once he discovers something is the right thing to do. I have met dozens of this guy. To some extent, I am
this guy. And I love that there’s a book where instead of being cured he gets to fly around on his magic
sword killing zombies and falling in love. My second pitch is the themes. Mo Dao Zu Shi is very
thematically rich. When you’re done writing your thousands of words about the inner life of Jin Guangyao,
you can easily write another ten thousand words about, say, the theme of how the stories others tell about
us are different from what actually happened, or about how every villain is the hero of their own story. But
there are two themes I want to discuss in more depth.
Firstly, Mo Dao Zu Shi is a story about trauma. Everyone in the main generation is a child soldier; most
were abused as children; several watched their entire family be murdered. Everyone’s lives are
profoundly shaped by their trauma, mostly badly. They hide all their feelings under a protective layer of
anger; they isolate themselves from those who love them; they hide their suffering under jokes; they
refuse to express preferences and try to please everyone around them; they hurt themselves. They hurt
other people. They hurt other people, again and again and again, and you can hurt people quite badly, if
you have magic powers, and you’re in a war. It’s about how your pain puts blinders on you which makes
you hurt other people, and then those people have blinders in their turn.
The ending of Mo Dao Zu Shi is bleak. It’s about as sad an ending as you could have, given the genre
constraint that a romance has to end with the main characters in love and reasonably happy. I was
recently involved in an argument about whether Mo Dao Zu Shi was less depressing than Les Miserables
which mostly hinged on whether people being in Heaven at the end of Les Miz counts as ‘happy.’ It’s
depressing, is what I’m saying.
And yet…There is some hope in it. The main-generation characters have children who were given a
choice and were given a life much more hopeful than theirs.

IV.Conclusion

The other Mo Dao Zu Shi theme I find fascinating is its anti-authoritarianism. Anyone who touches the
government is corrupted. Indeed, one character’s tragic arc is about his attempts to be compassionate
and carry out his duties as a clan leader, which ultimately destroys him. Many characters are
fundamentally good people, but every one of them ends up doing wrong because the system is not set up
to allow people to be good. The only ethical action is to step away from power entirely and spend the rest
of your life as a wandering zombie-killing do-gooder.
Even in the most repressive societies, the desire for freedom is one which cries out from every human
heart. Mo Dao Zu Shi, although appearing in the disguise of a homosexual love story, can be what we call
an eye-opener and a novel that has themes, instances, and happenings that reflect on current society. It
is one of the great points I took note of while reading the novel. The fact that it was also hidden away in a
love story made it even more intriguing and worth the time. Somehow telling us all a message, that love,
or the idea of believing and choosing to see love could hide away, or even banish all ugliness from this
world.

“When you’re standing on their side, you’re the bizarre genius, the miraculous hero, the force of the rebellion,

the flower that blooms alone. But the second your voice differs from theirs, you’ve lost your mind, you’ve

ignored morality, you’ve walked the crooked path.”

― 墨香铜臭, 魔道祖师 [Mó Dào Zǔ Shī]