Eastern Heretic and Western Venom: Jin Yong's Wuxia Universe Begins

Posted in: TV | Tagged: Jin Yong, Legend of the Condor Heroes, wuxia

Eastern Heretic and Western Venom is the first and best new prequel to Jin Yong’s classic wuxia saga, Legend of the Condor Heroes.

This is how Wuxia begins, with Eastern Heretic and Western Venom. Chinese television is filled with wuxia series of varying quality to the point of becoming kitsch. Audiences are said to be getting tired of them, but there are still plenty coming because every current TV show was shot anywhere from a year or two years ago, so how does yet another adaptation of Jin Yong‘s classic novel Legend of the Condor Heroes stand out?

Eastern Heretic and Western Venom is an interesting new take on the tropes of the wuxia genre. It takes place at least twenty years before the birth of the Guo Jing and Huang Rong, the hero and heroine of Legend of the Condor Heroes, and is the earliest prequel that takes a Batman Begins approach to a classic saga that virtually every Chinese person has known for over sixty years. Chronologically, it’s the first of the four prequel series that premiered this year that lead to the 3o-episode Legend of Heroes: Hot Blooded, which adapts the first half of Legend of the Condor Heroes. The next prequels are Southern Emperor and Norther Beggar, The Five aka Duel on Mount Hua: The Five Masters, and The Nine Yin True Sutra. While they’re all good if flawed, this first prequel is arguably the best of them in writing and direction, especially since the director Xu Bing is also being WeTV’s faithful adaptation of Liu Cixin‘s Science Fiction saga The Three Body Problem.

Eastern Heretic and Western Vemon: Neither Heroes Nor Villains

Eastern Heretic and Western Venom seems to take place at a time before the ideals of heroism and chivalry of the wuxia world existed, when Chinese kingdoms were either on in an endless cycle of being on the verge of war or having just ended a war. The entire plot of Eastern Heretic and Western Venom is not from Jin Yong’s novel. It’s a completely original story by the filmmakers to tell the unknown origins of Huang Yao Shi and Ouyang Feng. The novels mentioned that they were friends long ago, but became bitter enemies. Ouyang Feng, called The Western Venom for his treachery and knowledge of snake poisons, is one of the major villains of the saga, a power-hungry martial artist obsessed with attaining the power of ultimate martial arts from the scroll of the Nine Yin True Sutra, and he continuously menaces the young hero and heroine. Huang Yao Shi is the reclusive, powerful sorcerer and father of the Condor Heroes heroine Huang Rong. Neither Huang Yao Shi nor Ouyang Feng is considered a traditional knight or warrior of the wuxia world. Huang Yao Shi is a reclusive master who has no interest in the conflicts or rules of the martial arts world and is feared for doing whatever he feels best, an agent of Chaotic Good if you’re thinking in D&D terms, hence his nickname The Eastern Heretic. Ouyang Feng is his opposite, completely amoral and ruthless in his pursuit of ultimate power so he can reign supreme in the world of martial arts.  Eastern Heretic and Western Venom tells the story of how they first met and became friends.

Like a Western: Two Strangers Come to Town

The plot of this prequel is most like a Western: two strangers come to town, become friends, and end up in the middle of warring gangs. Ouyang Feng (Gao Wei Guang), the son of a merchant family, is on an adventure with his two manservants, who are also his bodyguards and childhood friends. They’re immediately treated with suspicion by the local gang, which operates under the guise of salt merchants, as foreigners, and things escalate quickly, partly because Ouyang Feng is a little cocky and happy to show off his fighting skills. The son of that same gang separately murders a traveling magistrate for jailing their members and attempts to kill his daughter. That daughter is Feng Heng (Chen Du Ling), who would become the mother of Condor Heroes‘ Huang Rong. She’s saved by Huang Yao Shi (Zhao Yi Wei), a mystic who has spent years in seclusion perfecting his magic and martial arts. Huang Yao Shi is barely socialised and doesn’t quite know how to be around people, so he falls in love with her against his will. The leader of the salt gang holds the ailing Feng Heng hostage to use him to fight a gang war against a rival clan.

Meanwhile, Dan Min (Luo Qiu Yan), the daughter of the clan at war with the Salt gang, falls in love with Ouyang Feng in a meet-cute where she tries to kill him. This is after Ouyang Feng and Huang Yao Shi met earlier by chance and became friends since Huang had never had a friend before and couldn’t resist the gregarious Ouyang Feng’s offer of comradeship. The series might feel frustrating because neither man is particularly noble or heroic, and their hesitation or refusal to do the right thing causes the situation to escalate into tragedy. The frustration you might feel at their selfishness, bad decisions, or lack of action at crucial moments is a feature, not a bug, in the story. They both take too long to admit to themselves that they care about these women, and it ends badly, particularly for Ouyang Feng. It’s a story about a lack of heroism before real heroism comes along later in Legend of the Condor Heroes. They’re not heroes – they’re the heretic and the venom.

A Mini Saga of Love and Tragedy

Eastern Heretic and Western Venom also establishes why Jin Yong’s saga is compared to J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings. There’s sorcery, superpowers, and magic in this world, and martial arts have a mystical quality. At this point in the story, both Huang Yao Shi and Ouyang Feng are neutral, neither interested in getting involved in someone else’s clan war, but love leads them both into this conflict that ends in tragedy. Fans of Jong Yin know Huang Yao Shi will marry Feng Heng and give birth to Huang Rong in the novel. Dan Min is new to the series, and you can pretty much assume that any character not part of the book canon is probably not going to survive.

This series re-establishes many of the recurring themes of Jin Yong’s stories, including the somewhat retrograde trope of the women having to be rescued by the men, no matter how competent and skilled they are. It also keeps fridging the female characters to give the men their emotional weight, in this case, the first of Ouyang Feng’s tragic losses that drive him into eventual villainy in the main saga, much later. On the other hand, the four leads are some of the best actors in China who are utterly convincing as they play out the tragedy. This is a prequel that shows the first of many heartbreaking moments that will drive the characters into the main saga of Legend of the Condor Heroes. For an original story set in Jin Yong’s universe, it’s as good a pastiche as you’re going to get.

Eastern Heretic and Western Venom is streaming on WeTV and free on YouTube, including a version where all eight episodes are cut together as a single six-hour binge, which we also linked above. Yes, there are English subtitles. If you like wuxia sagas, this is worth checking out along with the rest of the prequels and main series.

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