r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Morr4Seiya • 17h ago

Hated Tropes (Hated)changing somenthing to be more "progressive" ends up being a bad thing

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Now to be clear,i am not one of these "anti-woke" losers that complain some people exist,and i am also not the type to complain about changing somenthing in a new version or adaptation,however there are cases where it did ended up being a bad idea.

-In the anime of Cowboy Bebop there is the character Gren,despite being short lived the character is very memorable specially thanks to his tragic story.Basically his story was that he was a soldier from the titan war who was a great friend with Vicious(the main bad guy)after the war he was emprisioned thanks to Vicious who testified against him and he was forced to take a experimental drug that caused him hormonal problems,giving him a feminine appearence and even breasts.

In the Netflix live action,for some reasons they decided Gren was going to be non-binary,which wouldn't be a problem(some people believe he was gay in the anime)if it wasn't for the fact that they also removed all the nuances and complexities that made the character memorable and interesting,instead of a tragic war veteran that was betrayed and had his body changed against his will,Gren is just kinda there.

-The original Rugrats cartoon had the couple Betty and Howard,Betty was a big and masculine woman while Howard was a smaller and nervous man,it was a genuine interesting relationship that stood out from the other couples who were the standard straight couple.

In the new series however they replaced Howard with a woman named Trish,two things,first off why?What was the problem with having a woman being the stronger in a straight relationship?Second why does Hollywood seem to think that every tomboy or masculine woman is a lesbian?

Overall not the worst thing but it is jarring that they had a gender reverse roled that was progressive and decided that wasn't enough.

-Oh man,this one pisses me off the most so i am gonna have to break it down

So back in the late 80s and 90s there was this anime called Saint Seiya also knows as Knights of the zodiac,it tells the story of knights who fight for the Goddess Athena to protect earth,being divided in the golden,silver and bronze knights,the anime was a huge hit in latin america and Europe and while it floped in the US it still has a loyal fanbase.

Being a fan myself i can't recommend it enough,now granted the story does have a fair share of flaws,and that's because the author was honestly just making stuff up as he went along(also a lot of side characters are poorly used or even forgotten about)still it is a great story you should check out

But then a couple of years back Netflix got the rights and decided to a 3D reboot,in this reboot they decided to make the story more "american" to try to bring more american viewers,now i could go on and on a big rant about how that was a bad idea and the execution was so terrible that it made me want to strangle someone but this post is about one specific change.

So Saint Seiya has five main characters,those are Pegasus Seiya,Dragon Shiryu,Cygnus Hyoga,Phoenix Ikki and finally Andromeda Shun.

While the other four characters were the standard masculine and brute male characters who were always ready to throw punches,Shun was smaller,more sensitive and even feminine looking,a pacifist who didn't liked fighting,but don't mistake that for weakness because Shun was loyal to his friends and was extremely powerful.

Then Netflix decided to change Shun into a girl named Shaun.

So wait,you have a male character who goes against every male stereotype and you turn him into just another generic female character?

When asked about it,the showrunner Eugene Son said he made that change because there was no girl in the group and having a all boys group wouldn't be acceptable nowadays

First off that's not true because Athena was also part of the main cast,yeah she wasn't the fighting type but she still helped quite a lot in the story even saving the knights on several occasions,second if you wanted to add a girl to the main group why not use Marin or Shaina?Hell,if you were going to change the story anyway why not turn Seiya sister into a knight?

Thankfully this monstrosity was cancelled(so much for trying to bring more fans)

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u/SuperSaiyanTrunks 14h ago

Why cant anyone just stick to the source material? Its like these directors take something awesome and beloved and think hmmm im going to do something COMPLETELY different. Surely the fans wont take issue!

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u/myrmonden 14h ago

well the director of this openly hates games so.

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u/RealityOk9823 13h ago

Why do they keep doing that? "Let's make this fresh by having someone who either hates the show/game/movie or knows nothing about it". OK, it worked once for Starship Troopers, but outside of that?

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u/myrmonden 13h ago

because they SUCK so they cant get any investment for their own projects.

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u/RealityOk9823 13h ago

Fair, but it seems to be a thankfully dying trend with the movie studios where they're like "let's hire the guy that doesn't like this franchise to make the new movie!".

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u/myrmonden 13h ago

ye but not for netflix when it comes to tv series

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u/RealityOk9823 6h ago

Ha, true.

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u/blitzbom 6h ago

Meanwhile Tony Gilroy is on record that he's not a fan of Star Wars but made one of the best side stories.

Don't give non-fans keys to an adaptation.

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u/blitzbom 6h ago

Brandon Sanderson has said that someone bought the rights to Emperors Soul and the script that came back was about pirates. Exactly what you said, someone had an idea for a story that they couldn't get greenlit so they bought his.

Part of the reason that it took so long to get anything of his put on screen and one of his requirements being he needed control over the project.

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u/myrmonden 5h ago

BUT I WANT TO MAKE A STORYU ABOUT PIRAITES !"!

yes...its a very known issue a lot of terrible writers /producers etc. Cannot get greenlit, mostly because they just F suck, so they instead ONLY can get jobs writing on shows that are part of a franchise like castlevania, cowboy bepop, etc this is basically most of Netflix shows, Now these people HATE the actual source material they dont wan to write about some stupid vampire hunter or w.e thjey wanna write a story about a space lesbian cowgirl that (half cow half girl) that is on a fender bender trying to fuk transdragons underwater

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u/Loki_Agent_of_Asgard 10h ago

Starship Troopers is a fluke, and only works because it's (excellent) sci-fi action schlock but it is not remotely an adaptation of the book and has basically no similarities whatsoever. Like Starship Troopers the movie is so abysmal as an adaptation that it's actively damaged the view of the book and made brainlets think it's fascistic when that's not remotely accurate.

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u/RealityOk9823 6h ago

I love the book and the movie but for totally different reasons.

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u/Loki_Agent_of_Asgard 5h ago

Same, the movie is FANTASTIC as a film, but the only thing it has in common with the book is the name of the characters.

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u/extinct_cult 9h ago

The director wanted to be the one who "revives" the series, but dmc5 came out and it rocked, so he was mad that a game, from the game series he was adapting, was good

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u/Kaining 10h ago

Honnetstly i've come to term with it i'm ok with that pathetic ego trip from most producer. I've got so many thing in the different backlogs that having to add good adaptation to my game/book/movie/tvshow pile is unmanageable.

Please, continue to make slop not worth my time. It's finite and there's so much more that's worth seeing.

It's the "imma gonna invent Chess 2(tm)" syndrome. No, you won't. It's a waste of ressource, don't bother me anymore !

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u/Rider-Idk-Ultima-Hy 10h ago

Because their blinded by their ego. We could’ve gotten a good american Yakuza show, but they SQUANDERED IT!

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u/Secuter 6h ago

I'm amazed that people who openly hates or mocks the source material is chosen. Like, what made the studios think that they'd do good with that material when they state how much they dislike and what to change it?

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u/Cavery210 5h ago

Adi Shankar is also a hypocrite who hates the Iraq War, yet showed up at Trump's inauguration, which also got us into a pointless war against Muslims.

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u/NatashOverWorld 12h ago

A lot of times apparently the director has their own story they can't get produced, so they take someone else's IP, skin it and wear it over their personal project, which produces iPs that are just as horrifying as it sounds.

Or just plain ego of course, like the Witcher series. The directors hated the original story and thought they could make fanfiction of it that surpassed the original.

They could not.

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u/Verraise-Mage 1h ago

Henry Gigachad dropping the role because it wasn't book-accurate:

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u/audiodudedmc 13h ago

I blame superiority complex, I think hollywood script writers think they are better than people who write video game scripts, even when said video game stories are more beloved and successful than anything that they have done in their entire careers.

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u/Golden_Alchemy 11h ago

As i say in other comment, it is more than the studio buys the scripts, think it will not work without a strong name behind, buys the license and then applies the mask over.

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u/oops_all_memes 7h ago

Not the case for DMC. Adi Shankar fought to do DMC. It was a shock to me that apparently what he loved about DMC is... I've no fucking idea tbh now that I typed it out. I've no idea why he wanted to do DMC so bad

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u/Demon_AbyssWalker 6h ago

Kenny Omega(Pro-Wrestler and Big Capcom guy) had him on his podcast and the idiot absolutely self-reported that he wanted to be the savior of what he thought was a dead franchise and got mad when he found out about DMCV being a thing

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u/TechnicalBen 3h ago

Also swapping scripts and titles. Often a script is for "movie/show A" but they want to publish/push it, and "brand X/label C" is what's popular, so they just go with an entire branding swap. Like "This is actually an alien invasion book, but Zombies are the big thing now, so... just make it about zombies, okay?" corporate meddling.

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u/sunstruker 10h ago

not just video games, mangás too, and intentionally ignore the fans (dragon ball evolution was ass and both goku and picollo's actors were dragon ball fans who still couldnt help fixing all this)

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u/MiseryGyro 13h ago

Nah I will defend writers. When you do an adaptation you do have to make it your own thing. You cannot just recreate what happened before. It would bore people already familiar with the material.

Adi Shankar just sucks and his shows suck

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u/Slateboard 9h ago

It really seems like 'making it your own thing' is what has people upset over many adaptations.

Making pre-existing work your own thing sounds more like fanfiction.

Or am I misunderstanding your words?

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u/MiseryGyro 7h ago

A lot of you all seem to think "make it your own" means "change it completely"

Let's look at Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson had to make a film. He only has so much time an audience can sit down to watch his movie.

Inherently he cannot fit all of Tolkien's work in that time frame. So he fits what he can. To be economical with time he does something like remove Glorifindel and gives Arwen more prominence.

That is not Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, it's now Peter Jackson's adaptation. His own thing.

If you are adapting anything you have to start asking yourself what can stay and what must be cut

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u/Verraise-Mage 1h ago edited 1h ago

There's a difference between removing side characters from one chapter, and doing a 180 on the story, characters, and lore, especially considering DMC was already voiced visual media.

Lord of the Rings characters spoke unsubtitled Elvish, referenced the Silmarillion, relied on in-universe information, and lots of lines are written in Tolkien's style or just make zero sense unless you read the books ("Fourth Eorlingus!").

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u/MiseryGyro 1h ago

Glorifindel was one example I chose of many from Jackson's Lord of the Rings. My father has been complaining about the lack of Tom Bombadil for almost 30 years.

Jaws and Jurassic Park are good examples of Stephen Spielburg knowing what subplots to cut and what characters to change.

When it's done well, none of us care. We only care when it's bad.

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u/amaROenuZ 8h ago

Nah I will defend writers. When you do an adaptation you do have to make it your own thing. You cannot just recreate what happened before. It would bore people already familiar with the material.

I disagree strenuously. Some of the best films ever made are faithful, by the numbers adaptations of the source material. Lord of the Rings, the Godfather, the Wizard of Oz, the Princess Bride, No Country for Old Men, the Shining, Silence of the Lambs, they're all good precisely because they refrained from trying to "make it your own thing", and instead preserved the plots, themes, and settings that people came to the theatre to see. Your job when adapting a book, a game, a play, a comic book, is to make the adjustments needed to translate mediums, not to use the original work as a costume for the story you pitched and got shot down on.

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u/blkbullnyc 2h ago

In the case of The Princess Bride, it helps when the guy who wrote the book also wrote the screenplay.

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u/MiseryGyro 7h ago edited 7h ago

I'm assuming you mean Jackson's Lord of the Rings films? Because those famously cut a lot from the books and changed the character arc of Aragorn.

Book Frodo is 50 when he leaves the Shire.

You are dead wrong about your very first example. And a number of your examples. They all famously divert from the books in some way. Except for No Country for Old Men. Edit: McCarthy wrote the script for No Country first then wrote it as a book so it would get made I believe

Stephen King famously hates the Shining film because Jack Torrance is his negative self insert. And in the novel Jack is given a small redemption at the end.

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u/HarrisonTheBarbarian 3h ago

I'm assuming you mean Jackson's Lord of the Rings films? Because those famously cut a lot from the books. Book Frodo is 50 when he leaves the Shire.

Hence the "adjust for the medium". Why waste time in an already massive movie trilogy when you can cut to the chase. Quite frankly, it's a small change and certainly doesn't "do it's own thing".

And the movie Trilogy famously has a lot of content CUT from the final cuts played in theater. Everytime there's a new one we learn that there's apparently even more cut scenes.

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u/MiseryGyro 1h ago

Jackson's films fundamentally change Aragorn as a character. They needed to give the trilogy a character in the B plot that goes through a hero's journey.

Elrond is changed to be antagonistic to Aragorn in that story. In the books he loves him.

If I was to explain all the work Peter Jackson did to "adjust to the medium" I would be here all day.

And that work is my point. It was a substantial task to translate these books to film and it required creative decisions from Jackson. And writing from him and Fran Walsh when they veered from Tolkien.

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u/ERedfieldh 10h ago

The Wheel of Time.

That's all I'm gonna say.

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u/bigtiddieslover 9h ago

Make their own thing but sadly they suck at that

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u/Godzillagamer15777 10h ago

Monster adaption

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u/mega153 9h ago

People forget that adaptations and even translations are not good in 1 to 1 transitions to different media. Look at the Last Airbender live action for an attempt at directly copying the source.

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u/Bacon042302 9h ago

Not really a good example as the issue people have is how much was changed

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u/RobertPham149 6h ago

Yeah I am also of the opinion that writers adapting to the screen need to change it into its own thing that is fitting with the medium. However, what grinds my gear is that whatever you adapt, you must keep the thematic and emotional core intact, but showrunners consistently miss the mark on this.

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u/blkbullnyc 2h ago

I agree. An adaptation isnt supposed to copy. It's supposed to adapt. Imagine being a part of the fandom of the book The Orchid Thief and being excited because the movie version is coming out. Would they be mad because it wasnt exactly like the book? I can't imagine a writer/filmmaker just copying and pasting soemone else's work and expecting to be respected. I definitely wouldnt want to be considered a glorified Xerox machine.

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u/PM_ME_SMALL__TIDDIES 10h ago

Nearly every anime adaption in existence begs to differ

And the ones that actually followed your logic are wildly panned lol

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u/MiseryGyro 10h ago

Both Dragon Ball Z and One Piece are so infamously poorly paced that we got Kai and are getting The One Piece on Netflix.

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u/PM_ME_SMALL__TIDDIES 10h ago

Manga to anime. Not anime to new anime(which most often only exists because the first adaption didn't follow the manga)

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u/Misa_rosia 10h ago

FMA 2003 catching strays

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u/PM_ME_SMALL__TIDDIES 10h ago

I didn't want to name names but we all knew the guilty parties.

That horrid 3d Berserk too.

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u/RaDiOaCtIvEpUnK 9h ago

The 3d Berserk was such a tease too. The first couple of minutes of it is done in really nice 2d that was really great. Then everything else was just wildly crap 3d. All it could do was make you wish the rest of it was in that 2d style, but no. Just tempting you with what could be.

And they even do this again at the start of season 2 just in case you forgot things could be better, but won’t. Such an ass thing to do.

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u/TheGentleSenior 8h ago

FMA 2003 is still worlds above something like Berserk 2016 though. Even when it outpaced the manga and started doing its own thing, it was still pretty damn good.

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u/94MIKE19 4h ago

This was me for the whole of the 2023 WGA/SAG-AFTRA Strike:

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u/VanguardVixen 13h ago

See Amazon and Stargate. They rejected the newest idea because it's too close to classic Stargate and the crowd. There are some people in positions of power which are simply nuts.

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u/StevieMJH 7h ago

The wild part is they said the quiet part out loud.

"We didn't want Martin Gero to make it because it was too similar to what fans liked in the past."

What?

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u/VanguardVixen 7h ago

Yeah, it is absolutely baffling. Not just rejecting the concept but also saying it in the face of their very audience. It's like.. are you averse of making money? Do you deliberately torpedo your own company here? It's like Amazon here was infiltrated by a competing company.

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u/TheFlyingSheeps 13h ago

Because egotistical writers and directors who could never create anything worthwhile hijack existing IPs and fans in order to shoehorn their own creation

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u/Shikabane_Sumi-me 10h ago

Cause Adi Shankar wanted to be heralded as the one to bring back Devil May Cry in the mainstream. I am not joking. There was an interview where he was working on the Netflix series a long time ago and he wanted to bring it back since there wasn't a game since 4. Then Capcom made 5 except Adi didn't get the memo or know about it, for some reason, until a few months after that game came out. Apparently he was furious over that. He felt Capcom stole his thunder.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Adi always wants to make original stories but Netflix doesn't let him. So he takes other properties and uses them as an engine for his stories. Many folks don't know but he did this with Castlevania. Adi wanted to make a show about how religion was bad but couldn't get it greenlit. So he used to concept in Castlevania instead. To be fair, the first Netflix Castlevania series did turn out fine. He wanted to do another original series but Netflix executives denied him, so we ended up with Devil May Cry.

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u/allquietonzanzibar 13h ago

Those people while being talentless corporate losers, think they are superior to the original's authors and therefore have the right to change the source material however they see fit.

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u/Golden_Alchemy 11h ago

A lot of times, it is because people and studios buy scripts and then executives start thinking that without a real license or a name people will not know the movie/it will not work. So, they have a script, see a license of a game/book/something that looks kind of similar to the original script and then buy it.

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u/SuperBackup9000 11h ago

I mean, everyone loved the Castlevania anime (DMC anime creator was a producer) despite that being one giant mess full of extremely odd decisions stated right from the get go.

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u/TransBrandi 10h ago

Many of these people want to make their own thing, but "existing IP" is sometimes the only way for them to get the studios to greenlight anything, so they use it as a backdoor to tell their own stories. Tale as old as time. Just look at the original Super Mario Bros. Movie from the 1990s. It's basically another movie with a tiny bit of Mario wrapped around it.

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u/ScrambledxEggzz 10h ago

These writers want there own series but can't get it greenlit. So they pitch an exisiting IP that is gauranteed to make money and then change the story completely to what they wanted to write.

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u/Ensign-Nemo 8h ago

Directors want to leave their mark. Netflix DMC is an example of how not to do it.

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u/Thin-Nerve6367 7h ago

Funny enough though the new DMC anime IS actually pretty good when it's not trying to shove politics in your face. And since S3 SHOULD be moving away from that completely I have high hopes for it

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u/Mr_Piddles 7h ago

A lot of the Netflix DMC is Adi Shankar "fixing" things.

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u/Such-Cookie7226 3h ago

Tbf to dramatically changed adaptations (for example Starship Troopers and the Shining) making something different than the source material can have great results. The important part is these examples had reasons and thought behind them (Criticism of the source material and adaptation for different medium & emphasizing a different interpretation that the source downplays/denies) and weren’t just trying to be different or tell an unrelated story. The DMC show is a great example (imho) of someone having an idea for an unrelated show and just slapping an existing inappropriate license on it to get it funded and out the door.

A good example (imho) of a simple adaptation that changes a lot is “30 Days of Night”. A lot is changed to make it a both tighter as a film while also wider in (narrative) scope, it’s not trying to say something different nor commenting on the original, it’s as simple as “movies aren’t comic books”.

TL;DR: being beholden to source materials is dumb, shot for shot adaptations are dumb, but it seems that too many adaptations simply don’t care about the source material at all which is usually worse.

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u/Mrbubbles96 12h ago edited 12h ago

Contrary to what most people are answering, IDK, personally, i don't think it's them arrogantly thinking "I'm better". They do this simply because usually, a lot of these adaptations weren't part of insert franchise they're currently working on originally--they was it's own, seperate thing. The problem is, thier original thing isn't something most backers are interested in giving money to. They're want them Big Franchises like Halo, Resident Evil, and God of War, because those IPs are safe (they're popular, acclaimed, and for sure hits, at least in theory).

So there you go. In order for thier original thing to see the light of day, the creator/producer puts a team to work on this Frankenstein of thier original idea and an existing IP, with the idea being that because it's such a popular and recognizable series (or it just had a massive resurgence and made it to the mainstream's attention) it'll bring a lotta cash from folks with only a basic understanding of it, and some fans that accept the adaptation or hate-watch it. Oh, the dev's of the adaptation will say stuff like "I've always been a big fan of the series, the original specifically" during interviews and shit, but that's just for promotion and to generate interest, not something they mean. Because usually, the existing IP is just a means to an end they don't really care about.

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u/ArcaneMadman 3h ago

In this case it is the creator thinking he's better. He wanted the credit for saving the series and when a new game came out he was upset because it meant it wasn't a dead franchise and he wouldn't be praised for saving the series.

https://reddit.com/link/pgsctr1/video/b3oxlo87hivh1/player

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u/Mrbubbles96 3h ago

Oh no, yeah, in this case there's very much arrogance involved. I've seen the clips and when i gave the example qoute, I was thinking of Adi specifically since...yeah, if he was a fan of the original game like he claims, it'd look very different from what he made.

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u/CoachDT 9h ago

Adaptations are meant to change. If we wanted a carbon copy of DMC the games then folks can play them. Its the reason why we have the current Samuel L Jackson Nick Fury because someone thought "wouldn't it be cool if instead we just..." and tweaked something.

The "problem" is that not every swing hits. If we want cool creative renditions of things we have to also accept that sometimes folks are gonna fuck up.