Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9854709" data-attributes="member: 18">That only follows logically if you believe the sole sin is deviation from the original at all, not the nature (or arguably degree) of the deviation.Which would be a very strange and unusual view. Almost universally, people grade deviation from the original on the basis of whether it serves the story and the vibes of the original (and the new version), or whether it just ruins them, not just that "all change is bad" like we were antagonists in a Moorcock novel.No.They both deviate from the source material's specific plot to a similar degree, arguably.However even if we say that, that isn't the end of the story. The Hobbit takes much bigger liberties with the personalities and attitudes of the characters in the story, for one example. Generally people are more upset by that than abbreviating, adding to or somewhat altering the plot. Even when it's quite well done in more objective terms (like the elf/dwarf love story in The Hobbit movies is one of the better-written parts, bizarrely, but rings kind of hollow in the cartoonish context the movies create and yet also doesn't fit the vibes of the novel).And the specific deviations The Hobbit (the movie trilogy) makes tend to undermine the story and vibes of The Hobbit (the novel) to a far, far greater degree than those of LotR. Indeed the LotR movies convey the general vibe and themes and ideas and overall story of the books extremely well, to the point of making people who read the books understand them better in many cases! I would suggest The Hobbit did the precise opposite and quite strongly. Even if we viewed The Hobbit as deviating less plot-wise (which seems hard to credit, but let's say for the sake of argument), the choices of deviation it made were very bad, and in some cases it did the plot technically right, but in such a ridiculous and kinda-stupid way it felt almost like mockery or parody.So you do have a pointless nitpick here, fair, but it's specifically reliant on people only seeing deviating at all as the problem, and ignoring the how/why/specifics of the deviation.(EDIT: Also worth noting, not all parts of a book are necessarily seen by readers of said book as equally vital for a filmic adaptation. For example, with LotR, a lot of book readers never really got Tom Bombadil, and saw that as basically pointless, and the scouring of the Shire was also a bit "huh" to a lot of readers. So cutting those from the extremely long books to help them fit into three extremely long movies makes sense to the audience. Personally, I find both sections fascinating and they illustrate the weird radical politics Tolkien had well, but they barely served the story even in the original, they were more kinda "The author has arrived to explain what he actually thinks". I'd include them in a TV series of LotR for sure, but they're obvious easy candidates for cutting in a movie series version and help show how audiences get mad when you remove, add to or change stuff they value, not when you just remove, add to or change stuff period. You might see a similar thing with say, an adaptation of Tigana and the weird BDSM-y interlude in one part, or indeed the close-to-metaphor sequence that's next to it. They're interesting and technically connect to the message of the book, but don't really fit very well, and would probably be significantly altered or removed if Tigana was made into a TV series or movie(s). And I doubt most audiences would be mad about that - many might be relieved. Another example of a popular change might be aging up characters in source material where their ages make plot elements feel a bit questionable/dodgy. It's not "change = bad", it's "bad change = bad". Sometimes change can arguably improve how well something is understood in another medium.)</blockquote>

Verification