I thought that it would get easier to keep up with blogging when the semester ended, but I guess things just keep on piling on. I finished up two really good papers–one on teaching students with dysgraphia in first-year writing and another using C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves as a lens to interpret Fatima Mirza’s novel A Place for Us–and all of my grading, and promptly collapsed.
Then I got back up again and promptly made up for my lack of mom-hours during the semester by chaperoning my daughter’s field trip the zoo and running all the last-minute errands for various school projects. My husband and I also ran a 5K at our local tulip festival with my teenagers, who we’ve been forcing to run all year. I don’t think they enjoyed it as much as I did.
In writing news this month, my short story “Birthright” was published as part of an anthology called Tales of Mystery: Dead for a Spell. The collection features detective stories with a fantasy twist, while the companion volume, Tales of Mystery: The Gravity of Death, is science-fiction themed. My story features a reluctant detective forced to take a case from a dangerous magical family. If you pay attention to the biblical allusions in the story, you may get a hint as to whodunit. I feel honored to be included in the collection along with some other really wonderful writers (including one who wrote one of the books reviewed below).
I had hoped to do more creative writing during the summer, but looks like academia has other ideas. I’m currently working on a paper about memory in dystopian novels by LDS authors for the Association for Mormon Letters conference in July. And in April, my podcast co-host Carl Cranney and I received a conditional acceptance for a paper on The Mandalorian and religious clothing for a possible edited collection, so now I am being forced to rewatch the show for research purposes. Oh, the hard life of the speculative fiction literary critic. 🙂
Speaking of the podcast, this month’s release is a short conversation about The Most Reluctant Convert, a film about C.S. Lewis’s conversion based on his memoir Surprised by Joy. I can’t believe it took me 42 episodes to get a legitimate Lewis episode into the podcast. The film is very short and really faithful to the book. Highly recommend for Lewis fans.
And now onto book reviews, of which 4/5 are rereads. It’s interesting (to me, at least) to see how my perspective on a book has changed over time. I hope the reevaluations you see below are an indication that I’m growing over time.
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?
