Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

This is probably going to be a loaded question that can spread out into numerous branches, but it's inspired from one of the discussions in the now closed Amazon series thread. But I think it's a topic that deserves to be pulled out and discussed further on its own. I won't go into a detailed recap of the arguments that were made in that thread, but I do invite you all to share, and hopefully explain your opinions further, here.

My thoughts boil down to wondering what impact adaptations have on their source material? Do you think it's a net positive or net negative effect? Do adaptations draw more fans to the original source or do they just introduce more fans to the vision of those creating the adaptation? What effect do the visuals of an adaptation have on the imagination of reading written text? After all, many people are visual learners and as John Hammond says in a different franchise, people want something they can see and touch. Do the constraints of visual adaptations (time constraints being the major one) mean that it's impossible for an adaptation to be completely faithful to the source material? That at best an adaptation can achieve is appearing faithful on the surface, but scratch the surface and you wonder if the creators had any serious understanding of the source material?

These are just some of many questions rambling around in my head, so I'll just stop there and invite others to share, pick up on whatever bits they want and see where this discussion goes!

Do we have any statistics or feedback on what happened with the source material when LOTR came out and then the Hobbit? Like do we know if more books were sold, or if they suffered?

My guess is that they sold more, but it is just a guess based on what I personally did. Because of the movies I ended up buying around 40-50 books, including biografies and such. Have I read them all, no. But I have read the LOTR twice and like a quarter of the Silmarillion and all of the Hobbit. LOTR was hard to finish because I at first could not get past Tom Bombadil. Sil was difficult to read, period and the Hobbit was too dumbed down for my liking, totally a childrens book.

My point is, I do think we gain some true book fans from each rendition of the source material. Sure they are bastardizing a lot of it, but there will be fans and hopefully among them there will be some who will want more and will go get the books and read those.

Yeah as I made my opinion in other threads I agree with what @Winddancer said.

Sure I would like for the adaptations to be as close to the works as possible but I also recognize that that’s not always feasible. And even when it is feasible and people deviate from the texts anyway I still tend to think that the increase in engagement with the fandom in general is worth it. I’ve been a Tolkien fan for almost my entire life and I don’t love when my favorite characters get misrepresented but on the other hand I do love seeing people come to fall in love with Tolkien’s work the way that I did. I’d personally rather have a broad and diverse community than a niche and reserved one. I also tend to enjoy different takes on Middle-earth including video games and plaza RP

Plaza rpg does veer quite far from the source. Me included. I mean Winddancer is a Lorien elf, who is now evil and has red eyes. Not really sticking with the source there, sorry! :P But it does not make me any less of a fan. I still love LOTR and all that it has brought to my life over the last (omg..) 20 years.

Hmmm I think over all adaptions might be a plus to the original source material. I personally bought my first copy of the Lord of the Rings before the films came out, or were even being advertised (my parents were more CS Lewis). After the films I started collecting - by 2003 I had all of the histories of Middle Earth, and the Silmarillion and the UT etc etc. I haven't read all of these either I've read a good number of them. By the time the Hobbit came out I had multiple copies of most of the books including several first editions.

The one thing it has impacted is me wanting to beat children who's parents are stupid enough to let them believe the books were written after the films (honest to goodness this happened in a freaking bookstore and it was everything in my power to not scream at the parents standing there while these kids talked smack about how Tolkien was trying to profit off of the movies that had just come out)

My personal RP however is... pushing the boundaries of canon in terms of relationships but I am cannon in a lot of other ways and I would like to think Tolkien would be happy to see diversity in skin tones and relationships in his creations as he was constantly updating and changing his lore to perfect it.

Excellent topic Boromir! I'll throw my opinion out here on your questions.

• What impact adaptations have on their source material? Do you think it's a net positive or net negative effect?
  I would say it has a generally positive effect.
• Do adaptations draw more fans to the original source or do they just introduce more fans to the vision of those creating the adaptation?
  I believe sales of the Lord of the Rings books went up after the Bakshi adaptation, and most certainly did with the Peter Jackson adaptation.
• What effect do the visuals of an adaptation have on the imagination of reading written text?
  I would say a lot to a person who sees a visual adaptation and then reads the book.
• Do the constraints of visual adaptations (time constraints being the major one) mean that it's impossible for an adaptation to be completely faithful to the source material?
  I think it is impossible for a visual adaptation to be completely faithful to the written source material. That said, the producers of an adaptation should make concerted attempt to keep the story as presented in the source material intact. Removing core parts of the story and adding one's own made up parts to it does a disservice to presenting the source material's story. In the case of the two previously mentioned adaptations of Lord of the Rings, Bakshi was more true to the source material story than Peter Jackson's adaptation.
• That at best an adaptation can achieve is appearing faithful on the surface, but scratch the surface and you wonder if the creators had any serious understanding of the source material?
  This sounds a bit like a loaded question as worded. I think at best an adaptation can present a reasonable telling of the source material story if the producers don't try to 'make it better'. I had wondered if Peter Jackson actually had a grasp on the actual story he was adapting with the wholesale changes of the origin story of Aragorn and the decimating of some characters like Denethor.

I will say that having a complete story as source material should make it easier to present a reasonably faithful adaptation. Trying to make an adaptation of an incomplete story will have more artistic license taken to make somethng complete to tell, it is this that one hopes the producers have at least some understanding of the source material to keep them from flying too far off center.

What impact adaptations have on their source material?

Depends on how well known the book was to begin with. What immediately comes in mind to my head in terms of effect are three works: Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption, and Water Margin.

Most people probably don't know that Forrest Gump started out as a book. Nor the fact that it also has a sequel. Nor that certain events in the book happened that did not occur in the movie (e.g: going to space). Nor that Forrest Gump has a contrastingly different character. I can't even name the author, sooo yeah. Impact is there but it has not propelled a lot of people to read the source material otherwise aforementioned statements would be more well known. Quality of movie and its ending also satisfied me to such an extent that I don't really want to read the book. Knowing of its differences.... even less.

Shawshank Redemption became its own celestial entity in media because of how well the movie was portrayed. It's a more known fact that Stephen King wrote the source material. But not many people outside the literary realm knew this because the film's title did not hook people to watching it initially. Why watch something called a "Shawshank Redemption" if one never even heard of it as a book. Even after the movie became popular, I know most people haven't read the book because I have not seen many viewpoints on the significance of Red's change in physical appearance from the book to the movie. In fact, I would argue (without reading the book) that the movie change actually enhances some of the themes of the work. The movie is so good and has such a resolved ending that I also have no desire in reading the source material.

Water Margin is much more widely known in the Eastern Hemisphere, having a historic influence in both Chinese and Japanese culture. It has an entire list of adaptations ranging from TV to video games (Any video game nerd has heard of the Suikoden video game series, which is a loose adaptation of Water Margin). It is also one of the few works I know of that has essentially an erotic fanfiction adaptation of one of the book's story arcs become a literary masterpiece (Jin Ping Mei). It's like an old Marvel cinematic universe-style of origin stories leading to an Avengers-like army (of 108 people) of criminals. If you combine Robin Hood with A Song of Ice and Fire, you get something that resembles Water Margin. Water Margin's lack of inclusion from top books in world literature show how myopic, uniliterate, biased, and unilingual a lot of those list compilers are. That's another story though. Anyhow, its tv adaptations are well known in China and Japan. I believe one of those adaptations aired on the BBC with an English dub for a time. Here's the thing though: because of the book's legacy, most of the close adaptations were judged on how accurate they were to the book. Sort of like the initial reception towards HP Philosopher's Stone. The looser adaptations became their own thing (Jin Ping Mei, Suikoden) and did not have much direct impact to the source material.

There's also the additional wrinkles with Water Margin the book. For one, it's written in Literary Chinese, which honestly is a language by itself outside of modern Chinese. The lingual departure isn't even something like Shakespearean English to Victorian English. It's more like Old English to Victorian English. But because the tales have been around for more than 900 years and are really well known, fans don't even need to read the work (translated or not) to still criticize certain TV adaptations for changing parts of the tale. So there has been no negative impact from adaptations because the book is essentially holy... and most people cannot/haven't even read it in its original source.

So in general, the bigger and well-known the source material is, the less potential for negative impact from adaptations. The level of positive impact depends on the quality of the adaptation. Bad adaptations are more likely to be ignored or seen as non-canonical if the source material was already well known (Song of Ice and Fire for both extreme ends of the spectrum). However, if the source material is not well-known, the adaptation most likely brings short-term material gain but positive impact is dependent on how good the adaptation was. If the adaptation is too good (Forrest Gump or even something like Dragon Ball), particularly if its a movie, then the source material gets only a marginal increase as the adaptation probably satisfied its audience enough. Either the adaptation has to be in the slightly bad to merely good range, leaving the audience wanting more, or creating a sort of cliffhanger for a sequel, would there be a large positive impact to the little-known work. This is evident in a lot of 1-2 season anime nowadays, where they intentionally keep the story unfinished to hook people into reading the source manga/visual novel/literature. I would argue that if LOTR was a little-known work, the first two movies' kinda cliffhanger would have created that impact.


I wanted to answer all the questions in the opening post but uhh I've typed too much already. Maybe save it for next time.

What impact adaptations have on their source material? Do you think it's a net positive or net negative effect?
I would say it's a net positive effect. The lifecycle of a literary work is cyclic; in other words, it is popular for a time, then interest fades away as other stories garner public interest. I'm old enough to remember a time when LoTR was simply a dusty tome on Jr. High school and college library shelves. Although the original publish date of the work (in England) was 1955, it wasn't until 1964 that the book arrived on American shores. Even so, it took the sweep of the "counter-culture" of the 1960's to bring it into popularity. By the time Leonard Nemoy sang the "Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" in 1968 (an "adaption" of a peculiar nature, I'll grant) the book was already starting to fade from public popularity. Then, in 1977(when Rankin Bass created their musical version of the Hobbit) the popularity peaked again (so much so that Bakshi released his version in 1978). You see a final upsurge in popularity again in 1980 (when Rankin Bass released their version of "Return of the King.")

The advent of D&D-style gaming also provided an unexpected boon to the mythos. As the characters, scenarios, races and themes passed into use by a whole generation of gamers; the books once again rose in popularity and (strangely enough) cultural utility.