Good. Bad. We argue a lot about adaptations and have strong opinions on what they should and should not be. So why not have a thread for sharing thoughts on adaptations, and in particular looking to analyze those thoughts. BEHOLD. ADAPTATION THREAD. As an example I myself come from the school of thought that an adaptation need not be thematically faithful, nor faithful to the plot or characters, or the worldbuilding or honestly anything. An adaptation need simply be good as a piece of media, regardless of its faithfulness. Now it may or may not be faithful and that may add to one's enjoyment of the material but it does not need to be. We can look at The Birds as an example. In the original short story thematically we were far more focused on the impotency of government and the willingness of the people to believe in it even far past the point of reason. The trust in the British government theme is entirely missing from the film, however. What we instead end up with is a film whose central theme is focused around how women are perceived as stupid and vapid. This does mirror in a way the treatment of the short story's main character but it isn't the main thrust of the work. Melanie being treated like a fucking dumb bimbo, however, is. And yet it's beautiful and wonderful. It's just a really great film and one that gets me thinking and which I feel merits discussion. Perhaps we changed the setting and the characters and our main themes, but we managed to make a work just as good as what it was adapting. This is what really mattered.
I think the best example might be to look at public domain works though. Dracula has ended up fucking absurd in adaptation, even when we are working with adapting the novel itself.
I PROBABLY HAVE THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS um continuing with Hitchcock movies, because I can and will talk Hitch until I'm blue in the face…Psycho I think is an interesting example because while the film's not too drastically different from the novel, Norman is a much more sympathetic character in the film than the book. Which was at least partly a deliberate decision; they decided to cast someone young and charismatic as Norman rather than have him be the middle-aged schlub he is in the novel specifically so audiences wouldn't immediately go "oh, that character's a creep, he's a bad guy." (I'll have more to add in a bit, I have to go run some errands right now)
Shit like that is why I think Brotherhood is a poor adaptation of the Shou Tucker story in FMA. It was rushed through one episode and used spooky evil lighting consistently. It lacks the emotional gut punch of the original anime's method of handling it and is more just "Well that happened and we all saw it coming. I guess." Though the makers of Brotherhood were in a damned if they do, damned if they don't situation. Condense the early material and you get people like me bitching. Do not condense the material and you get people bitching about having to watch the exact same shit again in the same amount of time.
I may be halfway through an incredibly pedantic and detailed liveblog of my opinions of the 3DS port of my special-interest favorite game, the highlight of which so far has been when I concluded that somebody's fridged female acquaintance who is never given a name or appears onscreen is actually his drag alter ego, and he's angsting about it because he's in too deep on the lie now and can't back out.
