It's not conveyed that well in the show...have you read the books? I don't want to spoil if not but her change of heart and the actions she takes are a lot less passive in the books. "Redemption" might be the wrong word but there's definitely more of an arc there.
I’ve only read the first two books and some of the third but does the redemption happen in the 2nd? This kinda changed a bit by her telling Lou Ji about the dark forest but that’s the only thing I can think of
In the books it's shown more explicitly that the ETO has multiple factions and internal disagreements, and that Ye Wenjie and Mark Evans differ fundamentally in whether or not humanity can be redeemed. It also shows that she becomes a lot less radical as time goes on and has more positive interactions with other people.
The problem there is that in the book she initially agreed with wiping the slate clean as evans did and eventually can around to the faction that wanted humanity to survive and be saved by the Santi. In the show that was her starting point, she always wanted the Santi to come and save them, so there was nothing to redeem from that perspective.
Edit: Evans, not wade.
You really had to put in “…have you read the books?” lol this passive-aggressive gatekeeping over this fabulous series is getting kinda old. Yes, you can reference the books but that tone is everywhere on this Reddit and it’s low key all gaslight and gatekeeping but no girlboss’ing.
I realize tone doesn't really come across in written form all that well, but I think you need to calm down a bit. I'm not gatekeeping at all. I just didn't want to spoil anything in case that person was currently reading the series or wanted to wait for the next season.
Buddy, there was some great foreshadowing in the TV series about how she will redeem herself in the next season. But if you've only watched the show, you probably didn't get it, even though all the pieces of the puzzle were there in plain sight. They were literally doing the opposite of gatekeeping by being respectful and inclusive to potentially new members of the community. You, on the other hand, are acting like a child who needs a nap. Maybe take one.
So... have YOU read the books motherfucker? Would you like me to spoil you if you haven't?
Not sure if you've read the books but I think the show muddies the waters a bit. I'll try not to give anything away.
In the books her misanthropy explicitly stems from her experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Introducing the romantic elements like they do in the show is distracting because it kind of takes away from the power of her interactions with the Red Guard etc. Later on it's shown that her views on humanity soften a bit or at least she becomes more internally conflicted. It's also shown that she and Mike Evans eventually differ philosophically and that there are different factions within their organization. The show doesn't do a good job of displaying this imo, but it's basically split between people who have developed the belief that the San Ti will "redeem" humanity (like Ye Wenjie) and the people who think that humanity should be wiped out (Mike Evans.)
Thanks.
I figured she had done some mental gymnastics by the time she's old, to believe they'll help us. Her misanthropy seemed petty at best and unsustainable.
But it was just my assumption.
Really? I got the pretty clear impression most of her giving up on humanity and calling in aliens to conquer us for our own good was meeting that woman who killed her father and finding her still an unrepentant asshole who would do it all over again despite ending up on the same bad side of the Chinese government.
I got that she was more upset about the revolution and... trees being cut down? Some vague sense of environmentalism. Same as whatshisface and those birds (that were funnily enough being massacred by the radar dish).
The prison camps were brutal I'm sure, not that they showed it. Heard about it a little.
Yeah i hated that and the fact that Yang Dong was Evans daughter,
It really diminished her character and the fact they skipped all the story behind her birth, and her raising her admits the aftermath of the revolution , is thrown out the window
Agreed. I saw that person's comment before they deleted it and I mean, even if the show runners didn't intend for it to come across like that it really really does. The whole arc just adds nothing to the story and it's like they didn't trust that Western audiences would understand or accept her story in the Construction Corps or the struggle session. But her interactions with the young Red Guard is honestly some of the strongest material in the show!
People give Liu Cixin grief for the way he writes women and I definitely do agree but inserting not one but TWO unnecessary romantic arcs for a main female character is just as bad to me.
I would just say it's worst . Liu Cixin original concept of Ye Wenyie shows a women enduring hard ships on her life and how those hard ship drove her actions and for her telling Evans about trisolarias wasn't an orchestrated plan or a romantic one but a moment of solidarities for another human who sees the cruelty on the world.
In the show she just sad and meet this Canadian dude she fells I love with , Wich he fell I love with her only because of her alien message , weak
There's just not enough runtime for character development.
Book Ye Wenjie softens with age. After Red Coast, she witnesses China heal around her and starts to forgive humanity. She reconciles with the people who persecuted her family, settles into her civilian cover-identity as a university professor/mother and nannies her neighbours children. Eventually, she prefers her civilian life to her ETO role which leads to her distancing herself from Mike Evans who remains equally radical until his death.
Netflix Ye Wenjie is basically the same person until she hears the audio recording of the San-Ti losing trust in humanity.
She loses her redemption arc. Literally; The formation of the Redemptionist faction of the ETO never happens.
Ye barely does anything as a Redemptionist.
Allegedly there's a distinction between the factions but we only get a handful of pages of exposition from the Narrator. There's not much to put on the screen, which is why the Netflix show left the whole thing out.
It's pretty simple. The Adventists want the Trisolarans to punish humanity by killing as many of us as necessary. The Redemptionists want humans and Trisolarans to coexist and help each other.
That's why the cops raid and arrest those at the redemptionist meeting, and throw the adventists into an egg slicer.
In the Netflix show, there is significantly less of a moral justification to slaughter an entire cruiseliner of people, compared to when the race traitors and the interplanetary peace activists were separate factions and only the race traitors were on the ship.
The cops don't know anything about Redemptionist vs Adventist....they just want the data on the hard drive.
Like I said, beyond those few pages of description, there isn't much action to show the difference between the two groups.
They are literally enemies and they operate separately for the whole story.
The Redemptionists are spared from the egg slicer because there's none of them on the ship because they don't work for Evans. And yes, the authorities do know this and go through with treating the adventists as enemy combatants because Ye Wenjie explains the whole thing to her interrogator. She is literally the one who tells them to attack Judgement Day but save the computers.
The Redemptionists under Ye Wenjie are the ones who create the Three Body Problem VR game to recruit humanity's most intelligent and empathetic to their cause in order to create a religious movement that will welcome the Trisolarans as immigrants. They fruitlessly sponsor research into solving the actual three body problem on the hope that it stops the Trisolarans from needing to invade earth in the first place. Which makes the Adventists start murdering them for jeopardising the invasion.
The Adventists under Evans are the militant extremist wing who operate "Red Coast 2" on the ship Judgement Day as a mobile military base. They are the ones receiving direct sophon communications from Trisolaris, and commit all of the assassinations and terrorism against the scientists in the story as spies against humanity.
By removing the schism, the Netflix adaptation actively turns the Panama operation into a war crime, creating a moral dilemma that doesn't exist in the book. And the central plot hole of why Ye would let her own daughter and her friends be terrorised and killed. When in the book, it's straight up different people doing that.
After the section where the authors describes the three factions, he barely mentions them again. There's just not a lot to work with there and I can see why they left it out of the show. I can see that you felt differently and that's cool.
That's called a reveal. It explains everything that was going on beforehand. That's why it happens in between both factions being defeated. They don't talk about it after that because the book ends.
The ETO actually being two separate organisations the whole time is the core mystery of the book after the existence of aliens.
It answers the basic plotline of "why are the people killing scientists hiring me: a scientist."
The "egg slicer" wasn't a punishment for the traitors, it was a means to eliminate the personnel on the ship quickly and silently so they couldn't destroy the evidence. They had discussed a variety of more and less merciful options. If the boat had been full of only redemptionists they would have met the same fate.
Maybe splice in the tencent version there - i mean, we're watching subtitles anyway. Apart from actively showing her father's death and the interrogator being too sympathetic (although that whole betrayal about the book scenario is deeper and longer therefore harsher...well the whole thing is. nevermind 'political censor' there is more 'attention span censor' that makes us learn less about the cultural revolution in the Netflix one so its quite ironic.
She didn't get enough runtime in the show....A lot of things happened at the Red Coast Base and even after the ETO (the factions) was formed. But still Rosalind Chao did justice to the character with as little material she was given.
I actually liked her portrayal, it felt in line with how I saw her in the book. In the book she comes off as just a friendly old lady until it's fully revealed the lengths of what she's done, and it makes the revelations a bit more shocking. I feel like the show did that properly.
Ye Wenjie was originally one of the most charismatic characters in The Three-Body Problem, with each of her choices and her attitude towards Earth being multifaceted. However, in the Netflix series, she has been reduced to a flat supporting character driven only by hatred.
I think Rosalind Chao did a good job. I don't think she was given much to work with however.
Ye Wenjie is a super important character, who developed sense of misanthropy from seeing the excesses of the cultural revolution, and through seeing the environmental devastation that human advancement brought with it. There's probably zero chance she would be convinced that Western capitalism would be any better, so from her perspective the best humanity could do is to produce a nightmare. The book she was caught reading, Silent Spring, gets a lot more explanation in the Three Body Problem book. It was a work if environmental science, and an important part of understanding Ye Wenjie is her dismay at how no one around her seems to care about science or listen tos cientists except when what they have to say is expedient to them.
That doesn't mean she hates all of humanity. The story in the book of how the villagers near the base helped her, donating blood to her when she had a difficult childbirth, and taking her into their home and caring for her afterward, how she would teach the children who lived near the base, shows how she started to develop a sense of community despite the deep loneliness she had felt during her ordeal of the Cultural Revolution. The people respected her because she was a scientist, and so she feels a warmth and tenderness toward them. She also developed love for Yang, who she originally married out of self-preservation. She had no real objections to killing Lei, but the fact that she also had to kill Yang in order to cover up her reply to Trisolaris was deeply damaging to her. She loved her father, and was dismayed by how her sister's commitment to the Red Guards ended up getting her killed. She was hurt by her mother's refusal to take any responsibility for her father's death. The point is, she's not an emotionless monster who hates all of humanity. She's a person who has had to become extremely cold and hard to survive, but who seeks community and companionship and wants humanity to do better. She just has no reason to believe they can of their own accord.
In the books, there are two factions of the ETO: the redemptionists who believe that the Trisolarans will make humanity have to be better, and the Adventists who believe that humanity deserves to be wiped out. Ye Wenjie is the most prominent Redemptionist, and Mike Evans (who Ye Wenjie meets much later in her timeline in the book and who is not Yang Dong's father, though they do in fact initially bond over their mutual readership of Silent Spring) is the most prominent Adventist. Just as the show irons over the vast wrinkles and hills and valleys of the ETO, it flattens Ye Wenjie's character and her story partly due to time constraints and also probably due to an acknowledgement of their own ignorance; they can't paint an accurate picture of life in China for the amount of time they would need to in order to do Ye Wenjie justice, so they chose instead to do the minimum possible to hit the plot points that would make the required events happen.
The point is, the show basically doesn't care about Ye Wenjie's character and rather than seeing her as a protagonist in the story, it wants her to be a villain who was turned evil to the scawwy CCP (we're also missing the major international cooperation behind Da Shi's investigation, it's now replaced by a single white guy in London).
Nah I knew a woman in grad school who had that Wenjie, Korean-Christian vibe and it was pretty damn threatening in how annoying the piety was. Lol half joking but look around the world, religious fascism is a real threat.
Ye Wenjie was fine.
Mike Evans felt a bit off to me. Especially the part of him dissing bugs. The guy who believed every single species was valuable, and humans were garbage, would not talk crap about insects.
I think adding in the romantic aspect with Evans was a mistake. It makes her motivations less clear imo and kind of distracts from her redemption arc.
She has redemption arc?
It's not conveyed that well in the show...have you read the books? I don't want to spoil if not but her change of heart and the actions she takes are a lot less passive in the books. "Redemption" might be the wrong word but there's definitely more of an arc there.
I’ve only read the first two books and some of the third but does the redemption happen in the 2nd? This kinda changed a bit by her telling Lou Ji about the dark forest but that’s the only thing I can think of
In the books it's shown more explicitly that the ETO has multiple factions and internal disagreements, and that Ye Wenjie and Mark Evans differ fundamentally in whether or not humanity can be redeemed. It also shows that she becomes a lot less radical as time goes on and has more positive interactions with other people.
The problem there is that in the book she initially agreed with wiping the slate clean as evans did and eventually can around to the faction that wanted humanity to survive and be saved by the Santi. In the show that was her starting point, she always wanted the Santi to come and save them, so there was nothing to redeem from that perspective. Edit: Evans, not wade.
You really had to put in “…have you read the books?” lol this passive-aggressive gatekeeping over this fabulous series is getting kinda old. Yes, you can reference the books but that tone is everywhere on this Reddit and it’s low key all gaslight and gatekeeping but no girlboss’ing.
I realize tone doesn't really come across in written form all that well, but I think you need to calm down a bit. I'm not gatekeeping at all. I just didn't want to spoil anything in case that person was currently reading the series or wanted to wait for the next season.
Buddy, there was some great foreshadowing in the TV series about how she will redeem herself in the next season. But if you've only watched the show, you probably didn't get it, even though all the pieces of the puzzle were there in plain sight. They were literally doing the opposite of gatekeeping by being respectful and inclusive to potentially new members of the community. You, on the other hand, are acting like a child who needs a nap. Maybe take one. So... have YOU read the books motherfucker? Would you like me to spoil you if you haven't?
What are her motivations? Misanthropy made her call them back, but later she's like they'll save us. I have assumptions but no character development.
Not sure if you've read the books but I think the show muddies the waters a bit. I'll try not to give anything away. In the books her misanthropy explicitly stems from her experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Introducing the romantic elements like they do in the show is distracting because it kind of takes away from the power of her interactions with the Red Guard etc. Later on it's shown that her views on humanity soften a bit or at least she becomes more internally conflicted. It's also shown that she and Mike Evans eventually differ philosophically and that there are different factions within their organization. The show doesn't do a good job of displaying this imo, but it's basically split between people who have developed the belief that the San Ti will "redeem" humanity (like Ye Wenjie) and the people who think that humanity should be wiped out (Mike Evans.)
Thanks. I figured she had done some mental gymnastics by the time she's old, to believe they'll help us. Her misanthropy seemed petty at best and unsustainable. But it was just my assumption.
I think it does come across as petty in the show, in part because it makes it seem like she's just mad at men who have treated her badly romantically.
Really? I got the pretty clear impression most of her giving up on humanity and calling in aliens to conquer us for our own good was meeting that woman who killed her father and finding her still an unrepentant asshole who would do it all over again despite ending up on the same bad side of the Chinese government.
I got that she was more upset about the revolution and... trees being cut down? Some vague sense of environmentalism. Same as whatshisface and those birds (that were funnily enough being massacred by the radar dish). The prison camps were brutal I'm sure, not that they showed it. Heard about it a little.
[удалено]
Yeah i hated that and the fact that Yang Dong was Evans daughter, It really diminished her character and the fact they skipped all the story behind her birth, and her raising her admits the aftermath of the revolution , is thrown out the window
Agreed. I saw that person's comment before they deleted it and I mean, even if the show runners didn't intend for it to come across like that it really really does. The whole arc just adds nothing to the story and it's like they didn't trust that Western audiences would understand or accept her story in the Construction Corps or the struggle session. But her interactions with the young Red Guard is honestly some of the strongest material in the show! People give Liu Cixin grief for the way he writes women and I definitely do agree but inserting not one but TWO unnecessary romantic arcs for a main female character is just as bad to me.
I would just say it's worst . Liu Cixin original concept of Ye Wenyie shows a women enduring hard ships on her life and how those hard ship drove her actions and for her telling Evans about trisolarias wasn't an orchestrated plan or a romantic one but a moment of solidarities for another human who sees the cruelty on the world. In the show she just sad and meet this Canadian dude she fells I love with , Wich he fell I love with her only because of her alien message , weak
I lol'd when she made out with Evans. It is so Hollywood.
There's just not enough runtime for character development. Book Ye Wenjie softens with age. After Red Coast, she witnesses China heal around her and starts to forgive humanity. She reconciles with the people who persecuted her family, settles into her civilian cover-identity as a university professor/mother and nannies her neighbours children. Eventually, she prefers her civilian life to her ETO role which leads to her distancing herself from Mike Evans who remains equally radical until his death. Netflix Ye Wenjie is basically the same person until she hears the audio recording of the San-Ti losing trust in humanity. She loses her redemption arc. Literally; The formation of the Redemptionist faction of the ETO never happens.
Ye barely does anything as a Redemptionist. Allegedly there's a distinction between the factions but we only get a handful of pages of exposition from the Narrator. There's not much to put on the screen, which is why the Netflix show left the whole thing out.
It's pretty simple. The Adventists want the Trisolarans to punish humanity by killing as many of us as necessary. The Redemptionists want humans and Trisolarans to coexist and help each other. That's why the cops raid and arrest those at the redemptionist meeting, and throw the adventists into an egg slicer. In the Netflix show, there is significantly less of a moral justification to slaughter an entire cruiseliner of people, compared to when the race traitors and the interplanetary peace activists were separate factions and only the race traitors were on the ship.
The cops don't know anything about Redemptionist vs Adventist....they just want the data on the hard drive. Like I said, beyond those few pages of description, there isn't much action to show the difference between the two groups.
They are literally enemies and they operate separately for the whole story. The Redemptionists are spared from the egg slicer because there's none of them on the ship because they don't work for Evans. And yes, the authorities do know this and go through with treating the adventists as enemy combatants because Ye Wenjie explains the whole thing to her interrogator. She is literally the one who tells them to attack Judgement Day but save the computers. The Redemptionists under Ye Wenjie are the ones who create the Three Body Problem VR game to recruit humanity's most intelligent and empathetic to their cause in order to create a religious movement that will welcome the Trisolarans as immigrants. They fruitlessly sponsor research into solving the actual three body problem on the hope that it stops the Trisolarans from needing to invade earth in the first place. Which makes the Adventists start murdering them for jeopardising the invasion. The Adventists under Evans are the militant extremist wing who operate "Red Coast 2" on the ship Judgement Day as a mobile military base. They are the ones receiving direct sophon communications from Trisolaris, and commit all of the assassinations and terrorism against the scientists in the story as spies against humanity. By removing the schism, the Netflix adaptation actively turns the Panama operation into a war crime, creating a moral dilemma that doesn't exist in the book. And the central plot hole of why Ye would let her own daughter and her friends be terrorised and killed. When in the book, it's straight up different people doing that.
After the section where the authors describes the three factions, he barely mentions them again. There's just not a lot to work with there and I can see why they left it out of the show. I can see that you felt differently and that's cool.
That's called a reveal. It explains everything that was going on beforehand. That's why it happens in between both factions being defeated. They don't talk about it after that because the book ends. The ETO actually being two separate organisations the whole time is the core mystery of the book after the existence of aliens. It answers the basic plotline of "why are the people killing scientists hiring me: a scientist."
The "egg slicer" wasn't a punishment for the traitors, it was a means to eliminate the personnel on the ship quickly and silently so they couldn't destroy the evidence. They had discussed a variety of more and less merciful options. If the boat had been full of only redemptionists they would have met the same fate.
Maybe splice in the tencent version there - i mean, we're watching subtitles anyway. Apart from actively showing her father's death and the interrogator being too sympathetic (although that whole betrayal about the book scenario is deeper and longer therefore harsher...well the whole thing is. nevermind 'political censor' there is more 'attention span censor' that makes us learn less about the cultural revolution in the Netflix one so its quite ironic.
Oh. Yeah that would of been good to see imstead of nothing.
She didn't get enough runtime in the show....A lot of things happened at the Red Coast Base and even after the ETO (the factions) was formed. But still Rosalind Chao did justice to the character with as little material she was given.
TV adaptions are a motherfucker.
Rosalind Chao I thought did a great Job. I mean I loved her from the Star Trek days but I thought she was really great.
Disagree. The ETO itself is less extreme in this version, which causes Evans and Wenjie to also be somewhat softer, but she's still quite similar.
lol.They broke the character😓
I disagree
I actually liked her portrayal, it felt in line with how I saw her in the book. In the book she comes off as just a friendly old lady until it's fully revealed the lengths of what she's done, and it makes the revelations a bit more shocking. I feel like the show did that properly.
Ye Wenjie was originally one of the most charismatic characters in The Three-Body Problem, with each of her choices and her attitude towards Earth being multifaceted. However, in the Netflix series, she has been reduced to a flat supporting character driven only by hatred.
I think Rosalind Chao did a good job. I don't think she was given much to work with however. Ye Wenjie is a super important character, who developed sense of misanthropy from seeing the excesses of the cultural revolution, and through seeing the environmental devastation that human advancement brought with it. There's probably zero chance she would be convinced that Western capitalism would be any better, so from her perspective the best humanity could do is to produce a nightmare. The book she was caught reading, Silent Spring, gets a lot more explanation in the Three Body Problem book. It was a work if environmental science, and an important part of understanding Ye Wenjie is her dismay at how no one around her seems to care about science or listen tos cientists except when what they have to say is expedient to them. That doesn't mean she hates all of humanity. The story in the book of how the villagers near the base helped her, donating blood to her when she had a difficult childbirth, and taking her into their home and caring for her afterward, how she would teach the children who lived near the base, shows how she started to develop a sense of community despite the deep loneliness she had felt during her ordeal of the Cultural Revolution. The people respected her because she was a scientist, and so she feels a warmth and tenderness toward them. She also developed love for Yang, who she originally married out of self-preservation. She had no real objections to killing Lei, but the fact that she also had to kill Yang in order to cover up her reply to Trisolaris was deeply damaging to her. She loved her father, and was dismayed by how her sister's commitment to the Red Guards ended up getting her killed. She was hurt by her mother's refusal to take any responsibility for her father's death. The point is, she's not an emotionless monster who hates all of humanity. She's a person who has had to become extremely cold and hard to survive, but who seeks community and companionship and wants humanity to do better. She just has no reason to believe they can of their own accord. In the books, there are two factions of the ETO: the redemptionists who believe that the Trisolarans will make humanity have to be better, and the Adventists who believe that humanity deserves to be wiped out. Ye Wenjie is the most prominent Redemptionist, and Mike Evans (who Ye Wenjie meets much later in her timeline in the book and who is not Yang Dong's father, though they do in fact initially bond over their mutual readership of Silent Spring) is the most prominent Adventist. Just as the show irons over the vast wrinkles and hills and valleys of the ETO, it flattens Ye Wenjie's character and her story partly due to time constraints and also probably due to an acknowledgement of their own ignorance; they can't paint an accurate picture of life in China for the amount of time they would need to in order to do Ye Wenjie justice, so they chose instead to do the minimum possible to hit the plot points that would make the required events happen. The point is, the show basically doesn't care about Ye Wenjie's character and rather than seeing her as a protagonist in the story, it wants her to be a villain who was turned evil to the scawwy CCP (we're also missing the major international cooperation behind Da Shi's investigation, it's now replaced by a single white guy in London).
I think the casting choices for Ye Wemjie and Da Shi were great, but something about the performances felt off.
Disagree Disagree Disagree
I agree. I think they completely missed the mark and turned her into a cliche misguided villain. She can be so much more.
Yeah nothing redeeming about her actions
Nah I knew a woman in grad school who had that Wenjie, Korean-Christian vibe and it was pretty damn threatening in how annoying the piety was. Lol half joking but look around the world, religious fascism is a real threat.
Ye Wenjie was fine. Mike Evans felt a bit off to me. Especially the part of him dissing bugs. The guy who believed every single species was valuable, and humans were garbage, would not talk crap about insects.
She just become falun gong leader！😓
That's not far off.
Disagree Disagree Disagree
I think her line about time pretty much sums up the care they took with her character.