Adaptation & Re-Writing Canon

It’s a long weekend because Mondaybor Day is Labor Day! I got out of work early on Friday, but that also means I don’t have any desk notes for the Saturday Note, so this is a bit more spontaneous than usual. Which is sort of saying something, because I still don’t usually get notes for this until Saturday.

I am getting towards the end of the main story of God of War, though it will still keep me busy for a while. I’m reading Ron Chernow’s biography of George Washington, which is really long, though I should also get a couple of comics out of the way this weekend.

There was a different idea for a Note, about immigrants/refugees in fantasy, but I don’t know if I have enough material for that, other than I want more of it.

Adaptation & Re-Writing Canon

Alright, so I’ve only seen one episode of the Percy Jackson & the Olympians show on Disney+, so I can’t really be a judge of its quality. Not a lot of what I’ve heard has really encouraged me: the heroes seem way more savvy about the threats they face, removing a lot of the tension, and a lot of the fight scenes are removed. But something I’ve seen come up a few times, in discussions and articles about the show is that Rick Riordan, author of the original series and now an executive producer/major writer on the adaptation, is using this as a chance to redo some of the story he originally wrote twenty years ago.

Part of me has A Reaction to this idea. Part of that is because Riordan complained a lot about the movies of his work in the last decade or so, and part of why he’s been pushing so hard for a new adaptation, in which he’d have much more involvement, is so that fans would get an adaptation that felt like the books, one that was true to his vision for the story. After saying that for years, and then willfully contributing to a piece of media that intentionally diverges from the textual story feels a bit, uh… dishonest.

It also feels a bit frustrating when you fall in love with a story, and then the author comes and says, “Well, actually, you know what? It’s not really good enough, I’m going to pitch this adaptation as the true version of events.” In an interview for a magazine, one of the actresses for the series more or less said that, and I don’t blame her as much as I suspect Riordan’s input here–that the original books are “the protagonist’s journal, so it’s an unreliable narrator, while the series shows you what really happened.” 

[Which raises a lot of questions, like how the protagonist got such details wildly wrong in his personal journal, like his hair color, his girlfriend’s race, why certain characters appear earlier than recorded and act more helpfully than in his journals, or why he tells about himself falling into obvious traps that he was evidently clever enough to not fall into in “real life”.]

So my gut reaction is to reject this reasoning as remarkably stupid.

There is something here, though, worth considering, which I had heard, but I thought about it again when I found this interview with Rick Riordan on YouTube. In it, he mentions that when writing about Medusa for the story, he felt he had to make some changes. In the original novel, she’s just a monster; twenty years later, with a lot of critical conversations about Greek mythology in popular culture, her typical framing in the story of classical myths makes her into a misblamed victim, and he felt as if it would be a mistake to not at least touch on that aspect when telling a story with Medusa in it.

And, like, I kind of get that. In a culture that’s rapidly changing, I can fully understand that a writer may say, twenty years after publishing the original, saying, “That’s not exactly how I’d tell the story if I was writing it now.” Part of that might be culture, and some of it might be that other ideas pop into his or her head. Jim Butcher, for instance, has made the comment that he’d make a couple of minor changes to the early Dresden Files books if he’d have been writing them now–such as making Chicago the place where young wizards often train.

“Having more awareness of sensitive topics” is not a bad reason to make a change, and to say you wish you could rewrite something!

At the same time, I still don’t think it’s great to try to pitch an adaptation as the “updated, better” version of a story. Because it makes it seem like every change you make is to make it updated for modern audiences, when a lot of it isn’t. I don’t think that making a lot of the situations significantly easier for the protagonists is a change that makes the story better, and it’s a little dishonest to try to pretend that it’s a critical choice, and not one created because of time constraints or because Disney won’t allow certain things.

[I think it’s pretty much confirmed, for instance, that Percy’s stepfather Gabe is less abusive and more just a loser in the show because Disney didn’t want to have on-screen abuse like that in a kids’ show.]

It also makes the reader feel like the books are somehow less–they’re not the “real version”, after all. If the author says that the new version, the streaming series, is what you should take as his real vision…then why should you read the books at all? Why should you read anything he writes, when he’s going to rewrite it for the screen and call it better anyhow? Never mind the silliness of denigrating actual books in favor of live-action television, of all things.

Riordan seems to have gone about this business in a very silly way–he could have just said that he’d change some things in the adaptation, and been honest about why some of those changes were made, instead of pitching this as the “New & Improved” edition of Percy Jackson, everyone would be a lot happier.

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