r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Chill0000 • Aug 21 '26

Hated Tropes [HATED] Adaptations done intentionally without help from the source

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Halo TV show: Before the show came out, the writers were praising their decision to not look to the games for inspiration when making the show

God Of War TV show: Chris Judge, the actor of Kratos in the games from 2018-Now, spoke up about his dislike on the show not hiring anyone who worked on any of the previous games. One of the original creators of Kratos also spoke up about them not having faith in the adaptation.

Supergirl 2026 film: the director for the film not only said he decided to not read Woman Of Tomorrow, the comic the film is adapting, because he wanted to do his own thing, he also didn’t look at comic art for inspiration to design Lobo and instead used an AI image generator to design Lobo’s look for the film

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775

u/corvettee01 Aug 21 '26

Wheel of Time TV show totally ignored Brandon Sanderson, the guy who only WROTE SOME OF THE BOOKS!

307

u/No_Blacksmith_2591 Aug 21 '26

I mean, it would have been ok if they ignored sanderson but followed Jordan's books to the letter... but nooo typical hollywood hubris says we're better than everyone else so we won't even read the books, we'll stick to bullet points from the cliffnotes.

208

u/Mordetrox Aug 21 '26

Imagine ragging on the books for being written in the 1990's, and then you turn around and create a wife for a character just to fridge her in episode one. Actually baffling.

109

u/HourlyBadIdeas Aug 21 '26

Don't forget having the two characters who wind up seeing each other as siblings by the series end bang during season one, and having the super slow-burn (and super satisfying because of it) also bang in season one.

Like, motherfucker Lan could not sneeze without Nynave expecting it being proof of him being up to something nefarious for the first half of the series.

36

u/Aladris666 Aug 21 '26

"My name is Nynaeve ti al'Meara Mandragoran. The message I want sent is this. My husband rides from World's End toward Tarwin's Gap, toward Tarmon Gal'don Will he ride alone?"

4

u/ethanice Aug 21 '26

The Golden crane flies for Tarmon Gai'don!

2

u/Fenix42 Aug 21 '26

Glad I am already on a re-read or this would have made me start one. :D

24

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

27

u/HourlyBadIdeas Aug 21 '26

Yup.

Also, by giving Perrin the wife, they completely invalidated the comedy (that the show never got too) of the three ta'veren being totally lost as to what to do about their respective love interests, wishing one of the others was there to pick his brains about said romantic woes as surely he will know what to do... Only to cut to the homey in question having pretty much the same issue or one close enough to make it clear that, no, he wouldn't know what to do either.

7

u/No_Blacksmith_2591 Aug 21 '26

I always thought it was suspicious how posts shitting on that type of comedy with similar wording to what was on the books started showing up here on random subredits after the first episodes came out. Like the studios wanted to astroturf acceptance of their decision to get rid of that part.

11

u/HourlyBadIdeas Aug 21 '26

I mean, when one of the show runners (iirc) outright brags about not having finished reading the series before starting on the show, ya kinda gotta go hard in the paint to block criticism that isn't easily shut down by calling the person making the criticism some sort of istaphobe.

2

u/RechargedFrenchman Aug 21 '26

People probably wouldn't even mind that much if the adaptation was also good. There are some who get upset anytime Starship Troopers is mentioned because Verhoeven didn't like or finish the book, but the movie does actually get a bunch of stuff from the book right and the primary thing missing is the book's earnest-ness (since the movie is satirical), and the first movie is a good movie so the general response is positive.

WoT wasn't particularly good on its own merits as a show even ignoring that its an adaptation, while also being a kind of terrible adaptation, so there's not really any merit to salvage it with.

2

u/EttinTerrorPacts Aug 21 '26

Ehhh, they do progress their relationship a lot in EotW, before doing very little for the next 10 books or so.

EotW in general is a hard one to adapt, because it was written initially to stand a complete story if need be (Jordan didn't know if he'd get the deal for a sequel). So in addition to the usual early instalment weirdness from the worldbuilding not being complete yet, the pace is way off from everything else.

14

u/patchyj Aug 21 '26

I may be wrong but in the books Moraine and Siuan mentioned they were "pillow friends" when younger, implying a sexual history

11

u/No_Nectarine_5440 Aug 21 '26

This was always the impression I got too.

8

u/EkbatDeSabat Aug 21 '26

You are not wrong.

Robert Jordan specifically mentioned in a blog, 2005, that it was a homosexual relationship.

And for MJJ, as posted by DomA, pillow friends are not just good friends. Oh, they are that, too, but they also get hot and sweaty together and muss up the sheets something fierce. By the way, pillow friends is a term used in the White Tower. The same relationship between men or women elsewhere would be called something else, depending on the country.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110222204832/https://dragonmount.com/forums/blog/4/entry-326-yet-another-post/

4

u/RSquared Aug 21 '26

Yes, but they also played the longest game in the present to portray themselves as rivals to the rest of the Tower, in order to obscure the quest for the Dragon - other characters who remember their relationship as accepted are shown as thinking they changed completely and hate each other now. Their behavior in the present is testament to their dedication to the cause.  

Having them hook up and then use the Oath Rod as they did was a double tap of fuckery with the characterization. 

2

u/patchyj Aug 21 '26

Yeah agreed.

I think it really goes to show that WoT is far too long and complex of a story, with too many characters and plots, to adapt to small or big screen.

Theres like 14 3-500 pages books goddamit

3

u/theLichQueenofthePNW Aug 21 '26

They're a lot longer than that depending on the font size. I mostly listen to audiobooks, but using my Audio copy of New Spring and my Physical copy as comparison points makes me suspect they're closer to 800-1500pg books

1

u/patchyj Aug 21 '26

Fair. They are LONG

1

u/Fenix42 Aug 21 '26

The chapter "the last battle" in book 14 is 81,200 words. The first Harry Potter book is 76,944 words.

Thats right 1 chapter is longer then a whole book.

2

u/Dr-Robert-Kelso Aug 21 '26

Was it only implied in the books?

I remember reading the first three or four and it wasn't some mystery to me or something, they definitely were either romantically involved or very much wanted to be.

3

u/HourlyBadIdeas Aug 21 '26

Yea, iirc 'pillow friends' was a cross between someone to cry to because they're attending what's essentially a boarding school that employs corporal punishment and is super far from home, and 'theres a time and a place for everything, and it's called college being an Accepted at the a White Tower.' So could be both or either.

3

u/EkbatDeSabat Aug 21 '26

Robert Jordan specifically mentioned in a blog, 2005, that it was a homosexual relationship.

And for MJJ, as posted by DomA, pillow friends are not just good friends. Oh, they are that, too, but they also get hot and sweaty together and muss up the sheets something fierce. By the way, pillow friends is a term used in the White Tower. The same relationship between men or women elsewhere would be called something else, depending on the country.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110222204832/https://dragonmount.com/forums/blog/4/entry-326-yet-another-post/

1

u/HourlyBadIdeas Aug 21 '26

Ah, so it was hard confirmed to be that way most of the time, not just the grab bag of implications we got in the novels. Neat.

7

u/EkbatDeSabat Aug 21 '26

I mean, IMO, it was clear as day in the novels, but maybe that was my young adult horny brain imagination.

5

u/HourlyBadIdeas Aug 21 '26

Oh I saw it too, but my brain hung up on Elaida freaking out over it being something 'most women grow out of' when that one Black Ajah leader instructed her to lean on a targets former pillow friend to leverage her. Made it seem like more of a transitory/figuring yourself out thing for most Aes Sedai.

2

u/MisterTamborineMan Aug 21 '26

And then in Season 3, two other characters who saw each other as siblings in the book banged.

22

u/jeffdeleon Aug 21 '26

I was SO hopeful they were gonna make her one of The Forsaken or something to make Perrin feel more relevant.

Nope. The Pilot needed some spice.

13

u/jack-twohats Aug 21 '26

It was very critical to Perrin's character, it's not like he suffers at all later on in the series or anything.

3

u/5050Saint Aug 21 '26

And they didn't just fridge her, they had Perrin do the killing blow! I gave up after seeing that.

3

u/GloriousNewt Aug 21 '26

And that character has a pretty long arc involving his actual wife later in the story

3

u/EldritchFingertips Aug 21 '26

This 30+ year old book series may have some outdated material that modern people could possibly call sexist.

So rather than updating the ideas a bit and developing them further for a modern audience, what we should do is fall back to the laziest tropes we can think of and end up writing our own sexism in that can't even get the excuse of being written in the 90s! The Gen Z TikTokkers will love that!