BALDUR'S GATE 3 🐾 Kira the Cat

Opinion Piece: Where Adaptation Original Content can fall flat or be seen as something creative

This is a personal opinion Essay. That means what follows will be all from my perspective and reflective of my tastes. Don’t like it? Fine. Because it’s just an opinion from one person.

So, now for the essay:

Adaptation Extension: Where it’s failed and where it’s succeeded and why.

There’s no avoiding it sometimes whenever a hot new intellectual property takes the world by storm and there is a clamoring to get it adapted into another form ASAP. Only there’s one problem: they don’t have enough material from the source to go for as long as they need it, which leaves those adapting it with one choice: time to make up their own stories. This used to happen a lot with manga-into-anime adaptations hastily commissioned after a manga sudden boomed into popularity with, usually, awful results. It’s happened with western materials from time to time as well. In this instance I will be comparing two cases where there was a very solid base but the speed of publishing and the speed of adaptation varied. One is the Fullmetal Alchemist series from 2003, and the other is the current HBO smash hit Game of Thrones. Both are adaptations of a source material that was still in progress when they started and both ended before their sources ever wrapped but and both changed and omitted things as they were forced to grow without the guidance of the source. Yet one of these will definitely be more fondly remembered by its fans than the other in the long run and that all comes down to the execution of the alterations to the adaptation and consistency of the characters within both.

Fullmetal Alchemist the manga ran in Square Enix’s Monthly Shōnen Gangan from around 2001-2010. This slow long run was partly due to it being a monthly manga, and therefore didn’t update as frequently as the weekly stories. It was popular enough that an anime was commissioned very shortly into its run. This anime, called Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 by those who are fans of the series, was very faithful at first. It was whenever they wanted to drag out the first act by a lot that they began to add filler and then would go back to the main story. Yet they diverged with a pivotal moment: the death of Maes Hughes. From then on out, the stories had the same characters in the same country but they could have not been in more different stories. The manga had a deeply analytical and dark political intrigue story with themes around power, knowledge, and humanity. The anime instead went almost faustian with its take on the world of Amestris and leaned into more supernatural elements and brought in the idea of other worlds and questions of what is means to be human, but not too deep into that. The plot with Dante and Hoenheim of Light is very faustian to my eyes, full of strange magic, regrets over a loved one dying because of their hubris, and the desire to have more power. Yet despite it being vastly different from the manga, whose ending was more coherent than the anime, that first anime is still looked at fondly. Yes, it deviated a lot and yes, it went down many strange rabbit holes before it was all through, but they kept the characters at the core of it all consistent. The Elric Brothers were still the Elric Brothers, their values were still the same and they still acted like themselves no matter what. It was also wildly creative with its new material in a way that was actually enjoyable as well to those who like harder science fiction stories.

Then there’s HBO’s Game of Thrones. This is a case where they had a lot of source material but they burned through it faster than GRR Martin was able to write the sixth book and came to the point with the end of season five where they now had to make their own way forwards without Martin’s expert storytelling guiding them. Season 6, as far as that was concerned, was actually somewhat competent. It had a lot of Season 5’s threads to draw from and help guide their hands but there were still several missteps that they made in the eyes of the fans in how that was all handled. Seasons 7 and 8 are by far where their lack of skill is most evident. Characters who were known as smart are suddenly losing several IQ points and making blunders in such ways that is seems out of character for them to be caught up so easily. Some of it is the fact that humans are fallible but the moves they had them make were not only questionable but at times, highly controversial. While FMA 2003 kept the tone and characters similar to its source, HBO’s GoT seems to now favor flash to substance. Spectacle to careful plotting. Nowhere is this more evident than with Episode 3 of Season 8. “The Battle of Winterfell.” Firstly, the battle plans themselves were asinine. That is NOT how you mount a castle defense. You lace the ground with traps and pits and shit and keep the troops WITHIN your walls and have your best archers manning the walls and several vats of flammable shit ready to go to dump down and make an undead inferno. Civilians in the crypts still but maybe with a few more armed people.

Elite soldiers are to act as the vanguard and those less experienced at fighting in the rear guard. More people should have been on Bran. Jon should have had Rhaegal PARKED on the walls next to the God’s Wood and Dany should have been in the air if they needed someone in the skies lighting stuff up. Also, actual targeting of the white walkers. Jon knew canonically that a walker’s death would spell the death of any wights it reanimated. Instead we get a barely visible (at times) spectacle that keeps your so tense you can’t notice how terrible this battle strategy is until later. Then there’s the twist they decided to put in as of their writing of season seven: Arya gets to kill the Night King. I’m not actually against this idea. It was just executed so poorly that it takes away any impact it might have had and because of her lack of role in later episodes, it just gave Arya a premature high-point to her character arc that cannot be matched by the rest of her arc (should one call it that) for season 8. Bran for all his prophesizing, is just a lump. He’s not even trying to do anything beyond those ravens his sends up once. The books are building up to a prophecy. The show mentioned it but in the end the show runners decided to shove it for a “gotcha” moment and make all the threads from the books they’d actually maintained through the prior seasons just fall loose and flat. They did their own thing and in this case they robbed characters of moments they maybe needed or should have had as character development. They also cut a lot out of the books as they burned through them, which meant characters were cut. In one instance they cut a somewhat important character and that is now biting them in their asses as they’ve seemingly grafted his plot lines onto two other characters: Jon Snow and Danaerys Targaryen.  It’s making both act somewhat out of character at times—Danaerys more than Jon—and making things just feel out of sync with the previous characterizations.

And that’s where FMA 2003 succeeds as having people still liking it despite its far meanderings away from the canon of the manga and people are disgusted with how far off course Game of Thrones is from A Song of Ice and Fire: Consistency of characterization with the intentioned situations, and an understanding of the world they are playing in. The show runners and writers for the HBO show seem to lack these things without a book telling them explicitly. The writers had an unenviable task of attempting to live up to GRR’s skill level and fell woefully short. By no means is all of Game of Thrones’s book free run awful: Season 6 is remarkably close to competent and parts of season 7 are alright, it’s whenever we get to the final season their strain and stretching can be seen on full display and compared to the tightly plotted first five seasons, it’s glaringly obvious they were not up the task of imitating Martin. He gave them a broad outline and the writers were unable to flesh it out as complexly as he will. It does mean a few things will happen as a result. One, people will now read Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring just to see how badly fracked the show-runners made GoT and two, it’ll lead to a redo since it is a very popular franchise.