It’s been coming on for a while now—easily for years; arguably for decades—but as of 2016, I’m calling it: We’re officially entering a golden age of SFF adaptations. Exactly where and how the trend started is hardly an isolated question, though I’d argue that the release of the first Harry Potter film and Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring back in late 2001 had a great deal to do with it. Not only were both films extraordinarily well-received, but they showed the major studios that, provided you got the fanbase onboard with the first installment, you really could bank on the sequels years in advance. With the special effects budgets needed to make SFF narratives work no longer cost-prohibitive to everyone beyond the biggest players, the steady trickle-down to television was inevitable.
By the same token, it’s impossible to consider the adaptation of SFF novels and short stories without also examining the commensurate rise in superhero properties, the one being inextricably paralleled by—and intertwined with—the other. Looking at the current ubiquity of comic book adaptations on both the big and small screen, for instance (to say nothing of the almost terrifyingly long-game future release schedules of both DC and Marvel), it’s easy to miss the comparative subtlety in how it all started. Officially, the MCU-as-is began in 2008, with Iron Man; unofficially, given Bruce Banner’s inclusion in subsequent MCU films, there’s an argument to be made that it really started in 2003, with Ang Lee’s Hulk. However, this series swapped Eric Bana for Ed Norton in the 2008 sequel, then brought in Mark Ruffalo for 2012’s The Avengers. Either way, the Hulk remains a narrative staple, though his conflicts have shifted from addressing classic mad science and the military industrial complex to focusing on the more internal battles of depression and self-acceptance.
Going back further, however, the rise of big Marvel movies arguably started in 1998, with Wesley Snipes and Blade. Though Blade did well enough to merit two sequels—Blade II in 2002, Blade: Trinity in 2004—it was more a cult success than a global phenomenon; and yet, it remains significant. The introduction of X-Men in 2000 was another milestone, though one that seems more obviously so in retrospect. It was X-Men 2, released in 2003, that garnered greater acclaim, though a lot of that figurative capital was subsequently squandered in the disaster of 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand. Nonetheless, the X-Men films have kept on keeping on, due in no small part to the popularity of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and, following the release of X-Men: First Class in 2011, the younger versions of Professor Xavier and Magento, played by James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender. Not that the X-Men films exist in the same timeline as the rest of the MCU; to steal a phrase from Doctor Who, it’s all very wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, regardless of who’s responsible. Even so, their popularity laid a great deal of groundwork for the MCU’s subsequent transformation, and thanks to the success of The Avengers, we now have multiple related TV shows, all thematically different despite their interconnectedness: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013), Agent Carter (2015), Daredevil (2015), Jessica Jones (2015), and the forthcoming Luke Cage.
DC and its properties have undergone a similar metamorphosis. Looking back on the Batman films of the late eighties and early nineties, which can best be described with words like kitschy, camp and why?, they’re almost unrecognisable when compared to the grittier, Nolan-era reboots of 2005 and onwards. The Spider-Man films performed the same trick in a vastly shorter timeframe: Tobey Maguire’s 2002 debut has a shiny-happy-puppy quality which, by the third installment in 2007—the less said of which, the better, because what the actual fuck was that evil dance routine?—had well and truly lost the plot. Andrew Garfield’s 2012 revamp in The Amazing Spider-Man went a long way towards redeeming the franchise, but given that Sony’s control of the character is a use-it-or-lose-it deal, it was arguably a decision driven more by necessity than true apologia. (The fact that Spider-Man is going to appear in Marvel’s next Avengers film is a case in point.) And yet, from this structural morass, there’s still been a commensurate—and successful—jump to television: Following the success of Arrow (2012), we now have The Flash (2014), Gotham (2014), Supergirl (2015), and Legends of Tomorrow (2016), all of which have been well received by critics and fandom alike.
Regardless of individual failures, as a collective whole, superhero and comic book adaptations have been on a steady upwards trajectory—both in volume and critical acclaim—for the better part of twenty years. For anyone who grew up in the nineties, it’s been an omnipresent and increasingly visible part of the cultural landscape: Regardless of your interest in comics, a trashy action blockbuster is a trashy action blockbuster, and if you’re aged between twelve and twenty at the time of release, the chances are you’ll see it, or be exposed to discussions of it, on that basis alone. (Which explains why, despite several years of vehement protestations to the contrary, I was recently outraged to realise I had a dog in the Marvel vs. DC fight. It’s not like I meant to start giving a crap, but there’s only so much you can do about fandom by osmosis.)
The rise in adaptations of other SFFnal properties, however—novels, non-superhero comics and short stories—has been a much more chequered process, despite the presence of an eager, overlapping fanbase. It doesn’t escape notice, for instance, that the adaptations most prone to failure are fantasies, either epic or urban, while those that succeed, or whose trashiness is often deemed a feature instead of a bug, are SF. Partly, one suspects, this is because SF has a longer, more established history as a cinematic genre than fantasy, though many superhero properties tend to blur the magic/science line in ways we don’t often discuss. But mostly, if we’re being honest, Hollywood just doesn’t seem to understand that fantasy narratives, however action-oriented their plots might be, are more than just a different flavour of blockbuster.
Flops like Eragon (2006) and The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (2007) weren’t merely badly acted; in fixating on visual spectacle, their adaptations entirely missed what made the source material so popular in the first place. Arguably the most egregious such failure was The Golden Compass, released in 2007. Adapted from the first book of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, the film attracted controversy from the outset, most loudly from Christian quarters. Pullman had never been shy about describing his books as the atheistic equivalent of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, with criticism of organised religion in general and Christianity in particular being central to the story. Frightened by the backlash the project was attracting, the studio tried to soften things. The end result, though visually beautiful, was fundamentally bowdlerised: still too radical a product for the protestors who’d never been going to watch it in the first place, but missing everything fans of the books had most wanted to see.
By contrast, the Narnia films were given a much greater leeway to adhere to the source material, yet never quite managed to enter the zeitgeist. Though The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) was ultimately successful, the studio still ummed and aahed about sequels. There were financial reasons for this, certainly, but Narnia is also something of a unique case: though linked, the books can be read out of order, there are multiple hefty timeskips between volumes, and as such, their structure and content varies wildly. With Prince Caspian released in 2008 and The Voyage of the Dawntreader in 2010, any future installments seem stuck in limbo; both The Silver Chair and The Magician’s Nephew are still slated, albeit nebulously, for future production, yet when that exactly might happen remains unclear.
Put bluntly, fantasy stories are often treated by Hollywood as an excuse to indulge in visual spectacle, instead of—as they really are—a vehicle for ideas. Though CGI isn’t as great a novelty in 2016 as it was in 2006, the idea that the thematic integrity of fantasy stories is of equal or even greater importance to audiences than how they look is still something movies struggle with. The success of the Twilight films is a case in point: whatever you might say about the quality and content of the source material, you can’t claim that the adaptations didn’t strive to respect it. (That both films and books were—and still are—criticised on multiple other counts is a different issue.) Similarly, the cinematic quadrilogy of The Hunger Games, released between 2012 and 2015, was successful precisely because it respected the political and emotional aspects of the novels on which it was based. No matter the acting talent of Jennifer Lawrence and her castmates, without that central thematic core, the first film would’ve been like The Golden Compass: beautiful, but missing everything that made it real.
That being so, the steady transfer of fantasy adaptations to TV rather than movies makes a certain degree of sense. Whereas many SF and dystopian stories are built around a central “what if” premise whose moral and social implications can be cleanly addressed in under three hours—what if everyone had robots, or children were trained as military tacticians, or life was determined by rigid factional alliances, or you woke up in a post-apocalyptic setting without your memories, for instance—fantasy, as a genre, is frequently built on variations of the hero’s journey. Thematically, such stories are as much about the world and its magical particulars as they are the development of the protagonist, and trying to do justice to both within the cramped time-frame of a single film is seldom easy. TV pacing is a much better narrative fit; but up until very recently, it was somewhat tricky to manage. Not only were the necessary special effects prohibitively expensive for the small screen, especially given the lack of certainty in the payoff, but it wasn’t until the DVD-and-streaming era that TV was able to move away from episodic, procedural styles and trust that their audience was able to follow a longer, more overarching narrative.
Arguably, the first major TV show to really take this approach was 24, whose premise saw an entire season depict the real-time events of a single day. First airing in 2001, it was successful enough to merit nine full seasons and multiple spinoffs: a game-changing move in upending the primacy of traditional TV formulas. The applicability of this setup to fantasy adaptations came later, but when it finally started to catch on, it did so with a bang. In 2008—the same year that the first Twilight movie hit the big screen—HBO debuted True Blood, a southern gothic urban fantasy/murder mystery series adapted from Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels. Though the show departed steadily from the books the further it progressed—and wavered in the process, though not without making some solid original decisions first—it was nonetheless hugely successful, not just in its own right, but in establishing the viability of long-game fantasy shows.
And then, in 2011, midway through the seven-season run of True Blood, HBO premiered Game of Thrones. Now approaching its sixth season, the popularity of GoT is undeniable, both in mainstream and genre circles. So many words have been devoted to unpacking its various strengths and foibles that it feels redundant to add any more; and yet, with the show now thoroughly outpacing the source material from which it has steadily diverged—first subtly, then overtly—since the beginning, it’s difficult not to feel newly reinvested, if only for the sake of intellectual curiosity. To what extent will the two forms of narrative dovetail? Which one will we prefer, and why? And what might the comparison tell us about successful adaptations?
Because while it’s important to respect the source material—not so much literally, as a verbatim transfer, but thematically, in terms of the meaning—the best adaptations are also brave enough to innovate. The trick is doing so in the spirit of the original, taking advantage of the structural differences between screen and page to explore new narrative avenues. The new Shadowhunters show on Netflix, adapted from Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments series, is a compelling case in point, especially when compared to the 2013 flop movie, City of Bones. Not only does Shadowhunters star one of the most effortlessly diverse fantasy casts I’ve ever seen—a conscious evolution of the source material—but it makes good use of them. Where the film tried to cram the events of the first book into 130 minutes, the series, now on its fifth episode, has already surpassed that by over an hour, making up the difference with a mix of character development and worldbuilding.
Yes, it runs a little thin at times, and the fight scenes are less tightly choreographed than they could be, but these are small failings compared to the fact that Shadowhunters is unapologetically fun. It’s just the right blend of spectacle and emotion, popcorn absurdity and character depth to make you want to curl up with it for an evening. Perhaps the most important change, however, is the diffusion of the source material’s love triangle—Simon loves Clary, Clary loves Jace, Jace loves Clary but can’t admit it—into a clever mirroring device. In the books, the tight perspective on Jace and Clary means that, while we’re aware that Alec, Jace’s best friend, is in unrequited love with him, the tension of it takes a background seat. In the film, there isn’t time to address it at all; Magnus Bane, who goes on to become Alec’s boyfriend, is reduced to a mere cameo. But in the show, with its omnipresent perspective and longer timescale, Simon’s feelings are no longer a source of claustrophobic tension, but are rather contrasted with Alec’s, the pair of them forced to watch as their closest friends and secret love interests fall instead for each other. (Matthew Daddario’s nuanced portrayal of Alec is already a highlight, his shy interactions with Magnus rendered all the more touching when compared to his regular, tightly controlled persona.)
Occupying a similar Popcorn Feelings niche to Shadowhunters is MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles, adapted from Terry Brooks’ series of (roughly) the same name. Not having read the books, I’m on slightly shakier ground in assessing the validity of the adaptation, but while I’m enjoying it thus far, albeit with reservations, it’s hard not to compare its comparative lack of diversity with Shadowhunters’ abundance of same. Not only is Shannara predominantly white—despite, as others have pointed out, being set in a far-future version of America’s Pacific Northwest—but I’m yet to see so much as a glimmer of deliberate queerness. Deliberate being the operative word: because while we’re clearly meant to view the relationship between half-elf Wil Ohmsford, elven princess Amberle Elessedil, and human rover Eretria as a traditional love triangle, the women behaving antagonistically towards one another while expressing mutual interest in the young hero, the chemistry between Amberle and Eretria far outweighs anything that either of them has with Wil. (Their ship name, for the curious, is Princess Rover. And yes, there is fanfiction; overwhelmingly more for the two of them, in fact, than for any other pairing on the show.)
It’s the kind of thing which almost makes me want to read the original Brooks and see if their relationship reads the same on the page, or if it’s become more obvious in the transition to screen. Almost. But either way, I’m not holding my breath that we’re heading towards a canonically queer relationship: From what I know of the novels, it wouldn’t materially change the plot for Amberle and Eretria to end up together, and yet I can’t quite imagine it happening here. While I can think of a few instances in which characters who were straight in the source material are made queer in their adaptations—notably Tara, Pam and Eric in True Blood, a show which had multiple queer/magic dream sequences, but only sometimes translated them to queerness in waking—it’s not a common phenomenon, and especially not when the end result would potentially deny a main male character their happily ever after. (But god, would I love to be wrong!)
Which is ultimately the point, when it comes to adaptations: that slavish adherence to the source material can often mean a lack of diversity, particularly when the stories being adapted, like Shannara or Lord of the Rings, are products of a different time. By making a conscious choice to racebend certain characters, Shadowhunters has done something largely unprecedented in modern fantasy adaptations of any kind, but especially in those aimed at a YA audience: produced a show with a majority POC cast. It’s a striking change in some respects, and yet it doesn’t violate the spirit of the original story or undermine its themes, because none of those things were race-dependent in the first place. Instead, it gives us a new, more expansive interpretation of the source material by telling the same story about a wider range of people, simply because it can. Whereas The Shannara Chronicles, having created something unfathomably rare and wonderful right off the bat—a relationship between two female characters so complex, engaging and chemistry-fuelled as to have not only produced a femslash ship, but one more instantly popular than any canonical straight pairing, and oh my god, do you even know how rare that is?—is going to ignore it in favour of a heteronormative love triangle, because Tradition.
The very best adaptations aren’t carbon copies, but intelligent variations on a theme. They make changes to the source material, not because they fail to respect or understand it, but precisely because they do. You can’t make a coherent judgement about what matters to a story—what it fundamentally is—without, in some sense, interpreting it anew, and that means putting your money where your mouth is. The diversity of Shadowhunters reflects the fact that it’s set in present-day New York, a city famed only for its whiteness in contexts where storytellers have made a conscious decision to ignore reality; the lack of diversity in The Shannara Chronicles, no matter how true to the source material, is a failure to imagine how our multicultural present could lead to such an overwhelmingly white future.
By their very nature, adaptations are always at chronological variance with their source material: The world moves on, the audience shifts, and our understanding of stories—both culturally and personally—changes. That being so, if we really want to create a golden age of SFF adaptations, we have to acknowledge the truth: that golden ages are defined, not by how successfully they imitate what came before, but by how splendidly they transform it.
Next time: a list of adaptations I’d love to see, and why I think they’d work.
Foz Meadows is a bipedal mammal with delusions of immortality. Her epic portal fantasy, An Accident of Stars, is due for release from Angry Robot in August 2016. As well as being the author of two YA novels, Solace and Grief and The Key to Starveldt, she reviews for Strange Horizons, and is a contributing writer for The Huffington Post and Black Gate. Her writing has also appeared at The Mary Sue and The Book Smugglers, and in 2014, she was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. She like cheese, geekery, writing, webcomics and general weirdness. Dislikes include Hollywood rom-coms, licorice and waking up.
I want my high-budget Mistborn film trilogy.
I was just thinking yesterday about how unusual the original Star Trek was back in its day for building on concepts from the prose science fiction of the day and hiring actual SF writers (e.g. Sohl, Sturgeon, Spinrad, Bloch, Ellison, plus Niven in the animated series) to contribute episodes. I was thinking how rare that has been in later SF shows, including later Trek shows, and wishing that the new Trek series now being developed by Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman would incorporate the same SF literacy, bringing the concepts of the past half-century of prose SF to the screen. But then I realized that there is now a trend to adapt novels directly to the screen. There was a fumbled attempt with FlashForward a few years ago. We currently have The Expanse and The Magicians on Syfy. And there are the fantasy shows you talk about here, though I’d certainly like to see more SF to balance them out.
I don’t agree that 24 deserves credit for introducing the seasonal-arc narrative structure. It took it to a more completely serialized degree than before, probably, but I think it was Babylon 5 that pioneered the idea of treating each season of a series as a complete story arc with a beginning and ending. Even though the individual installments were episodic — with a single plot arc introduced and resolved in a single episode, rather than having fragments of four or five parallel plots like in fully serialized shows — they added up to a continuous whole that came to a climax in the season finale. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other Joss Whedon shows deserve credit for introducing (or at least normalizing) the trope of the seasonal “Big Bad” (a term coined by Buffy), an archvillain that an entire season is devoted to battling and that gives way in the next season to a different Big Bad.
Somewhat surprisingly, the earliest American SFTV show I’m aware of to have serial elements is the 1978 Battlestar Galactica, and its ill-conceived sequel Galactica 1980. In both shows, there’s a surprising amount of arc progression and continuity from one installment to the next, although it’s diluted in BSG’s case by the network-mandated insertion of a bunch of standalone episodes in between the more arc-driven 2-parters in the first half of the season. Even the mind-numbingly stupid Galactica 1980 has a surprisingly serialized narrative structure and a loose story arc that reaches a resolution of sorts by the end of the season. And this seems to have been right at the beginning of the rise of serialized prime-time soap operas, with BSG premiering in the same year as Dallas. (Come to think of it, the 1984 V: The Series was also rather serialized and soapy.)
A few factual nitpicks and clarifications:
The 2008 Incredible Hulk didn’t just change the actors from Ang Lee’s Hulk, but the continuity as well; the two give Banner different origin stories for his transformation, with the 2008 Hulk’s origin implicitly linked to the supersoldier program that created Captain America (even though the Cap movie was still years in the future).
“Not that the X-Men films exist in the same timeline as the rest of the MCU…”: The X-Men films are not in the MCU at all. That term refers specifically to the continuity of the films and shows produced by Marvel Studios. It doesn’t encompass Marvel films from other studios, such as Fox’s X-Men and Fantastic Four films, or Sony’s previous Spider-Man films (although future Spidey films from Sony will be in the MCU because of the deal the studios have struck).
Your list of MCU TV shows leaves out the fourth Netflix series, Iron Fist, which is currently casting. Also, the plan is to combine the four Netflix heroes in a miniseries called The Defenders, by analogy with how the solo movie heroes teamed up in The Avengers.
Has Gotham been well-received by critics and fans? Most of the critical commentary I see on Gotham ranges from “entertaining train wreck” to “What the hell were they thinking?”
The recent DC boom has also included Vertigo-based properties like the short-lived Constantine (which has been retroactively folded into the Arrowverse) and the current iZombie on The CW and Lucifer on FOX, although both of those last two are only tenuously based on their source comics.
I feel “television” isn’t even the best term anymore…would you call a Netflix, or Amazon produced show a TV show? Sure, you technically watch them on a TV, but that’s just cause most people don’t have movie screens in their homes. And you watch “movies” at home too, on a TV. The difference is serialization. Semantics, maybe, but despite the evidence, there is still a lingering perception that “movies” are somehow the superior medium. Despite the mountains of evidence that this is bullshit.
If we can do away with that prejudice, it will be to the benefit of fantasy adaptations. Serialization allows room for the sort of world-building that is an integral part of so many fantasy stories. @@@@@ 1: Mistborn is a great example. Do you want the novels crammed into 3 movies, with all the necessary compromises? Or do you want each novel to be a season of serialized episodes, produced with the quality of, say, “Jessica Jones” or GOT? My vote is for serialization (I’ll mention here also how great a relief it is that American Gods will be a series, and not a hacked up mess of a movie or two).
of course, much still depends on the legal issues of rights ownership. for example, i’m not sure who currently has the film rights for Earthsea, but if they are back with LeGuin, is there any possibility she’d let anyone else touch it after the travesty the SyFy channel made of her work? A series based on her Hainish cycle, following the travels of members of the Ekumen, would be astounding in the right hands, or a complete disaster in the wrong. Again, would past experience prevent something like this from ever happening? There are so many classic works that have their rights owned by hacks and bastards, because of the past stigma against sci-fi & fantasy. It would be nice if those rights could be liberated and sold to the sort of people who are making fantastic shows these days.
The word “television” refers to the medium, not the device. The full name of the device, which is hardly used anymore, is “television set” — i.e. a set (apparatus with several components) that receives and displays television signals. Television (Greek for “far sight”) refers to the transmission of moving images over a distance. The term has always been used to cover a variety of different means of delivering those images — broadcast television, closed-circuit television, cable television, satellite television. So it’s perfectly valid to refer to the transmission of moving images over the Internet as television as well. Heck, cable TV is all digital and computerized these days. The cable box/DVR you use to watch TV — or your smart TV, if you have one — is essentially a computer specialized for the purpose of displaying programs delivered to it in digital form. So it’s hardly any different from watching TV on Netflix or Amazon.
I think you’ll probably appreciate Shannara 90210’s deviation from the source Elfstones of Shannara since Eretria’s catchphrase was “I am for you Wil Olmsford” They would have to completely change the ending to have a legend of Korra style walk in the sunset ending due to what must be done to resurrect the Ellcrys plus Wil and Eretria’s Children are the protagonists for “Elfsong of…”
Shannarra 90210 is what I’d expect from MTV. It’s OK, full of pretty 20 somethings, and I really like Manu Bennet who made even the Hobbit films tolerable.
I WANT MY WHEEL OF TIME ADAPTATION, DANGIT
@6: “Eretria’s catchphrase was “I am for you Wil Olmsford””
Is she a Kalandan hologram…?
Here, here. I’ve wondered for a long time why other shows (including later Trek series) have not followed that model, which I think tends offer a richer conception of the possibilities of science fiction. We’ve had things like the occassional Neil Gaiman episode on Babylon 5 and Doctor Who, but the pool of talented SF writers has not been plumbed. A few years back at a panel with the Doctor Who show runners, it was clear that they were looking mainly to film for their influences and that they did not appreciate the depth of ideas and stories that have been explored throughout the history of SF literature. I’m guessing this is a common gap in the business, which is not helped by the generally low placement of writers in the Hollywood hierarchy.
@1. I would kill for a Mistborn series. I love those books.
@6. Manu Bennet should be in everything. He is immensely entertaining to watch. Arrow hasn’t been nearly as fun since he left, even though they still have John Barrowman.
@7. YES! PLEASE GIVE US WOT!!!!!
In music, for variations to have meaning, there must be an underlying theme. The composer must be able to pull the essence of the theme into the variations. Otherwise you’ve just got a bunch of random sections.
Similarly, for the television (or movie, or streaming, or whatever) variation to work, the writers/showrunners must understand the original theme (source).
In large part, it’s because modern TV writing is so much more staff-driven. In the time of ST:TOS, a show’s writing staff would be basically just a producer or two and the script editor, with most of the writing being done by freelancers. So there was plenty of room for outside writers to contribute, including writers who didn’t primarily work in TV. But these days, just about every show has a large “writers’ room” of writer-producers who work together to develop the whole season of a show. So most of the creativity comes from career TV writing staffers, and there’s less of an opportunity for freelancers or prose authors to get involved. These days, when you see a novelist involved with a show, it’s often as a consultant or executive producer on a show based on their own work. John Scalzi was listed as a “creative consultant” on Stargate Universe (he was mainly a science consultant, which is why SGU had the most plausible science in the franchise), but didn’t get around to writing a script for them (although I think it was discussed). Sometimes novelists do write the occasional episode of shows based on their work; Robert J. Sawyer wrote an episode of FlashForward (even though the show was hugely different from his book), and Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck (the authors who write the Expanse novels under the pen name James S.A. Corey) wrote one episode of The Expanse. But novel adaptations aside, generally the only novelists who work extensively in TV are the ones who are also experienced TV writer-producers.
It’s really only in feature films that writers are powerless. TV is much more of a writer-driven medium, with writer-producers generally being at the top of the industry. Look at all the powerful big-name producers who were originally writers — Joss Whedon, Shonda Rhimes, J.J. Abrams, Greg Berlanti, Liz Friedman, etc. Writers rule the roost in TV, but they got there by being regular writing staffers and working nonstop to rise through the ranks. So there’s not a lot of room for novelists to get involved, unless it’s their own books that are being adapted.
@2, 9: Yes! That definitely made for a greater variety of stories, and many of them were really good. Why isn’t this done any more? Because SF writers are too expensive? Because they tend to get pissed when their stories are rewritten?
@@@@@ CLB – Television isn’t Greek for “far sight”. “Tele” is Greek for “far”; “vision” is from the Latin for “sight”. Television is a classic (pun intended) example of hybrid etymology.
@13/Jana: See comment #12.
@2 — Star Trek’s use of prose science fiction authors was a great idea for finding stories, and I agree modern television should revive it, but it wasn’t that unusual for the time. Twilight Zone and Outer Limits had already done it quite a bit, using stories and scripts by Bradbury, Matheson, Ellison, and the like. Plus radio shows like X Minus One and Dimension X had adapted sci-fi stories in the 1950’s. X Minus One even proudly name-checked the publisher in its opening:
I’ve enjoyed seeing adaptations of fantasy IPs become more popular. I like SF, but it doesn’t have the same kind of attraction for me as a good fantasy story.
I disagree with the writer that transformation of the material is necessary in most cases. If the point of a show is to tell the main story of a series, staying close to the author’s material is going to help, not hurt. Some changes are necessary to present the story in a different medium. The writer rightly points out the importance of setting in fantasy stories, but then goes on to describe how changing the characters to conform to the political views of some audience members is a positive influence. When a series like Game of Thrones veers too far from the source material, it’s easy to tell because the writing is not as good, the characters are less consistent, and the setting loses depth.
If the goal of the series is to create an open-ended adventure that plays in the world rather than telling the canon story, larger changes are easier to stomach.
If someone slavishy adapted Wizard of Earthsea it’d be MORE diverse than all the adaptations of that story done so far (I’m looking at you, TV show and anime).
What I miss are the original fantasy stories made for TV and cinema. Why aren’t there any more Xena or Dragonheart out there? Why must it come from a book or comic book first?
I won’t complain about western animation, though. In the last 10 years, it produced one of the best original fantasy stories out there (Avatar: the last airbender and Avatar: the legend of Korra).
@18 Ryamano
In my experience, original stories aren’t nearly as deep and well-plotted as stories taken from published work in other media. Television writing in general seems to suffer from writers who can’t stay focused on a pre-designed arc or deliver a satisfying ending. Lost and Battlestar Galactica aren’t really fantasy, but they’re good recent examples of these problems.
no no no no no. Sigh. You do not transform them you stay true to the books in spirit AND in form. Shanarra is bad as it takes retcons from the authors later works and uses them to inform how it creates a visual version of the first books. This should not be done. The changes in the later seasons of Game of Thrones are more examples of how not to do it … sigh. Adaptation goes to changes you have to make to put it in a new medium – but they should be kept to the bare minimum in sci-fi and in Shakespeare. Sigh…
and yes get off my lawn ….
@16/Sketchy: Yes, but those were all anthologies. For a continuing series to draw so heavily on prose authors was unusual then, and it’s become even more unusual since.
@17/Halien: Acknowledging human diversity is not “political,” it’s just admitting reality. What’s political is pretending that humanity is overwhelmingly white or exclusively heterosexual. That’s a willful denial of everyday reality, and the only reason to do it is a political agenda. If you portray the human population in an informed and unbiased way, you get an ethnically and sexually diverse population, because that’s just the way it is in real life.
And the whole point of adaptation is change. That’s what the word “adapt” means — to change something to be a better fit for the demands of a new context or environment. There’s no point in just slavishly copying the original story, because the original story already exists. The value of adaptations is that they let you bring something new to the work, approach it from a fresh angle and thereby complement the original rather than just copying it.
Sure, some unfaithful adaptations are bad, but that’s just Sturgeon’s Law — 90 percent of everything is garbage. Sometimes a massively changed version of a story can be terrific in its own right and beloved by fans of the original — the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk TV series, for instance. Heck, Philip K. Dick said he liked Blade Runner better than his own novel that it was very loosely based on.
No, the screen relationship between Amberle and Eretria didn’t exist in the book. In fact, there’s a lot in the TV series that didn’t exist in the book. Clearly the plot has been reworked to be more cinematic; it’s heading vaguely the same direction as in the book, but staggering around in drugged circles on the way there. To some extent, extra material was needed in order to get enough screen time to know the characters in enough depth to carry the weight of later plot events, where in the original novel, the prose does the work of painting the personalities. The problem is that the new material often ends up not fitting very well with the original material, and the characters end up substantially different as a result. Time will tell whether these altered characters can pull off the dramatic ending that was so beautifully done in the original book, or whether that will be rewritten as well.
Y’know what other 1970s SF show had episodes written by actual SF writers? Land of the Lost!
I remember reading a theory somewhere that the two main female characters (Brin Ohmsford and Kimber Boh) in the next Shannara book (ergo next season) become the real couple at the end as their chemistry/bonding was so much better than Brin’s was with her ‘love interest’ Rone Leah. Their having descendants is not a problem as it is theorised that Brin’s reality bending magic would be capable of changing her gender long enough to do the necessary. That would be an interesting adaption.
I read on a forum lately about the predictable cliches in the first episode that made The Shannara Chronicles unwatchable (from someone who had not read the books), what was interesting was that the cliches they pointed out were all additions to the adaption not present in the books.
I thought the Shadow Hunters broadcast on the Freeform/ABC Family channel. I haven’t looked to see what’s new on Netflix in around a month.
@23: Land of the Lost (the 70s show) rocked.
@@.-@: the point i was so poorly making is that, yeah, sure, the medium is called television (though named after the device). but there is a lingering stigma attached. not nearly so pronounced now as it once was. but having a tv show is still sometimes viewed as a second tier, or consolation prize. movie trumps tv insofar as “making it” goes. the serialized format, however, is more often superior for telling epic fantasy tales, as it does not have to compromise as much on world building. divorcing the serialized format from the name “television show” might speed the demise of that second class status that quality TV has been steadily chipping away at.
Writing for radio serials — Superman, Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke — was much more outsider writers than staff writers. Roddenberry didn’t invent the model at all.
Harry Potter and LOTR movies broke the perception Hollywood was stuck on, that fantasy failed on film. With this revelation they attempted cookie-cutter repeat success using other popular novels – using all the same mistakes as before HP and LOTR, so of course failing again. The trick is not to put some grandiose escapist go-go-go action adventure spin on it; the trick is to make the fantasy real. Make the people in it real, the people caught in those realities, who would probably just as much like to escape their own given half a chance. I’m again disappointed with the Elfstones adaptation. So much striving to add complexities and layers to what was a beautifully simple and elegant story that thrived on inner turmoil more than spectacle – thus the changes. The Pykon episode was so mishandled, I’m done.
@27/twiff: “yeah, sure, the medium is called television (though named after the device)”
No, the device is named after the medium. As I said, the full name of the device is “television set” or “television receiver.” We call it a “television” as a shorthand in the same way we refer to a microwave oven as a “microwave,” or a radio tuner as a “radio,” or a cellular telephone as a “cell.” But the shorthand has been universally used for so long that a generation or more has grown up not realizing that “television” was not the full name of the device. And so they make the mistake of assuming the medium was named for the device, when in fact it was the other way around. Which is why it’s better to look things up than just to assume things.
@28/Ross: Of course Roddenberry didn’t invent the model — I never suggested anything of the sort. What I said was, “In the time of ST:TOS, a show’s writing staff would be basically just a producer or two and the script editor, with most of the writing being done by freelancers.” A show. Not the show. I was clearly describing a practice that was commonplace in television at the time, not something specific to any one show.
@27: i stand corrected. and though advised not to assume and to look things up (hey, it’s the internet after all), i will have to assume my argument that the serialized nature of television programs is often superior to movies for the telling of fantasy stories, yet still suffers from a lingering second class status, is vastly less interesting than my knowledge gaps.
i’d rather your thoughts on the pros and cons of tv vs. movie and whether you feel there is merit to the idea of a stigma still clinging to tv shows. as well as what to do about that. instead of focusing on my failure to properly use google when dashing off replies during breaks at work.
if there is no merit to my musings, then fine. i’d rather be called a dumbass on that account than have the focus be why the medium is called television and why i didn’t know that.
@31/twiff: I don’t think there’s a stigma against TV anymore. A lot of big-name talents in the movie industry are glad to work in TV; a lot of big-name directors and producers in movies today came from TV, like Whedon and Abrams. It’s widely recognized that TV is classy and prestigious and capable of smart, sophisticated storytelling. Pretty much the only advantage movies still have is budget, the ability to go far bigger than TV can.
For that matter, look at the leading trend in movies today: Serialization. Building ongoing continuities consisting of multiple installments that form a continuing series. In other words, movies today are emulating the format of series television. So I’d say TV is leading and movies are following.
I think the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies provide a good example of both good and bad adaptions. For the most part, I think the Lord of the Rings adaptation is a pretty good one in terms of the changes needed to come to a new medium, as well as expanding on a few things/fleshing things out that we didn’t get to see in the book. But for the most part, kept true to the general theme, spirit and feel of the books (Faramir being the huge exception that I can’t accept). The Hobbit movies on the other hand – while they started out strong, and I really liked the idea of ‘re-imagining’ it as a LotR prequel and telling it from that perspective (and they also DID do a better job of adding some more diversity to the cast), the last two movies went so ridiculously off the rails regarding just making it about spectacle and visuals and overwhelming so many of the quiet character moments and heart of the story that to me, at least, made it enjoyable. (I don’t actually read – or watch – fantasy for the battle scenes).
@21 ChristopherLBennett
I think it’s more important for an adaptation to reflect the source material instead of trying to make it look like modern-day America. Some fantasies take place in worlds where we see people with a wide variety of features and appearances. In those places, it makes sense to represent the variety in an adaptation. But if we’re talking about a story that takes place in a smaller part of a world, or a place where all the ethnic groups we see on Earth aren’t represented, it’s perfectly fine to represent the work the way it was written.
Changing the ethnicity and sexuality of characters that weren’t written that way serves little purpose, except distancing the adaptation from the original. The authors intended their characters to be the people described and gave them the characteristics they wanted.
@34/Halien: “I think it’s more important for an adaptation to reflect the source material instead of trying to make it look like modern-day America.”
If it’s a period piece, maybe — although the America of the past was a lot more diverse in actuality than the fiction of the time tended to reflect. But if it’s an adaptation set in modern times, it just makes sense to update it. If you were writing a Superman movie set in 2016, it would make sense to have cell phones instead of phone booths, digital cameras instead of cumbersome film cameras with single-use flash bulbs, the Internet instead of corner newsstands, etc. — and since Metropolis is meant to be an idealized New York City, it would only make sense to portray its population as being equal in diversity to modern NYC, for the same reason, because it isn’t a period piece.
Besides, the whole point of adapting a pre-existing work is to introduce it to a new audience. Fans of the original form of a work keep insisting that any adaptation should be targeted exclusively to them, but that’s selfish and shortsighted. They’re already fans of the property. They don’t need to be won over. Creating a new version in a new medium is about attracting new fans. And that means taking the concept and making it relevant to a different audience. I have no patience for selfish fans who think a work should never be changed or broadened in its appeal, that it should just pander exclusively to them and what they’re used to. That’s incredibly egocentric and unfair. You already have a version of the work that you love. What the hell gives you the right to begrudge different people the opportunity to have a version that they can love too?
“But if we’re talking about a story that takes place in a smaller part of a world, or a place where all the ethnic groups we see on Earth aren’t represented, it’s perfectly fine to represent the work the way it was written.”
Which is not really the case with a lot of works of fiction, because they were written at times when writers were forced to exclude racial, religious, or sexual minorities that actually were part of the real-world population in that place and time. Most of the great creators of superhero comics in the ’40s and ’60s were the sons of Jewish immigrants, but they weren’t allowed to portray Jewish characters openly and had to subtly code their characters as outsiders (Superman is an alien immigrant, the Thing and the Hulk are persecuted for their appearance, etc.). Even to this day, movies and shows set in major cities tend to grossly misrepresent their racial diversity — for instance, the movie Limitless is set in New York City, which has a nonwhite majority, and yet its cast is almost exclusively white. Ditto Dawn of the Planet of the Apes vis-a-vis San Francisco. Even Big Hero 6, which purported to show an alternate-history version of San Francisco with a stronger Japanese influence, had a cast with a slightly lower percentage of Asians than the real San Francisco.
So the pretense that the all-white works of fiction you’re so keen on preserving actually represent the reality of the time is a total lie. They represented the racism of the time. There’s a lot of stuff in older works that isn’t worth preserving.
@35 ChristopherLBennett
My remarks about adaptations and the physical, ethnic, and social characteristics of characters were specifically about fantasy IPs, not comic books or other works that are set in our world. Obviously, it makes sense that a show set in New York City would portray the population of the city close to the way it appears in real life. But I’m talking about wholly invented places and peoples, and for me, trying to make them conform to modern day America is what doesn’t fit.
I’m not sure why you feel the need to put words in my mouth, because I never said anything of this sort. I never addressed historical fiction or works set in our own world.
@36/Halien: It’s still a bogus argument, because fictional characters — especially fantasy characters — aren’t real, they’re constructs created for the enjoyment of the audience. And today’s audience is diverse, is comfortable with diversity, and wants to see that diversity represented in their fiction. Stories built around the pretense that only white people are worth writing about are no longer satisfactory for the millennial audience. Heck, they’ve never been satisfactory for a lot of people, myself included, but it’s reached sufficient critical mass now that the media are finally starting to catch up. The change in representation isn’t arbitrary, it’s a response to the wishes of the audience. As I said, adaptations are not about slavishly adhering to the original. “Adapt” means “change.” It means modifying a work to appeal to a new audience, to keep it relevant and fresh with the passage of time. If the audience changes, if their preferences change, then fiction needs to change to keep up.
It’s worth pointing out that Shannara (mentioned in the article) is both set in our world and is a fantasy realm with different races. There are implications of all the vanilla humans being white, given the history of the world’s history, and they aren’t particularly pleasant. Far better, in my opinion, to make the humans more diverse in order to avoid those implications. Just because Brooks put white characters in by default or unthinkingly doesn’t mean the show’s creators should do the same. And it’d be nice if casting were done on merit rather than skin colour, eh?
The problem isn’t necessarily that stories are all white or all male or all straight but that they don’t treat those situations as artificial. Homogeneity does arise without cause. In some cases, it could be reasonably ordinary barriers to travel; in other cases it could be explicit and deliberate exclusion. Authors and creators should recognize this and deal with it in their world building. If they didn’t, then people adapting their work should.
If the lack of diversity regarding race and sexual orientation is what stands out to you as weaknesses of the show when watching that Shannara adaptation, you are waaaaaaaaaay forgiving.
Someting else in CLB’s post made me think: I think the idea of who an adaptation is for is a bit subjective and I’m not sure there’s a right/wrong answer to that. I’m not talking about attempts to make the world more diverse or nuanced, as I generally approve of that, and I think there are ways to do that without completely altering the spirit of the work (for example, despite my misgivings initially, I think they did a decent job of that with adding Tauriel in the Hobbit movies as a fleshed out character, with the exception of the overblown romance plot which I just didn’t find believable and did play into some of my misgivings).
But I tend to take the opposite view on adaptations in that they should first be for the fans (who are the ones that loved and made the work popular in the first place) and respect the author’s general intent/theme. I think it’s a bit over the top to call that idea selfish, arrogant, egotistical, etc. In fact, I somewhat feel that way of people who want adaptations of works to go in a different direction (although I wouldn’t use such strong words about it); I feel like there are usually already other works that go in those directions (or they can create new ones), but if I’m drawn to a particular work for a particular reason, I don’t want to just see it become like other works and feel like I no longer get to partake with the same amount of enjoyment. Yes, there are the original works, but it’s not quite the same, and after a while it can feel like you’ve been pushed out of whatever the ‘current’ fandom is. Now, if it’s the type of thing where lots of different versions exist (comic books, or even the various Star Trek series which all have different feels to them), or something like a fairy tale/myth where retellings are common and expected; it’s not really such a big deal if you don’t care for one of them. And there’s a difference between reboots, adaptations, sequels, alternate versions, retellings, etc
Again, I’m not taking about changes in representation/diversity, or even cutting/adding/changing things, compressing plots/characters, adding a different perspective, etc. I mean more drastically changing the tone/themes of the work or drastically changing characters’ motivations. For example, changining the Hobbit (I just watched the EE so it’s fresh in my mind) into a really gory, R-rated adventure movie, which isn’t really what most fans of the book are after. Sure, I guess it appeals to action movie fans, but there are plenty of other action movies out there. This doesn’t mean I want to see a literal retelling of the book (and I enjoyed many of the other changes) but in my mind it wasn’t a great adaptation and they tried to appeal to too broad a a base, and it lost what made it unique. Of course the book is out there, but it’s still fun to get to see a movie with all the music, visuals, etc that entails.
@40/Lisamarie: “But I tend to take the opposite view on adaptations in that they should first be for the fans (who are the ones that loved and made the work popular in the first place) and respect the author’s general intent/theme. I think it’s a bit over the top to call that idea selfish, arrogant, egotistical, etc.”
That’s not what I’m saying. Of course a good adaptation captures the essence that made the original fanbase love it, but it also needs to appeal to a new audience as well. The goal is to do both. And lots of successful adaptations have done both, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Animated Universe, the Harry Potter films, etc. What I object to is the attitude that an adaptation should pander exclusively to the people who are fans already and should avoid doing anything different or new that might make the work appealing to anyone beyond the pre-existing fanbase. It’s that insularity and exclusionism that I find objectionable. Fandom should be about sharing the things we love, inviting more people to come and join us in the tent. Too many fans today seem to think it’s about being elitist, closing themselves up in little clubhouses and priding themselves on keeping everyone else out. But it would be fatal for the makers of the works themselves to have such an exclusionistic attitude, because existing fanbases inevitably dwindle and suffer attrition. For a franchise to endure, it needs to invite more people in, not make them feel unwelcome.
As for your Hobbit example, of course there are instances where a revisionist take doesn’t work, but that’s not a condemnation of all revisionism, any more than the existence of Catwoman is a condemnation of all female-led superhero movies or the existence of a corrupt judge is a condemnation of all judges. The failings of a specific thing should be held against the thing itself, not generalized to the entire category it belongs to.
Oh, I can agree with you on that – I dislike ‘true fan’ posturing and am generally happy to let lots of people in. I’m just saying if it is going to lean one way or the other, that is the way I’d lean – but certainly not to the point of being completely exclusionary about it.
@37 ChristopherLBennett
Obviously, you and I value different things in fiction, and that’s fine. I don’t find it a bogus argument to want the things that make fantasy interesting and attractive to me to be preserved when it’s adapted to another medium. I like these stories because I enjoy the care and thought the author has put into making the world and the characters the way they wanted them to be. I’m not sure the story is still the story if too much of it is lost or changed to meet expectations that have nothing to do with the work itself.
It’s not at all selfish or egotistical to want to see on screen what attracted me in the first place to whatever IP is being portrayed. The existing fans are the ones who took a chance on a story, loved it, recommended it to their friends, chatted with strangers on the internet about it. They’re a key part of the success of a story. But I think there’s a real line between fans of fiction and fans of television. When I read a book, it’s a work created on the author’s terms, an experience for me to have. Modern TV audiences seem to think that they should have input into the creation of a work and that creates tension between the medium a book comes from and the one it’s being adapted for. I want to see what made the work successful in the first place, not an echo of it that may have been tailored so much it no longer reflects the original.
Oh the Eragon movie adaptation. I so wanted it to be good but I knew going in it just wasnt going to happen. Too many things were ‘off’ in the previews. I distinctly remember reading a review or a story about the release and there was a note that a kid (who was a major fan of the books) was so distraught and crying when he left the theatre because they took something so amazing and just gutted it of all the good and wholesome stuff that made the book special.
Sad :-(
“Not having read the books…”
All right. We’re done here.
Why do you say Shadowhunters is a Netflix series? It is on ABC Family now called Freeform. Also, I can’t believe you didn’t even reference Outlander which is a much better adaption of a book series than Game of Thrones. It should have at least garnered a mention if not a “Well done!”
@43/Halien: “Obviously, you and I value different things in fiction, and that’s fine.”
It’s not about either you or me. It’s about recognizing that people making a screen adaptation that needs millions of viewers in order to succeed are not going to base their decisions on any one person’s preferences. It should be self-evident that they need to draw as large an audience as possible, and that means appealing to both the pre-existing fans and the newcomers. The pre-existing fanbase is never going to be remotely large enough to make a movie or TV show profitable on its own. Look at comic-book movies. A successful comic book will have maybe tens of thousands of readers. A blockbuster movie needs nearly the square of that number of ticket buyers. The pre-existing comics fanbase is statistically irrelevant in terms of ticket sales; they’re influential mainly as tastemakers, whose approval or disapproval online can influence the broader public’s perceptions of a movie. But the movie still has to appeal first and foremost to the general audience. My recognition of that fact has nothing to do with my personal preferences; it’s simply common sense.
And as I already said, I’m not saying it’s selfish or egotistical to have personal preferences; I’m objecting to the attitude that it’s wrong for other people to have their tastes catered to as well. As I said, those aren’t oppositional goals; a successful adaptation appeals to both old and new fans, capturing the best of the original while adding something new.
On the general issue of fidelity in adaptations: Shakespeare didn’t give a crap about accuracy, he wrote for his audience. MacBeth and Richard III were not the evil bastards he made them out to be, and ancient Romans didn’t have bookbinding or clocks. We’re still reading him, performing him, and adapting him five hundred years later.
@2/ChristopherLBennett:
You have to go back a bit farther than Babylon 5, since Straczynski was consciously emulating the longer-form serials of British TV SF like Doctor Who and Blake’s 7. Although arguably primetime soaps like Dallas and Dynasty have as much to do with it.
been watching the shannara chronicles , and while it`s good tv , it`s not the elfstones of shannara ! it`s elfstones of shannara meets a crappy teen love story ! we need screenwriters who are smart enough to know when to leave well enough alone ! personally I wouild love to see an adaptation of robert jordans wheel of time , but I also hope it never happens ! it`s been 24 years since coppala destroyed bram stokers dracula , and I have`nt fully recovered from that !
Just to clarify the Shadowhunters issue–Netflix acquired the global rights to the show outside of the U.S. The author of this post, who is based outside of the U.S., is watching the show via Netflix. As always, there’s no reason to be rude or dismissive when discussing these matters, or any other aspect of the article or comments.
@48/joeinformatico: Yes, those shows were serialized, but what I said was that Babylon 5 pioneered the specific model of serialization in which each season tells its own distinct story with a beginning, middle, and end. Prior serials obviously did exist, but they told pretty much continuous stories rather than treating each season as a distinct “volume.” And Doctor Who‘s serial arcs were typically 4-6 episodes in length, rather than contiguous with entire broadcast seasons.
I second this:
An adaptation of the Elfstones of Shannara would have been great, this transformation is barely better than Sixteen and pregnant.
Also introducing diversity themes in real world settings can be useful, but in fantasy settings it usually just confuses the audience, since racial/sexual themes are better served by the in-world racial/sexual conflicts that were originally wrotten for that purpose (eg: elves vs gnomes takes the place of white vs black).
There’s the matter of what happens when an adapted version of a book comes to overwhelm the original material in the public’s affection, the best example of which is arguably THE WIZARD OF OZ. For most of the world, OZ as transmogrified into a 1930s MGM musical, with much of Baum’s literary aesthetic jettisoned, is the version that’s taken hold of the world’s imagination.
In 1985 Disney released RETURN TO OZ, which was much more faithfully based on Baum’s original novels, in terms of characterization, plot and setting (the wonderfully proto-steampunk 1910 ‘s of the novels’ original illustrations). The result was that it overjoyed a few thousand hardcore Baum Oz fans, and led to widespread bewilderment and rejection by the vast majority of moviegoers, ending up in being a huge flop and major loss for Disney (I remember seeing it in a theater with maybe a dozen others in the audience).
In response to everything that’s been said about representation and adaptations not needing to be “political”:
As I believe someone else mentioned, they are inherently political by being works of fiction published in a cultural and social context. If all of the characters in a book or series of books are white (or implied to be) that is a political act. In many cases it might be the relic of a prior time, but what is the value of ‘accurately’ adapting that kind of racism and exclusion?
Not to mention that when we’re talking about fantasy, we’re talking about fictional worlds here (obviously that’s not true for urban fantasy/superhero movies, but that’s been covered int he comments above). Why exactly are the characters in all of these fictional worlds white? Why is it that in a world that has magic and dragons and elves we only have white people? The only actual explanation for that kind of thing is the racism of a prior age, and again, what is the value of staying true to that? And no, the argument that the fantasy world is modelled on “Europe/the past” doesn’t work, because, to quote Gus from Psych, “what, are you saying black people hadn’t been invented yet?” The past is a much more diverse place than fantasy likes to pretend, with all of its white characters. Not to mention that often the race of a character isn’t even given in a story, and the only reason they are assumed to be white is because it’s the default. For example, at no point in Harry Potter is it actually, explicitly said that he’s white, and the UK has a huge population of people of color. It’s seen as a political act to cast Harry (or Hermione, as seen by the recent uproar over the play casting) as a person of color, but it’s an equally political act to make them white when that’s not specified by the story.
Moreover, I’m surprised no one has mentioned whitewashing. For all of the complaining about “making white characters black” (or making characters of unspecified race not white), it should be noted that it’s much more common for characters of color to be turned into white people on the screen. Katniss Everdeen is a case in point. In the stories she has dark hair and “olive colored skin.” In the movies, she’s played by the whitest of white actresses, Jennifer Lawrence. In Arrow, Raz al-Ghul is played by….a white guy. Who speaks Arabic while his secret hideout is somewhere in Southern Asia.
In short, you’re already making a political statement by assuming that everyone should be white unless proven/stated otherwise, and one wonders, why are some fans so threatened by changing the race of the characters in a fantasy/fictional world anyway?
Serialization has been around for a while now, but it seems like it really took root as “the thing you just do” around the time the first season of Supernatural aired. I think some series would be better off returning to a less connected structure – Doctor Who being the big one; the classic episodes were more or less self-contained, with a few bare-bones season arcs like Key to Time and Trial of a Time Lord, but it just seems as if these days every series requires a season arc. Whether it’s the Medusa Cascade or the fumbling Hybrid storyline from the most recent season, they always feel shoehorned in, easily the weakest part of any post-revival season.
@@@@@ 55 – While I completely agree with most of what you say here, I do think the Harry Potter and Hermione Granger point is one that tends to be made by people outside the cultural context, i.e. people who aren’t British.
Yes, the UK has a very diverse population, and did in the nineties when the books are set and the earlier books were written. But the diversity tends to be centred in the big cities and, to a lesser extent, their suburbs. I went from outer London to a smaller city for university in the early 2000s and was freaked out by how white it was; people I met there from rural areas were freaked out by how diverse it was, including a girl who’d come from a Hampshire village where her family was the only non-white family. A large proportion of British ethnic diversity arises from 20th and 21st century immigration (though the 19th century and earlier were far more diverse than you’d think from the literature of the times) and is consequently focused around industrial centres.
For Harry and Hermione in particular, there are social cues. Both of them have incredibly white names, particularly Hermione. Surrey is to this day pretty white even by the standards of the Home Counties. Harry’s mother was a green-eyed redhead, and the Dursleys are white; if James Potter hadn’t been white and Harry had therefore been mixed race, it would be highly odd for the Dursleys never to comment on that when insulting him, particularly Marge who doesn’t know about the magic. Hermione states that both her parents are dentists – while now that would if anything suggest to me that her grandparents were immigrants from the Subcontinent, in the early nineties that basically meant white; possibly Jewish (and there is a religion/ethnicity that as a North-West Londoner I get weirded out by the absence of in British TV and literature) but the name doesn’t fit there – Granger is a name that came to England with the Normans, and Hermione you get either from Shakespeare or mythology, both of which are pretty white middle class name sources.
Admittedly JKR (or possibly the Dursleys) doesn’t get name cues right all the time; Petunia dismisses Harry as a “common” name with apparently no regard for the 8 kings of England who had variations on that name, a number beaten only by the Edwards. Admittedly Prince Harry hadn’t been born in 1981, so Petunia can be slightly excused there…
What I’m trying to say is that how we perceive a character in a book doesn’t just arise from what is explicitly said by the author or from our societal assumption of what “normal” is – there are other cues that we pick up on, and that can be missed when we read the literature of other societies. Even with the amount of US culture I’ve been exposed to in my life, I know I miss a large proportion of that sort of cue in US media because the culture isn’t one I’ve ever been truly immersed in.
I lasted 6 episodes of Shannara, having not read the books for a veeeery long time, before I just couldn’t take it any more.
I would absolutely LOVE to see an adaptation of Barbara Hambley’s “Time of the Dark” series. It has a really different take on “bad guys” (who happen to be intelligent ectoplasmic beings who use human bodies to pupate their offspring), but it also has a really excellent church vs state vs magic wielders storyline as well as one of the best fantasy wizards after Gandalf. It would lend its self superbly to serialisation for TV.