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there's adaptation for the visual medium and then there's the dogshit that is the witcher netflix series. if you're adapting a series you may find it necessary to condense characters or add motivations but that is a decision that should be made thoughtfully every time and its very obvious they did not do that here. it's the difference between the earliest seasons of game of thrones that respected the story and wanted to tell it with passion and the latest ones where they thought they were hot poo poo and over it. and say what you will about the GOT fellas, they didn't even have books at that point!
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Dec 17, 2022 22:36
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Like, for four seasons GoT was adapting the books (and making necessary changes) really well.
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Dec 17, 2022 22:37
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The problem with GoT is that not only did they run out of source material by the dreaded Season 5, they'd been tearing out so much source material that they weren't left with much by the end. I'm a fan of the books who's also plenty critical of them, but D&D could only do so many seasons of "We decided to take these characters and stuff them all into one character" before you ended up with a mess of characters with no consistent tone or motivation.
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Dec 18, 2022 02:01
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Pennsylvanian posted:The problem with GoT is that not only did they run out of source material by the dreaded Season 5, they'd been tearing out so much source material that they weren't left with much by the end. I'm a fan of the books who's also plenty critical of them, but D&D could only do so many seasons of "We decided to take these characters and stuff them all into one character" before you ended up with a mess of characters with no consistent tone or motivation. They hadn't run out of source material by season five. They had two books left to adapt if they wanted to. Or am I misunderstanding your point about "tearing out so much source material"?
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Dec 18, 2022 06:04
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Open Source Idiom posted:They hadn't run out of source material by season five. They had two books left to adapt if they wanted to. season 5 ended with the last published jon snow chapter iirc
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Dec 18, 2022 06:13
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itry posted:It was mostly good which makes it extra frustrating.  I recently finished Season 2 and anything related to Geralt and Ciri were mostly great and everything else was mostly not good. Even characters became more interesting based on their distance to main story. Triss was such a bore for 1,5 seasons, became interesting for 2 episodes in Kaer Morhen and then went back to being waste of screentime. It felt like there were 2 teams running the show. One for the
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Dec 18, 2022 06:31
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scary ghost dog posted:season 5 ended with the last published jon snow chapter iirc Ohhh. I thought the OP meant that they'd run out of material at the start of season five rather than the end. I get it now.
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Dec 18, 2022 09:59
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Open Source Idiom posted:Ohhh. I thought the OP meant that they'd run out of material at the start of season five rather than the end. I get it now. I misremembered how many seasons of GoT there were, I'd say actually five and a half good seasons before it started to fall apart. And I'd contend that was the showrunners getting bored and high on their own farts rather than inherent problems of adaptability. The TV show was going to have to diverge from the (future) books because of the adaptation changes, but there was a solid enough foundation to finish off the story well.
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Dec 18, 2022 10:23
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scary ghost dog posted:ive said it in this thread before but the tv writers and producers who decide to adapt a series should not consider themselves better writers than the people who wrote the thing theyre adapting. at worst they should trim fat. in no world should they completely scrap characters and change fundamental aspects of the setting. the witcher tv show is extremely guilty of both scary ghost dog posted:my point is literally that the original author is the only one who should be allowed to do those things, because tv writers - especially the ones employed by netflix - are not usually very talented, and i am specifically talking about the witcher books, which are perfect and should have been adapted fully unchanged Jesus, this take is so bad I really feel the need to stop and make fun of it for a second. Adaptations by their nature should be encouraged to change and play with the material that is being adapted. If you don't want to change a story when adapting it from print to visual media then why is the thing you're making something to care about vs just reading the book? The existence of dogshit adaptations does not mean that show writers making changes is a bad thing. Here's where I would spend several paragraphs talking about Peter Jackson's LotR movies, the good seasons of GoT, or the first season of HotD, but I'm going to skip that and just go right to The Expanse. The Expanse is a good book series, and it is also and excellent TV series. Are you aware of how much poo poo is different in the TV series? Entire characters are added in that people love and who never existed in the books, other characters are completely cut. Several books are extended with entire episodes devoted to poo poo that never happens in the books at all, while some books are cut short and covered in less than half a season's time. Detective Miller's investigation of Julie, completely different. In fact, gently caress, the character of Miller is not even the same between the two (he is an incompetent, suicidal drunk in the book who intentionally kills himself). Drummer? Barely a character in the books. The spy from season 1, nope, show only. Huge long bouts of exposition describing the politics of the system and the mechanics of the ships, completely absent from the show. I could go on and on here, but I think my point is made. Adaptations should change the work. They need to change the work. Otherwise they're boring trash.
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Dec 18, 2022 10:52
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Alchenar posted:I misremembered how many seasons of GoT there were, I'd say actually five and a half good seasons before it started to fall apart. And I'd contend that was the showrunners getting bored and high on their own farts rather than inherent problems of adaptability. The TV show was going to have to diverge from the (future) books because of the adaptation changes, but there was a solid enough foundation to finish off the story well. Just remembered that GoT ends with Westeros inventing the concept of the Holy Roman Empire
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Dec 18, 2022 10:53
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Anonymous Zebra posted:Jesus, this take is so bad I really feel the need to stop and make fun of it for a second. Adaptations by their nature should be encouraged to change and play with the material that is being adapted. If you don't want to change a story when adapting it from print to visual media then why is the thing you're making something to care about vs just reading the book? The existence of dogshit adaptations does not mean that show writers making changes is a bad thing. Here's where I would spend several paragraphs talking about Peter Jackson's LotR movies, the good seasons of GoT, or the first season of HotD, but I'm going to skip that and just go right to The Expanse. Didn't the writers of the expanse you know, help write the tv series?
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Dec 18, 2022 13:05
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Open Source Idiom posted:Ohhh. I thought the OP meant that they'd run out of material at the start of season five rather than the end. I get it now. I was talking about it in a lot of ways. By seasons 4 and 5 and especially 6, you had cut characters like Victarion, Arianne, Stoneheart, etc, on top of massively changed and condensed characters in the Winterfell, Wall, and Meereen plots. Tormund was so condensed that he was basically the only Wildling character. The Night Watch was down to Edd. I don't need to even mention the problems with Dorne and Euron. They even lost the only real interesting Dance plot, the Theon in Winterfell murder mystery plot, because they'd been condensing and cutting material leading up to it. There's a lot to bring up but I'm getting ready to clock in ti work. You do have to make alterations to adapt to a visual medium, but there are right and wrong ways. Handmaid Tale and The Expanse and early GoT worked with the author to pull it off, but Witcher, Bebop, later GoT and others didn't while seeming like they had contempt for the material and they all suffered for it.
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Dec 18, 2022 13:44
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Pennsylvanian posted:I was talking about it in a lot of ways. By seasons 4 and 5 and especially 6, you had cut characters like Victarion, Arianne, Stoneheart, etc, on top of massively changed and condensed characters in the Winterfell, Wall, and Meereen plots. Tormund was so condensed that he was basically the only Wildling character. The Night Watch was down to Edd. I don't need to even mention the problems with Dorne and Euron. Also they hosed over my boy Barristan, and my other boy, the actor who plays Barristan.
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Dec 18, 2022 13:58
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there's a marked difference between consolidating characters or changing poo poo to be more visually interesting for tv and arbitrarily killing off fan-favorite characters and power-resetting Yen so she has a tedious (romcom-esque "why aren't these characters just talking to each other") character arc that completely disconnects her from the other two central characters in the series by being willing to kill off one that the other loves Ciri is meant to be her surrogate daughter, how do they ever come back from "yeah I was gonna sell you off to get my magic back, soooorry" if you absolutely needed Yen to have a story arc for the season, why not have her going through elven ruins to find out how to help control Ciri's elder blood magic and have her encounter some hosed up wizard or the wild hunt or something there was no reason to have her entire season as a reset of her arc from season 1 but this time she's a child murderer
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Dec 18, 2022 16:13
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Kaedric posted:Didn't the writers of the expanse you know, help write the tv series? Yeah, I happen to agree that adaptations can sometimes require drastic changes to work in a different medium, but man, the expanse is a hilariously bad example to use when trying to rebut a post saying only original authors would be allowed to make such changes.
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Dec 18, 2022 20:35
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Plus Expanse has its own problems that get worse the longer the show goes on. A lot of stuff written for TV only from season 4 and 5 isn't that good but because some of thr characters didn't appear in some of the hooks they needed new content. And that's before you get into casting issues where Cas Anvar was outed as a sex pest and hastily written out of the show or Jared Harris having a massive career glow up and being too busy to return as a fan favourite character.
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Dec 18, 2022 20:57
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Season 5 of the Expanse is problematic because it's one thing for a book series to scatter the main character to the four winds and chase their own stories for a while, it's a pretty big problem when your tv show built around the strength of an ensemble cast does the same.
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Dec 18, 2022 21:09
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The Yen selling out Ciri thing has been covered but the Eskel thing also weirded me out like OK, you want an arc where some Witcher fights a monster and turns into one, OK, fine. Why take a named character who people seem to like who you could do cool things with later. Why not just be like "hey this is Witcher Jymme"
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Dec 19, 2022 01:36
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The show runner specifically said they didn't want a throwaway character to die, so instead they introduced a character who non-book readers had no way of recognizing, and then immediately threw him away just to piss off book readers (and game players for that matter). I mean I wasnt terribly upset because he's a minor character anyway but it was just so pointless, particularly in an episode where they made all the witchers act out of character for no particular reason.
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Dec 19, 2022 01:51
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Why do they hire showrunners who dislike the source material?
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Dec 19, 2022 07:18
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Noam Chomsky posted:Why do they hire showrunners who dislike the source material? I've seen industry people asked this question before and the answer seems to be "There are way more TV writers than there used to be and they're spread really thin over tons of projects and services." Witcher is also fairly niche. You can probably find a Tolkien turbonerd anywhere in show business, but finding someone who read the Polish translated fantasy book or played one of the 80-hour games is probably a bit more difficult. There's also a difference between "We pitched this show to Netflix or HBO because we read and enjoyed the source material and we want to bring it to life as a show" versus a network/streamer saying "Game of Thrones was popular, so let's buy the rights to another fantasy show and staff it with whoever wants to work."
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Dec 19, 2022 15:10
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The real question is why give your tentpole franchise to Hissrich, whose career achievements to that point were writing lousy episodes of Daredevil and the horrible Defenders series netflix seems determined to make her into a thing even when she's clearly not very good at it
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Dec 19, 2022 15:16
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You assume they thought about it as a tentpole franchise from its conception. I'm not sure they did.
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Dec 19, 2022 15:34
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itry posted:You assume they thought about it as a tentpole franchise from its conception. I'm not sure they did. They were throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into it at a time when they were already getting cost conscious, they had to have decided pretty early on that they were going to try to make it one.
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Dec 19, 2022 15:42
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eXXon posted:The show runner specifically said they didn't want a throwaway character to die, so instead they introduced a character who non-book readers had no way of recognizing, and then immediately threw him away just to piss off book readers (and game players for that matter). Oof that was such an unforced error. It would be one thing if they'd given him half a season or so, so he'd get to do some things and maybe slay a monster, and then fans of the character would be like "wow it's so cool to see Eskel onscreen!" and new viewers would be like "hey, I now have feelings about this new character" and then it actually seems shocking when he dies. Instead it just seems kinda mean-spirited to just give this redshirt witcher that name and then immediately kill him, like "haha, nope, you won't be seeing any of that character on this show, losers."
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Dec 19, 2022 23:46
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I think killing Eskel was a minor sin all things considered. You're adapting the books, and his role there was "ugly" and "nicer to Triss than Lambert". I get that it's a shorthand for a major change breaking away from the books, but I think the real violence was done to the short stories in a way that was basically entirely gratuitous from episode one. I'd be fine with them making changes to the later seasons, but early on they had an easy layup and just bricked it for no real reason.
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Dec 20, 2022 02:29
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Worse was turning the entire wolf school into a frat house rather than a refuge for very broken people
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Dec 20, 2022 02:35
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the show was already kind of bad from ep 1. some of that renfri crap in the woods was puke. this show was never good, guys. you just want it to be, but it's not. and s3 will come out and be mostly badly written with 1 good-ish episode that makes people go huh but in this case it's funny because now a hemsworth is coming in and i doubt if we ever actually see a single episode of that unless they reboot.
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Dec 20, 2022 05:19
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I think the Witcher is a great candidate for a "preBoot,” where they remake the new version while production is still going on the old one
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Dec 20, 2022 05:22
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roomtone posted:the show was already kind of bad from ep 1. some of that renfri crap in the woods was puke. I enjoyed it.
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Dec 20, 2022 09:09
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Vim Fuego posted:I think the Witcher is a great candidate for a "preBoot,” where they remake the new version while production is still going on the old one They should just make more animated movies and that's it. Because there's no way they aren't going to scrap the show now.
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Dec 20, 2022 10:46
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Season 1 was pretty good. The Renfri woods stuff is... the Witcher. Highly sentimental, with lots of semi-cryptic superficially philosophical musings and symbology overlayed. They nailed a lot of the short stories by sticking pretty close to the source material, and managed to introduce the Ciri stuff in a way that didn't suck. In general it held together pretty well despite being based off a disjointed collection of short stories, and Geralt, Yennefer and Jaskier were great. A lot of that has to do with the fact they managed to preserve the charm of the rather odd/sentimental source material. It was very popular as a result. The only bit of S1 I felt was genuinely bad was the Yennefer magic school poo poo, which was just ham Harry Potter garbage and bad CGI effects. And ...eels?? All that poo poo I think was just made up straight off by the showrunners and was terrible. Season 2 inverted the ratio of original books material versus showrunner-created garbage, and even in when it was going books material it changed a whole ton of stuff without any comprehensible reason to do so. It was garbage as a result. scary ghost dog posted:my point is literally that the original author is the only one who should be allowed to do those things, because tv writers - especially the ones employed by netflix - are not usually very talented, and i am specifically talking about the witcher books, which are perfect and should have been adapted fully unchanged
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Dec 20, 2022 13:31
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If Season 1 had kept more of that Adventures of Hercules/Xena energy about going on single adventures to build up the world and characters, I would have liked it. It wouldn't have been the best television, but the time jumps where everybody looked the same and plots went nowhere for episodes was really bad.
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Dec 20, 2022 15:19
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itry posted:You assume they thought about it as a tentpole franchise from its conception. I'm not sure they did. Lol ok
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Dec 20, 2022 23:45
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Nah, signing Henry Cavill, doing massive pr, and doing Christmas releases for the seasons all screams tentpole franchise.
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Dec 21, 2022 09:58
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That DICK! posted:Lol ok i bssicaly am in love with you hahah but whaat so you mean by that?
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Dec 21, 2022 10:49
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Lauren Hissrich is also a huge Witcher fan and was really excited about the show from the announcement and this thread going full Gamer Gate on her is pretty  …
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Dec 23, 2022 01:22
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Lauren Hissrich is also a huge Witcher fan and was really excited about the show from the announcement and this thread going full Gamer Gate on her is pretty She wanted to inject "meta humor" like cracking jokes over Roach dying which is 100% contrary to everything established even in the show up to that point. I don't know how much of her being a fan effects her ability to be a good writer, but by the second or third time someone is pointing out the writing team for the show seems to not have much concern for the source material it comes back to who's running it and what they approve/write.
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Dec 23, 2022 02:51
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Lauren Hissrich is also a huge Witcher fan and was really excited about the show from the announcement and this thread going full Gamer Gate on her is pretty its really clearly the mercenary netflix writers that are most to blame though i dont consider the person who assigned them to the show blameless
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Dec 23, 2022 04:40
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why are you so obsessed with lauren
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Dec 23, 2022 05:14
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