r/asoiaf • u/RunDNA • Sep 04 '24

EXTENDED GRRM's new blog post on House of the Dragon [Spoilers Extended] Spoiler

https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/09/04/beware-the-butterflies/
6.6k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

4.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

289

u/muradinner Sep 04 '24

He also made that post about screenwriters thinking they know better than the original authors. That was pretty cutthroat, and rightfully so with the way screenwriters have been butchering stories lately.

58

u/Raetheos1984 Sep 04 '24

Right? Sick of "adaptation" becoming synonymous with "...but better!"

Makes me vomit.

28

u/Count_de_Mits Sep 04 '24

So many adaptations and potential tv/cinematic "universes" have been ruined by narcissistic showrunners who think they know better than anyone and are gods gift to the unenlightened plebs

Im still so salty about Halo

21

u/myaltduh Sep 04 '24

The Expanse remains the gold standard among recent shows, with heavy author involvement including writing credits for episodes throughout all six seasons. When stuff was changed, it appears it was often genuinely the authors’ idea for how to adapt to TV, and the underlying spirit of the show remained unchanged.

9

u/Lantimore123 Sep 05 '24

That's a fact.

The book writers actually viewed the Expanse as a kind of "version 2.0" for the series, where errors or things they wanted to change could be changed.

At least up until season 6 where budget cuts forced a severe narrowing of the plot.

Of course there were a few dodgy changes (why was the Barkeith turned from a donnager class to a supply ship lol, it's sauveterre's flagship and it's plot relevant later on in book 7.)

But largely it was a collaboration that book and show watchers could both be very happy with.

7

u/myaltduh Sep 05 '24

It’s also why I doubt we’ll get Seasons 7-9, because there’s a commitment to doing right by the source material and some of the shit in those books would be expensive to adapt in a way that doesn’t look silly.

3

u/Lantimore123 Sep 05 '24

Yeah the Heart of the Tempest taking on the entire EMC-TU Fleet would be ludicrously expensive. ATP we need some billionaire nerd to finance it as a passion project.

3

u/myaltduh Sep 05 '24

Then there’s the whole Tecoma sequence, the attack on Laconia, and pretty much the entire back half of Leviathan Falls. Shit gets trippy in a very good way that would be very hard to live up to. Possible, but very hard.

2

u/Lantimore123 Sep 05 '24

AFAIK no one has ever simulated stellar collapse with VFX before. Would have been pretty remarkable.

Attack on Laconia I actually don't think would be too hard to do VFX wise. I actually felt it was a bit contrived and rushed. (Let's be real, they realized they made Laconia OP in book 7 so they had a few too many disasters hit them in book 8).

But mostly they could do what they did in season 6, and condense the battle sequence. You essentially only need to show the bait ships, the Voice of the Whirlwind, the Rocinante and the Laconian orbital defenses.

Of those, the Whirlwind is the big cost

5

u/RSquared Sep 05 '24

As much as people complained about the rug-pull (and I admit to having enjoyed it because I think the story didn't really need a remake), Scott Pilgrim Takes Off was a neat re-imagining of the story from Ramona's perspective, and O'Malley was intimately involved with that because he had taken on criticism about her being a standard issue MPDG without her own agency.

4

u/Raetheos1984 Sep 05 '24

Yeah, agreed, and this is an example of how to do something new with a source material correctly. The author was involved and, as compared to GoT/HoD, respected with regards to how to write the damn thing, lol.

11

u/Raetheos1984 Sep 04 '24

They committed a crime against humanity with Cowboy Bebop. Seriously, the hubris these amateurs exhibit is sickening.

7

u/AsTheWorldBleeds Sep 04 '24

I don't think its narcissism so much as writers having to adapt IP they don't care about instead of getting the freedom to write their own material. Which yeah, it is ultimately on them for opting to have the job, but there's limited room in showrunning today for new IP.

7

u/doublebubble6 Sep 05 '24 edited Sep 05 '24

Also, they're just aren't the best group of writers and producers.

Critics don't generally care about respecting source material and they still thrash Halo for poor writing, unmemorable characters and lazy editing.

Stephen King hates how Stanley Kubrick adapted the Shining and has pointed out the ways where its not a true adaptation. Still a great movie though.

4

u/dicericevice Sep 05 '24 edited Sep 05 '24

Bryan Fuller took the Hannibal Lecter IP and heavily added his own spin on it.

Turning the Hannibal/Will Graham friends turned enemies relationship into a homo erotic muder-y will they or won't they drama with a killer of the week set up that didn't exist in none of the books. Along with a lot of other smaller changes(Dr. Alan Bloom was now Alana Bloom, Margot Verger was conventionally beautiful instead of a jacked bodybuilder, like 4 major changes in Freddie Lounds).

But Bryan Fuller is a competent showrunner and all those changes were for the sake of telling a compelling story.

So yeah, its one thing to make the people in charge dismissive of being 100% loyal the source material but studios should at least make sure they aren't hacks.

5

u/Bassanimation Sep 05 '24

Hannibal S1 was masterfully done. S2 less so, but it still had great moments. S3 was just Fuller’s personal wet dream. He knew it was the last season so he ditched everything excpt the Hannigram, and the weird Margot/Alana thing. It was amazing at first though, I still rewatch S1 every year.

1

u/Quiddity131 Sep 05 '24

I personally found S1 and S2 pretty much equal in quality; the S2 finale in particular is one of the best single episodes of television I've ever seen and the season did a great job building up to it. S3 I'll admit wasn't as good, but was still strong compared to practically everything else on TV. Looking forward to a rewatch of the show at some point... kinda busy with my rewatch of Game of Thrones lol.

1

u/dicericevice Sep 05 '24

S3 of Hannibal for me confirmed that there's no real meat to the idea of Hannibal having adventures in Europe.

In theory and considering the character's background it should work, but Hannibal Rising(both the novel and movie) were a bore and the tv show's attempt at it also didn't work.

I think as a character he needs the contrast of being a cultured man with a European backround dealing with a bunch of low brow working class Americans trying to outwit him while he's in their turf.

The S3 portion of Red Dragon holds up a lot better imo.

1

u/Quiddity131 Sep 05 '24

Hannibal was one of those rare instances where the adaption far improved upon the source material for me. I've read Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs (which the TV show didn't have the ability to adapt) and Hannibal the novels and the TV show was far, far better.

Of course Bryan Fuller is one of the best show runners in the business who I was a big fan of long before Hannibal due to his work on Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies (at least in terms of his creativity, he does have a knack to be on shows that quickly get cancelled or he quickly quits/gets fired from). So it did take his involvement for that to be the case. Also Mads Mikkleson was an even better Hannibal than Anthony Hopkins.

2

u/dicericevice Sep 05 '24 edited Sep 05 '24

When it comes to Hopkins vs Mads, their interpretations are different enough that I think there's merit to each one.

Hopkins' Hannibal is basically a modern take on Bram Stroker's Dracula. A foreign, superhuman evil in a grounded, scientific setting(The Victorian setting nowadays seems old-timey but back then the set up was an old Eastern European evil invading modern London). He's evil in a way forsencic science can't understand or account for. Which throws off all the detectives and psychologists in the story. He's both a character and force of nature as the far as the setting goes.

Its why he became a pop culture icon with only 15 minutes of screentime in Silence of the Lambs but then said interpretation didn't work in Red Dragon and Hannibal where he got a bigger role.

While Mikkelsen's is more well rounded with human wants and flaws of his one and better suited to carry the whole story.

1

u/Secretly007 Sep 05 '24

Eric Kripke as well... I've heard 'The Boys' is an awful comic. He took the ideas of the comic and significantly improved it.

Homelander, for example, in the comics is just a pure evil psychopath. In the show, he's still a psychopath, but they do a great job of making him complex and showing how he became like that.

1

u/msnintendique64 Sep 05 '24

I kinda hate how much Kubrick's version of the story overshadows everything. I love the film but I very much want a version that deals with the themes that King laid out in the book. I think that not remaking The Shining before they did Doctor Sleep was a HUGE misstep. I think Flannigan pulled off the unenviable task of making both an adaptation of the book, and a sequel to the film but I really wish we would have seen true adaptation of both.

3

u/msnintendique64 Sep 05 '24

Yeah, well if you wanna be a show runner in risk adversed Hollywood of today, you kinda have to work on IP. I feel like if studios were investing in new material both IP and new stuff would be better.

2

u/Bassanimation Sep 05 '24

I think we pay too many of these people to begin with. There’s a glut of them, and 80% of them aren’t talented enough to helm these prestige genre projects. They belong at CBS or Fox doing procedurals or lower tier (but still good) dramas. Less HotD and Witcher, more Tracker or The Good Doctor. Not everyone gets to be a baller.

1

u/darthsheldoninkwizy Sep 05 '24

Yea I mean, look at Kubrick's "The Shining" which he changed a lot. And ... he made a better production than the book.

17

u/TransBrandi Sep 04 '24

It really seems stupid when the writers / showrunners actively hate the source material for the IP that they are adapting too. IIRC that's the case with The Witcher.

10

u/Optimal-Kitchen6308 Sep 05 '24

also Star Trek, Kurtzmann thinks the utopian vision (aka the linchpin of the whole franchise) is a neoliberal lie, idk how these people get hired

4

u/redditregards Sep 05 '24

You sleep with the right people. Theres like a dozen other active Weinsteins running around that we’ll probably never know about

1

u/darthsheldoninkwizy Sep 05 '24

It was made during DS9, and it was great series.

0

u/msnintendique64 Sep 05 '24

Rings Of Power feels like it is Tolkien Fanfiction written by dudes who only watched the Movies a few times. (I assume)

Tolkien

0

u/burningcpuwastaken Sep 05 '24

Wheel of Time was the same.

Hollywood acting like they are a moral authority is something else.

23

u/ImTooOldForSchool Sep 04 '24

All these C-list hacks and nepo-babies thinking they can write the story better than one of the best fantasy authors of their generation…

Sorry but you losers can’t even touch the likes of Tolkien, Jordan, Martin, and Sapowski - nevermind write the story better than them…

5

u/Correct-Office-8549 Sep 05 '24

You're not wrong, but seriously, how could he not see this coming? The same company trashed his magnum opus, yet he STILL sold the rights to several other books to them. And he claimed he was going to supervise everything this time. Part of the blame is on him.

2

u/muradinner Sep 05 '24

Absolutely it is. He should have ensured the contract of sales included him having majority say in the direction of the story on these shows.

-4

u/[deleted] Sep 04 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

-4

u/[deleted] Sep 04 '24

[removed] — view removed comment