A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality Draws Early Criticism as Wang Yuren Speaks Plainly

After A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality officially resumed airing, its first two episodes immediately drew criticism over narrative gaps, illogical character behavior, and questionable adaptation choices. In response, director Wang Yuren posted on his personal account, rejecting rumors that the series had undergone a "screenwriting team change" and saying the disputed episodes had actually been completed at the end of last year.

On the evidence available, this looks less like a sudden staff shake-up and more like a production scheduling problem. The team seems to have put its time into the later battle-heavy material, while the opening episodes missed the review pass they clearly needed. Wang more or less confirmed that: the team had been rushing to finish the later major battle scenes, which meant the earlier completed episodes lacked enough of a "look-back" check. It's a familiar problem: polish the big set-piece later on, neglect the opening, and viewers trip over the roughest material first.

The complaints are also fairly specific, not just aimless venting. They focus on execution issues that can be named and judged: gaps in narrative logic, character actions that do not make sense, and unreasonable adaptation decisions. For a long-running serialized work, those are exactly the areas that matter most. People are not watching just for a few big moments in a single episode; they are watching to see whether character motivation and the rules of the world stay consistent. Once a character stops feeling like themselves, or the plot starts moving because it has to, people naturally begin to suspect that something in the creative pipeline has gone wrong.

Wang's response on that point was unusually direct. He said the so-called "screenwriting team change" was "utterly groundless," and added that the screenwriter rumored to have been "forced out" only participated in the first draft of Season 1 and did not work on the following seasons. The important part of that reply is not just the denial itself, but the emphasis on traceability. Wang said he has been involved with the project for more than five years, and that script documents for more than 200 episodes, along with multiple rounds of editorial revisions, can all be verified. For anyone familiar with large-scale production, that's an attempt to answer with records rather than emotion.

Still, the more valuable part of his statement is that he did not blame everything on public discourse. Wang acknowledged that some lines and plot beats in past work were indeed off. That is the professional part of the response. On a long-running project, two responses are especially risky: treating all criticism as malicious, or getting pulled so hard by online sentiment that the team falls into complete loss of confidence. The first kills a team's ability to correct itself; the second can damage both output and judgment. At least for now, the production side seems to be trying to separate rumors from real problems instead of lumping them together, and that is a better sign than the alternative.

More broadly, the backlash is also a reminder of an old problem with long-form IP adaptations: audiences often have less patience for mistakes in serialized animation than they do for a rough single-player game's launch window. Once an animated series airs, the first two episodes are the audience's first impression. If that opening fails, later spectacle, no matter how impressive, may not fully repair the trust already lost. That is especially true for a project like A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality, which has been running for years and already has an established audience. Viewers assume a mature production pipeline. If basic problems are still this obvious, they are easy to read as signs of corner-cutting or schedule pressure.

Among viewers, the discussion now seems split into two broad camps. One is still focused on the show's problems in those first two episodes. The other is more concerned with whether rumors like the alleged writer swap were deliberately amplified to push the conversation in a certain direction. Wang also said such rumors often spread through newly registered throwaway accounts using similar phrasing and attaching themselves to socially sensitive topics, which then fuels online abuse and fresh rounds of controversy. That may not explain everyone involved, but in the current social media environment it's not hard to see how that kind of thing spreads. For ordinary viewers, the better approach is simpler: look first at what is actually wrong in the work itself, then look at whether the creators make adjustments, instead of letting secondhand claims define the entire discussion.

Based on this response alone, A Record of a Mortal's Journey to Immortality currently looks more like a case of uneven production pacing causing swings in quality than the abrupt team break described in outside rumors. Whether it remains worth following depends less on how forceful the statement sounds and more on whether the next few episodes can steady out character behavior, narrative flow, and adaptation choices. If they do, it suggests the team can still correct course. If not, then Wang's line about lacking enough "look-back" will stop sounding like reflection and start reading as a real project-management warning.