4 ms·

I reread the books after watching the show, and I have to say that I am in complete agreement with this take. I think there are 2 things that impact why people

by xracy 2y ago

I reread the books after watching the show, and I have to say that I am in complete agreement with this take. I think there are 2 things that impact why people hate the adaptations. 1. Some people just don't like adaptations, and they need to understand what different mediums limit in terms of story telling. If you think of WoT as being 10,000 pages of content, and how you would shorten that to make it finish-able within a single human lifetime, then they have to change some things. But I gotta say, I think they capture a lot of the good of the books within the show. 2. Most people just have a picture in their head of what the thing is going to look like, and when that picture doesn't match up to what's made they're unhappy. And they don't understand why they couldn't just do the thing in their head because they don't understand the limitations of the medium. 2a. I think a thing that's important to a lot of people is the characters looking like the characters they imagine, and when casting is more diverse than that, people have a pretty negative reaction to the characters not "looking" like the characters. I think this ends up being more true the further from the description people feel like the characters are. ^This is a thing that has been hurting LoTR for a lot of people, in my opinion. I don't think it's a reasonable thing to expect.

cthalupa 2y ago
For sure. I've also learned that some people just... didn't read the books all that closely, either. Or at least not character descriptions. Two Rivers people are described as being dark eyed and dark haired with fairly dark complexions - probably mediterranean - but people seemed to think they were supposed to look like they were from England, forgetting that Elaida explicitly mentions Rand is too fair skinned in EoTW. Or everyone outraged about Moraine/Siuan, apparently not understanding what RJ meant when he said they were "pillowfriends," despite lots of other fairly explicit hints at what the phrase meant.
monkeywork 2y ago
>I don't think it's a reasonable thing to expect. It's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way they are described (or the way most people picture them), or it's not reasonable to expect people to accept a re-envisioning? Asking because I'm not sure which way you were leaning there. In my opinion, If you are going to use an existing franchise with a built-in audience attached to it, you should feel obligated to honor the audience's vision for the franchise. If you have dramatically different visions then you should be creating original content. The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed.
- xracy 2y ago
  > It's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way they are described (or the way most people picture them), or it's not reasonable to expect people to accept a re-envisioning? Asking because I'm not sure which way you were leaning there. I'm saying it's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way people imagine the characters in their heads. Which may or may not be "the way they are described." I'm saying this because I think there are a million different ways people can imagine characters differently. "Tall Dark and Handsome" is a pretty classical example of something that means different things to different people. To me, this always meant a person of color, and I only learned relatively recently that to most people this means "Mediterranean". The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong. > The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed. I think the projects that I've seen that have failed that people complain about "identity politics" for fail for the plot being bad. But there's a separate issue I see that's unrelated where people blame people of color on the projects for ruining the projects when in fact the companies are ruining the projects, and the people of color are often just a small piece of the puzzle. I think people very often over-react to this, and it often comes across as racist. Both of those things can be true. That the company is bad, and that the audience is being racist about the casting including black people that otherwise don't change anything about the way the movie watches.
  - monkeywork 2y ago
    >The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong. I disagree - I think for the most part there is a wisdom of the masses where sure not EVERY SINGLE person will have the same image of a character but if you had a character artist draw out what 1000 people think of that character you'd find they converge pretty closely... the problem happens when the casting is not close to that convergence and is far out on the fringes. As I said before I think if you are looking to make a product based on an existing IP you are doing so because you want that built-in audience that IP has - if you can't make the effort to ensure you are honoring how that audience expectations then your project deserves to fail. The place to do experiments with gender-bending, race swapping, expectation subversion etc is in original IP's that hommage the older franchises.

by xracy 2y ago

cthalupa 2y ago

For sure. I've also learned that some people just... didn't read the books all that closely, either. Or at least not character descriptions. Two Rivers people are described as being dark eyed and dark haired with fairly dark complexions - probably mediterranean - but people seemed to think they were supposed to look like they were from England, forgetting that Elaida explicitly mentions Rand is too fair skinned in EoTW. Or everyone outraged about Moraine/Siuan, apparently not understanding what RJ meant when he said they were "pillowfriends," despite lots of other fairly explicit hints at what the phrase meant.

monkeywork 2y ago

>I don't think it's a reasonable thing to expect. It's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way they are described (or the way most people picture them), or it's not reasonable to expect people to accept a re-envisioning? Asking because I'm not sure which way you were leaning there. In my opinion, If you are going to use an existing franchise with a built-in audience attached to it, you should feel obligated to honor the audience's vision for the franchise. If you have dramatically different visions then you should be creating original content. The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed.

xracy 2y ago
> It's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way they are described (or the way most people picture them), or it's not reasonable to expect people to accept a re-envisioning? Asking because I'm not sure which way you were leaning there. I'm saying it's not reasonable to expect characters to be cast the way people imagine the characters in their heads. Which may or may not be "the way they are described." I'm saying this because I think there are a million different ways people can imagine characters differently. "Tall Dark and Handsome" is a pretty classical example of something that means different things to different people. To me, this always meant a person of color, and I only learned relatively recently that to most people this means "Mediterranean". The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong. > The only thing I've found more annoying than companies burning well-loved franchises in movies / TV / video games by trying to "modernize" them with today's identity politics is those same companies blaming the audience and telling us it's OUR fault the project failed. I think the projects that I've seen that have failed that people complain about "identity politics" for fail for the plot being bad. But there's a separate issue I see that's unrelated where people blame people of color on the projects for ruining the projects when in fact the companies are ruining the projects, and the people of color are often just a small piece of the puzzle. I think people very often over-react to this, and it often comes across as racist. Both of those things can be true. That the company is bad, and that the audience is being racist about the casting including black people that otherwise don't change anything about the way the movie watches.
- monkeywork 2y ago
  >The very idea that an audience has a consistent picture of what character's look like is necessarily wrong. I disagree - I think for the most part there is a wisdom of the masses where sure not EVERY SINGLE person will have the same image of a character but if you had a character artist draw out what 1000 people think of that character you'd find they converge pretty closely... the problem happens when the casting is not close to that convergence and is far out on the fringes. As I said before I think if you are looking to make a product based on an existing IP you are doing so because you want that built-in audience that IP has - if you can't make the effort to ensure you are honoring how that audience expectations then your project deserves to fail. The place to do experiments with gender-bending, race swapping, expectation subversion etc is in original IP's that hommage the older franchises.