Makin' It Mecha: The Untamed

[ninthfeather]

 mirrorfalls said: You have been offered an exorbitant sum of money to (somehow) remake The Untamed as a mecha series. What Do You Do?

So, this is actually a bit trickier than the times you asked me the same about Detective Conan and Fruits Basket. Both of those stories are ones that I’ve interacted with for a long time and they have cores that I feel work with varying amounts of sci-fi and tech involved as long as certain elements stay stable. Meanwhile, the Untamed’s specific version of xianxia cultivation is pretty heavily tied to its plot. But I think it’s still doable.

 

Ok, so, for The Untamed, the most central plot is ultimately the one about the dangers of rumors and hearsay, with the theme of the complicated nature of real-world morality being almost as central. Other than those, my favorite theme is probably the whole ongoing narrative of each generation’s actions affect the next. None of this stuff would be out of place in a traditional sci-fi style mecha series set in space.

 

So, my inspirations here are primarily gonna be Magic Knight Rayearth, Sakura Wars, and the bits of various Gundam shows that involve what’s collectively referred to as space magic.

 

The concept: this is still, to some extent, xianxia. People still cultivate, they just do it on non-Earth planets and moons (note: if this is something that is specifically not allowable in Taoism I would appreciate someone letting me know). Each of the clans has their own planet/moon, corresponding in climate to the locations we see in the show and presumably named after those locations on Earth. The Burial Mounds is probably a subsatellite of the Yiling moon orbiting Yunmeng. The costuming will not change for the most part, though because space travel exists, there will be space suits—just made of materials available in the setting. I’m picturing some real funky ship designs, and also probably some scenes of cultivation-based metalworking to justify the existence of the spaceships in the first place. The sets would probably also look very much the same, but with occasional modern devices made with obviously ancient methods, thrown in just often enough to be subtly jarring. Tech levels would probably vary by clan—the Jins would have the most, the Lan would have the least, the Jiang would have a few weird things that Wei Wuxian came up with but not much else, etc.

 

As far as the mechs themselves, my solution here would be essentially creating a magitech setup, with mechs more along the lines of the ones from Magic Knight Rayearth or Scrapped Princess in piloting mechanics—i.e., they’d have magic bubble cockpits, transfer damage directly to pilots, and run on the pilot’s energy. I’d probably go ahead and have mechs be essentially summons that are exclusive to cultivators and tied to their swords, which adds even more layers to a number of scenes in the drama (people’s swords being stolen, certain people losing the ability to cultivate, the Nie saber stuff, etc.). Maybe people who have spiritual tools like Zidian can use them to power up their robots? Also obviously Wei Wuxian builds himself a new mech in the Burial Mounds and ties it to Chenqing.

 

I’m seeing the great clans all having very traditional sort of fantasy robot designs (like, Escaflowne/Rayearth/Dunbine vibes), color-coded by clan, with some design variations to differentiate them–I can see the Lans having the most curves, the Nie units being really blocky, the Jin units having extra ornamentation, the Jiang units being sleekest, and the Wen units being the most pointy. And then, just, the robots made through demonic cultivation? Evangelion-type eldritch horrors that are, given how demonic cultivation works, most likely made of organic material from dead bodies and scavenged bits of metal.

 

So, ok, it’s the Untamed, but everyone’s got robots. The thing is, they don’t only have robots. The show that results from this would probably end up including a mixture of the original series’ sword & cultivation combat and robot battles. There are some fights, for example, that basically have to take place indoors or right next to buildings, and those would probably end up involving sword combat. On the other hand, some fights would be just as fun if they involved two giant robots zooming around in the sky.

 

Some specific scenarios: a lot of the Sunshot Campaign involving simultaneous space and ground battles, the First Siege of the Burial Mounds starting with a gigantic robot assault before Wei Wuxian knocks enough of them out of the sky for them to try sending in ground troops, the battle between Lan Zhan and Xue Yang in Yi City happening in mechs while Wen Ning fights [spoiler] on the ground. It could be cool. Also, it would really emphasize the difference between people who can cultivate and people who can’t.

 

I’m not going to go full spoilers here, but I think you can imagine how the feelings of certain characters who aren’t strong cultivators would be even more intense in this type of setting. And how much easier it would be for them to argue that they felt weak, and vulnerable, and threatened!

 

I don’t think there’s any reason you’d need to add robots to The Untamed. But I think if you did, you could have a lot of fun using them to reinforce existing themes and make situations that were already gutwrenching even worse.

 

So, for that unlimited budget? The majority would be spent on getting as much of the original team as would be willing to return to make The Untamed: But Robots This Time, or replacing the cast & crew members who were unwilling to participate in this level of nonsense. The rest would go into hiring a robot-focused effects team with a focus on recruiting people who worked on Pacific Rim or Transformers, and then paying them to do a lot of work.

 

Once again, disclaimer: if I screwed up anything on a cultural level, feel free to tell me. I genuinely do not mean anyone any harm I just like putting robots in stuff.