This is why we can't have nice things.

So it totally still counts as Wednesday, especially if you take into account time zones, which you totally should. Those people out west have to wait so much longer to get to the end of the day! Poor people.

Anyway, I did decide that I would talk about why TV and movie adaptations of books never work. So here we go. Or something.

I will have a LOT of examples here. Some of these are stories and movies I've seen all the way through, and some are either book series I have not finished, TV shows I couldn't sit through for more than an episode or two, or the Avatar the Last Airbender movie, which I watched fifteen minutes of before quitting. I also have not seen the new TMNT movie because I have STANDARDS and a childhood I actually enjoyed and don't want to ruin.

Let me set the stage for you.

It was June 4th, 2004. Ten...years ago. Geez. Anyway, it was lined up to be a great night for me. I got the opportunity to sit in the pit of a performance of Les Miserables because of my awesome uncle who played French Horn with the orchestra at the time (Hey Uncle Erich! You said you read my blog!), and I was going to go directly from that to the midnight premiere of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

The third Harry Potter book is my favorite, and I was really excited. It was my first midnight premiere (my mother would not let me go to the premieres of the second and third LOTR movies because I was too young. And hello to you too, mother. Your brother has a nicer shout out in this post! Hahaha love you, looking forward to 18 hours in a car together), and the first two movies in the series had been flawless.

Why, then, do I remember hardly anything from the once-in-a-lifetime experience of sitting in an orchestra pit and distinctly remember the feeling of disappointment and anger I felt after the movie ended?

Because, inevitably, adaptations of books will never live up to your standards. Sometimes you get a rare exception, like the first two HP movies and the first few seasons of Game of Thrones. But most of the time, there is always something wrong and even if you can appreciate the movie or show, it's not the same and you are disappointed that a truer adaptation does not exist.

For example, I LOVE Howl's Moving Castle. The fact that it did not win an Oscar is something I will be mad at forever (Wallace and Gromit, REALLY?), and it's one of my favorite movies. I watched it while getting my wisdom teeth out. I watched it at my going away party in Ohio, when I had to say goodbye to the best friends I had had ever had. I also love the book by Diana Wynne Jones. However, these are two VERY different stories. They're both great and I highly recommend them both, but I also still kinda wish there was an actual adaption of Jones' novel.

It's like watching the new Hobbit movies. I actually like them and will defend most of the choices made to people who get into a snit over it. But...I read the book and I'm like "I can't wait to see how they will do that in the movie!" And then I realize that they already did it. Same thing with Percy Jackson. So much missed opportunity there.

So I'm not saying you can't enjoy book adaptations. I'm just saying that we should give up hope on ever getting a perfect adaptation of anything. I can provide reasons.

Here are some reasons:

1) First person POV. Some books are written in first person, some books are written in third. When first person books are adapted, they often will include a narrator. Now I don't know about you, but I think a narrator in a movie or TV show is always terrible. I mean sure there are examples like Easy A, but for the most part they feel like cheap and easy ways to tell us what is going on and what a character is thinking. They are often super melodramatic, but that is a topic I will discuss later. For an example of this, let's look at the Outlander TV show. I have only watched the first two and a half episodes and I started the second book. I have enjoyed the books so far and I had high hopes for the show when I saw the ratings were talking about how it was the next Game of Thrones. But man did I roll my eyes when I heard that narrator. The story could have been told so much better without one. It's all a part of telling instead of showing. When you have a narrator, you are telling us what's going on instead of showing us with, I dunno, flashbacks, interesting stories, good dialogue? And also the show is sooooo serious.

2) It's later. The second reason is that movies and TV shows seem to think that unless the show is specifically a comedy, it cannot be too funny. Prime examples are again Outlander and then Bitten, the adaptation of the series Women of the Otherworld. In the book Bitten, the character of Elena is way more interesting than the one in the show. Why? Because she was sarcastic and waaaay less serious than TV-Elena. And the werewolves in her Pack were way more fun too because they joked around and they felt like a family. Once more, I have only watched the first episode or two. Outlander took a book in Scotland in the 1700s and made everyone really tense and just jerks. Even when they're making jokes, it fell flat for me. Take a chill pill, for serious. Harry Potter is another example. Harry was a sarcastic little twit and Ron wasn't much better. How much more fun would it be if the characters were allowed to have their actual personalities? This is where we bring in Avatar the Last Airbender. As I said, I couldn't watch more than about fifteen minutes because I could actually see the actors struggling to make the dialogue work. They tried so hard. It was painful to watch them. But talk about sucking the fun out of a work. Who decided to take a light hearted and beloved kids show and do...whatever that was to it? For that matter, who decided to take the Percy Jackson series out of the children's section and market it to teenagers? Genres exist for a reason. It is OK to mix a little, such as putting in some humor, but I see no reason as to change the target audience or take all the fun out of something (*cough* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles *coughcough*). Seriously. Lighten up, y'all.

3) Third person POV. I might have put this after reason 1, but I really wanted to talk about that sense of humor thing. Third person, especially omnipotent third person, is touchy because we see in the minds of several different characters at once. I don't really have an example of this, so let me know if you have one. But I'll just say that you have more time to explore character development and get to know people, and you don't have time to do that in movies. Wait! Harry Potter. Nailed it. There are a lot of characters in Harry Potter that we barely got to know, if at all, in the movies. My biggest regret is Magnitu-I mean Lee Jordan. Incidentally, Fred and George also fall into reason #2.

4) That voice in your head. Everyone reads a book differently. They picture things differently, they mentally pronounce things differently. I've had a couple of times when I was talking about a book to my mom or brother and I realized I didn't know how to pronounce something because I had never said it out loud. I was in a video chat with Brandon Sanderson and people started arguing in the chatbox that they thought this character Shallan was actually Asian even though her picture was drawn on the inside of the book. People disagreed with Cho Chang's actress in the movies because they thought she WASN'T Asian. You inflect what people say, you give them a voice and possibly an accent. In countless little ways, you create a book world that is utterly unique to only you. Have you seen fanart of a book character that hasn't been in a movie or TV show yet? None of them are exactly alike. Even in reading this blog post, you are doing that. You're reading the words in your voice whereas I wrote it in mine. When those characters become actors and the settings a set and the written dialogue becomes spoken and it's recorded, that takes those infinite worlds created by viewers and shunts them into one person's vision. And, often, it's not even the author's vision.

5) Authors. Authors should be allowed to be a part of the adaptation of their own work. Some of the more successful adaptations have had author involvement. Game of Thrones had GRRM, Perks of Being a Wallflower had Steven Chbosky. These are their babies, their creations, and they deserve the opportunity to bring them to life beyond words on a page.

I probably had a lot more things to say and maybe I'll do a follow up on this, but I'm running out of Wednesday and I think five is a good number of reasons for now.

Let me know if you can think of any more examples of the things I said and if you have any other reasons!

Note: Things are not italicized because of laziness.