What Netflix’s Avatar Did Wrong: Four Fantasy Adaptation Failure Points

Last week, I was really excited to watch the Netflix live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I had been skeptical when the original show creators departed, but they’d earned back a bit of trust with the amazing trailers they released. I had hopes that even though I knew they would change some aspects of the series, they would still get the vision of it and make it more accessible to adults who are still too self-conscious to watch a “kids show.” My husband and I set out to watch the first episode for date night. We popped popcorn and everything.

Within about 20 minutes of the first episode, it was clear that Netflix had absolutely flubbed this adaptation. The fantasy fan criticizing the adaptation of their beloved property is cliche, but the recent string of Hollywood misses on big-budget fantasy projects is hard to miss. While Stranger Things, Shadow and Bone, and Arcane have done well, Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time have been notable failures, both artistically and financially. This mixed bag of major successes and failures is made worse than typical streaming shows because of the big investment that these series represent.

If we don’t want Hollywood to stop making fantasy (and science fiction) properties, they’ve got to learn to do this better. Some errors that future adaptations should avoid, with examples from Netflix’s Avatar:

Too much time gawking at the fantasy elements – The first two Harry Potter movies are nigh unto unwatchable because they spend so much time being amazed at the Wizarding World (which admittedly was so cool to see on screen) and neglect to move the plot along. There seems to be a belief in Hollywood that fantasy TV exists as a vehicle for cool special effects rather than for the same reason all film exists: to convey a story. If you don’t get the story right, no one is going to care how cool your costumes and special effects are. The Avatar YouTube channel is full of cool behind the scenes videos about the bending and other worldbuilding stuff, and the show also spends a lot of its screen time on wide shots of cool stuff while rushing through the dialogue and plot.

Not trusting the audience to get the worldbuilding: One major fault with Netflix’s Avatar is the way it explains all the background explicitly instead of letting the audience piece it together slowly. We get the explanation of the four nations and the Avatar at least three times in-world in the first episode. While info-dumping is always a storytelling no-no, it seems prevalent in fantasy adaptations, maybe because the people working on them aren’t used to the genre conventions for gradual explanations of world-building. The key is to reveal things when the audience has a reason to want to understand them, which is not necessarily when the audience first sees them. If we can wait to gradually understand that Ted Lasso’s marriage is on the rocks over several episodes, we can also wait for several episodes to understand Zuko’s motivation for chasing the Avatar.

Changing major plot points or character arcs: A movie is like a cookie recipe. You can easily substitute the chocolate chips, but if you want to change the flour or go vegan, beware. Look, I get that some things have to be cut and adapted in the move from book to film. It’s a different medium with different strengths: it can’t do interiority as well as a book, but it can cover description so much more compactly. But the original property worked not because of the fantasy concept but because of the story. The character arcs of Aang and Sokka were probably more crucial to the original series’ success than Netflix’s adaptation realized, and cutting them undermined so many other aspects of the story that they tried to keep. When you change endings or character arcs, that change alters not just one scene but the whole balance of the story. It takes a lot of skill to make that kind of change work. Unless you’ve written an original best-selling novel or show, you probably don’t have it. Have some humility. Otherwise, you look like the people in the recipe comments section who substitute five ingredients and then complain that the cookies didn’t turn out.

Get the tone right: By itself, fantasy is not a tone. Fantasy can be gritty, optimistic, mysterious, or zany. When the Netflix creators kept using Game of Thrones as a touchstone for the audience they wanted to reach, we should have known they had drunk too much cactus juice. An adult fantasy property is not automatically Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. A YA fantasy property isn’t automatically Harry Potter or Hunger Games. Comp titles should match the overall tone of the show rather than just glomming on to the most successful fantasy craze you can think of.

As a fan of Brandon Sanderson, I’m sort of glad that he hasn’t gotten an adaptation yet; the chances for a failure are so high. It’s a large book with a ton of interconnecting plots and pieces going on, and an adaptation has so many people working on it with so many chances to not get it. Still, I’ve been rereading to prepare for the release of Wind and Truth in December, and I couldn’t resist taking my own stab at what a faithful adaptation of The Way of Kings that takes into account the differences in medium might look like. I’ve gotten some interesting feedback on it over on reddit. Perhaps you could help me improve it?

The Postsecularism of Arthur C. Clarke

If we’re going to talk about the connection between postsecularism and speculative fiction, there can perhaps be no better example than Arthur C. Clarke. According to his Wikipedia page, Clarke described himself throughout his life as an atheist or logical positivist. He demanded that no religious rites of any kind be associated with his funeral and famously said, “One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion.” On the other hand, Clarke praised C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, which as a work of science fiction is just about as explicitly religious as possible. He was fascinated throughout his life by supernatural phenomenon, hosting several television series about unexplained events. He had “pantheist” printed on his WWII dog tags, and he sometimes claimed to be Buddhist (while insisting it wasn’t really a religion). Clear as mud, right?

This internal conflict is written all over Childhood’s End, Clarke’s third novel and the one that made him famous as a science fiction writer. The beginning of the book subscribes thoroughly to the secularism hypothesis, the idea that as science advances, religious belief will naturally decrease to the point of extinction. Childhood’s End begins with the invasion of Earth by a strange alien vessel that forces humanity and its governments to start acting in a logical, humane way. Working through the middle manager of the United Nations, the aliens stop all wars and conflicts, including the torture of animals. People’s standard of living increases dramatically overnight. Everything seems to be going for the best.

There are those who resist the alien takeover, and their resistance is portrayed as “a religious one, however much it may be disguised” (11). They claim some secular reasons, such as the right to self-determination and agency, but ultimately the narrative makes clear that these are all desperate excuses for their real concern. The UN Secretary General receives this perfect summary of the secular hypothesis from the Overlord when he explains the resistance to the imposition of a utopia:

“They know that we represent reason and science, and, however confident they may be in their beliefs, they fear that we will overthrow their gods. Not necessarily through any deliberate act, but in a subtler fashion. Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now” (19).

These religious resistors are portrayed negatively in the first half of the book. They kidnap the Secretary General in an attempt to get to the Overlord and are easily swatted away by his superior technology and benevolence. Their resistance is one of irrationality in the face of the obvious superiority of rationality and science-based progress.

At some point in the book, there is a turn in perspective. Mankind has everything it wants; people thrive in the post-scarcity culture brought on by the logical dictatorship of the Overlord. Yet something is dreadfully wrong. Humanity has lost almost all interest in the science of new discoveries, preferring simply cataloging of various species and other naturalistic pursuits. Additionally, the production of new art has almost completely stopped. The Overlord acknowledges this connection between the loss of humanities “superstitions” and the loss of human creativity near the end of the novel: “I am well aware of the fact that we have also inhibited, by the contrast between our civilizations, all other forms of creative achievement as well. But that was a secondary effect, and it is of no importance” (198). One scientist still seems to pursue the big questions in spite of the general malaise, and an artist colony nation forms in an attempt to reinvigorate the human spirit that has been somehow lost in the comfort of having all its needs provided for, but they are the exceptions fighting against the spirit of the secular age.

Why would someone who believed in the triumph of science write this? It becomes apparent that even though Clarke considered science edging out the old superstitions a good thing, he also believed something would be lost as it happened, and that this something was an essential part of humanity. The loss of religious belief seems, according to this book, to lead directly to the loss of everything that made humanity worthwhile.

Near the end of the story, humanity arises from this doldrum through what can only be called an ascension narrative. Children all over the world begin transforming from individual human beings into a metaphysical Overmind, eventually leaving their bodies behind to become part of the noncorporeal superbeing that sent the Overlords to Earth in the first place. There’s really nothing to distinguish this Overmind from a sort of supernatural God, other than the idea that it is the natural end-state of the evolution of most species. The Overlord describes it as something, while not identical, at least adjacent to the Latter-day Saint conception of God: “We believe—it is only a theory—that the Overmind is trying to grow, to extend its powers and its awareness of the universe. By now it must be the sum of many races, and long ago it left the tyranny of matter behind. It is conscious of intelligence, everywhere” (200). It is seemingly omniscient and omnipresent, and though it acts by commanding dead-end species like the Overlords, one could argue it is omnipotent as well.

This sense of the need for something beyond the rationality of science, the sense that in leaving behind religion we have lost something essential, is one of the major thrusts of postsecular literature. While science fiction might be the genre where we’d expect rationality to be celebrated, in fact I think we can find many authors, even in the golden age of sci-fi, who show this conclusion to be naive, including Arthur C. Clarke.

Ragging on Mormon Culture is a Problem

I often hear people complain about church culture, with the implication that we ought to get rid of as much of it as possible and live the pure gospel. “Let’s get rid of Latter-day Saint lingo; it’s confusing to investigators.” “Trek is such a weird thing; can’t we stop doing it?” The simplifying of church programs. And then there are also those scary stories people tell about Utah culture.

Part of this is what I recently heard Christopher Blythe call the “self-loathing Mormon,” the need to distance ourselves from the culture we know so many of our more sophisticated friends distain. We worry that liking Saturday’s Warrior or admitting to having read all the volumes of The Work and the Glory will make us look like backward yokels. Additionally, the move towards fewer church activities seems like a good idea because it helps us focus exclusively on the gospel, on Jesus, rather than the church and its many traditions; and besides, we have so many other things to be busy with.

bryce canyon with sandy rocks in national park of usa
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Eugene England tried to counter this exalting of the gospel at the expense of the church in his famous essay “Why the Church is as True as the Gospel.” He pointed out that only in interacting as a community can we truly practice the principles that we are learning through the gospel. Learning and intellectually assenting to gospel principles is irrelevant if we don’t practice them on those around us. Our wards are the ideal gym through which to practice love and charity by close association with those who we might otherwise avoid, practice leading and following without compulsion.

I love Brother England’s point, but I’d like to approach the necessity of the church from a different angle: the need for culture. Wherever humans are, this strange amorphous thing called culture develops. To misquote scripture, “where two or three are gathered,” there culture will be, that amalgamation of unique vocabulary, folklore, rituals, traditions, and activities, not to mention my favorite part, stories.

We can’t eliminate church culture any more than we can eliminate language. It’s something that’s going to happen either way. But what we can do is weaken it, starve it, actively suppress it. We can cancel traditional activities in favor of simplifying our ward’s social calendar. We can stop publishing fiction featuring contemporary LDS characters at our bookstores. We can take our distinctive Latter-day Saint music with its strange references to missions, pioneers, and the Book of Mormon, and water it down into something that would be unobjectionable to a nondenominational Christian. (Guess how I feel about the modern FSY albums…)

The key word here is unobjectionable, which I think is a synonym of undistinctive. All that has resulted from efforts to downplay LDS culture is culture that is almost not there because it is so bland. The issue is that the culture at large that we swim in is hardly likely to do us the same courtesy.

When forced to choose between a culture of thin translucence and a culture of vibrance and interest, we will tend to go with the stories in our hearts rather than the doctrines in our heads. Our beliefs have less to do with the arguments and theology than they do with the people we want to be around. As Arnold Kling puts it, we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe. If church movies are bland and basic, their messages are less likely to stick in our children’s minds when they have to compete with the interesting stuff being put out constantly from all sides. If our church activities are all solemnly focused on Jesus with no insertions of Pioneer Day fireworks or neighborhood roadshows, they simply can’t compete with the world’s celebrations or diversions. Not to mention that if we don’t create our own stories about what our culture means, the larger entertainment industry is sure to paint one instead. One solution to this is to shut the world out, but we all know that’s only a temporary one.

So I propose an alternative: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Let’s build up some Latter-day Saint treasure. Let’s stop trying to be like everyone else and instead be so interesting and compelling that people want to find out what’s going on over here. Of course, it would also be naive to equate Latter-day Saint culture with Utah culture. As the church grows more global, we need to have not less church culture but more church cultures. We can’t do that by playing it safe, by creating a gospel culture of lowest common denominator. We have to be not only true and good, but beautiful, interesting, fascinating, hilarious. Let’s stop apologizing and be our weird, peculiar selves.

What I Read: Jan 2024

January is my birthday month, and usually one of my favorites, but things got off to a rough start this year. The school board was thinking about closing a program my kids participate in, so I had to make time to go and speak at a board meeting. Success: they’ve decided to expand the program instead of close it. Then one of my kids slipped in the snow and got a concussion. On top of regular life stuff, I’ve been struggling to keep all the balls in the air this semester. I finally decided to withdraw from a class last week, so hopefully there will be a bit more breathing room.

photo of a black and white trees
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Next week is the Life, The Universe and Everything Symposium (number 42!) in Provo. I’ll be presenting my paper on Mormon portrayals of aliens on Thursday and participating in a panel about religious clashes in speculative fiction. On Saturday, I’m on another panel about speculative fiction for various school ages and classes. If you’re coming, please send me an email and let’s meet up!

Speaking of upcoming conferences, my paper on representations of Latter-day Saints in The Expanse and Stranger Things was accepted by the Mormon History Association for their conference in June. I really love this paper and am excited to work on it a bit more in preparation for the conference.

On the podcast side, we’re back in the swing of things with an experimental new short format which will hopefully let us cover more things while spending less time on post-production. Our first short episode is on a documentary called The Mission on Disney+, which is about an evangelical missionary who is killed trying to contact an isolated people. We also released an episode today on Indiana Jones as a possible lapsed Latter-day Saint, with the authors of the popular post over at By Common Consent. It’s a really fun episode!

And now, forward to the book reviews!

Continue reading “What I Read: Jan 2024”

Why Fantasy and Faith?

This semester I’m taking a postsecular literature course from Mikayla Steiner. Postsecular is a term complicated by a multitude of definitions, but in essence, it represents the “religious turn” in modern literature. The death of religion predicted by those who worshipped at the temples of rationalism has mostly failed to come to pass, and many writers have turned back to the ideas of religion (in all shades of orthodoxy and non-orthodoxy) to seek the consolation that had been lost in modernism. (Understand that this definition is based on three weeks of reading and is certain subject to the flaws of my current naiveté, though it fits with things I had noticed but never been able to articulate.)

However, as we’ve been reading foundational essays on the topic preparing to study novels that fall under the postsecular umbrella, I’ve noticed something strange: many of these essays cite as examples books that could also fall under the moniker of speculative fiction. John McClure in Partial Faiths points towards Thomad Pychon’s Nebula winning novel Gravity’s Rainbow as a prototypical example of the half-in, half-out nature of postsecular faith. Rita Felski uses Miyazaki’s portal fantasy masterpiece Spirited Away as an example of the enchantment that the postsecular seeks to return to literature in Uses of Literature. Her argument on the importance of being transported by a work grasps at the exact same ideas as Tolkien’s discussion of escape On Fairy Stories while managing to never cite it. (“Who would speak loudest against escape? Jailers.”) Now I’m digging into the first novel of the term, Lousie Erdich’s The Round House, and I find that not only are the chapter titles all drawn from episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that the show seems to be a major metaphor within the text.

red and orange galaxy illustration
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The connection between the spiritual or religious in literature can seem obvious. Both deal with things that the rational mind would consider impossible. Angels are just as unbelievable to a rationalist as dragons. There’s just as little evidence for believing in miracles as there is to believe in magical realism.

But is the connection really that simple? Does it really make sense to align fantasy which is transparent about being fictional with faith-based ideas that claim to be about ultimate reality? It seems to align with those who accuse believers of being blinded to reality by a story, and not even one as interesting as the latest installment of Star Wars at that.

Granted, I’ve seen some believers make the same conflation. Some worry that fantasy will confuse readers about their faith. You know the sort of thing: Harry Potter will teach your kids witchcraft; D&D is at best a waste of time and at worst Satanic; a visit from Santa Claus will cause them to doubt Jesus’s existence; even simple unease about studying Greek mythology and the worship of false gods.

But these concerns usually come from people who don’t actually read or enjoy fantasy. Among those who are religious and also enjoy speculative fiction (and if the size of the first Salt Lake City FanX is any indication, there are many), there’s no confusion about products of the imagination and the equally impossible things that they believe are real. Perhaps there are believers who have been led away from the faith by reading fantasy novels, but I’ve never met one.

Perhaps the key to the massive overlap between the literature of speculative fiction and literature concerned with spirituality is that both tend to leave behind concerns with the everyday and focus on ultimate concerns. Despite the recent turn towards cozy SF, a good percentage of fantasy novels focus on epic events that are country-, world-, or even universe-imperiling. Even when the plot is smaller, the magic system or technological innovation at the center of the “speculation” often deals with the deep forces of the universe–at a word, metaphysics.

Related to this large scope is the attitude of wonder that pervades the speculative and the religious. Whether we call it awe or the sublime, both genres put humanity in its place as a smaller part of something vast, something in the end unexplainable by logic and reason. Even the science in science fiction is less based on logic (except in the hardest sci-fi) than on what Sanderson calls the “rule of awesome.” Though I’m sure he didn’t intend it, it’s easy to see the connection to our human impulse to awe in speculative fiction.

Does this mean that speculative fiction is intended to be a substitute for religion? I’m certain some stridently atheistic authors might see it that way. I recently read Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke, and it’s clear that he is substituting the sublime of cosmic aliens for the sublime impulse of religion. Yet this substitution fails to account for the vast number of believers who read and enjoy speculative fiction. I was not really surprised to find in our podcast episode about Mormons watching Star Trek that three out of the four of us shared the experience of watching Star Trek with our very religious families growing up.

I would argue instead that religious people are drawn to speculative fiction precisely because it flexes the same intellectual muscles that they use in their faith. It’s like cross-training for our spiritual sensitivities. When done well, fantasy scratches the same itch for deep meaning that we seek in religion, but rather than a replacement, it acts as a supplement for our ability to think and believe abstractly in things beyond our everyday experience.